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Re: Process Disads -Reply to Croasmun

Eric,

Good, substantive response.  I may get back to it over the weekend if I
have the time.  Newnam's argument is that they do not address the
desirability of the policy (the "should").  I tossed in three casual
comments on the strength of the arguments.  Another serious problem, I
think, is that they stifle conceptual thinking.  Not completely unique,
of course.  Heck, the topic selection process just got through avoiding
timely discussions of civil rights and campaign finance in favor of "do
something in an arbitrarily selected area of the globe" (I am
exaggerating here, but not much).  But I still think it is better to
debate about conceptual positions than to do a weekly nexis search and
debate the exigence of the given moment.

A few brief comments.  Several of your arguments are that political DAs
pressure the affirmative, increase the affirmative burden, and give more
negative options.  All true.  But that doesn't make them good arguments. 
One of your reasons explicitly says they help negatives in the absence of
a limited and predictable topic.  Also true.  It is kind of sad when
preparing for nationals means (a) trying to research more than a hundred
VERY different cases, or (b) brushing up generic arguments that can be
run every round.  But that doesn't make generics into exemplars of
quality argumentation.

You also compare them to other DAs ["I think they're no 
different than most economy disads.(FRB, Bonds, you know, the 
perception based ones.) "] and to some topicality or kritik arguments. 
Same response applies.  You are right--there are other weak arguments
too.

>If you ran 
>Carbon Tax I might wanna debate something besides Carbon Tax bad and 
>Warming good.

On the "fossil fuels" topic (NDT topic about seven years ago) there were
many good on-point arguments, including good case arguments that undercut
the warming advantages.

>The CWC got tabled the first time because of the election.

But if I ever thought my congress-person voted for or against it based on
how it would affect Clinton's popularity, rather than how it would affect
the possibility of military conflict in the future, I would try really
hard to get that person voted out in the next election regardless of
their party affiliation.

>It certainly increases our understanding of the 
>political process and the games that get played up in Washington.

Cool.  A topic on Presidential selection process, or Presidential powers,
or campaign finance, etc., would do it better.  But these arguments can
appear on any topic, and trade off against research and understanding of
that topic area.  Example: how many teams do you think (on last year's
topic) spent more time and carried more evidence on sulphur dioxide than
they did on Clinton's popularity?

>What if my disad impact is a lot more people dying than 12,000?

The impact would be the harm multiplied by the probability.  Given the
various links within the typical bipart or Clinton DA, with fuzzy
probabilities at EACH step, how would you get such a solid impact?
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Archive created by Jonathan Stanton (jonathan@cs.jhu.edu)
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