Sunday, January 22, 2012

A Konami Code for APDA Debating

Suppose you're a BP debater about to debate on the APDA circuit.  Still, you're bewildered by all the jargon, and those Americans do speak awfully fast and seem to be judged on a metric you don't quite understand.  Two facts conspire to help you:

  1. APDA allows Government teams to list "caveats"; viz. propositions accepted as true by both sides for the purposes of the debate.
  2. APDA allows debaters to make meta-debate appeals to the judges.  (viz., that a round should be judged according to such-and-such a metric, for the following reasons.)
Therefore, when speaking in first prop, can one not caveat that victory should be determined according to the standards of BP debating?  Or, more appropriately, that victory should go to whoever is more persuasive, regardless of who "wins the flow" or answers every argument?


Also, after complaining about the misuse of the word "logical" in the worlds briefing, I encountered this weekend, for the first time in my life, a debate case that could be rebutted purely mathematically.  The policy constrained debt to follow one path, and net government spending to follow another path.  The problem:  Net government spending is the first derivative of the debt, so it was mathematically impossible for both paths to be followed at once.  By contradiction, QED.  Opp, of course, did not make this objection.


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