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political cases

as an author of several "political" cases that are far beyond the
pale of "normal" debate subject areas i am interested in this current
thread.  from my experience, it was not the affirmative that started
whining for moral high ground but the negative who somehow felt that
they could not argue against something so "true" for fear of
offending us.  this happened on both the advertising and crime topics
where i ran cases specific to women's political issues, namely
menstruation and rape.  the first time i heard everything from "i
don't want to have to talk about women" to "ooh, that's gross and i
don't want to have to talk about it."  like roskoski, i would say
that these are not arguments... i have cards so answer them.

like cheryl at plu i was always ready to argue against my own case-
i ran the same rape education counterplan on the media and crime
topic and only had to win a small d/a to working inside of the
system as i captured the affirmative advantage.  i think one of the
benefits of poicy debate is that both sides can reach a consensus on
what is the highest "value" (or desireable endstate) and then argue
about the best method to get there.  i never think that the negative
has to uphold 'repugnant'
ground, you just have to think.  the example of the homopanic case
was also run by western and i spent alot of time pounding on the
table in my 2NR that solvency outside of the legal system was far
better and i did not have to filter through some murky affirmative
'criteria' that working within the system was key to liberation.  i
think the point is that plenty of fertile ground exists on issues
that are perceived to be too political or personal.  for too long
these issues have not been dealt with because they are seen as too
uncomfortable to speak about in the public realm.  part of an open
debate forum is the opportunity to bring to light issues that were
once considered "unspeakable."
i think that we should also note that some of the authors we quote
for our nuclear war scenarios are also quite passionate about
human death and destruction of the planet- just because the impact is
quantifiable in terms of death and bodies on the flow does not make
the impact any more pertinent or understandable- i think it is our
adaptation of their arguments to our forum that strips some of the
emotion from their argumentation that seems so raw in other voices.

there is no doubt that a certain critical distancing happens in
debate rounds when we speak about "impacts" to humans- after having
listened to a whole year of the high school immigration topic i am
releived to not have to evaluate people in terms of their economic
production capacities or their reproductive capacities- all
doublespeak for who works for what low-paying jobs americans don't
want and how many non-white babies do we need in america.  what i am
saying is that more often than not, we are edging around these
issues, and people who take them straight on are just trying to call
it as they see it.  yes, people get offended and toes get stepped on.
 but that is part of the "real" world as well and we might as well
start dealing with it in our community honestly as well.

christina wise
oregon
Archive created by Jonathan Stanton (jonathan@cs.jhu.edu)
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