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Re: Topic choice

Danny Bell of Bakersfield says:
>Methinks that you're runnin Clinton the wrong way. There's plenty o cards
>that are topic specific to Clinton's foreign policy. Also, you might wanna
>try actually cutting new TOPIC SPECIFIC disads that aren't just rehashed
>outta your backfile. Disads like: Zapatistas, Zedillo, or China Security
>Council seem to link pretty well to only this topic. I think your problem
>with the Mexico resolution is a fundamental lack of wanting to cut cards. The
>Mexico topic is pretty darned spectacular in my book. If its info my vote is
>for debating the Middle East next semester.

[the following is in no way an attack on any particular person's positions,
in particular the person to whom Mr. Bell is responding]

Hear, hear! I don't think I'm revealing anything when I say that NIU teams
run disads related to the Zapatistas, Narco-terror, Zedillo, a wealth of
US-Mex and LA issues (trade/relations/etc-related), and plenty of other
directly topic-related positions. Some of these positions we were running
in September, others we're breaking this weekend, and probably new ones the
weekend after.

[And yes, as with any even remotely-generic position, there are always
uniqueness issues -- but the Mexican drug industry has to be more unique to
mexican cases than, say, Israeli arms sales :). ]

It doesn't take a year to find topic-specific positions, or to understand
how the topic area _really does_ relate to other world issues.

Not that Mexico would be hard to extend if continued to next semester -- we
havn't touched anything in Spanish, have had limited Internet research
(relative to what's out there) and could get a lot deeper. Some teams may
be ahead of us in some of these areas, but I havn't been hearing us get
out-classed on ev -- I suspect that everyone can make progress if we do
have more time.

2 topics, 1 topic -- whatever. Current events & recent history show us that
debate clearly works both ways. 

-- Glenn Ellingson/NIU
Archive created by Jonathan Stanton (jonathan@cs.jhu.edu)
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