That big ole (unofficial) collection o' Dr. Srader stories

This page collects various stories from the thirty-year forensics career of Dr. Doyle Srader, mainly collected from his posts on the HomeSchoolDebate.com forums.

Loyola vs. Dartmouth
Loyola Marymount. Very good debate school in the eighties and into the early nineties.

Topic: Resolved, that the federal government should adopt an energy policy which substantially reduces nonmilitary consumption of fossil fuels in the United States. Loyola affirmative, Dartmouth negative. Loyola had been in the semis of the NDT two years before, and would make the quarters that year; Dartmouth would make the semis. Two very good teams, very even match.

Judge: Jack Rhodes, inventor of counterwarrants. See if you can spot this coming. Dartmouth had, for several years, been very successful at running conditional counterplans, so Loyola took a look at what they expected from Dartmouth, and who their judge was, and what he believed, and formulated the following very funky strategy.

Loyola ran a huge affirmative consisting of conservation and renewables, and claimed everything in the book in the 1AC: global warming, Middle East wars, resource crunch, all of it. Dartmouth put several conditional counterplans on the case -- the only one I can remember is that they banned US military deployments to the Middle East to take out that part of the case.

Madison Laird, the Loyola 2AC, roadmapped his speech by saying "You'll need three new sheets of paper." Dartmouth said "For what?" Madison said, "New affirmatives." He spent the first minute or two of his speech running skeletal versions of (1). a gas tax, (2). ban drilling in ANWR, and (3). build nuclear power plants. A few cards and a plan that was only a sentence or two. He then debated Dartmouth on everything else.

Neal Katyal, now assistant solicitor general of the United States, started off the 2NC by straight-turning all three new affirmatives, including several "Nuclear power is bad" arguments: prolif, terrorism, accidents, etc.

David Breshears, the Loyola 1AR, pointed out that Dartmouth had legitimized conditionality in the 1NC by running the counterplans, and Loyola had stipulated its legitimacy by not arguing conditionality bad in the 2AC. Breshears then kicked out of all of the 2AC affirmatives, plus all of the 1AC plan except for a single sentence that banned nuclear power. He said all of Dartmouth's 2NC nuclear power bad arguments were the advantages. He gave the speech at conversation speed and ended with a lot of time left.

Katyal was dumbfounded. Only time in my life I've ever seen the man speechless.

The audiotape of his 2NR was one of the most entertaining debate recordings that I've ever heard. I played it for kids who came to debate camp for years, and they always died laughing. The poor guy's voice went higher and higher and got whinier and whinier as he went on. At one point, verbatim quote, he said "Which is NOT FAIR! It leaves me NO GROUND TO ARGUE!" On those words, he sounded like a coloratura soprano, his voice was so high and piercing. I half-expected all the glass light bulbs to break. It sounded like he was going to hit the floor and start pounding it with his fists in about one more second.

Two lessons from this debate: first, instead of arguing that what they're doing is illegitimate, give it some thought, and see if you can say that it legitimizes your own tactic which is even more outrageous and unfair than theirs. Judges are almost always reluctant to tell your opponent "You lose because of what you argued," but happy to tell them, "Don't start something you haven't fully thought through."

Second, no matter how bad the situation in a debate gets, never, never, never let your voice get whiny.

Loyola [won]. It was the 7-0, 7-0 match at the Baylor college tournament, which left Loyola 8-0 and the top seed. Then, as I recall, they lost in the quarters, either to Redlands or UT-Austin.

As of the negative block, it was a very risky strategy for Loyola. At that moment, they were advocating both build and ban nuclear power, and Dartmouth could've made a very reasonable and winnable argument that you can't advocate both A and not-A, because your opponent then has no ground. That's what Katyal tried to win in the 2NR, but the problem is, Breshears in the 1AR had already kicked out of building nuclear power plants, so at that point in the debate they weren't guilty of it.

Laird in the 2AR pointed out that the "ban nuclear power" plank was plainly written into the 1AC plan, that Katyal had asked for the plan during the CX of the 1AC, had glanced at it and put it down on his table, and Loyola hadn't asked for it back. Laird's rhetorical tack was that Katyal had lost the round by not paying attention, which I think is pretty much right. By the time the 2NR rolled around, I think Loyola had more or less checkmated Dartmouth.

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Envelope-pushing interpretations
My senior year in high school, the NFHSA/NFL topic was "Resolved, that the federal government should implement a comprehensive long-term agricultural policy in the United States." At camp, we heard endless lectures about the 1986 Farm Bill from the previous year, and how we had to be up to speed on everything it did, or our affirmatives wouldn't make sense. But then one enterprising team looked carefully at the word "implement" in the topic, and ran, as their affirmative, "Fully implement the 1986 Farm Bill," which consisted of adequate funding, oversight, etc. We affectionately nicknamed their affirmative "C.O.D." for "Counterplan Or Die," since it was murder getting a unique disadvantage link.

The 1991-1992 NDT topic was "Resolved, that one or more United States Supreme Court decisions recognizing a constitutional right to privacy should be overruled." In the semifinals of the National Debate Tournament, a very young Harvard team (a sophomore and a frosh) pulled off an upset over the Dartmouth team that was favored to win the whole shebang by defending a past Supreme Court decision -- can't remember which -- that had overruled a previous decision in which a privacy right had been recognized. They called it the "passive defense." They defined "should" as the past tense of "shall," and said that they could discharge their burden as the affirmative by proving that topical action from the past had been warranted. I believe, if I'm not mistaken, they won the debate on a 7-0 decision. Two years later, the topic was "Resolved, that the commander in chief power of the United States president should be curtailed," and Georgetown racked up some nice wins in the latter half of the year by arguing that the Youngstown Steel decision had been justified.

That same year, the CEDA topic for the Spring semester was "Resolved, that United States military intervention to uphold democracy is justified in a post-Cold War world." The CEDA folks were still hammering away at their experiment with quasi-value topics. Up until then, teams that picked a defined case area (and not all did) tended to have a plan with advantages, but on this topic, a lot of folks did status-quo defenses: the then-ongoing interventions in Bosnia, Macedonia, Haiti, arms sales to various countries, etc. That produced a lot of frantic hand-wringing from people who said if it was a policy debate, then whoever spoke first and last had to propose a change, because, well, well, because they had to! The more the issue was run round and round, the more evident it became that no one could articulate a reason that would resist disproof, and status quo defenses became pretty acceptable. But that was a unique set of circumstances: not a policy topic, and a weirdly worded quasi-value topic at that.

One last provocation, just to stir people's thinking in odd directions. The head coach I worked under during my doctoral years had an argument he wanted his debaters to make in topical counterplan debates, but all they did was smirk at it. I thought it was clever, but I didn't think they'd get much mileage out of it. He said the "ground" argument, affirmative ground vs. negative ground could be made even more robust, and affirmatives could say that they had a property right in their own ground that the negative was violating with a topical counterplan. Negatives would say, in plan-focus debates (what you call parametrics, a term that came from CEDA), that once the affirmative had staked out their plan, then anything that disproved its desirability became negative ground. But he said affirmatives should argue back that if you build your house on your property, that doesn't mean your neighbor can come build a house for herself in your backyard: your property remains your property, even if you only permanently occupy one part of it. Interesting, clever, but not necessarily all that promising. Still, probably worth thinking over.

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1989 NDT stories (video)
Part 1: Harvard and the position shift

Part 2: Kansas and the dead affirmative

Part 3: Georgetown and the near miss

Part 4: Kansas's meltdown

Part 5: Kentucky chickens out on topicality

Part 6: The big showdown with Michigan

When surprise Affirmatives collide
That made me think of one of my favorite Baylor debate stories. It's a good cautionary tale against pinning too much on the element of surprise, and also a good cautionary tale in favor of doing your own research.

Dartmouth had two very good teams at the National Debate Tournament in 1987, and both reached the semifinals. In one semi, Dartmouth was affirmative against Baylor and ran a new affirmative. The topic was about removing a restriction on the first amendment, and Dartmouth allowed legal defense funds to be included in the Combined Federal Campaign. The details aren't important; it was an obscure little affirmative, and to win, they counted on Baylor having no evidence at all, and in particular no disadvantage links, because the plan did virtually nothing. The 2AC link answer to everything was "It's exactly one hundred eighty words of free speech protected, which isn't enough to trigger anything."

One problem. That was also Baylor's new affirmative for nationals.

In the 1NC, Baylor started seven disadvantages, each with an on-point link card, and then read another fifteen to twenty case-specific cards on the case. The Dartmouth debaters were very, very smart, but also very slow, and the Baylor team was one of the two or three fastest in the country. It was a quick, merciful slaughter.

It gets better.

In the other semifinal, Dartmouth beat Nebraska, so the final round was also Dartmouth-Baylor, but this time Baylor was affirmative. And yes, Baylor ran the legal defense funds Combined Federal Campaign affirmative, which Dartmouth had prepped for nationals as their new affirmative. One of the Dartmouth coaches came over to the Baylor coaching staff after the 1AC and said, "Are you crazy? We can talk all day about this affirmative! What were you thinking?" The Baylor coaches said, "Let's see what happens."

You see, Dartmouth had pioneered a practice that badly backfired on them that day: hired researchers. They would hire debaters who had just graduated from college, and the debaters could make a reasonably good living just researching arguments for the Dartmouth debate team. As a result, the Dartmouth debaters were at times a little over-programmed, and didn't know what their own arguments actually assumed. They were technically proficient, eloquent, and very smart, but they hadn't read the parts of the books and articles that were between the cut evidence, so they didn't always know what was going on. It wasn't that much of a handicap; they still got two teams to the semis of nationals. But occasionally it left them high and dry.

In this case, the hired researcher who'd written their new affirmative for nationals, and the negative strategy against it, had also filed it for them, and they couldn't find the file. "What were you thinking?" rapidly turned into "What are THEY thinking?" after the 1NC, when it was all generic arguments and generic evidence against the case. Baylor coasted to an easy win.

Moral of the story: surprise can be powerful, but you can't count on it. And if other people are doing your prep, that'll wrong-foot you at the worst possible moment.

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The wrong argument with the right judge
I remember telling this story before, but I think it's on the old vlog. At any rate, if you've seen it before, bear with me. There was a very good Georgetown team that I debated several times during my sophomore year. We actually lost to them on Nuclear War Good -- as in, they said a nuclear war would be good, and we couldn't fend them off. We were a long time living that one down to our teammates. But this isn't that story.

This happened at the Dartmouth tournament, in January of that season, and we had a particular judge that we'd never had before, but Dave, our coach for that tournament, knew him quite well. Georgetown's affirmative was family planning assistance, and they claimed big overpopulation as the advantage: war, environmental collapse, mass starvation, the works.

Baylor had a sledgehammer of a strategy against family planning that year -- that was Baylor's last NDT win, and it involved a win over family planning in the finals -- but Dave, our coach, said not to execute that strategy in that debate. Instead, he told us to run Canadian Elections. We were bewildered. He said, "Just do it. And don't clarify anything. Explain each link as though it were a separate disadvantage, and make it complicated. You'll see for yourself why this is a good idea."

Canadian Elections was a really bad disadvantage. The initial link was that Canadians don't like being thought of as the fifty-first state of the USA. We even had a few cards that what we were labeling "foreign policy convergence" -- the US and Canada doing similar things in the foreign policy domain -- led to eruptions of anti-USA sentiment among Canadians. Along with that, we read evidence that Canada was giving family planning assistance to African nations.

As if the initial link wasn't bad enough, there was the chain of internal links. A Canadian election was coming up, and we had evidence that the US-Canada Free Trade Agreement -- an early forerunner of NAFTA -- was riding on the pro-trade candidate winning. An eruption of anti-USA sentiment could tip the election the other way and torpedo the US-Canada free trade agreement. The impact to that was a big spike in our trade deficit with Canada, which we then had to read additional evidence saying it would result in protectionist retaliation, a full scale trade war, and, naturally, nuclear war.

Absurd.

The Georgetown 2AC had a ball with it, counting up the internal links and making fun of how many of them were silly. I then did my level best to explain the argument in the 2NC, and I followed Dave's coaching: on each of the internal links I went into minute detail and scoffed at how naïve the Georgetown 2A was, that he couldn't appreciate the subtle nuances of my highly sophisticated argument. In any other debate, my speaker points would've been in the single digits and headed south.

The debate ended, the judge read a lot of the evidence, signed the ballot, and announced to everyone that he'd voted negative. He then went on a long, meandering explanation of the argument, explaining details of it that I'd never mentioned. I had to admit that he was smart, and some of the details he noticed would be useful if we ever went for the argument again -- which I desperately hoped we never would -- but it was hardly a typical RFD.

Dave explained to me afterward that this particular judge was notorious for warming up to arguments that he could turn over in his mind and play with, like Rubik's cubes. He liked to mentally fidget with arguments, look at them from all sides. And he derived intense pleasure out of reexplaining them in improved form after the debate, showing off his own analytical prowess by making the arguments sound dense and challenging. And the team that gave him the best opening to do this was usually the team he voted for.

It felt really weird, doing what I thought was bad debating on an argument I thought was fundamentally unsound, but it taught me a lesson about adapting to the judge, and not thinking that good or bad arguments, good or bad arguing, was some free-standing quality that was independent of the audience. I wouldn't be willing to tell lies, or use racial slurs, just to tickle the preferences of a seriously twisted judge, but for this judge, what constituted good, persuasive arguing was just different from what most judges expected. At the time I thought of it as rewarding me for bad communication, but looking back, I can see that it broadened my range of understanding of the kind of communicative approaches that could be effective, depending on the situation.

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Fictional examples
And after I got home last night, a story from way back popped into my memory. It's from TP, and it's off the wall, but it's good food for thought here.

The way it was told to me, it was a team from Caddo Magnet, in Shreveport, Louisiana, and they ran this affirmative at Kentucky's Tournament of Champions. Some of those details might not be right, but here's the meat of the story. The topic was "Resolved, that the federal government should adopt a comprehensive national policy to protect the quality of water in the United States." Caddo's 1AC began with a bunch of evidence that talked about how a lot of ground-breaking inventions were first predicted by science fiction authors. The biggest example was Jules Verne, who predicted (among other things) helicopters, submarines, television, the internet, and rockets to the moon. With that as background, Caddo presented their plan: ban ice-nine. They then read excerpts from Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Cat's Cradle.

(Spoilers, if you haven't read the book.) Ice-nine turns any water it comes into contact with into ice, instantly. In one scene in the novel, ice nine falls into the ocean and effectively destroys the world.

Goes the story, they won the debate. The only true constraint on what you offer in a debate is, does it convince the judge that you should win, without violating debate ethics? (Fabricated evidence could convince the judge, but if its use became widespread, the activity would tear itself apart. Nothing like that is true of using creative approaches like Caddo's.)

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Esoteric case structures
I completely forgot about this until this morning. When I was a freshman in college, we got in a goofy mood and rewrote our 1AC as ten commandments. Our very patient coaches smiled and said, "That's cute. Also completely unflowable." So then, we went back and rewrote it as four books. Book One, Genesis, was inherency; Book Two, Lamentations, was harm; Book Three, Acts, was the plan; and Book Four, Revelation, was solvency. This time our coaches said it was cheesy and that we should go back to the old 1AC, and they probably were right, but we did it that way for a tournament or two and enjoyed ourselves.

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Topicality for lawyers
One of my teammates in college was almost universally known as the best researcher in the nation. The man was scary. One side effect of his card-cutting skill was that he held topicality in serious disdain. He was the 2N, and it was all but impossible for his partner to persuade him to go for topicality in the 2NR, even when it was their best hope, even when the 1AR had messed it up badly. So part two of the story is that this debater went on to law school, and one year in he told me, "I wish I'd gone for topicality a lot more often. Ninety nine percent of what lawyers do is topicality: interpreting the law and explaining that the interpretation is better than competing ones. Everything I learned in debate about describing events and interconnections in the world, all the card cutting, is about one percent of the practice of the law." Something to think about, especially if you're arguing the educational value of topicality debates, and you've got a lawyer for a judge.

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PALS to Israel
Years ago, Pittsburgh gave PALS to ... Israel, I think? And they did it covertly. A big part of our strategy was to say "Since you do it covertly, you can't prove the plan hasn't already been done." We then said they lose for three reasons:


 * 1. Inherency's a stock issue.


 * 2. The topic had "substantially increase" in it, and if the plan's been done, it's not a substantial increase. 0% increase is not substantial.


 * 3. Status quo defense is exclusive negative ground. The affirmative has the burden of defending change, and they have infinite prep time to decide what the change will be. Choosing something they can't prove is a change at all steals negative ground, and ground theft is a voting issue, because the judge can't render a rational decision on who did the better debating if the negative never had ground to defend.

Beat 'em in their break round (4-3, needed 5-3 to clear) at the NDT on those arguments.

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Legal reasoning
The very last affirmative I ran in my debate career was a goals/criteria, or pretty close to it. It was a legal topic, and you had to overrule a Supreme Court decision. We said the round should be decided through legal reasoning, including only issues that were relevant to arriving at a legally correct outcome. If the Supreme Court case had been wrongly decided, it had to be overruled. Disadvantages that drew in politics, the economy, anything like that, weren't relevant, because a court never says "We've got to find this defendant guilty or the Blue Dog Democrats will lose political capital," blah blah blah. Best card we had -- I want to say it was from the Oklahoma Law Review -- said something like, "Lawyers are familiar with the saying, Fiat justitia ruat caelum -- 'Let justice be done though the heavens fall.' Seemingly extreme consequences do not negate a valid legal thesis."

We said a legal topic was a unique opportunity to learn about legal reasoning, that the law review literature we'd be in was best suited to researching legal arguments, that legal arguments get crowded out if all those other arguments are included, etc. We didn't have a perfect record with it, but we did beat a number of extremely good teams with it.

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It's not a counterplan, we swear
Years ago, Burleson High School right outside Fort Worth had a couple of quite successful teams, and they would run counterplans that they labeled "non-resolutional policy alternative." If anyone tried to answer them like counterplans, they'd say "It's not a counterplan; it's a non-resolutional policy alternative." Some debaters had the moxie to make fun of that in CX, by chasing them around until they had to admit it was a counterplan, but some debaters didn't have the stick-to-it-iveness to grind that out of them. And they did say that calling it a non-resolutional policy alternative helped them with some judges who thought counterplans were radical departures from their beloved stock issues. They wouldn't vote on a counterplan, but they'd at least listen to a non-resolutional policy alternative.

We, of course, ridiculed it. We abbreviated it to NRPA, which we pronounced "nurpa," and we threatened to give them a purple nurpa if they pulled any of that nonsense with us.

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Redlands vs. Kentucky
Redlands affirmative, Kentucky negative. Kentucky reads a new link to one of the disads in the 2NC. Redlands makes a new uniqueness answer to the new link in the 1AR. Kentucky counterplans out the uniqueness answer in the 2NR. Redlands runs three disadvantages to the counterplan in the 2AR, concluding with "And that's why you don't counterplan in 2NR." 3-0 for Redlands.

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Airplane antifreeze
The smart thing to do if you want to run a small affirmative and win it in front of judges of all stripes is to prepare with evidenced arguments, not just gyrate back and forth on "1% is enough! It is, it is, it is!"

On the college environment pollution topic, I researched and wrote a new affirmative that my debaters ran in one round -- the semis of the Harvard tournament -- that claimed just a few deaths. The plan regulated the practice of spraying airplanes with ethylene glycol (antifreeze) to de-ice them. Since the antifreeze runs off the airport into the surrounding soil, and they make no effort to contain it, it contaminates the surrounding watershed, which meant it was topical to regulate it. But the only harm we could find was that the practice was almost completely ineffective: they tended to deice while the planes sat at the gate, and when they stacked up in a queue, waiting for an open runway, they iced back up again.

So all we could claim was a fraction of all the air crash fatalities in the United States, which, to be honest, there aren't very many. We therefore did a few things to beef up the harm.


 * We cut cards from abortion and euthanasia writings that said every life was sacred and irreplaceable, and put one in the 1AC that gave a couple of reasons why in just a few words.


 * We cut cards about rescue operations the government had undertaken for single people who had gone missing or had been taken hostage, and how much the government spent, how many personnel applied to the job, etc.


 * We found one fantastic card -- this came out of wearying hours of reading -- from the literature of the ethics of product safety, saying if a decisionmaker knew there was a genuine risk a product could cause fatal injuries, and the decisionmaker gave it the green light anyway because of secondary consequences like economic losses, then in the event of any deaths, that decisionmaker would be guilty of murder -- not in the eyes of the law, but in the sense of moral culpability.


 * Last, we made one unevidenced argument: college debaters and coaches fly just about every weekend, and because of the school year and our traditional tournament schedule, we fly in and out of a lot of iced-over airports. This harm has particular salience for us, because we are the potential victims. Just as a drowning person rationally places getting back on dry land ahead of world peace or ending world hunger, a person who routinely flies through icy weather should rationally place ice-induced plane crashes above other possible consequences.

The point, of course, is the same one I was making above: instead of just asserting boldly that your idea of how debate should work is the correct one, and everyone else is just wrong, the far smarter thing to do is get a few arguments together and sell your side of it.

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Inappropriate emotions
Bit of a tangent, but I remember judging the final round of oratory at the NFL Nationals qualifier in Dallas, back in the late 1980s. One young woman had won first place at a string of tournaments, including the state championship, and people just assumed she'd qualify first out of her NFL district. So she gives this speech, and I have to say she was heart-stoppingly beautiful, but she smiles the entire time like a Miss America contestant while telling the story of a home invasion burglary where the burglars murdered the entire family, including chopping up the baby with an axe. All three of us ranked her dead last. I don't know how she won as much as she did with that speech and that delivery.

And I wrote on the ballot words to the effect of, "For goodness sake, don't smile while you tell that story! You don't maximize your ethos by coming across as a sociopath on antidepressants."

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Big moves in the 1AR
My last two years of debate, I was the 2A. At the time, most affirmative teams had a practice of keeping a ton of options open in the 1AR, and then making the big strategic choices in the 2AR. We did it a little differently. My partner was good, and very smart, but slow, so we did the big strategic moves in the 1AR: kicking out of various parts of the case, narrowing down to just one or two answers to each negative round-winning position, etc. That meant the 2NR couldn't complain about not knowing what I would do. We played our hand and let the 2NR make her/his best case against it, and then in the 2AR I answered that speech. It worked quite well. Beyond that, it was just a very satisfying way to debate: "Here's our big move, and you get a chance to answer it, and then I'll come along behind and sell it." Without four rebuttals, it would not have been possible.

When you shorten debates, you do make the logistics more workable, no question. And that does lower barriers to participation for a lot of debaters and families. But shortening the debates comes at a price.

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Supreme Court fiat
There's an argument we made years back that sheds some light. For a few years, the NFSHA topic framers didn't learn their lesson about the inadvisability of putting "U.S. citizens" in the topic, so we got two topics -- one about the government providing public works programs to achieve full employment, and the other about retirement security -- that included those words. Problem is, if lawful resident aliens are in the country long term, they're eligible for those programs: that's a pretty open-and-shut requirement of the equal protection clause, according to a lot of Supreme Court decisions.

On the full employment topic, we just said the Court would throw out the plan, which was a 100% solvency takeout. We didn't often hear "Well, we'll just fiat that the Court finds it constitutional," but when we did, we said it was an abuse of fiat, and we also said it would pulverize equal protection law, and we had a string of impacts to losing the equal protection clause. I don't remember us losing on that argument, but I suppose it's possible we did.

On the retirement security topic, what they more commonly did was to argue that the plan would have to be passed by constitutional amendment, and policy-based amendments were bad and would unravel the constitution, destroying the protection for a long list of rights. This was the core negative strategy for a lot of very successful teams that year; I remember the final round of the Texas state championship being decided on it, and it was 5-0 for the negative. Once again, the affirmative didn't bother to make the "We fiat the Court" argument, and I suspect the negative would've been all over it.

Fiat really only exists to get the plan past the "Well, that'll never happen" argument. It gives the plan special protection to come into existence as a hypothetical, but it's not meant to dispel anything that happens after its passage, including running into trouble with the Supreme Court. So I disagree with Coach Carter: I think the arguments against it are eminently winnable, and it's not a risk worth taking.

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Walking link to GATT
I have one example of this that I can remember. We had a topic about changing trade policy toward a list of east Asian countries. A popular generic disad that year said that the plan would destroy GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, a trade negotiation forum that was superseded by the WTO. Almost everyone was running the "You destroy GATT" disad, with impacts like trade wars, economic collapse, etc.

Augustana South Dakota spent a good part of the summer researching impact turns to GATT: GATT's bad, so destroying it is good. They were very deep on the issue, and the cards were better than anyone expected. They therefore ran as an affirmative passing a textile bill that was then before Congress. When this got out on the first scouting reports, a lot of people were puzzled, because the case didn't seem very strategic: it didn't claim much, and it was a walking link to GATT.

Yes. Yes, it was.

Many teams at the first couple of tournaments made the mistake of running GATT, only to hear a 2AC in which the Augustana debater blew through every other issue at warp speed, then got to GATT with five or six minutes left and just dumped impact turns. Getting through that, even with the block to do it, was a challenge.

Eventually, the entire strategic picture made the rounds, and people stopped running GATT against Augustana. That didn't slow them down; they just read the GATT impact turns as add-ons in the 2AC. But that let negatives push the debate on all fronts: in addition to answering the impact turns, the 2NC could also dispute the link by saying the textile bill alone wouldn't kill GATT, that other issues were bigger threats, and so forth. It wasn't possible for negatives to do that when they themselves had run the disad, letting Augustana concede the uniqueness, link, threshold and internal links, and just debate them on the impact.

That was a trap. I can't really think of many others.

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Satire in debate
Believe it or not, this has been tried in college TP debate. The first time I heard about it was on the 1997-98 security assistance topic, and Claremont-McKenna's affirmative had the US give torture weapons to Indonesia so it could successfully torture the civil rights protesters until they stopped making trouble. The team then read evidence about the effect of irony on public argument, about how making arguments ironically served to expose concealed hierarchies and such. Some of the evidence came from here, and some from an online essay I can no longer find called the Kommunication Guerrilla handbook, authored by Luther Blissett.

It worked in debate just because debate has always had a certain tolerance of, or maybe downright fondness for, weirdness. But I can't imagine it working in a platform; I think it would unleash a lot of confusion.

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Definition of "industry"
Well, I have a cautionary tale for that. One year, we had a pollution topic, and the wording included the word "industry:" you had to adopt regulations on an industry that required it to reduce its production/emission of environmental pollutants. So that year, standard operating procedure for most teams writing their affirmatives was to do a Lexis search and find a few sound bites referring to the _____ industry.

About December, I put together an argument that "industry" only meant the secondary economic sector: enterprises that turned raw materials into a finished product. It excluded mining and agriculture cases, since they were primary sector, and it excluded service sector cases, since they were tertiary. It was a potentially useful little argument, but it still needed something. Topicality can be an uphill fight in any judging pool if you don't have the "Wow" factor, the little wrinkle that makes your violation seem like no ordinary topicality argument.

I knew most people were only going to read back at us a few contextual usages of "industry," so I went looking for our own really absurd ones, so we could write a preempt into the 1NC shell that such usages weren't as good as a stable, predictable interpretation. The best one I found said that because Tito Puente had made so many recordings, he was a one man industry. Our example of an absurd plan that the affirmative's framework would make legitimate was to force Tito Puente to stop smoking.

Late Spring, our top team used the argument to take down a couple of quite good Samford debaters who tried to upend them with a surprise new affirmative. The Samford 2A didn't listen closely enough to the details of the violation and just read his standard contextual usages, after which Paul, our 1N, had a ball in his rebuttal with the Tito Puente argument. Dan went for it for the entire 2NR, and we dodged a bullet. Unfortunately, we didn't learn from our own cautionary tale, and went on to lose the final round of the National Debate Tournament just about six weeks later from failing to listen closely to the details of a topicality violation.

All that to say that finding a usage of "military commitment" will ordinarily be enough, but there's a way to checkmate that defense pretty thoroughly that you shouldn't overlook.

Last thing, and this is meant warmly: "my nickname has evidentiary support" is such a debater thing to say.

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Wackiest arguments
I've always had a soft spot for wacky affirmatives. One I researched and wrote for a team I coached declassified a single GAO report about the Palestinian National Authority. It got them their sixth prelim win at an important tournament and helped them qualify for nationals, so I felt good about it. The wackiest affirmative I ever ran happened my junior year in high school, when we built nuclear power plants next to all major rivers and read evidence from Lyndon LaRouche that doing so would clean out all their pollutants. Ahh, youthful naïveté ...

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Comic evidence
We used to cut comic relief evidence. One year, the topic was energy policy, and I was in charge of researching global warming. I cut lots of cards both ways on the real arguments, but here, in its entirety, from one article in the Economist, is an actual impact turn that I produced. One of our teams read it in a debate in which they were hopelessly outclassed. It made everyone in the room die laughing. They got a speaker point boost out of it, which is better than nothing.

A. TURN: WARMING GOOD, SAVES CLEVELAND

The Economist, '89 (January 7, p. 27)

Talk about a silver lining. A study commissioned by the Environmental Protection Agency has actually found a beneficiary of the "greenhouse effect", the warming trend that has scientists forecasting doom for much of the world. It is Cleveland, the habitual butt of bad jokes. "Cleveland is likely to benefit substantially," wrote the Urban Institute in a report on global warming. "An image change from 'rust belt' to 'garden spot' is not an outlandish prediction." Scientists have predicted that as carbon dioxide and pollutants build up, the earth's average temperatures could be five-nine degrees warmer by 2080. So as Atlanta broils, Cleveland, which now suffers long, brutal winters, might be having a balmy day. Warmer temperatures would help to attract businesses and and keep residents from fleeing. Heat also would cut the city's expenses. Cleveland's annual snowfall could decline by roughly 85%, from 50 inches to eight inches, according to the report. That would save $ 4,4m a year on snow removal. Fewer cycles of freezing and thawing would mean less buckling of roads and deterioration of bridges, thus saving the city more money.

B. IMPACT: OUTWEIGHS EVERYTHING, BECAUSE CLEVELAND TRULY NEEDS A BREAK

The Economist, '89 (January 7, p. 27)

No American city deserves this reversal of fortunes more than Cleveland. The city suffers a dreadful image problem, mostly left over from the 1960s and 1970s when it was on the brink of financial ruin and reeling from other embarrassments that included both the Cuyahoga River and the mayor's hair catching fire (not simultaneously). Things have improved, but Cleveland's public-relations campaigns of recent years still reek of desperation, featuring unconvincing slogans such as "The Best Location in the Nation", "The North Coast" and -- aping New York's successful fruit imagery -- "Cleveland's a Plum". Clevelanders must hope that warnings about global warming will be ignored long enough to give them the last laugh.

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Defending the status quo
In both NDT and CEDA, there are folks who've defended the status quo on the affirmative. I posted this several months back in another thread, but in the NDT semis in 1992, Harvard defended the status quo. The topic was about curtailing the commander-in-chief power of the president, so their affirmative was to say Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. et al. v. Sawyer had been decided correctly. (No, wait -- Georgetown defended that on the C-in-C topic, which was two years later. Can't remember what Harvard ran in the NDT semis in 1992, but it was a status quo defense, based on a past Supreme Court decision.)

A couple of years later, the fad hit CEDA. The topic I remember it being most prominent on was "Resolved, that United States military intervention to promote democracy is appropriate in a post-Cold War world," and a number of affirmative teams defended the US air strikes in the former Yugoslavia as a proof that the resolution was true.

In both cases, it was a little "flavor of the month," and it didn't catch on much, but both were very winnable -- Harvard won, and went on to lose in the finals -- and both gave ground to the negative.

Quite apart from that, one of these days I'm going to get ambitious and write a full-scale, fully researched topic paper for NDT/CEDA, for the topic "Resolved, that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, killed John F. Kennedy." I think that topic would be fascinating, and would do all kinds of good for the debate world.

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High speed chases
Years ago, a kid I coached told a story from his high school days. He, Chris, was on the top team at Westminster in Atlanta, and one of his opponents went on to win the NDT twice and be top speaker once, so they all knew what they were doing. It was the 1994-95 immigration topic for NFL. His affirmative was to restrict high speed chases near the border. The 1N roadmapped that they'd need six sheets of paper, the last of which would be a "surprise." The surprise was that Chris's plan had been passed that day.

Chris grabbed the "surprise" and noticed that it had been done as an executive order, and that set his wheels to turning. Apparently some teams were running that affirmative as an executive order -- he was running it as legislation -- and in putting together the negative against his own affirmative, he'd found some on-point link evidence to a backfiles separation of powers disadvantage: doing the plan by executive order would be a grievous violation of SOP that would set a dangerous precedent. Can't remember why.

Anyway, in the 2AC he answered the "surprise" by running the disad against the status quo, and pointing out that the 1AC plan had been legislative from the get-go, so voting for the plan avoided the disad. This apparently confused his opponents terribly, who kept repeating "But your plan has already been passed! You can't win the debate if your plan has already been passed! We took a stock issue down to zero; we win!" But the judge understood, and Chris won that debate.

Every time I read people wondering about the relationship between inherency and disadvantages, that story pops back into my head. It's a weird outlier, and I can't imagine it would ever happen to any of you, but it does cast some light on the relationship between them. And I remember how Star Muir, the coach at George Mason University, used to say that all learning about debate comes through war stories anyway. He actually at one point wrote a debate textbook, or tried to, that was all war stories, which I thought was an interesting approach.

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Fun speech events
There's a tournament in Oregon, at Linfield College, that invents a fun event each year. This year, it was Mad Libs Interp. They gave you a Mad Lib, and after about ten minutes they gave you a prose piece with some of the words replaced by blanks, and you had to write in your words, and then about ten minutes later deliver it to a judge. One young man saw that a blank on his mad lib said "Person's Name," so he went and got my name off the posting, since I was his judge. Only when he got the piece did he find out he had to be madly in love with me and stalk me.

Last year, their made-up event was Character Debate. The debate was parli format, so they announced the topic twenty minutes in advance, but you also drew characters, and had to debate as your character. We had a pretty good debate between, on one side, the Hulk and Spider Man, and on the other side, Michael Jordan and Dr. Drew. I don't remember the topic, but it hardly mattered.

Two years ago, their made-up event was Bad Interp. The whole point of the event, and what the judges scored on, was imitating bad, over-the-top things that interpers do. I wasn't at the tournament that year, but I've heard that the rounds in that event were the funniest thing people had seen in a long time.

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New affirmatives in finals
If you're near a decent college library, go dig out the Journal of the American Forensic Association, and get the Summer 1980 issue. They published transcripts of the final round of the National Debate Tournament every year until 1985, and the 1980 round was especially interesting. Northwestern ran a new affirmative and caught Harvard completely off guard, so in the 2NC Harvard made a fairly developed argument that new affirmatives in the finals of nationals were illegitimate, and then ran counterwarrants.

5-0 for Northwestern.

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