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Debate Potter

Policy Debate- Disadvantages and How to Answer Them(On the Civil Liberties)

What is a disadvantage?Also known as a disad or a DA, disadvantages are positions used in policy debate by the

negative team to attack the airmative teams! case" #hey basically say that the

airmatives team!s plan unintentionally causes some bad thing to happen" $elow will bee%plained the parts to disadvantages and how to answer them back"

Uniqueness

&) As the negative team, the irst arguments o your disadvantage should be a uni'ueness

argument" A uni'ueness argument basically says that the airmative team uni'uely

causes the disadvantage this is proved with some evidence that the disadvantage will notoccur in the status 'uo" or e%ample, in a spending disad you may say that either the

economy is doing well now or that spending is under control now"

*) On the airmative team, your irst answer to uni'ueness would be that it is +nonuni'ue"- .ou want to prove that the disadvantage is already going to happen in the status

'uo or will happen soon whether your plan is passed or not" or e%ample, show that other

actions similar to the plan are going to be enacted and that means that the disadvantagewill occur anyway" or e%ample, against disads that say you crush the reputation o the

/"0" in the world, read evidence that says that our reputation is already in decline"

Link

&) On the negative team, the second part o your disadvantage should be a +link"- #his

evidence (one or two, sometimes three cards) says that the airmative action will resultin a bad impact" One thing to keep in mind the more speciic your link is to theirairmative case, the stronger your disad will be" 1eneric links are easy to beat back

because they don!t convince the 2udge that the disadvantage actually links to the

airmative speciically" Also, the more generic the link, the easier it is to show it is nonuni'ue (see above)" or e%ample, in the #errorism DA, the link says any increase in civil

liberties will result in less security and more likelihood o a terrorist attack"

*) On the airmative team, one o the primary answers that you can make back to a

disadvantage is a +no link- answer" 3t basically says that your case will not cause the

negative teams! disadvantage to happen" 456 o the time you should make a no link

answer" 3 you don!t, you concede that your plan causes whatever impact the negativeteam brings up, and it will be hard to win the whole debate ater that" 0peciic evidence

that you don!t link is best, but even i you have no evidence against a disad, read their

link card(s) and critici7e the reasoning in them" or e%ample, you could say there is nospeciic link, that they give no brink (meaning they don!t say how near we are to the

disadvantage happening), or say no threshold (meaning they don!t say how much o an

action like your plan is necessary to cause the disadvantage)"

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Impact

&) #he last key part o the disad is the impact" 3t is basically the end result o what

happens i the link to the airmative case is true" or e%ample, the impact in the spendingDA is that a collapsed economy causes the ne%t ma2or world war (2ust like the 1reat

Depression did in the late &485!s with 9itler)"

*) On the airmative, you could argue that that the impact is +over claimed- and not

likely to happen" .ou could argue that it is not as harmul as the :;1 says" .ou could

argue that the disad gives no time rame, so that we don!t know when it will happen (thencompare this to your case, where hopeully you can be persuasive that the case harms will

happen more 'uickly than the DA!s impact)" .ou can also simply argue that your case

advantages outweigh the disadvantage (racism