Camp Hain
The adventures of a Catholic family that homeschools, public schools, online schools, and has one super-obsessed with baseball kid. Currently I, Tia Hain, am a Classical Conversations Challenge A director, so a lot of this podcast/channel is related to that for now. I post a new podcast episode every Friday. But I also post other videos, including math (mostly algebra since I tutor) and our life on my YouTube channel, Camp Hain. We love our adventures, so come along for the ride.
Camp Hain
020 Team Policy Debate Part 3 - Navigating the Affirmative Side
In Episode 20 of the podcast 'Team Policy Debate Part 3: Navigating the Affirmative Side,' Tia Hain breaks down the fundamentals of arguing for a policy change as the affirmative team, specifically tailored for beginners in Classical Conversations Challenge 1. The episode covers critical components such as stock issues (topicality, significance, harms, inherency, and solvency), the concept of fiat, and the importance of the warrant. It also provides an overview of constructing a solid 2AC (second affirmative constructive) and a preview of next week's focus on writing a compelling 1AC (first affirmative constructive) and building strong harms.
00:00 Introduction to Team Policy Debate
00:46 Podcast Overview and Host Introduction
01:26 Affirmative Team Breakdown
02:20 Stock Issues Explained
03:03 Topicality in Detail
06:56 Significance of the Problem
08:07 Understanding Harms
09:16 Inherency and Solvency
12:22 Fiat and Constructions
15:23 The Warrant and Conclusion
020 Team Policy Debate Part 3 - Navigating the Affirmative Side
Tia: [00:00:00] So you're new to Team Policy Debate, or maybe you're teaching someone on the ropes. The affirmative side is your chance to set the stage, but where do you even start? In today's podcast, we're breaking down exactly what it means to argue for a policy change and how you can build a strong, clear case that sets you up for success.
From framing your case to presenting your arguments, I'm going to walk you through everything you need to know as a beginner so you can confidently tackle the affirmative side in your very first round. This episode is episode 20, Team Policy Debate part three, all about the affirmative side. Please note this is geared to Classical Conversations Challenge 1, the grammar phase of learning Team Policy Debate.
Ready to make your first argument. Let's dive in, but first.
Welcome to Camp Hain, the Adventures of a Catholic family that homeschool public schools, online schools, and has one super obsessed with baseball kid. Currently, I, Tia Hain am a Classical Conversations Challenge 1 director. I directed Challenge 1 a few [00:01:00] years ago as well as directed Challenge A before too.
A lot of this podcast channel is related to that. I post a new podcast every Friday, other videos as well, and I also post videos about math, mostly algebra since I tutor and our life. We love our adventures, so come along for the ride and click subscribe or follow if you are a homeschooler or thinking about homeschooling, or even if this content just interests you.
There. I've said the things. Now let's move on into the content.
All right. Today's episode is all about the affirmative team, so we are going to dive into stock issues, something called fiat, constructions and the warrant.
These are all the things you're gonna learn about in today's episode. Let's talk about what we're gonna learn next week. So next week we are going to talk about the 1AC. I know that's the big thing to start off with is learning all about how to actually write your 1AC. That's what your whole debate is based on.
Then we're also going to go through an example, 1AC template that [00:02:00] I have. I have a quick example to show you as well as a template that I'm gonna walk you through step by step, and then you're going to learn how to build a harm. Building a harm.
It seems easy at first until you actually try to build one. So we're gonna spend a lot of that episode on how to actually build. I think I said actually quite a few times in that one. All right, so that's next week. Let's jump into stock issues. Okay, so this is what the affirmative has to prove to win the debate.
There are five main stock issues. I know in Classical Conversations they see there are four, but technically, I guess when you actually do debate, they consider harms a stock issue. But let's get into all five of 'em. We're going to start off with. Topicality, then we will learn all about significance, harms themselves, inherency, and then solvency.
So these are the five things that you need to really work on to get correct for the affirmative side, as the negative side, you only have to disprove [00:03:00] one. But we'll get into that when we get into the episode, all about the negative side. Let's dive into our first stock issue, which is topicality. Okay.
Topicality. What topicality is, is basically, if you think about it, it's kind of exactly what it says. It sets up the resolution boundaries. It is the topic that you're talking about. If you're in Classical Conversations, you also have a tour guide that you are using. I provide a supplemental that just expands on a lot of stuff that I don't think is covered in the tour guide.
So if you want that supplemental, just go to Camp Hain.com and you can find it there. I will link it in the show notes down below.
The affirmative must stay within these boundaries so you have a resolution. The affirmative has to stay within the boundaries of the resolution. The affirmative plan has to follow the resolution, and while that may sound like a kind of a duh moment, when you actually get into it, it's really easy to kind of start pushing outside the boundaries a lot, well, a little bit, or a lot.
So you have [00:04:00] to be careful with that. You gotta make sure you stay within the boundaries. Now the negative is the one that brings it up. Which kind of makes sense if you think about it, because if for some reason the affirmative is not staying on topic, they don't wanna call themselves out on it. So the negative is the only one that would bring this up.
If they notice that the affirmative is not staying on topic, they wanna call topicality. Now with you're in a really big Team Policy Debate, like not the kind that we do in Classical Conversations, which is just learning about it in the grammar phase. There is a whole set of things that you have to do to call out topicality. I am not getting into that here. I'm just saying that this is something that can be brought up. Okay.
I have an example of topicality issue that I used with my class the first time that I did Challenge 1. It's a plastic bags example, I'm gonna look to the side here for those watching me on video, some of you're just listening to me because I would like to make sure I read this correctly.
The resolution example that I came up with, 'cause we were actually thinking about using banning [00:05:00] plastic bags as one of our resolutions. So if the United States banned plastic carry out bags across the country. People would use reusable bags, less fossil fuels would be used in creating plastic bags.
Therefore, we would have less pollution due to less fossil fuels being used to create the plastic bags.
Using this example above, if the affirmative brought up how plastic bags cause pollution in the environment because they end up in the rivers and oceans, then all the lovely animals and sea creatures would die.
That is straying from the topic that we originally agreed upon when we did the resolution. The negative side can then call topicality, because what the affirmative team was supposed to be talking about is the pollution caused from creating the plastic bags from the factories.
When I was researching this, I heard a really good example that I thought, explain this even better. He was talking about, [00:06:00] let's say there is a debate about how we need to ban cats in California.
The negative team did all this research about how cats are comforting and they're cute and cuddly, and they are really helpful for people, for their health to have a pet like a cat.
Well, when they get to the actual debate, the affirmative team, because when the affirmative team does the 1AC, they're setting up the entire debate. So the affirmative team did their whole debate on banning cats, the giant construction equipment that is made by Caterpillar, but they go by CAT for short.
And the reason why you can call this is because the negative team doesn't know what to actually research for. It's not fair to the negative team if you go completely off topic because they haven't been able to do their research on what they needed to do their research on. That's topicality.
Our next term we're gonna talk about is significance. If you really think about [00:07:00] these, it is exactly what it says. Is the problem significant enough? Is this problem even significant enough to need to change the current policy?
The affirmative must indict the status quo. The affirmative wants to make a change, and the negative wants everything to stay status quo. They want it to stay exactly the way it is. The affirmative must prove that something bad is happening.
Now, the severity of the problem. How severe is this problem? It has to be super severe to need to make a change. Changing the status quo means you are asking the judges to take a risk. You have to show that you are on top of the burning tower. The tower is gonna fall down because it is burning, so you have to make a change. This problem has to be very severe. It has to be significant.
There are three ways to indict the status quo. Everybody already knows that there's a serious problem. That's one way you can do it. You can also have conscious raising about an existing problem. And then the third way is to use evidence to [00:08:00] make a prediction that something horrible is going to happen if we don't fix this right now. But people just haven't seen it yet.
That's our third stock issue. Let's get into the fourth one, which is harms. The harms themselves. This is the problem itself. We need to choose harms that are solvable because it doesn't make sense if you choose harms that even if we did the plan, it wouldn't solve anything 'cause. Why in the world are we having the debate? And you can use more than one quote per harm. This is something that was asked a lot, and so I wanted to make sure that you guys know that you can use more than one quote per harm because you actually need to build a harm to show that something is harmful.
It's a common practice that's used, and each quote can serve a different purpose in establishing the severity, the scope, or the evidence of the harm. For example, one quote might be statistical evidence showing that the problem exists while another could illustrate its real world impact or consequences. This approach strengthens the [00:09:00] argument by presenting multiple lines of evidence, and they're from credible sources.
We won't dive into that too much here because that is going to be on our next episode, which will have How to Build a Harm. Okay, so that's for the stock issues.
Now we are going onto the fifth one, which is inherency. So inherency is matching the problem to a solution.
For example, in the tour guide that we have for Classical Conversations, they had an example of this that it wasn't worded very well, so I'm going to reword it here.
Here is the example that they had. Their example is the government wants to make a policy change to reduce school bus accidents. Now they tied it to a thing that made it so it wasn't inherent, but they actually didn't, in their example, they actually proved inherency instead of disproving inherency.
So I'm going to reword this to, the government wants to make a policy change to reduce children getting [00:10:00] hurt in school bus accidents. They decide the problem is the visibility of the buses. So they address this problem by assigning specific colors to the buses, adding lights and stop signs to the buses, and increasing speeding regulations.
This causes buses to move more slowly in turn, causing more accidents in general traffic. The actual problem of children getting hurt in school bus accidents was the lack of seat belts in the buses.
Inherency is the children getting hurt. So we need to tie the problem to the solution.
So the solution is actually seat belts in the buses, not making the colors bright on the school buses, adding all the flashing lights, et cetera. That one's a little harder to pick out when you're actually in the debate, but it is one of the stock issues.
Okay, now I am sure you'll probably realize that I can't count because that was actually our fourth stock issue and the last one here, which is solvency. That is our fifth stock issue. So I apologize for my [00:11:00] miscounting.
The stock issues are topicality, significance, harms inherency, and now solvency.
I don't know why I couldn't count, I guess I just can't see my notes very well. Anyway, let's get into solvency. So this is our last stock issue.
Solvency for solvency. The main part of it is that the proposal rectifies the problem, so the affirmative team must offer a proposal designed to fix the problems with the status quo. It's similar to inherency, but this is part of the actual plan that it has to fix it.
Inherency is more, you're tying them together, whereas solvency is showing like this plan actually fixes this problem.
This is the measure by which we determine if the affirmative proposal would remedy the problems of the status quo. The affirmative team needs to demonstrate that they are addressing the root of the controversy, the root of the problem, and then the proposal also must be within the [00:12:00] power of the agency of the resolution.
When you have a resolution, you should have an agency that is supposed to solve the problem. The affirmative team has to prove that the agency does have the ability to solve the problem. And one last thing, it must show that their plan is feasible. Solvency mainly focuses on the plan itself.
Those are our five stock issues. Now we are moving on into something called fiat. It's pretty easy. It just means let it be done. I believe it was Latin, which us Classical Conversations, people should know all about that.
Fiat . It's not super important to like have it all completely explained, but it is super important to make sure that you say at the beginning of the debate that we are going to go by fiat, which means that whatever the plan is, it will be approved. That way they're actually arguing the merits of the plan itself. It guarantees that the plan will pass in a hypothetical debate world, so you can debate about the effects of the plan rather than its causes. [00:13:00] Instead of having this whole debate of, well, nobody would actually vote for that in Congress or wherever it is anyway, so the whole thing is moot.
We don't wanna be arguing that in debate. We actually want to be arguing. The effects of the plan itself, not whether or not it'll pass. You just say at the beginning of the debate, we're gonna go by fiat. Yes. We're gonna let it be done. It's gonna hypothetically pass. We're gonna argue the other points of the debate.
The next part that we're going into is the constructions. Let's talk about constructions. We're not gonna dive into the 1AC too much because that one is written ahead of time and it's just read. We should probably know that one by now, but we're gonna talk more about that in the next episode.
We're gonna build a 1AC so you're gonna know exactly what you're supposed to be doing with the 1AC.
Now we're going to talk about the 2AC. We will dive into the 1AC next episode. Let's talk about the 2AC. So your 2AC can be almost identical to your 1AC with a few exceptions.
Those exceptions are [00:14:00] you need new evidence. For every single thing that you have in your construction, you have to have new evidence for it. Do not recycle evidence from your 1AC. There is no reason for that. You should have a bunch of new evidence. You are the affirmative. You should have researched this ahead of time and had all new evidence.
As well as you must address every point brought up by the negative. Anything they brought up, if you do not address it in the 2AC, you concede that point to the negative, and technically they win the debate. They only have to get one thing and prove that the affirmative team did not prove their side for it, and the negative team wins.
So you have to address every single thing that the negative brought up, including any disadvantages that they brought up as well.
And. You also must address a counterplan. If for some reason the negative brought up a counterplan. You do have to address their counterplan as well.
Does their counterplan solve your advantages from your plan? Are your [00:15:00] advantages more important than theirs? Can you combine the advantages of both plans in some way? If you can do that, then you get it. And are there any disadvantages to their counterplan? You can add those things in as well, but you do have to address it.
And one last thing. You cannot introduce any more new harms. The harms that you set out in your 1AC. That's it. That's all you got. So don't bring any up in your 2AC.
Next we have the warrant. Now what this is, is the chain of reasoning that connects the evidence to the claim, which are the harms, the plan and the advantages. This is what the warrant is. It is not brought up as much in our Classical Conversations, Team Policy Debate. It's not really in the tour guide that I remember, but when I started studying debate, to really know how to do it. This was brought up a lot. So just to let you know why the claim is true, okay? And this is what the affirmative team has to do. Why do we assume that following the resolution would produce the good outcome of what our evidence [00:16:00] says is negative? Often it's the most vulnerable part of the argument.
So I do have an example here back to the banning plastic bags. Pollution is too much of a problem in the United States. If the United States banned plastic carryout bags across the country, more people would use reusable bags. Less fossil fuels would be used in creating the plastic bags. Therefore we would have less pollution due to less fossil fuels being used to create the plastic bags. See how I kind of tied that all together? Well, that's what the warrant is. You need to make sure that you tie all the stuff together.
Well, that is it. That is the end of our episode 20 for the affirmative team. Hopefully the affirmative team is making more sense in your head.
Next week we'll be all about the 1AC as well as how to build a harm. Building harms for your 1AC seems easy until you actually try it. Then it's not so much I'll break down how to build one from what to look for in your research [00:17:00] and how to find more evidence to really flesh it out into a strong harm.
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