Troop Cases

The problem with this card is that it’s way too generic. It claims that we’re moving towards a direction of providing better care, and it cites a few policies being implemented to achieve this. But if the aff doesn’t involve those specific policies, it’s not going to help you that much.

If you want to actually *win* on inherency, you have to prove that 100% of the affirmative is being done in the status quo. So for example, with the Ohio coop PTSD case, the inherent barrier is that regulations require that PTSD be diagnosed by a VA physician, not private practitioners. To win inherency on the neg, you would have to win that this specific policy has already been overturned, which it hasn’t. The Obama card doesn’t address this.

Put in plain language, just because steps are being taken to address a problem doesn’t mean we should outright reject alternative steps that tackle the same problem in a different manner.

A better way to use generic status quo evidence is to use it as harms mitigation. This particular card isn’t very good because it’s mostly rhetoric and doesn’t quantify an impact, but you can use stronger cards as a way of leveraging disads and other offense within your impact calculus.

A really rudimentary, poorly-warranted demonstration:

1AC: Here’s a harm, plan would save 1000 lives by addressing that harm
1NC: That’s chill and all, but this cool new program in the status quo would save 800 of those lives even without your plan, meaning you only save a net 200 lives. Oh, and here’s this disad that terminates in 600 people being killed. We outweigh on magnitude.

tl;dr: you can only beat a fool on inherency; if he’s not, then you’re a bigger fool for trying.

“If you want to actually *win* on inherency, you have to prove that 100% of the affirmative is being done in the status quo.”

Not true. Being somewhat of the Inherency hack that I am (or at least was last year), it’s important to note that there are multiple perspectives and theories of what constitutes Inherency. Nick obviously has a very high threshold for what constitutes an Inherent Barrier. Danny clearly has a much more lenient view of Inherency. It’s no secret that the Neg should ALWAYS be arguing for the more lenient view of Inherency; i.e. that “steps are being taken in the squo to remedy your harms”. While personally I think that’s theoretically illegitimate (because you can find cards saying steps are being taken to solve MOST harms), it can win you some rounds. I think a satisfactory Inherency argument would be that the USFG HAS taken actions to remedy the harms, but those actions are failing. I think once the Aff demonstrates that there are considerable harms in the squo, Inherency is pretty much established since there’s no way to tell whether the squo actions to solve the problem will be successful. For example:

1AC: Millions suffer from PTSD yearly and go untreated.
1NC: There’s a new federal program to help PTSD patients.No Inherency.
1AR: The squo might be taking steps to solve, but 1) we don’t know if that program will succeed, 2) that program could disappear overnight and 3) the harms still exist aka we need my awesome plan.

In any case, if you are going to argue Inherency (as Aff or Neg), I think it’s always a good idea to have carded interpretations of what constitutes/satisfies Inherency because the NFA-LD are notoriously vague on Inherency.

As a general note: I believe in existential inherency in that if the harms have not been solved, then that is sufficient proof that a barrier existent. The barrier might be a policy, an attitudinal neglect, etc. This argument stems from the assumption that if there were an easy and efficient way to solve a problem, and we knew how to solve it, then we would. Functionally, existential Inherency nullifies Inherency as a stock issue altogether since the harms of the 1AC usually exist unless evidence is outdated or fabricated. I’m fine with that though since I think Inherency in most rounds is less educational and useful than T: substantial.

Word to the wise: Be careful with Inherency theory though. KNOW YOUR CRITICS. There’s tons of critics who scoff at my conception of Inherency and indeed think that the Aff must prove that there is no way for the squo to solve and that no measures are being taken to solve the harms.

Let’s go back to the basics for a second. There are four common varieties of inherency:

√ ATTITUDINAL – People, policy makers, or others do not like the plan or do not want the problem solved.

√ STRUCTURAL – Laws, regulations, or physical constraints stop the plan or stop the solution to the problem.

√ HARMS INHERENCY – The way we try and solve the problem now is a bad one, creating harms, and the affirmative plan would solve the problem without these harms. This is pretty rare.

√ EXISTENTIAL – The fact that the problem exists and persists means there must be an inherency which “exists” somewhere, even if we can’t pinpoint it

Just to be clear, the PTSD camp aff falls under the category of structural inherency. There is a specific regulation in the status quo that is blocking effective diagnosis of veterans with PTSD.

Now, on to the line-by-line:

Danny –

First, inherency is technically not a stock issue meant to “preserve negative disadvantage ground,” even if that might be true in an indirect sense (I discuss this later). What I teach my high school novices is that inherency “refers to the necessity of resolutional action.” (Alfred Snider, of U of Vermont fame).

An example Professor Snider uses concerns landfills. If the plan text is simply to build landfills in the United States to address pollution, it would be non-inherent because there is no problem (harm) in the status quo regarding an insufficient number of landfills, and thus no need for resolutional action. Sure, we might have to truck our garbage out of cities a fair distance, but I haven’t heard of any landfill shortages lately. The aff is relying on existential inherency, so they lose.

However, hypothetically, if there were a policy banning the construction of new landfills, then a case that overturned this ban would be structurally inherent.

With the PTSD example, there is a clear structural barrier in the status quo to treatment, which is the diagnosis restriction. Now Danny, you point out that USFG policy in the status quo is moving towards increased treatment. The problem is that this movement exists independently of the specific structural barrier. Even if the USFG increases support for PTSD treatment programs, if thousands of soldiers are wrongly misdiagnosed by the VA, they’re still ineligible to receive that support, and therefore, they remain untreated.

Alfred notes that “Of the stock issues inherency is the one you should attack the least. You probably are not going to prove that the status quo is perfect, and you would have to do that in order to win the debate on inherency.”

Is the status quo perfect? No. As long as there are soldiers being denied treatment, and that number is significant, there exists a justification for the plan.

You say that the inherent barrier doesn’t exist because “government policy is not standing in the way of changing those regulations.” Hopefully I’m just misunderstanding you or you just wrote it out wrong, but when I first read that interpretation on its merits, I did a double-take. It borders on the absurd because you’re essentially warping 98% of affirmative ground. Not only does it eliminate existentially inherent cases, it also eliminates structurally inherent cases. You imply that even if the affirmative wins that a structural barrier exists to resolving a harm completely, like with the PTSD aff, if there is no government policy “standing in the way” of removing that barrier, the neg can still win inherency. That functionally limits the aff down to attitudinal inherency – cases like overturning the Mexico City Policy on the Africa resolution, where the USFG actively opposes the removal of a barrier.

Limiting to attitudinal inherency is horrible. There are literally millions of instances where the USFG fails to enact policies not because of attitudinal opposition, but because they have simply chosen not to address a particular issue. The reality of policymaking is that there can only ever be a finite number of policies enacted. For example, with the Africa resolution, the USFG certainly isn’t diametrically opposed to sending most forms of aid – it simply isn’t doing it well enough to solve certain harms.

That out of the way, let’s talk about your troops example. The problem is that it oversimplifies my argument. Of course a plan to increase troops by 10,000 in Afghanistan is non-inherent; it’s already being done in the status quo. (Although I should add, if you can win Obama won’t raise troop levels above a certain cutoff point in the status quo, a plan that commits additional troops above that cutoff would be inherent). But PTSD policies are not quantifiable like simple troop numbers are. Just increasing the number of programs doesn’t actually address the core issue that a specific POLICY is not being pursued in the status quo, and the failure to enact this policy/remove the diagnosis restriction has consequences. I could say that troop levels are being increased in the status quo, and that it might be good to some extent, but that those troops aren’t equipped to handle a specific type of problem. Under your interpretation of inherency, a plan that adds 50 provincial reconstruction teams to Afghanistan in addition to existing troop increases wouldn’t be inherent, which is absurd.

And the impact calculus example – I should have been more clear here, I am assuming that there exists an inherent barrier in the squo. You ignore the fact that as a result of this barrier, there are still 200 lives that aren’t being saved despite other current policies being enacted to reduce the harm. That’s offense right there. And even if you don’t evaluate arguments by way of offense-defense, I’m pretty damn sure 200 dead people is a harm.

Again, like Professor Snider says, you should have to prove that the status quo is “perfect.” There are two ways to do this. You can win that 100% of the plan is already being enacted in the status quo (thus removing the necessity for action). Alternatively, you can win that 100% of every harm and advantage will be solved for independently of the plan, and along the same timeframe as the plan.

To win the former is easy, if rare; to win the latter is nigh impossible. Look: if you can prove that these new reforms by Obama will eliminate all (literally, all) suicides that occur as a result of misdiagnoses by the VA, more power to you. You’ll probably win inherency. But good luck finding a card to back you up for that, because I doubt it exists.

“But wait,” you say, “the neg doesn’t get any disad ground if the plan only solves 1% of an overall harm that is being 99% addressed by other programs.” That, my friend, is why we have the word substantial in the resolution. Now I’m getting back to an earlier point, which is that inherency is not meant to preserve negative DA ground. A case that only saves ten lives doesn’t lose because it isn’t inherent; those lives will still die in the status quo as a result of some inherent barrier. It loses because it isn’t substantial – you prove its lack of substantiation by pointing out that it doesn’t link to your DA’s. Alternatively, you can bring up the rarely-used stock issue of significance, but I have literally never participated, seen, or heard of a round where this has been done.

David – I think you have “lenient” and “high threshold” mixed up. My interpretation of inherency is very lenient; Danny has a very high threshold for what an inherent case constitutes. And I agree with you that existential inherency is usually fine. Like I said earlier, the USFG simply doesn’t act in every instance where it could.

The advantage to existential inherency is that you open up a huge range of cases you otherwise couldn’t run. But on the flip side you have to be extremely prepared to answer back things like advantage counterplans and yes, even inherency presses. You’ll need warranted evidence that explains why other alternatives in the status quo aren’t sufficient.

And as a final aside, the day I lose a round on inherency in front of a non-lay critic will be the day I quit debate. Seriously. It just doesn’t happen to even halfway-competent debaters.

If for no other purpose, file this under “Know Your Critic.”

I thought inherency was a weak Negative position when I started debating in 1965, and I think it’s a weak Negative position now.

There are only two scenarios in which I would argue it seriously if I were competing: (a) If I didn’t have 7 minutes worth of better stuff; (b) Early in the year against some of the Otterbein cases, which are based entirely upon the pre-Obama federal approach to health care in general, and MH care in specific. (Indeed, some of the Otterbein “inherency” evidence is from as early as 2001; and a couple of the Otterbein Plans have either been passed – de jure if not de facto – or have been rendered moot.)

As I have previously reminded people reading this Board, health care in this country underwent a big change at the end of March of 2010.

Moreover, if the polls (and my political intuition – NOT my desire) are correct, health care in this country will undergo another huge change in January of 2011, when the “repeal and replace” GOPers take control Congress.

At the risk of stating the obvious, no competent LDer at the college level can be ignorant of day-to-day national politics and hope to win consistently.