The National Forensic League has released the resolution for March and April:

Resolved: Juveniles charged with violent crimes should be tried and punished as adults.

It’s not exactly a surprise.

The January-Febraury topic is considered by many to be the most important resolution of the year: districts and states are both often held during these months, and the Tournament of Champions will use it a few month’s later, too. For 2006, the topic is “Resolved: The use of the state’s power of eminent domain to promote private enterprise is unjust.”

Prospect Magazine (and Foreign Policy) have conducted their (annual) survey of the top “Global public intellectuals,” and I thought debaters might find some of the names interesting: After 20,000 votes, Noam Chomsky is the winner (although he seems to have poo-pooed the poll), Habermas is in the top 10, Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Zizek are 22 and 23 (respectively), Peter Singer is 33, Richard Rorty is 41, and Martha Nussbaum almost made the top 50.

Read the full list here.

Because you won’t read about this article on other LD web sites (you’ll understand why soon enough), I figured I’d post a link to Jason Baldwin’s October Rostrum article “The Commodification of LD” right here (PDF file). In it, Jason charts the growth of “Lincoln-Douglas-related business” over the past three to five years and assesses its impacts — some of which he sees as dangerous to LD.

Without blaming anyone for intentionally ignoring this article, I think it’s fair to say that it hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves from the people who are most likely to disagree with it. I’d like to especially invite comments from dissenters here. I’d even love to have a counter-argument to post as an article here, if any employees (or former employees) of LD-related businesses are interested in writing one (email me).

Update: It appears I was too quick to assume that other sites wouldn’t pay attention to Jason’s article. In the past few hours, Victor Jih (of VictoryBriefs) has posted his response here.

According to the NFL, the new topic is “Resolved: Judicial activism is necessary to protect the rights of American citizens.”

Forums will be available soon.

Update: the forum is now available here.

Well, it looks like the server move, which took longer than expected, is almost finished. As DNS entries continue to update, you’ll see more and more features coming online. In the end, this new design (which you see here in the “LD News” section) will be consistent throughout the site. Some new features you might notice include improved anti-spam capabilities (using Captcha images) for comment-posting in this news section, an LD Wiki (which will be up and running soon, but not quite yet), a faster forum, and pretty colors.

Please let me know if you notice any bugs in the design. And if you have any suggestions, etc., also feel free to drop me an email: chase@lddebate.com.

Update: The forum is now functioning! Check it out: http://forum.lddebate.com (the shortcut using LDforum.com might work again soon).

The server migration didn’t happen a few weeks ago like I posted saying it would. Instead, it’s going to happen over the next several days. I’m going to take the site down in a few hours, and hopefully it’ll be back up in a day or so.

Thanks for your patience.