Talk:Case (policy debate)

Redundancy

"there is a documented case of a case about wildfire control" -- this just sounds redundant to me Replaced with "there is a documented occurrence of a case about wildfire control"

Things that are terrible about this article

1. A case is more than a 1ac. The 1ac outlines a lot of important features of the aff, but the other 500 pages of evidence to back it up is just as much part of the concept as the cards in the first constructive. By analogy, a "disad" is more than a shell, it is a set of IDEAS. 2. Advantages are not 'relatively new' to debate. They've been around for near 20 years now. 3. The claim that the "focus of debate is supposed to be the case" is extremely controversial. A good negative team would probably like to make the focus of the debate their counterplan, or perhaps their kritik. At the very least, controlling the 'focus of debate' is a job both sides attempt to do. 4. Topicality contentions are NOT common in college debate. I can think of three examples EVER of a team including topicality in the 1ac and it's always been the same team, and the only reason they do so is because they run non-topical affs and know teams will go for topicality, so they modify the 1ac heavily in anticipation. 5. The distinction between policy-based and "critical" advantages is arbitrary and poorly explained. Some advantages make a utilitarian impact calculus, others a deontological or other calculus, but the distinction is not simply "philosophical vs non-philosophical" which is just code for "too many big words vs stuff I'm used to." For example, a team might defend that the ends of a case to end the global gag rule, promoting women's rights, are more important than 'body count' disadvantages. That would be a different type of 'critical' (if you could use the term) advantage than one which defended the mere representations of the aff strategy as valuable political discourse.

Look, I realize that stock-issues, high school debate is a legitimate way to look at the activity and am not trying to push a bias, but some of the factual untruths here should probably be changed. The fundamental stance this article takes heavily favors one form of debate as 'the norm' while ignoring or marginalizing severeal others. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Balonkey (talk • contribs) 16:51, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

Merge Proposal

I don't think there is much or ever will be much to say about "Plan" that will warrant a full article that won't be redundant with what could be said about a "case." So it should be moved. Balonkey (talk) 17:02, 2 March 2008 (UTC)