Saturday, April 2, 2011

Anti-Values

2 comments:

  1. Dr. Srader,

    This is Luke Juday, former NCFCA LDer and former parli debater at Grove City. I returned to NCFCA coaching to find anti-values alive and sporadically occurring, which I find mildly hilarious. I'm not sure if anything similar has developed in the NFL (even under a different name), but my guess is not, knowing the history of the theory...

    To the best of my knowledge, I came up with the first anti-value case (in the shower... hehe). I talked it over with Travis Jordan of Paradigm (recently graduated from William and Mary) and I cannot remember if it was he or I that coined the term "anti-value." Travis wrote and ran the first NCFCA anti-value case at Nationals 2005 (a NEG on "tyranny"). Our conclusion was that it was interesting, but not especially effective. However, his case sparked a significant thread on HSD, which is buried in the old archives somewhere before the first great crash. A number of people weighed in on the subject and picked up the idea the next year. I believe Travis ended up running a more successful foreign policy anti-value case around "hypocrisy" - since hypocrisy is a concept that lacks an antonym of equal rhetorical power.

    Do you know if anything similar has developed in the NFL and, if so, what it's called? I think your thoughts are excellent, especially the "there is a simpler way to make this argument" thing. I generally tell my students now that it has some of the same rhetorical downsides as negative campaigning and doesn't always leave the judge with a clear story for your side. It's also generally just too clever for its own good.

    My advice to my students is to let it die...

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  2. It's made the jump. I found out about it by asking old friends, none of whom were NCFCA people. But it's regarded as an oddity. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that some really unique topic might pop up someday for which an anti-value would make for a brilliant, hard-to-beat case, but I'm with you that it hardly seems like the strategy of choice for most cases. Thanks for the kind words!

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