I think that this is a great public forum topic: it relates to a current event that will educate students on some of the nuanc
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Lesson 4.2 Day 3
| Strategic Notes When you choose positions to argue for this resolution, I would suggest you avoid some of the “high-power” offense we see so often on the debate circuit. It is often, amongst offense/defense debaters, the case that debaters reduce the arguments to a race to extinction or a race to see who can reach nuclear war first in the hopes that they will outweigh their opponents every move. Such tactics make sense in the game framework of debate – it is a game and you need offense to win so go get the biggest offense you can find. But, I would suggest that doing soon this topic will ring untrue. Many judges will balk at your claims that failing this duty will cause a nuclear war or will cause extinction. The claims you establish can access some large offense but you will have to develop the internal link story much more carefully than in many resolutions past. For example, the affirmative has good offense to be had within the realm of representation, governmental legitimacy, and activating voice and participation. These may not seem like much, but if you consider that alack of meaningful voice and participation leads to public disengagement in politics and government, less faith and trust in government, and eventually the deterioration of a government due to its perceived illegitimacy, you can see that government implosion is, while perhaps just as complicated a matter to explain the links for, still much easier to persuade a judge byway of probability versus nuclear war scenarios. Certainly, empirical examples abound for where governments have fallen apart overtime from causes very similar to a public growing evermore disenchanted with the elected officials. In some cases, it may even be argued that there is a duty to use compulsory voting in order to offset systemic oppression and racism within current and existing norms for politics. In other words, it would not be hard to imagine an affirmative case built around the idea that politics as usual amounts to no more than entrenching racism, sexism, homophobia, or any other number of social injustices caused by leaving those with power to further stretch the gap between themselves and those without political power. The affirmative line of attack would probably suggest that compulsory voting serves as a first mechanism in the redistribution of political power, or something along such lines. |