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Topic narrowing

Here's to my hombre Ricardo! He and Stacy Sowards <here's to her as
well, but I've never met her> did a bang-up job scouting their problem
area.

We discussed the subject matter phrase on a Blimpie's run this
afternoon, and what follows is a combination of ideas from that
discussion and some additional ideas of mine:

MILITARY/SECURITY:

"substantially increase/decrease defense cooperation"
"substantially increase/decrease military commitments"

The latter has a good balance of definitions available: some pretty
extensive attempts at defining it precisely and exclusively, along with
a healthy share of flippant usages for creative affirmative teams.

TRADE:

"abrogate one or more commercial treaties/trade agreements with"

The goal is to pick the word that denotes a negotiated instrument
governing trade in several commodities.

"impose <comprehensive> trade sanctions upon one or more of the following":

I'm no fan of "comprehensive" after multiple fiasco high school topics
over the years, but the idea is to find the term that denotes across-the
board sanctions, and let the affirmative pick the cause <human rights
violations, protectionism, belligerency> and the particular methods
<partial embargo, remove MFN>

"substantially decrease/reduce/loosen/ease regulation of international
trade with one or more of the following" <or increase/tighten, I suppose,
but that almost seems like _too_ much of a burden>

Anyway, those're opening thoughts. I think we'll get a much better
idea of the debatability of the area once we drill down to topic wordings.

A proposal for next year, or the future: how about we take yet another
page from the high school topic's book, and work on framing topics at the
same time as picking among problem areas? I really was struck over and
over again by the near-absurdity of discussing the merits of the problem
areas absent topic wordings.

Doyle Srader
University of Georgia
<706> 548-9938
Archive created by Jonathan Stanton (jonathan@cs.jhu.edu)
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