Upcoming Tournaments
Just wanted to give everyone a heads up of the 7 local NFA-LD tournaments for the upcoming two months! There are NFA-LD tournaments for six weekends in a row in the Southern California area!
Jan 21-22 — The Free at Concordia – Concordia Univ, Irvine (Irvine, CA)
Jan 29 — Back to the Beach Pt 2 – Mt. SAC (Walnut, CA)
Feb 4-5 — Sunset Cliffs Classic – Pt. Loma (San Diego, CA)
Feb 10-11 — Golden Cowboy Day 1 – Glendale Comm. College (Glendale, CA)
Feb 11-12 — Arizona Swing – Glendale/Mt. SAC (Glendale, AZ)
Feb 19 — Southern California LD Championships – Cerritos College (Cerritos, CA)
Feb 24 — PSCFA Spring Champs – Moorpark College – (Moorpark, CA)
If there are any omissions please leave information in the comments section.
PSCFA Fall Champs Results
I wanted to post the results from the 2011 PSCFA Fall Champs. Result Sheets are available at forensicstournament.net. 25 Senior NFA-LD Debaters and 21 Junior NFA-LD Debaters participated in 4 rounds of prelims. Here are the award winners – Congrats!
Senior NFA-LD
Bronze
Biola Univeristy Hilary Boerger
Palomar College Brandan Fletcher
Point Loma Nazarene University McKayla Carpenter
Point Loma Nazarene University Sydney Awakuni
Silver
Silver Irvine Valley College Ray Craig
Silver Palomar College Saxon Metzger
Gold
Biola Univeristy Sean Hansen
Point Loma Nazarene University Frank Daniel
Junior NFA-LD
Bronze
El Camino College Ashley Lanning
Mt. San Antonio College David Kim
Pasadena City College Alexander Ortega
Pasadena City College Shelbie Bradley
Silver
California Baptist University Matt Phillips
El Camino College Harrison Shieh
Gold
El Camino College Jonny Deatherage
El Camino College Thomas Tsai
Evidence Photographs
Recently, I’ve run into more competitors who refuse to allow their evidence to be photographed during / after round.
I, for one, do not fully understand the arguments against this. Photographing evidence allows debaters to:
- Ensure everyone is citing evidence accurately (i.e. text is verbatim)
- Quickly collect citations (very little time in-between rounds)
- Promote better information-sharing (better debates)
Good luck this weekend!
10 NFA-LD Debaters are braving it out this weekend at the 2011 Ray Dahlin Invitational – best of luck! Thanks to Palomar for offering the event for the first time at their tournament.
I will try to report breaks and any other information here as we go along.
2011 The Ray Dahlin Invitational
Open NFA-LD entries:
Chapman University – Tim Seavey
Biola Univeristy – Daniel Chiu
Biola Univeristy – Scott Alford
Point Loma Nazarene University – Sydney Awakuni
Saddleback College – Danny McAnderws
Mt. San Antonio College – David Kim
California Baptist University – Alex Lamascus
California Baptist University – Victor Rose
California Baptist University – Matt Phillips
California Baptist University – Richard Wickham
Debriefing the Double Up
Some thoughts from this weekend:
1) The tournament really benefited from the great Midwestern schools that swelled the ranks. Some great debaters to watch, and got to hang a bit with Glenn Prince again.
2) The cultural gulf between L/D in the Midwest and L/D in California is fairly wide. Some evidence: One California judge reported to me that he was called out in a loud manner in front of students by a non-California judge who said, “How dare you tell us what ‘conversational’ means!” after the California judge voted on a speed position. What’s sad about this horrible argument is that not only is the judge a, you know, judge, so he’s kinda supposed to have an opinion on who won the arguments about the meanings of words, but the argument is of course self defeating. He was trying to argue that “conversational” can’t have an objective meaning, but that his interpretation was more correct. Critical thinking fail.
The good Midwestern debaters adapted, the poor ones didn’t adapt and got frustrated. My advice to several was to “at least have the ability” to read your case with more dynamic vocal patterns if you want to do well at Pt. Loma.
3) This is an oversimplification, but may be clarifying for some. Midwestern debate teams see L/D as an alternative to IEs, since it normally runs along side them at their tournaments. This means that L/D should not be like impromptu and extemp, and should include more speed and more arguments. California debate teams see L/D as an alternative to Parli and CEDA, and so as Parli (especially in Open) gets faster and more nonsensical in California, the L/D teams I see tend to get more persuasive and logical in their speed.
4) Tough weekend. One of my debaters and at least one other young lady I spoke to were 3-1 and didn’t break. The CBU affirmative went 9-1, which shows the earliness of the season. My guess is that affirmatives based on some sort of economic sanction will get less popular as the year goes on.
5) Friday will be epic, because most of the local schools got copies of each other’s affs and will be poking massive holes in them.
6) W. Kentucky was doing something so obvious, I can’t believe more debaters aren’t doing this. Instead of writing down cites furiously, they were taking pictures of evidence with smartphones. CA debaters were so thrown off by this, at least two claimed this was “cheating”, which of course it is not. Anything presented in a round is the intellectual property of your opponent, regardless of method. Great idea, wish I had thought of it.
7) Public congrats to Matt “DeathHawk” Phillips of CBU who won the tournament (Novice L/D at least) at his first ever forensics competition. Welcome to Junior, sir.
World Trade Organization
It’s very likely that you will be covering the World Trade Organization (WTO) throughout the upcoming year.
I found this Congressional Research Service (CRS – great evidence source!) on “World Trade Organization (WTO): Issues in
the Debate on Continued U.S. Participation” and thought there may be some interesting cards to cut on both running a WTO counterplan as the neg as well as answers to a WTO counterplan as the affirmative.
http://www.nationalaglawcenter.org/assets/crs/R41291.pdf
Starter Packet for 2011-12 Topic
I attach here a starter packet for teams looking to begin practicing. It is likely of lower quality than the larger teams already have, but it should allow small and/or new teams to start practicing right away. It includes a currency manipulation aff (donated by Danny), some specific negative against currency manipulation, a specific DA against currency manipulation (from me), and a kinda/sorta generic counterplan, that will work best against affirmatives arguing human rights abuses. You should not be surprised that, coming from me, the Counterplan is both non-topical, and a bit bizarre.
I apologize for the lack of page numbers on the front of the CBU material, but I’m trying to get my whole team using Google Documents this year, they have yet to put that feature into their newest “Table of Contents” function. If they don’t do it soon, I may have to go back to OpenOffice.
This is the packet that Danny and I will be distributing at the coaches conference this afternoon in Rancho Mirage, for those of you planning on attending. We’ll be sure to post anything LD related that comes out of this weekend’s conversations.
Good introduction to trade debate
Debate Central is a project of the National Center for Policy Analysis where overviews and evidence is provided to help spur high school policy debate.
In the spring of 2010 UIL had a topic that dealt with free trade versus protectionism. While it’s not exactly the same topic we’re covering the site features a great overview that will point you in the right direction.
Here is one helpful section:
Second, the affirmative can make the claim that free trade decreases the likelihood of war and increases peace. In 1748, Baron de Montesquieu wrote that “Peace is the natural effect of trade. Two nations who differ with each other become reciprocally dependent; for if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling; and thus their union is founded on their mutual necessities.”
This can be a powerful affirmative argument. If the United States is dependent on, say, China for trade, we may be deterred from starting a war with China because, in the end, we need the goods they give us more than we need to blow them up. Likewise, if China is dependent on the money we give them for the things they provide, they will be less likely to take extreme action in the case of a disagreement.
That would be a great stock answer to any war disadvantage… good luck with your researching.
Tomorrow, at the PSCFA coaches conference, Marse and I will be facilitating a discussion of this year’s topic and we will have some evidence to share. I’ll post everything that gets distributed sometime next week on the site so stay tuned!
Need an idea for an affirmative? Start here!
We’re drawing closer to the beginning of the NFA-LD season—if you haven’t chosen a case or done research, it’s past time to get started. This is a big resolution to cover, so affirmative selection isn’t necessarily an easy task.
Fortunately, in 2005-2006, the NDT-CEDA policy debate community debated the following resolution -
Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase diplomatic and economic pressure on the People’s Republic of China in one or more of the following areas: trade, human rights, weapons nonproliferation, Taiwan.
You’ll notice that one of the subareas of this resolution is trade. For your convenience, I’ve examined a substantial quantity of NDT backfiles and cites and compiled a list of the most popular affirmatives that were run that year and could potentially be topical under this year’s resolution. Rather than go through specific plan texts, this list consists of sub-topic areas that can be translated into policy action in a manner of your choosing.
- Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (file a WTO complaint)
- Censorship/Internet filtering
- Currency revaluation (Renminbi)
- Export bans/restrictions on PRC goods (NB: there are hundreds of potential targets. Common examples were endangered wildlife species, products made by prison labor, and solid wood packaging).
- Forced technology transfers (including military technology)
- Application of countervailing duty law on the PRC
- Revoke PRC’s Most Favored Nation (PNTR) status
- Sanctions on PRC companies and products (NB: there’s literally an infinite number of sub-cases that can be fiated. Common conditions included revaluing the Renminbi, ending various human rights abuses, ending the one-child policy, ending Sudanese oil contracts, etc).*
It’s important to note that these cases all assume the world of 2005-2006, and I haven’t checked the inherency on any of them. Before you get excited and run off to cut cards, it is critical that you make sure that your chosen policy area has not already been superseded in the interim.
You should also keep in mind that the above list is nowhere near exhaustive. For instance, export restrictions on U.S. goods aren’t even mentioned because they were rarely topical under the NDT resolution, yet they will likely form an integral part of this year’s resolution.
If you are doing negative research, it’d be a good idea to have some generic answers ready to go for the first tournament on all of these cases, since you’re not going to know what anybody is running beforehand.
I hope this was useful.
- Nick
* I’ll discuss whether or not sanctions are actually a form of “trade policy/practices” in a later post.
Subnational Cooperation
I first want to start by thanking Kern for coming on as an author on SoCal-LD.net! Kern is entering his third and final year of LD Debate for Rice University. I’m excited to hear Kern’s view points from a different circuit in NFA-LD.
Regarding the ability to counterplan I think there is a growing body of research (I have been reviewing it this evening) on Subnational cooperation with China. I think a really fascinating counter-plan could be developed arguing that there is no need for Federal Action when Governors and States have been doing a lot to reform trade policy with China:
As the United States and China continue to build stronger government-to-government ties, there is a growing awareness in both countries that increased cooperation at the subnational level will strengthen our bilateral relationship and benefit both our countries. At the second round of the Strategic and Economic Dialogue in May 2010, the United States and China pledged to enhance bilateral economic cooperation at the subnational levels. http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2011/01/154874.htm
It would operate like the States counterplan (follow the link for a thorough explanation). The key for me is that this seems to be an emerging area of the debate over U.S.-China Trade policy so it seems very germane to the discussion.
In the event the affirmative debater runs a very “small” trade policy case I wonder if this type of counterplan, coupled with a politics disadvantage, could be a winning strategy.
Your thoughts?
Topical Counterplans (2011-2012)
Related to Matt Whitman’s thesis on topical counterplans, I am curious how the community believes the NFA-LD rule prohibiting “topical counterproposals” should be viewed, in light of this year’s resolution. Specifically, since the China resolution is bi-directional, wouldn’t this exclude most (if not all) viable counterplan options for the negative? As competitors and judges, do you believe that this rule should be re-interrogated each year, depending on the resolution?
SoCal-LD.net updates
Hello all – not sure how many people are really all that interested but I’ve decided to change a few things for this upcoming year and wanted to seek anyone’s input in case they want to argue for something different.
1. We’ll effectively end the sweepstakes award. I don’t think it brought much value. Mike has volunteered to continue calculating a sweepstakes point total system so he’ll still post rankings but it won’t be anything official.
2. The executive council will be ended – it really didn’t function as I hoped and there wasn’t a very big need to make decisions. By eliminating sweepstakes we all but eliminate the need for the council anyway.
3. Authors - I’ve added a few authors. Right now we have 7 authors: myself, John Boyer, Kasey Gardner, Michael Marse, Tariq Bruno, Nick Matthews, and Michael Miller. If you would like to contribute as an author please email me a letter of interest to info@socal-ld.net and I’ll consider adding you. I hope to have input from many perspectives so coaches, students, alumni, etc… are all invited. Your location doesn’t matter either – as long as you support the growth of NFA-LD in Southern California you’re more than welcome.
Looking forward to a great year debating China!