[eDebate] andy peterson's thoughts on China as the agent

[David Heidt]

1.  Passive voice solves nothing.  A good deal of Andy's post is why China 
as an actor makes it impossible to win on the negative.  If Andy is right, 
including the passive voice means that smart affirmatives will choose China 
over the US as an agent, and negatives will be going for normativity as 
their A strategy.

2. Some expert posting about why the China agent is bad doesn't necessarily 
end the debate on this, but, so far the defense of non-US agents amounts to 
"wouldn't it be cool if" as opposed to a serious literature-based analysis.  
I imagine if someone was willing to refute or disprove Andy's arguments, or 
the arguments about the EU two years ago, and actually demonstrate that good 
debates were possible for  both sides, then a non-US agent topic might be 
possible.

3.  I don't know about the "non-communist nations" topic; I didn't debate 30 
years ago and it seems that someone like Southworth is more qualified to 
comment on this subject than any of us.  In any case, Andy's point seems to 
be not that debate is impossible under such a topic, but that the quality of 
the debates would be substantially inferior.  It also seems that the 
"non-communist nations" topic wasn't subject to the literature questions 
that have been raised about China; there are a lot of articles about the 
alliance system vs. communism, after all.