I drove to work today; I needed to get a few extra things done at the office. It was, surprisingly enough, a peaceful, even pleasant drive. Normally I hate driving the Beltway.<\/p>\n
I had NPR on this morning, and I heard a story that, somehow, provoked a random thought.<\/p>\n
I can’t imagine how policy debate today in high school and college even functions<\/i>.<\/p>\n
This is going to be painfully obscure to some, and I can’t help that. Not everything I write is meant to be understood by one and all.<\/p>\n
The thought that occurred to me (and looking at today’s rundown of stories from Morning Edition<\/i>, I have no idea which story it was that provoked the thought) was this — In today’s extremely polarized political climate in Washington, how could any policy enacted not<\/i> have dire political costs?<\/p>\n
This year’s topic, according to some websites, is this: “Resolved: the United States Federal Government should substantially increase the number of and\/or substantially expand beneficiary eligibility for its visas for one or more of the following: employment-based immigrant visas, nonimmigrant temporary worker visas, family-based visas, human trafficking-based visas.”<\/p>\n
So, an immigration topic.<\/p>\n
We fiat this into existence. The United States has decided to alter its immigration policy to let more people into the country.<\/p>\n
Considering how anti-immigration the Republican Party has become, how could this not<\/i> have dire political repercussions?<\/p>\n
I cannot imagine what a disad today would look like.<\/p>\n
Five minutes ago, I didn’t know what the 2010-2011 topic was. I honestly didn’t. But I look at the text of the topic, and I think about it, and I see all sorts<\/i> of neg disads — Obama uses his political capital (ha!) to pass the affirmative plan, and the result is Republican intransigence on judicial vacancies, sane deficit reduction, health care, whatever<\/i>, and it leads to government shutdown, economic collapse, loss of American hegemony, Walter Russell Mead.<\/p>\n
I always knew debate existed in its own little world, but you look at Washington today, and you think about how things actually work<\/i>, and I can’t see how any affirmative team in a policy debate round would ever<\/i> win.<\/p>\n
Academic debate. Yeah, it’s not actually about debating policy. Please, don’t make me laugh.<\/p>\n
Of course, I’m the person who judged high school debate rounds over a decade ago on the “Civ II<\/i> Paradigm” — “Whoever builds me the best world or gets to Alpha Centauri first…” — so I’m probably not the right person to think about the problems of policy debate in today’s poisoned political climate.<\/p>\n
Random, random thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I drove to work today; I needed to get a few extra things done at the office. It was, surprisingly enough, a peaceful, even pleasant drive. Normally I hate driving the Beltway. I had NPR on this morning, and I heard a story that, somehow, provoked a random thought. I can’t imagine how policy debateContinue reading “On Policy Debate and Actual Politics”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[119],"tags":[4146],"class_list":["post-5713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-debate","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5713\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}