i sent this to cx-l some time ago ... during a bit of a discussion there concerning fiat. My thought at the time was that the amount of net time spent in debates on questions concerning political capital could easily have exceeded the time spent on other issues concerning juvenile crime or the environment. While the notion to restrict any form of argumentation -- be it world government or bipartisanship -- is arbitrary, it seems that the motivation of redirecting argument back to the yearly topic focus is probably worth consideration. hope that others have some thoughts ... :) The suggestion on CX resulted in no direct replies. david rhaesa
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- To: Multiple recipients of list <cx-l@debate.net>
- Subject: FIAT
- From: David Rhaesa <race@midusa.net>
- Date: Wed, 26 Feb 1997 13:46:32 -0500 (EST)
- Reply-To: race@midusa.net
- Sender: cx-l@debate.net
The history of FIAT appears to be partly related to creating classes of argumentation that are not germane to the debate on a given topic. In the early days this was the elimination of arguments that the plan wouldn't be adopted by Congress. This prevented the negative from doing an equivalent of a roll call vote on current Congressional attitudes to argue that the plan would not be adopted. Another wave of FIAT discussion came in the mid to late 1980s in relation to the "power" of FIAT for negative counterplans. Alterations in the understandings of FIAT were proposed to eliminate entire classes of systemic/utopian counterplans which did not seem germane to the discussion of the affirmative proposal or resolution. In both of these situations the range of FIAT was altered to remove certain forms of argumentation from legitimate ground. These alterations were warranted by the fact that the particular arguments in question appeared to have overwhelmed the key notions of the affirmative plan/resolution and its justification. In the current phase of debate, it appears that political disadvantages have reached this point. At many tournaments, nearly every negative team includes some form of political implementation disadvantage in every round. Teams who are deep on the resolution but not deep on the politics of implementation are doomed to watch the elimination rounds every tournament. This seems an odd focus for the debate. The political implementation disadvantages which are actually linked to the FIAT of the plan seem to have replaced research and discussion of the merits of the subject of that particular year's topic. I'm not at all certain what changes need to be made in conceptions of FIAT to address this question and force the negatives to debate more than plan implementation. My inquiry is a preliminary one. In the discussions of FIAT which are beginning to occur on this service's postings, I hope that these notions can begin to play a part.
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