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> I like to believe that my one lasting contribution to debate is convincing a lot of tournament directors to change the traditional wording in resolutions "The government shall $DO_SOMETHING" to "The United States federal government shall $DO_SOMETHING", because when we interpreted the government to mean "Japanese government" the other team invariably said something along the lines of "That's not what the resolution writer intended", to which I would say "You being ignorant of a major first world nation whose internal political issues are well-reflected in the academic literature may make this debate inconvenient for you to win but that does not mean I'm not allowed to pick something which fits within the clear definition of the word 'government.'"

In Parliamentary Debate, this is commonly known as squirreling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squirrel_(debate)).




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