Yeah, so there are quite a few different formats (I won’t even mention all of them below) and they can evolve, and they work somewhat differently here, and “being honest in your advocacy” comes up in the debates themselves quite often (but the other side is, sort of necessarily, also argued whenever the debate “goes meta about debate itself” like that).
I. “SPAR”
In High School (when I was competing in individuals events for the team I eventually returned to and coached) there was one tournament every year that had a “SPontaneous ARgument” competition.
That tournament was the best, and lots of us loved to SPAR, and that was just like the thing you’re imagining.
You don’t even know what the question will be. Its usually something trivial like “Peanut better is objectively better than jelly” but it could be “Invading Iraq was a mistake” or whatever.
If both people agree on who wants to be pro/con they can, otherwise its a coin flip.
Amateur parent volunteer judges with no rhetorical training then judge on… random criteria?
It is, to serious undergraduate NDT tournament at a national Finals, what your first day at an improv class is to starring in Hamlet.
II. RESOLUTIONS SELECTED BY A NATIONAL COMMITTEE
In serious policy debate the community picks a RESOLUTION and then at a tournament you take the affirmative three times, and the negative three times. When you are affirmative, you pick ANY CASE YOU WANT that is an instance of a detailed policy consistent with the RESOLUTION to advocate.
At least that’s how it works nowadays. Sometimes in the past there was poor resolution selection such that every round for the entire year was the same argument and it was terrible. The trick to a good one is to hit the zeitgeist a bit, but also to leave wiggle room for crazy cases.
1928 Resolved: That a federal department of education should be created with a secretary in the president’s cabinet.
1943 Resolved: That a federal world government should be established.
1966 Resolved: That the federal government should adopt a program of compulsory arbitration in labor-management disputes in basic industries.
1985 Resolved: That the federal government should provide employment for all employable United States citizens living in poverty.
1999 Resolved: That the United States should substantially change its foreign policy toward Russia.
2007 Resolved: The United States federal government should establish a policy substantially increasing the number of persons serving in one or more of the following national service programs: AmeriCorps, Citizen Corps, Senior Corps, Peace Corps, Learn and Serve America, Armed Forces.
2016 Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially curtail its domestic surveillance.
In general, teams can run cases they truly believe in, or they can run “trick cases”, or they can run centrally topical cases. These are more like dimensions? In modern times there’s a whole other thing called “kritiks” which I’ll touch on very lightly later. Affirmative cases can often be positioned in these three or four dimensions, but often push very hard into one specific dimension.
III. Example Trick Case: Bomb Russian Booze
I remember a trick case with Russia, where the affirmative plan was to send Navy Seals into Russia, and secretly bomb literally every large alcohol distillery (also all the warehouses with stores of vodka), and get away with it (no one would know who the bombers were), and so (the claim went) nothing would change except a massive increase in the price of hard alcohol in Russia, based on massive decrease in the supply, and thus a massive lowering of their rates of alcoholism, for a massive net benefit to Russian domestic wellbeing.
And this was, obviously, INSANE. But it kept winning! :-D
They had all this published recruiting material, that young men are often exposed to by ROTC recruiters, saying that the Navy Seals were essentially made of magic and could do anything and never be caught.
And they submitted it as strong direct written evidence of the ease with which the plan could be carried off, and bloviated about how “the American government would never lie to its precious young men in its recruiting material so either this is true or else the USG is evil… is that what you’re really saying when you accuse our recent and clearly cited evidence of being overstated?? do you you lack patriotism?!?”
It was hilarious. People almost always laughed the first time they heard it. And (rare) Flow Judges and (common) Coms Judges could both appreciate the “technically clean logic” and (often) the fun/patriotic/cynical showboating.
IV. Other Example Cases: Drug Legalization & Dioxins
So, basically, if you wanted to spend your optimization pressure to pick an AFF case you really really believed in (like as a political posture?) even if it had shit evidence, and only one crackpot in one insane progressive magazine with a readership of 1000 was advocating it directly (and you weren’t even doing what the crackpot suggested because that was a bad plan, but you were modifying it creatively yourself)… I mean… you could do that, but it would be tougher and maybe less funny?
And funniness, in my book, counts for a lot.
((I kinda “went authentic” my second year of actually debating, trying to pass off radical domestic drug reform in the US as a “demand side” attempt at a “foreign policy” adjustment towards a country with large “illegal” opium farms and cartels and stuff. It was something someone in their early 20s might foolishly think was wise? Arguably we were Brucing a bit in choosing to run it… we sometimes actually lost on AFF, which is not great.
In my first year we just went straight up the middle with a dioxin emission fix based on mandated medical waste incinerator smokestack filters paid for by government subsidies, and enforced by fines for refusing to accept the retrofit. Dioxins are basically not emitted in the US anymore, but back then they were. We won a lot. And it wasn’t even a trick case! But people didn’t laugh… just nod along and agree that this boring thing was boringly correct and the negative arguments were grasping at straws. The coach made sure we didn’t change since we were beginners and etc etc.))
Often, teams would pick a case, and change it a little bit between every tournament and bring polished proposals and skilled defense to tournaments at the end of the year.
The hard and creative (and more morally ambiguous) part was Negative.
V. The Desperate (Deeply Theoretical?) Bullshit Negatives Need To Ever Win
Over and over and over (usually three times every tournament) you hear this AMAZING First Affirmative Constructive (1AC) and with shining rhetoric, a clean story, tidy evidence, and true confidence in the voice of the person speaking it, and…
...you want to stand up and applaud and say “this is a great proposal that America should do”...
...but instead you have to pull shit out of your ass somehow to say NO to it...
...like maybe: “NO! uh… because… technically it is a prima facie burden of the affirmative team to propose a plan with no vagueness, and here is a formal expert in rhetoric to back us up on this claim about how debate has to technically work if it is to be properly educational, and this plan is vague because… uh… [checks list of 20 ways a plan can be vague that was given to them by the advanced team that usually gets to at least the quarter finals in tournaments] it lacks a clear funding mechanism… and you, dear wonderful Judge who is very wise and full of common sense, you wouldn’t sign a blank check, would you? wouldn’t that be crazy? this is a prima facie burden! and it can’t be fixed in the second speech! if they didn’t have it in the first speech you know they’re just making shit up and you can’t trust them, and therefore they should lose and there’s no two ways about it, and here are five independent reasons that the basic idea, if true, constitutes valid reason to give the ballot to us, all based on just the truth that their plan was vague <and so on>”.
You actually give it A LOT more structure thatn that. Break “Vagueness” into an A, B, C, D set of claims, where the four lettered claims abstractly explain why NEG has to win. Give each letter several numbered justifications… Also, you make four other half-crazy arguments, each of which attacks the AFF case from orthogonal directions from “Vagueness”.
Then (on the Vagueness position) the AFF later says:
(1) you made an ad hominum in your accusation, about them not being trustworthy
(2) and yes do too they have a price number, and they just baldly assert <a made up price> with no evidence at all, and
(3 & 4 & 5) they make some other rebuttals, but they don’t don’t refute EVERY independent line of argument through your entire plan vagueness scaffold.
So in your counter you magnanimously grant almost everything they said, except for the totally made up price which is obviously made up. Which you reiterate is too late so shouldn’t count for educational reasons, and also NEW 1 its a fake number with no evidence, and also… <three more new numbered arguments>.
And you point out that you made more and stronger arguments that they ignored, and reiterate the A B C and D of the Vagueness argument...
...using only A2, A4, B1, B5, C2, C3, and D3, D4, and D5 as voters.
You point out that you now have 2x2x2x3==24 different paths to retain the overall Vagueness Position in a form that could destroy AFF! <3
(These 24 paths to victory are a shorter and smaller version of what you originally said! You said more before… via speed reading a generic Vagueness Template that you’ve practiced speed reading the pro forma parts of.)
And then you remind the judge that the next time the AFF talks it won’t be a constructive, and they would have made their strongest arguments, and if they make new arguments it wouldn’t be fair, because you probably could have made strong creative counter-arguments to those new arguments, but you won’t have the time or legal allowance for that (which might be why they would have stuck arguments in that were weak in the long run but strong initially)...
...and so anything else they make up later would violate the “educational spirit” of “the noble practice of policy debate”, and so, sadly, despite the case possibly being great in real life (unless either of the two other independent anti-affirmative voting arguments goes through) the judge will have to Vote On Vagueness And Vote Negative.
And then you watch the judge’s facial expressions carefully during this as they look down at their notes and write what you say… or whatever the judge does. Its the judge. The judge is god for the round. You want the ballot, right? The judge controls the ballot.
VI. Subservience To The Judge Is Good Strategy
Depending on the judge(s)’s nods or frowns, maybe in an even later (even shorter) speech, you might concede or silently drop or spend only 20 seconds half-assing the Vagueness position at the very very end?
Or you might hammer it super hard in an eloquent minute long rant explaining why this is ONE OF TWO very very strong and very very independent reasons to Vote Negative.
And you spell out a potted but plausible history of the debate so far (that everyone has notes on and it just happened but it was fast and you’re trying to crystalized it in people’s minds) summarizing all the rhetorical flubs of the AFF team who had a BURDEN OF PROOF! And not-at-all-fakely emoting about how the AFF burden of proof is so important… right now… (until you’re on AFF in the next round, insisting that stock issues are fake bullshit in general, and Vagueness isn’t even one that people normally cared about)...
In finals, there are three judges!
Based on facial expressions these three “gods” might buy different things, so there are entire lectures you’ll get from the coach in the five hour van ride to yet another college for yet another tournament, on how to pick what to drop and what to emphasize so that you can try to get at least two of the three judges in the final to vote for you, even if they vote on different issues.)
And then sometimes all the prep work and all the fallbacks, and all the combinatorial optimization gives you a weaselly win as a negative?
And you win against a naively “real world very strong case” where the Affirmative just were kinda lazy about researching the cost of their plan enough? Or not?
It depends.
VII. The Bullshit, Emphasized Above As Silly, Is Actually Often Educational
However also… it overall… these practice really are, often, “educational in general”! <3
The vagueness bullshit might work in the second tournament of the season, but in the fourth tournament of the season, with the AFF running a newer and sexier version of their case, and they will have changed the wording slightly (at no time cost) to mention a price in their Official Plan!
And it will be backed by evidence they didn’t mention, but now have in their laptops or box of papers, that they can quote (but only if you’re fool enough to not notice the slightly different words and try vagueness on reflex, rather than from actually listening and deciding what Negative attacks to try, on the fly, in the round) and the evidence will be based on an expert they found in some library article, after haunting the library for a day.
Negative teams rarely win the same way twice against the same Affirmative team, and by the end of the year the same teams will often have been in the finals against each other two or three times, arguing the same AFF case as always (but now very strong) and “yet another crazy way to attack it” (like a kritik maybe?).
But anyway.
If you go with a stock issues frame, and try Vagueness, on NEG, that first time… (early in a season, with a strong generic theoretical counter-argument to a half-assed AFF case) you might win, especially in High School...
...in college anarchoprogleft types might try to accuse you of being logocentrically racist if you naively try to use stock issues, and anarchoprogleft college judges might agree with that? College rounds can be insane or not, in hundreds of different ways ;-)
I lost to “Kant”… twice. Never got a 3rd rematch.
I lost to “deep eco feminism”… twice and then beat it the third time and had “Cara” (who was in her late 20s, and finally getting a degree to make something of her life, and was intimidatingly confident, and made finals in like half the tournaments I saw) ask for a copy of my citations and evidence at the end, which made me felt super proud. Then she stopped running “deep eco feminism”! Which I thought was high integrity of her!
Anyway. If things are working well overall, Winning As Negative gets harder and harder and harder over the course of the season.
Because there is feedback!
Because it is at least half real, and every 90 minute debate at a tournament gives the AFF yet another real life, adrenaline filled, actual redteamed, OODA loop’s worth of information on how to make their advocacy, that they get to choose and refine (within the arguably vague bounds of the annual resolution that is stable all year) stronger against arbitrary attacks :-)
VIII. Thoughts On The Flexibility Of The Ontology Of Traditional Debate Norms
Mostly here I’m talking about specifically undergrad level “CEDA/NDT debate” and its echo at the High School level which is called “Policy Debate”.
Anyone can make up anything they want, in terms of a group of people who meet to argue and vote and award prizes and whatever.
“Debate” in a fully general form, is nearly infinitely open and flexible. It doesn’t have to be two people vs two people. It doesn’t have to have a yearly resolution (in High School sometimes they change it halfway through the year).
Debates have been happening for millennia and you can do them however it seems correct to you to do them. They are deeply “existential” rather than “essential” when the judges can write anything they want on a ballot, and your job is to get people to grant you ethos, and feel “<YourName> wins” is true of what just happened, and express it somehow. If people are truly good, it can work. If people are bad, then… maybe the methods can save it? Maybe?
The debates exist… that existence includes a competitively collaborative search for the meaning of the competitive practice, with winners and losers, internal to the practice...
The form that exists now agrees, mostly, that it should be able to regenerate itself from inside its own logic, but the forms we have are deeply deeply tested and not everyone will understand all of why things happen and particular way. And these forms are part of continuous traditions going back to the 1920s that are still culturally resonating, which I think is kinda cool <3
Yeah, so there are quite a few different formats (I won’t even mention all of them below) and they can evolve, and they work somewhat differently here, and “being honest in your advocacy” comes up in the debates themselves quite often (but the other side is, sort of necessarily, also argued whenever the debate “goes meta about debate itself” like that).
I. “SPAR”
In High School (when I was competing in individuals events for the team I eventually returned to and coached) there was one tournament every year that had a “SPontaneous ARgument” competition.
That tournament was the best, and lots of us loved to SPAR, and that was just like the thing you’re imagining.
You don’t even know what the question will be. Its usually something trivial like “Peanut better is objectively better than jelly” but it could be “Invading Iraq was a mistake” or whatever.
If both people agree on who wants to be pro/con they can, otherwise its a coin flip.
Amateur parent volunteer judges with no rhetorical training then judge on… random criteria?
It is, to serious undergraduate NDT tournament at a national Finals, what your first day at an improv class is to starring in Hamlet.
II. RESOLUTIONS SELECTED BY A NATIONAL COMMITTEE
In serious policy debate the community picks a RESOLUTION and then at a tournament you take the affirmative three times, and the negative three times. When you are affirmative, you pick ANY CASE YOU WANT that is an instance of a detailed policy consistent with the RESOLUTION to advocate.
At least that’s how it works nowadays. Sometimes in the past there was poor resolution selection such that every round for the entire year was the same argument and it was terrible. The trick to a good one is to hit the zeitgeist a bit, but also to leave wiggle room for crazy cases.
1928 Resolved: That a federal department of education should be created with a secretary in the president’s cabinet.
1943 Resolved: That a federal world government should be established.
1966 Resolved: That the federal government should adopt a program of compulsory arbitration in labor-management disputes in basic industries.
1985 Resolved: That the federal government should provide employment for all employable United States citizens living in poverty.
1999 Resolved: That the United States should substantially change its foreign policy toward Russia.
2007 Resolved: The United States federal government should establish a policy substantially increasing the number of persons serving in one or more of the following national service programs: AmeriCorps, Citizen Corps, Senior Corps, Peace Corps, Learn and Serve America, Armed Forces.
2016 Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially curtail its domestic surveillance.
In general, teams can run cases they truly believe in, or they can run “trick cases”, or they can run centrally topical cases. These are more like dimensions? In modern times there’s a whole other thing called “kritiks” which I’ll touch on very lightly later. Affirmative cases can often be positioned in these three or four dimensions, but often push very hard into one specific dimension.
III. Example Trick Case: Bomb Russian Booze
I remember a trick case with Russia, where the affirmative plan was to send Navy Seals into Russia, and secretly bomb literally every large alcohol distillery (also all the warehouses with stores of vodka), and get away with it (no one would know who the bombers were), and so (the claim went) nothing would change except a massive increase in the price of hard alcohol in Russia, based on massive decrease in the supply, and thus a massive lowering of their rates of alcoholism, for a massive net benefit to Russian domestic wellbeing.
And this was, obviously, INSANE. But it kept winning! :-D
They had all this published recruiting material, that young men are often exposed to by ROTC recruiters, saying that the Navy Seals were essentially made of magic and could do anything and never be caught.
And they submitted it as strong direct written evidence of the ease with which the plan could be carried off, and bloviated about how “the American government would never lie to its precious young men in its recruiting material so either this is true or else the USG is evil… is that what you’re really saying when you accuse our recent and clearly cited evidence of being overstated?? do you you lack patriotism?!?”
It was hilarious. People almost always laughed the first time they heard it. And (rare) Flow Judges and (common) Coms Judges could both appreciate the “technically clean logic” and (often) the fun/patriotic/cynical showboating.
IV. Other Example Cases: Drug Legalization & Dioxins
So, basically, if you wanted to spend your optimization pressure to pick an AFF case you really really believed in (like as a political posture?) even if it had shit evidence, and only one crackpot in one insane progressive magazine with a readership of 1000 was advocating it directly (and you weren’t even doing what the crackpot suggested because that was a bad plan, but you were modifying it creatively yourself)… I mean… you could do that, but it would be tougher and maybe less funny?
And funniness, in my book, counts for a lot.
((I kinda “went authentic” my second year of actually debating, trying to pass off radical domestic drug reform in the US as a “demand side” attempt at a “foreign policy” adjustment towards a country with large “illegal” opium farms and cartels and stuff. It was something someone in their early 20s might foolishly think was wise? Arguably we were Brucing a bit in choosing to run it… we sometimes actually lost on AFF, which is not great.
In my first year we just went straight up the middle with a dioxin emission fix based on mandated medical waste incinerator smokestack filters paid for by government subsidies, and enforced by fines for refusing to accept the retrofit. Dioxins are basically not emitted in the US anymore, but back then they were. We won a lot. And it wasn’t even a trick case! But people didn’t laugh… just nod along and agree that this boring thing was boringly correct and the negative arguments were grasping at straws. The coach made sure we didn’t change since we were beginners and etc etc.))
Often, teams would pick a case, and change it a little bit between every tournament and bring polished proposals and skilled defense to tournaments at the end of the year.
The hard and creative (and more morally ambiguous) part was Negative.
V. The Desperate (Deeply Theoretical?) Bullshit Negatives Need To Ever Win
Over and over and over (usually three times every tournament) you hear this AMAZING First Affirmative Constructive (1AC) and with shining rhetoric, a clean story, tidy evidence, and true confidence in the voice of the person speaking it, and…
...you want to stand up and applaud and say “this is a great proposal that America should do”...
...but instead you have to pull shit out of your ass somehow to say NO to it...
...like maybe: “NO! uh… because… technically it is a prima facie burden of the affirmative team to propose a plan with no vagueness, and here is a formal expert in rhetoric to back us up on this claim about how debate has to technically work if it is to be properly educational, and this plan is vague because… uh… [checks list of 20 ways a plan can be vague that was given to them by the advanced team that usually gets to at least the quarter finals in tournaments] it lacks a clear funding mechanism… and you, dear wonderful Judge who is very wise and full of common sense, you wouldn’t sign a blank check, would you? wouldn’t that be crazy? this is a prima facie burden! and it can’t be fixed in the second speech! if they didn’t have it in the first speech you know they’re just making shit up and you can’t trust them, and therefore they should lose and there’s no two ways about it, and here are five independent reasons that the basic idea, if true, constitutes valid reason to give the ballot to us, all based on just the truth that their plan was vague <and so on>”.
You actually give it A LOT more structure thatn that. Break “Vagueness” into an A, B, C, D set of claims, where the four lettered claims abstractly explain why NEG has to win. Give each letter several numbered justifications… Also, you make four other half-crazy arguments, each of which attacks the AFF case from orthogonal directions from “Vagueness”.
Then (on the Vagueness position) the AFF later says:
(1) you made an ad hominum in your accusation, about them not being trustworthy
(2) and yes do too they have a price number, and they just baldly assert <a made up price> with no evidence at all, and
(3 & 4 & 5) they make some other rebuttals, but they don’t don’t refute EVERY independent line of argument through your entire plan vagueness scaffold.
So in your counter you magnanimously grant almost everything they said, except for the totally made up price which is obviously made up. Which you reiterate is too late so shouldn’t count for educational reasons, and also NEW 1 its a fake number with no evidence, and also… <three more new numbered arguments>.
And you point out that you made more and stronger arguments that they ignored, and reiterate the A B C and D of the Vagueness argument...
...using only A2, A4, B1, B5, C2, C3, and D3, D4, and D5 as voters.
You point out that you now have 2x2x2x3==24 different paths to retain the overall Vagueness Position in a form that could destroy AFF! <3
(These 24 paths to victory are a shorter and smaller version of what you originally said! You said more before… via speed reading a generic Vagueness Template that you’ve practiced speed reading the pro forma parts of.)
And then you remind the judge that the next time the AFF talks it won’t be a constructive, and they would have made their strongest arguments, and if they make new arguments it wouldn’t be fair, because you probably could have made strong creative counter-arguments to those new arguments, but you won’t have the time or legal allowance for that (which might be why they would have stuck arguments in that were weak in the long run but strong initially)...
...and so anything else they make up later would violate the “educational spirit” of “the noble practice of policy debate”, and so, sadly, despite the case possibly being great in real life (unless either of the two other independent anti-affirmative voting arguments goes through) the judge will have to Vote On Vagueness And Vote Negative.
And then you watch the judge’s facial expressions carefully during this as they look down at their notes and write what you say… or whatever the judge does. Its the judge. The judge is god for the round. You want the ballot, right? The judge controls the ballot.
VI. Subservience To The Judge Is Good Strategy
Depending on the judge(s)’s nods or frowns, maybe in an even later (even shorter) speech, you might concede or silently drop or spend only 20 seconds half-assing the Vagueness position at the very very end?
Or you might hammer it super hard in an eloquent minute long rant explaining why this is ONE OF TWO very very strong and very very independent reasons to Vote Negative.
And you spell out a potted but plausible history of the debate so far (that everyone has notes on and it just happened but it was fast and you’re trying to crystalized it in people’s minds) summarizing all the rhetorical flubs of the AFF team who had a BURDEN OF PROOF! And not-at-all-fakely emoting about how the AFF burden of proof is so important… right now… (until you’re on AFF in the next round, insisting that stock issues are fake bullshit in general, and Vagueness isn’t even one that people normally cared about)...
In finals, there are three judges!
Based on facial expressions these three “gods” might buy different things, so there are entire lectures you’ll get from the coach in the five hour van ride to yet another college for yet another tournament, on how to pick what to drop and what to emphasize so that you can try to get at least two of the three judges in the final to vote for you, even if they vote on different issues.)
And then sometimes all the prep work and all the fallbacks, and all the combinatorial optimization gives you a weaselly win as a negative?
And you win against a naively “real world very strong case” where the Affirmative just were kinda lazy about researching the cost of their plan enough? Or not?
It depends.
VII. The Bullshit, Emphasized Above As Silly, Is Actually Often Educational
However also… it overall… these practice really are, often, “educational in general”! <3
The vagueness bullshit might work in the second tournament of the season, but in the fourth tournament of the season, with the AFF running a newer and sexier version of their case, and they will have changed the wording slightly (at no time cost) to mention a price in their Official Plan!
And it will be backed by evidence they didn’t mention, but now have in their laptops or box of papers, that they can quote (but only if you’re fool enough to not notice the slightly different words and try vagueness on reflex, rather than from actually listening and deciding what Negative attacks to try, on the fly, in the round) and the evidence will be based on an expert they found in some library article, after haunting the library for a day.
Negative teams rarely win the same way twice against the same Affirmative team, and by the end of the year the same teams will often have been in the finals against each other two or three times, arguing the same AFF case as always (but now very strong) and “yet another crazy way to attack it” (like a kritik maybe?).
But anyway.
If you go with a stock issues frame, and try Vagueness, on NEG, that first time… (early in a season, with a strong generic theoretical counter-argument to a half-assed AFF case) you might win, especially in High School...
...in college anarchoprogleft types might try to accuse you of being logocentrically racist if you naively try to use stock issues, and anarchoprogleft college judges might agree with that? College rounds can be insane or not, in hundreds of different ways ;-)
I lost to “Kant”… twice. Never got a 3rd rematch.
I lost to “deep eco feminism”… twice and then beat it the third time and had “Cara” (who was in her late 20s, and finally getting a degree to make something of her life, and was intimidatingly confident, and made finals in like half the tournaments I saw) ask for a copy of my citations and evidence at the end, which made me felt super proud. Then she stopped running “deep eco feminism”! Which I thought was high integrity of her!
Anyway. If things are working well overall, Winning As Negative gets harder and harder and harder over the course of the season.
Because there is feedback!
Because it is at least half real, and every 90 minute debate at a tournament gives the AFF yet another real life, adrenaline filled, actual redteamed, OODA loop’s worth of information on how to make their advocacy, that they get to choose and refine (within the arguably vague bounds of the annual resolution that is stable all year) stronger against arbitrary attacks :-)
VIII. Thoughts On The Flexibility Of The Ontology Of Traditional Debate Norms
Mostly here I’m talking about specifically undergrad level “CEDA/NDT debate” and its echo at the High School level which is called “Policy Debate”.
Anyone can make up anything they want, in terms of a group of people who meet to argue and vote and award prizes and whatever.
“Debate” in a fully general form, is nearly infinitely open and flexible. It doesn’t have to be two people vs two people. It doesn’t have to have a yearly resolution (in High School sometimes they change it halfway through the year).
It doesn’t have to have five minute constructive speeches with two minutes of cross-examination at the beginning. It doesn’t have to have ballots that say either AFF or NEG. It doesn’t have to have “speaker points” over and above that to help break ties in how the seeding process for finals should work.
Debates have been happening for millennia and you can do them however it seems correct to you to do them. They are deeply “existential” rather than “essential” when the judges can write anything they want on a ballot, and your job is to get people to grant you ethos, and feel “<YourName> wins” is true of what just happened, and express it somehow. If people are truly good, it can work. If people are bad, then… maybe the methods can save it? Maybe?
The debates exist… that existence includes a competitively collaborative search for the meaning of the competitive practice, with winners and losers, internal to the practice...
The form that exists now agrees, mostly, that it should be able to regenerate itself from inside its own logic, but the forms we have are deeply deeply tested and not everyone will understand all of why things happen and particular way. And these forms are part of continuous traditions going back to the 1920s that are still culturally resonating, which I think is kinda cool <3