Fitting the battle of life

Prep time, boys and girls. What did we learn? (This really does sound like school. I’ll stop it now.)

[I had to pop out for a bit while Dim was talking, and I spent too much money at the bar afterwards so my memory is a bit hazy as to some of the specifics, for which I apologise.]

The five-minute rule

Think of your fifteen minutes as split into three five-minute chunks in order to structure your preparation and force yourself to think –don’t leave all the hard work to the last two seconds before the judge calls you in. Keep an eye on the time.

{The first five minutes}
Make your way quietly to the room, thinking over the motion \emph{to yourselves}. During this time, make sure you know where you’re debating and go to the toilet if you need to. Use a sheet of paper for getting these starting ideas down before you forget them.

{The second five minutes}
Start talking to each other. The arguments you both come up with are probably the basic ones that you need to include; explain to each other your individual ideas. Pooling knowledge is important in this stage. Listen to each other and argue back–make sure the arguments are defensible enough to stand up for a few minutes on the debating table. Decide on a `line’ you will be following–usually something like `let’s take it right-wing’. This way arguments across your two speeches, and your PoIs, will be consistent.

{The final five minutes}
Keep talking to each other, but scribble everything down now. Decide who is taking which points, or what the extension is going to be. You must both understand each other’s arguments so the second speaker can defend them in his speech, or either speaker can defend them in PoIs.

We then went over the four main areas you need to be thinking about: actors, principles, mechanism(s) and examples.

Just a gentle reminder that the debate on Thursday will centre around democracy in Africa; it will be a good idea to read up on the Kenyan situation, and probably other elections around the continent. What’s at stake, what are the problems and why? Good material can help you win a debate (it can’t win you a debate, of course - only help you win it).

See you all on Thursday, 2nd floor Bloomsbury (the CSC).

This is just to point out a few general things where I thought teams/sides went wrong or hit things on the head, and what I think was missing from the debate we had (not the debate as it should have happened, if that makes sense).

THW conduct medical experiments on prisoners

Prop

• Defining as excluding the public from a risk was a bit dodgy; what about cancer drugs that need to be tested on patients with cancer? Some better knowledge about phase 1 and phase 2 clinical trials would have come in handy here. The argument that you’re taking a risk away from the public is alright but was easily taken down by the ‘controlled experiments’ point; they do tend to be ’safe’ (for a given value of ’safe’).
• Atonement/paying back a debt to society should have been the major point here; if it had been set up as the main reason to do this, with an additional benefit that it would help society in general, would possibly be harder to argue against as Opp would have to defend the penal system and prisoners’ rights, not the existing medical testing regime.
• The extension about why we conduct medical experiments didn’t serve a great purpose; the second point about rights should have been the major argument here: first prop didn’t do a great deal of analysis as to why prisoners shouldn’t have rights, so that would have been great from 2nd prop. It didn’t help that the summary didn’t mention this, either.
• Rebuttal concerning the ‘fiscally insecure’ who need to be protected from medical testing was ok but slightly unnecessary. In 2nd Prop I would have had no problems with you saying ‘even if we don’t stop the public getting involved with medical testing, here’s why this is still a good idea.’ It’s slightly a knife but I think not one that would lose you the debate automatically.

Opp

• Points about the small sample size are fine, but don’t need to be dwelt on for very long; I think everyone seemed to bring it up as rebuttal when it had already been fully dealt with in the first opp speech. The informed risk that the public take is also a good point, but should have been developed more into why it’s then wrong to force prisoners into this, and not give them a choice. Some material was made out of this (’they won’t co-operate as much as volunteers’), but really that didn’t go far enough.
• The rebuttal that ‘forced atonement isn’t atonement’ was good; I’d have liked to have seen it in a discussion about the role of prisons and of punishment rather than as a stand-alone point though. Still, kudos on it.
• Nazi comparisons should never be made. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Not once. Ok? Good.
• Extension was again on this side somewhat non-existent. The best line I got was ‘we remove their liberty but they still have rights’, and that came up in rebuttal, not as constructive material. Just as on Prop we should have seen a detailed analysis of prisoners’ rights, tell me why prisoners do and should still have rights. How do prison and punishment fit into society, our principles etc. Analysis!
• Summay was good, but was the first mention of the word ‘rehabilitation’. Why was this a) not mentioned before and b) not given to your partner to say? The function of prisons (i.e. what punishment is) is a key topic: do we make the punishment worse by imposing these tests? Yes we do. Why should we therefore not do it?
• One massive point that still stood for Prop was that we pay for prisoners to sit around doing nothing all day. The rebuttal was that they ‘could’ do something you guessed. Why not defend the fact that we pay not for them to do nothing but for them to be kept off our streets? There are sometimes costs we are prepared to pay, and prison is one of these things (especially for the kinds of criminals that were being discussed in this debate).

General

• Timings were all (with one exception) dodgy.
• Don’t giggle. I begin to wonder what was really in that cake…
• PoIs: Never take them during rebuttal; don’t give them a chance to answer back. They’ve made their mistakes and it’s your chance to point them out, not to let them recover their asses.
• Structure could be a bit tighter. Personally as a judge I find it a lot more helpful if you tell me what your three points are before you do any rebuttal.

Ok, hopefully that all makes sense and no one has any complaints. I shan’t at the moment give positions, unless you really bug me. See you guys Monday.

(For those who came to the debating workshop on Thurs 10/1 and wanted a refresh.)

We talked about the fact that most debates can be reduced to a broader topic, and went over what the main issues in some of those debates are. I’ve added a little more here since we were running out of time. This should serve as a reminder of what we said, rather than being exactly what we said (my memory serves me only poorly, even if I can remember 52).

Democracy
    THW give the vote to <group>
THW limit Prime Ministers to one five-year term of office.
These debates are about what’s best for democracy, not whether you can be ‘too old’ to be PM.

Security vs Liberty
    THW allow the use of torture/evidence gained by torture etc
Human rights of a few individuals ([suspected] terrorists) versus the liberties of the majority (the innocent public).

International Relations (IR)
    THW invade Zimbabwe
Best route to ’stability’; sovereignty vs internationalism; the moral duty to intervene or not.

Rights generally/benefits, harms
    THW conduct medical experiments on prisoners
THW ban music that promotes criminality
Balance of rights and harms, e.g.freedom of speech vs the harms it might cause; discussion of rights generally (how do you get them, can you lose them?).

We debated THW conduct medical experiments on prisoners. I’ll get some of the feedback about arguments etc up about that over the weekend.

My thanks especially to Stanzie for the cake, and to you all for coming. Until next Thursday, goodnight.