Negative? Yup.

[Andy Ellis]

At first the concept of slapping a procedural on ethics questions made me
think, woo hoo teams can win their way out of being unethical. After all it
would be great to just reward the good unethical debaters, they need that
extra edge. Then I started thinking about why some things are procedurals.
Is T not an ethical challenge? Is the negative not saying you claim to
support the resolution, but you are lying. Then we as debaters engage in our
equivelant of the clinton testimony. We construe every word as we would
like, we include only some evidence. Then i started thinking, how many times
have you heard a debater say "we just ain't topical", not in a round but at
the party, in the van, at the denny's. These comments are usualy not
accompanied by remorse but usualy by laughter and stories about how we had
convinced people we really where topical, or why somebody just ran the wrong
violation. Woo Hoo teams can win their way out of being unethical. After all
it would be great just to reward the good debaters, they need the extra
edge.

Andy
Towson