Ask Jim about Debate
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Breaking Down Barriers: Ask Jim about Debate |
You can submit questions too, just email Jim at hansonjb@whitman.edu
This answer is modified from a section in Breaking Down Barriers: How to Debate (Version 2.0, 1990).
Like spiked punch, a spiked plan can really surprise your opponents. A spike is an addition to your plan that allows it to gain its advantage or to prevent a disadvantage. For example, if your plan banned coal mining, you could include a spike in your plan to provide a jobs program to prevent the plan from causing large amounts of unemployment.
Do spikes need to be topical? This is a good question. Most theorists agree that if the spike is essential to gain your advantage, it must be topical. Theorists begin to disagree when the spike avoids disadvantages. Some feel that the affirmative should be able to avoid disadvantages, especially ones that don't need to occur ("non-intrinsic" disadvantages), because the negative has too many opportunities to run all kinds of disadvantages. The majority of theorists, however, feel that non-topical spikes are abusive and eliminate opportunities for the negative to present disadvantages.
In my opinion, at least two standards should apply to spikes. First, a team should not be able to win solely because a non-topical spike gains an advantage or turns a disadvantage . Second, spikes should give both sides ground upon which to debate. The decision of what is the right amount of ground for both sides should be argued in the debate.
When you add spikes to your plan, attempt to use topical spikes. How do you decide which spikes to use? Think of the arguments that opponents will use against your plan. Can you avoid them? For example, against our plan to regulate hazardous wastes, some teams argued that companies would just dump the wastes in foreign countries. So, we spiked our plan by banning any toxic waste dumping in foreign countries. In other cases, simple changes in your plan can avoid disadvantages. In order to avoid a freedom of choice disadvantage, my debaters allowed elderly to go for preventive checkups on their own. They could document that elderly people would go voluntarily and so didn't need to make it mandatory. Spike your plan too, so that negatives have a more difficult time.
Thanks to Jeremy for this question.