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Author: Matt Liu, University of Wyoming Director of Debate
I’ve had the opportunity to do a little research on the new PF topic. These are my first thoughts about the January 2024 PF resolution: Resolved: The United States federal government should repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Intro In short, Section 230 provides immunity for online computer services with respect to third-party content generated by its users. Translation: Facebook et al can’t get sued for almost all content that is shared by its users. Section 230 was part of the Communications Decency Act, the rest of which was tossed out by the courts as unconstitutional (ironically the rest of the law was very anti-speech and anti-internet, Section 230 was a last-ditch amendment to try and preserve the burgeoning internet by some tech-friendly Representatives). What kinds of things might folks sue over if Section 230 was repealed? Well, Democrats argue that Section 230 allows hate speech and misinformation to go unchallenged. Conservatives argue that Section 230 provides platforms immunity for ideological biases (the GOP loves to argue that Big Tech’s platforms have a liberal bias). Read the complete article below the fold. or: Matt Liu, University of Wyoming Director of Debate
These are my first thoughts about the January / February 2024 LD resolution: Resolved: The United States ought to substantially reduce its military presence in the West Asia-North Africa region. I want to offer a clear disclaimer that these are off-the-cuff reactions, I have not done copious in-depth research on this topic, so these are not definitive thoughts. This is just a primer to get you thinking about the topic. You should take my observations with a grain of salt, and you should do the copious in-depth research to further your own understanding of key terms and arguments. Read the complete article below the fold. The Wild, Wild West of “Expanding” Social Security: Winning Against “Shoehorn” Social Security Affs12/18/2023 Author: Matt Liu, University of Wyoming Director of Debate
Since the summer we’ve known that people were going to interpret “expanding” social security in pretty unlimiting ways. For the most part, we’ve got a small an awesome topic that requires the affirmative to make a giant change to the economy, most often through either a federal jobs guarantee or establishing a basic income. Fewer teams have ventured into the social security area (except when talking just about expanding SSI to the territories), but many of those that have do so in ways that fundamentally change what social security is. We saw this during camp season, when affs were written to “expand” social security by making it include universal health insurance. This past weekend, in the finals of the Holiday Classic, I judged an aff that expanded social security to include a “Federal Indian Health Insurance Program.” The team that read this is taking advantage of the fact that "expand social security" could mean anything, and they’re shoehorning their very not-social-security idea into social security by calling it an expansion. You can expand social security to be universal healthcare, to be health insurance for natives, etc etc ad infinitum. You can expand social security to have it include monthly snack boxes from around the world, if you want. How do you beat all the potential affs this strategy opens up? Read the complete article below the fold. Author: Matt Liu, University of Wyoming Director of Debate
Quickdraw posts are snapshot reflections that are usually spurred by observations the WDR staff have while judging at Wyoming tournaments. This quickdraw is about overviews: when you should have them and what should (and shouldn't) be in them. Overviews are often understood to be places where you summarize or re-explain your position for a judge. I want to complicate that! Rather than thinking of overviews as summary, I want you to think about them solely as a place to locate comparative impact calculus. If you have a lay judge, it is a good decision to add a summary of your position above that, but the more you think of overviews as comparative impact calculus, the better. If you don't have a lay judge, you should completely avoid summary. With an experienced judge, you don't need to re-explain your position because they will have understood it when you introduced it in the 1NC. Instead, overviews should be about winning that your impact comes first. Read the complete article below the fold. Author: Matt Liu, University of Wyoming Director of Debate
Quickdraw posts are snapshot reflections that are usually spurred by observations the WDR staff have while judging at Wyoming tournaments. This quickdraw is about sign-posting: what it is and how you should do it. Sign-posting is how you announce transitions between arguments during a speech. This is in contrast to roadmaps, which tell the judge the order you will address arguments before a speech begins. Roadmaps are also different because they only tell the judge what order to put their sheets of flow paper in ("the economy DA with an overview, then solvency, then the inequality advantage"), while sign-posting addresses moving between arguments on a flow and moving between flows. Sign-posting is how you do every transition between any argument, making sure the judge knows what you're answering and isn't getting lost. It's an incredibly important skill because if you're losing the judge, even for a second, less of your arguments are going to get through to the judge. The way we teach novices sign-posting is through "they say." For example, "they say 2AC number one, labor shortages now. That's wrong. First, ... ." However, that method is inefficient. It both takes a bunch of time, and it does too much explanatory work for your opponent. Sometimes teams spend so much time sign-posting through "they say" that they do a better job explaining their opponent's position than their opponents did! I think the optimal way to sign-post is to practice "label by negating." Quite simply, this means you sign-post by negating your opponent's argument. For example, if you are reading a workforce shift DA and the aff says there are labor shortages now, then you can sign-post by saying: "NO WORKFORCE SHORTAGE NOW." I know the all caps is aggressive, but I am doing it for a reason: because label-by-negating is a shorter sign-post, you need to use your voice toolbox to make it clear you're doing sign-posting work to the judge. This means you need to change how you speak when you sign-post: either slowing down or getting louder (or sharper, more staccato -- short and sharp). One important note: flowing well is a prerequisite to good sign-posting. I like to "box" my labels on my flow: literally drawing a box around each section of the debate, and that cues me to switch to my "sign-post" voice for the judge. Author: Matt Liu, University of Wyoming Director of Debate
Quickdraw posts are snapshot reflections that are usually spurred by observations the WDR staff have while judging at Wyoming tournaments. This quickdraw is about vagueness arguments in policy debate. Wyoming debaters love to talk about vagueness! There's some ups and downs to this phenomenon, but I think to make arguments about vagueness more effective we need to reconceptualize how they're executed. In short, vagueness arguments should almost always be made as solvency deficits, not as procedural arguments. In addition, debaters should avoid asking how the plan is implemented, and instead make arguments about what the normal means of implementation would be based on their strategic self-interest. Read the complete article below the fold. Author: Matt Liu, University of Wyoming Director of Debate
Quickdraw posts are snapshot reflections that are usually spurred by experiences the WDR staff have while judging at Wyoming tournaments. This quickdraw is about NSDA points. Hot take: the world would be a better place without NSDA points. At the last tournament I attended, I noticed two related phenomena that trouble me: debaters measuring their own self-worth through NSDA points, and debaters measuring their opponent's talent through NSDA points. I heard one debater say they were worried because they were going to debate "the top team in Colorado." This statement mystified me. Top team according to who? I honestly don't believe that we have a metric to determine this. Were they last year's state champion, I wondered? Nope -- it was NSDA points. I've heard other debaters either boasting about their NSDA points in an event or worried that their NSDA points reflected poorly on them. I don't like any of this. First, I don't think NSDA points come anywhere close to measuring the quality of a debater (or even an interper or platformer). NSDA points prioritize quantity of competition over quality and they quite simply can't capture the data inputs that really measure a competitor's strength. I think we should be very careful when it comes to ranking students and nothing leads me to believe that NSDA points are an appropriate way to do that. Second, I don't like either the trepidation or the overconfidence that brooding over NSDA points produces. I don't want any debater to get in their own head because they're worried about their opponent's NSDA points. I have been doing this activity for over 20 years, and I have never spent a single second of my life worrying about my debater's NSDA points. I have never once thought that one of my teams might be in trouble because their opponents have a lot of NSDA points. I encourage you to adopt the same mentality. You will be better off and more successful for it. Bonus hot take: sweepstakes points are also sus. I worry they encourage thinking about what is best for the school instead of what is best for individual competitors. Author: Matt Liu, University of Wyoming Director of Debate
“You find out life’s this game of inches. … The margin for error is so small. I mean, one half a step too late or too early and you don’t quite make it. One half second, too slow, too fast, you don’t quite catch it. The inches we need are everywhere around us. They’re in every break of the game, every minute, every second. On this team, we fight for that inch. On this team, we tear ourselves and everyone else around us to pieces for that inch. We claw with our fingernails for that inch because we know when we add up all those inches, that’s going to make the … difference between winning and losing, between living and dying.” – Any Given Sunday “Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.” -- Tim Notke “A dropout will beat a genius through hard work.” -- Rock Lee One of the amazing things about debate is that so many of the variables that determine your success are things you can exercise control over. Writing a new aff, researching your rival’s case, giving rebuttal redoes: these are all examples of things you can do to radically improve your chances of success. You can spend time practicing flowing, doing cross-x drills, or learning how to integrate technology into debate. You can prepare for tournaments by scouting your opponents and making sure you're prepared to debate their arguments and innovating novel arguments to get a leg up on your competition. The more you put in, the more you’ll get out. All of those are things you can do any day of the week, either on your own, with teammates, or with coaches. However, there are some things you can only do at tournaments. Tournaments are a scarce resource. You only get to go to so many. Therefore, the time you spend at tournaments is extremely valuable. This post is about how to best improve your chances of success in debate by making sure you use that time well. Read the complete article below the fold. Author: Matt Liu, University of Wyoming Director of Debate
This past weekend a program I volunteer with attended the Cheyenne Central and Alta tournaments, and in both places our LD debaters encountered novel arguments and argument structures. After the tournaments, I was sent some smart questions about the nature of LD. I liked these questions a lot and thought I’d write up something similar here. Read the complete article below the fold. |
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