I am the worst debate coach

Resolved: The United States ought to eliminate subsidies for fossil fuels

The good news is I’ve been writing about related topics for longer than most of you have been alive.

Some thoughts:

Judge’s lounge coffee needs to be stronger

Tabroom is hard on a phone

Resolved: The United States ought not provide military aid to authoritarian regimes.

So, right off the bat, I’ll admit that world affairs are not my strong suit. However, I can see a couple terms that are ripe for picking out fun ideas:

“Authoritarian regimes”: How broadly or narrowly will you define these terms? A regime can be smaller than a country, so a warring faction or a stateless group could count. How broadly do you want to define “authoritarian”? A group pledging itself to a single warlord would fit sensibly within a broader definition, whereas a narrower definition would only leave you with the least democratic governments on the planet.

“Military aid” In the context of the resolution, this can sensibly mean both “the aid of a branch of the US military” and “resources for an authoritarian regime’s military”. I’m sure someone will have a topicality argument written for both of these, if one’s opponent decides to run one or the other. Fortunately a definition which includes “support” can sensibly link to either of these, depending how vague you write it.

Would sending in the Army Corps of Engineers to control flooding or some other infrastructure-based project be Military aid?

Higher level stuff:

Where does the obligation to intervene, or the obligation to NOT intervene come from? A necessary predicate for the particular kind of support the resolution anticipates (namely, to an authoritarian regime) is that there is some reason why the US ought involve itself in the affairs of the world.

However, I think the inclusion of “to authoritarian regimes” is important. Granted, a statement why the US ought not support any intervention would include the resolution; you’re just doing more than you need to. But it’s not actually asking the specific question the resolution wants.

What is it in particular about authoritarian regimes that make them a thing which the US ought not support? The resolution does not indicate the dynamics of the conflict (if indeed there even is one). At a certain level, the resolution is about giving legitimacy to these groups. Why is this not permissible? This question, more than anything else drives the framework debate

Resolved: In a democracy, the public’s right to know ought to be valued above the right to privacy of candidates for public office.

Part 1. What’s the extent of the “right to privacy”?

Part 2.  What’s the point of privacy, anyways?

Part 3. What’s Democracy got to do with it?

As a threshold matter, I think “in a democracy” can mean both the general idea of a democracy (that we’re talking about some distinctly conceivable democracy that could exist), or it could mean in one single specific democracy. The difference between the two is largely whether you think evidence from one actual democracy has value in and of itself, or whether it can be used to illustrate general ideas or point in the direction of how this hypothetical democracy would operate. Further, the difference between “affirm because the policy would be good for a general democracy” and “affirm because the policy would be good for this specific democracy for these specific reasons” is mostly going to be how you choose to package a lot of the same ideas.

I think it’s fair to limit “public office” to the class of things where you exercise discretion in what you do, and where your job isn’t essentially ministerial. So a bus driver would not be a public office since the gist of the job is “follow this route”. Similarly, the land records office probably are mostly not public officials, because their job is “record who bought and sold what pieces of land” - the head of the department might be, if they have discretion in terms of how they want erroneous records to be dealt with.

That said, the category of “public offices” is pretty large. Your district soil conservation officers, boards of taxation and estimation, and neighborhood boards would all arguably fall under this. In a democracy, these are offices which still rule with the consent of the governed, but their specific way they “rule” is often pretty attenuated. (ie “Alex has the authority to set the rate at which you are charged for water usage”)

So, why do we care? Some things which are kept private have a direct bearing on one’s fitness for office. Crimes of dishonesty, for example, might matter more than a traffic ticket for parking in the Mayor’s reserved parking spot. But suppose the following: I’m tasked with managing the finances for a relative who is no longer mentally capable of managing their own money. Suppose next that I take some of this money for myself, as a way to even things out between us for the way they treated me when I was younger. Lastly, suppose that this is the only dishonest action I will ever take; that I have no desire for financial gain, and if elected to a public office, I would never ever touch any funds besides my own paycheck. How much should the public care about this (totally private) dishonesty?

Resolved: In a democracy, the public’s right to know ought to be valued above the right to privacy of candidates for public office.

Part 1. What’s the extent of the “right to privacy”?

Part 2.  What’s the point of privacy, anyways?

Part 3. What’s Democracy got to do with it?

Part 2.  What’s the point of privacy, anyways?

I’m going to use this as a bit of a thought experiment. There are a lot of things we keep from other people. Sometimes, we keep these to ourselves and ourselves alone. You can make an argument that there are some things we keep to ourselves that people should know about. (eg. if you took a copy of the answer key to an upcoming test, and nobody has found out, there’s a very good reason to say that maybe people should know about it)

Conversely, there are whole swaths of things we keep to ourselves that are essentially harmless, but we still keep them private. (eg. what I REALLY think about someone that I wouldn’t say to their face).

For the second category, you can make an argument that these are questions of tolerance. By this, I mean that there’s some amount of increased tolerance in the world that would remove the need to keep it private. For example, in some cases a feeling of the need to keep the fact that you’re queer private could be removed if you knew that people would be totally tolerant or accepting about it.

But I don’t think tolerance is the end of it. Which leads me to the thought experiment. Imagine you have the most tolerant parents/guardians possible. They tell you that as long as you’re not hurting anyone else or yourself, they’ll accept anything about you, and accept you as you are. However, they will read your journal, go through your search history, and get friends and acquaintances to tell them things you’re up to.

Resolved: In a democracy, the public’s right to know ought to be valued above the right to privacy of candidates for public office.

Part 1. What’s the extent of the “right to privacy”?

Part 2.  What’s the point of privacy, anyways?

Part 3. What’s Democracy got to do with it?

Part 1. What’s the extent of the “right to privacy”?

There’s a huge spread in terms of how broadly or narrowly you want to draw this. On one extreme, you would have things like the contents of journals; things that only the candidate would have knowledge of. This wouldn’t cover too many things, so you could use this for the negative very easily.

Moving a little further along, you could expand it to include areas where courts have traditionally recognized what are called privileged communications. Something a candidate says to an attorney, a doctor, a psychotherapist, a spouse, a religious leader, etc, are all areas where a court couldn’t compel that person to say the contents of those communications. This, I believe, is a very fair ground for both sides. It also aligns with English Common law, so there’s a lot of information written about the ideas underpinning these privileges. Those articles would be great framework-level arguments.

In the US at least, there’s a body of law that suggests that information transmitted via the internet is not private because it’s shared with an Internet Service Provider. So, if I’m a candidate who writes like, embarrassing fan fiction under a pseudonym, under the ‘privilege’-kind of definition of privacy, this wouldn’t be covered.  Arguably, this would also fall within the realm of things we’d want to recognize as private, so maybe there’s a more expansive definition needed.

I’ll be honest, I like the topic (and I’m probably in the minority here). It’s super abstract, which means you can play with the ideas in a way that’s untethered from limiting facts. You can bring in questions about identity, questions about ruling/being ruled, questions about democracy, questions about the limits of the role of being a public official; there’s a lot of ground when you play in a space this abstract.

go to the nearest large library you can access and find the political science section, and look for book that sound interesting. Anything that proposes a model for understanding these massive, battleship-sized ideas. You can get frameworks that way.

If I could sum up my philosophy towards teaching debate, and towards arguing in general, one of the main points would be this:

Believe in what you’re arguing.

You do better when you believe you’re right. There’s not really anything that’s gained from arguing something you don’t believe in that you can’t gain from arguing something you do believe in. In the real world, if you don’t actually want the thing you’re advocating for, and it prevails, then you win a result you don’t want.

So when you’re breaking down a topic, an easy way to find ground for both sides is to play with scenarios, fact patterns, and abstract ideas until you find a point where it becomes a close call. That close call becomes a fault line where you can put arguments on either side of the resolution.

This is a more novice-level post, but I think there is something here for more advanced debaters as well.

What’s the point of the 2NR?

The 2NR is weird. I’ll just get it out of the way. It’s pure argument, but you can’t make new arguments. You have to leave the judge with a clear reason to vote for you, but your opponent gets the final say, and can spin and minimize your arguments. It’s hard to do it well.

If I had to summarize the point of the 2NR, it would be “critical evaluation”. The 1AR has made arguments against your case, and extended its own. The job of the 2NR is just not to ADDRESS those arguments but to ASSESS them. Are they actually responsive? Do they add up to enough to win?

How to make the 2NR a better speech

1. Be proactive, not reactive

Everyone knows the 1AR is hard. This means that a common 2NR strategy is to point to everything the 1AR didn’t cover well enough, and extend that. The problem is that strategy rings hollow because you can always make that claim. Are you convinced by this: “Sure, you might have thought their 1AR was good, but I didn’t think it was good enough. Therefore I win”.

As a judge, I feel better voting for someone because they’ve showed that they deserve to win, not that their opponent deserves to lose. You get the second move. You can plan your case and off case in response to the affirmative. This means you get to present the strongest potential advocacy. Give that advocacy its proper weight. A 2NR should feel like a clean story that existed from the moment you started reading your case, not “these leftovers are enough to get me there first”.

This is very hard to do. You can’t always do it. But if you’re on the lookout for opportunities to deploy this strategy, you’ll see them pop up more and more.

2. Address and Assess

Here’s a conundrum:

Sometimes it’s a strong strategy to use an argument where you discredit any merit in your opponent’s side.

Sometimes it’s a strong strategy to acknowledge strengths in your opponent’s side, but to show how they’re not relevant/outweighed.

One approach is not universally better than the other.

So, how DO you respond in the 2NR? Personally, I feel that acknowledging where your opponent has made a clean extension in the 1AR is a fair thing to do, and it gives you an opportunity to outweigh them at a higher level of abstraction (ie, the value/criterion).

That said, point out responses that aren’t on point, that are contradictory, or where you can get turns, and feel free to dismiss them.

3. Don’t say more than you need to

Explaining why your opponent’s responses don’t add up to a victory for them, articulating a small number of points that you’re winning, and that these points are important within the evaluative framework that has won the round will often take you the whole 6 minutes.

(Special note for novices: Novices, for your first few tournaments, try to use all 6 minutes. Don’t belabor the same points over and over, but be thorough and assess every argument on the flow)

However, if you can explain everything you need to in less than 6 minutes, do it.

Time how long it takes you to explain and extend two arguments, then explain how they link to your value and criterion. Even novices should be able to do this in under a minute with practice by the end of the season.

If your opponent dropped key arguments, and didn’t extend (this will happen sometimes, novices) this is technically all you need to say to win. Saying this confidently can win you rounds just because it shows that you have understanding of what’s really at stake.