By Anthony Trufanov

Like all arguments, stupid counterplans wax and wane in their popularity over time as people crack the code on how to defeat them and then forget as these counterplans fall out of favor. High school debate is unfortunately on the part of the cycle where people have forgotten, and stupid counterplans have started gaining currency again. One such argument (which I will discuss below) made an appearance in the TOC finals. It seemed like a lot of minds were blown on the live stream chat, the tell-tale sign of a generation of trolls and imitators getting it through their heads that this is good negative strategy. Hopefully by refreshing people’s memory we can shorten this part of the cycle and stop people from thinking this style of argument is cool.
 
What do I mean by stupid CPs? I am talking about CPs that rely on NEG fiat in order to manufacture an opportunity cost where none would otherwise exist. I am not talking about most process CPs per se, although some process CPs do fall under this category. What I am talking about is mainly stuff like this:
 
The United States federal government should use nuclear weapons against the Russian Federation and People’s Republic of China if and only if [plan].
 
In the TOC finals, MBA had a pretty sloppy perm selection in the 2AC, but eventually landed on a correct perm in the 1AR and justified it by saying that functionally intrinsic but textually non-intrinsic perms are good. This is a reasonable approach, but missed an even simpler approach that was also on the table – arguing that the perm was not functionally intrinsic in the first place.
 
Why is it better to make a non-intrinsic perm instead of saying “intrinsic perms are OK” or “functionally intrinsic but textually non-intrinsic perms are good”? Two reasons:
 
1. Complexity. The NEG will always say that the AFF’s standard is arbitrary and snowballs into all intrinsicness, which is bad. It is very hard to justify the notion that the AFF should get to add literally anything to their perm. It is far simpler to avoid the debate about drawing arbitrary lines around intrinsicness, and simply say the perm is not intrinsic.
 
2. Textual competition is nonsense. The premise of textual competition is that the meaning of words is irrelevant, all that matters is the letters on the page. No real decision-maker thinks in these terms – it is just a contrivance that was made up in order to exclude counterplans that include every word in their plan text when theory was not getting the job done. It ignores syntax and context. It leads to letting in absurd results like word PIKs that replace words in the plan with synonyms, or excluding perms because the words the perm uses to describe combining the plan and CP are not drawn from the plan and CP texts. Introducing this standard is unnecessary, lends credence to a fundamentally poor method of evaluating competition, and is risky, as imprecisely worded permutation texts often fail to meet their own textual standards.
 
To fully unpack why a functionally non-intrinsic perm that solves the net benefit always exists when a CP is artificially competitive, we have to go back to basics.

How CPs work

The NEG wins if they prove the AFF is net bad. There is a link, which is something that the plan results in, and that link has an impact, which is a reason that result is bad, and that result outweighs the benefits of doing the plan.
 
The logic of a CP is only slightly different than the logic of a DA. Instead of the link being an outcome of the plan, the link can also be an argument that the plan forecloses a better approach – what we call an “opportunity cost.” This can include doing the opposite of the AFF to achieve some positive effect (e.g. increase arms sales with climate offsets to solve warming), solving the case some other way to avoid a disadvantage (e.g. suspend delivery + the industrial base DA), or utilizing the absence of the plan to compel some kind of outcome (e.g. the conditions CP). These examples share a key element: adding the plan is impossible or doing so has some negative outcome.

How intrinsic perms work

The phrase “intrinsic perms” derives from intrinsicness as a theory argument about DA links. Under this theory, if a reason the CP is net beneficial can be preserved without forgoing the plan, the net benefit to the CP is not intrinsic to the non-plan, and therefore not a reason the plan should not be done. Such “intrinsic perms” take an action not included in the plan or CP to avoid the opportunity cost.

Why aren’t perms against artificially competitive CPs intrinsic?

In artificially competitive CPs the negative effect of the plan is entirely a construct produced by the wording of the CP. Any reasonable person presented with the plan and CP would see a way to avoid the opportunity cost presented. However, the NEG obscures this through grammar that makes it look like no combination would avoid the net benefit.
 
This is entirely a rhetorical sleight of hand that coopts the language of intrinsicness in service of a totally different concept. There is not a NEG link argument that the perm is advancing an intrinsicness argument about – after all, the NEG has not said anything about the plan causes something bad! This is simple to illustrate:
 
Plan: The United States federal government should reduce arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
 
CP: The United States federal government should use nuclear weapons against the Russian Federation and People’s Republic of China if and only if the United States federal government reduces arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
 
The NEG would then read evidence that Russia might be nuked now and the CP stops that but including the plan would nuke Russia which would be bad.
 
Take a step back. What is the opportunity foreclosed by including the plan? The opportunity to not use nuclear weapons while not doing the plan? Technically yes, but that’s irrelevant – the whole point is that the net benefit has nothing to do with not doing the plan, and is entirely about not using nuclear weapons, which is an action the CP does that can be permuted.
 
“But the perm adds a WORLD that didn’t exist before – one where the plan happens and nukes aren’t used,” the NEG might claim at this point.
 
That is drivel. To state the obvious, literally any perm that includes the plan and all or part of a CP creates a “world” that is not included by either the plan or CP alone. In an artificially competitive CP, like with any other non-competitive CP, actions prescribed by the CP can be combined with actions prescribed by the plan to create a new “world” that avoids the net benefit.
 
A slightly more precise wording of this objection might be “the perm introduces a decision calculus for nuking Russia that neither the plan nor CP presents.” But this is also wrong. “Not nuking Russia” is an action. The CP introduces “not nuking Russia” as an option that is available for the USFG to take. Nothing about the plan precludes taking the option to “not nuke Russia.” True, the perm does not include the CP’s decision calculus – that’s because it doesn’t include any decision calculus, only the end action of not nuking Russia.
 
A final objection might be that no part of the CP says “not to nuke Russia” – it only describes exclusive conditions under which TO nuke Russia. But that is obviously pedantic. The only reason the CP alone is better than the plan alone is that it prevents a nuclear attack which would happen now by acting to stop it. That is a function that can be permuted.
 
The above discussion also misses the forest for the trees somewhat. So what if it is debatable that “not nuking Russia” is an independent function? The normative case for such an understanding of CP functions is obvious and overwhelming. “Use nuclear weapons against the Russian Federation” is just a stand-in; the forced trade-off could be with literally anything. It is obviously illogical and pedagogically vapid to make the AFF debate literally any nonsensical opportunity cost the NEG might dream up. And it’s not like the NEG will present a counterinterpretation of what constitutes a function anyway.
 
That’s all well and good. How can a 2A operationalize any of this?

Crafting a 2AC permutation
 
Before I get into examples, I want to point out something that these examples will have in common: all of them will have a full permutation text. You should also do this. The NEG will have a block to “perm: do both” that will rely on spinning the words you said in a way that is favorable to their understanding of CP competition. Saying a full text blocks them from doing this and gets them off their blocks, both of which are good for you.
 
You will also notice that there are a lot of examples. You should not say this many. They are hard to flow and there are diminishing returns because many of them share theoretical justifications.
 
I will use the following CP from the TOC finals:
 
Plan: The United States federal government should reduce arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
 
CP: The United States federal government should anchor space elevator funding to (the monetary value of Foreign Military Sales over two years minus 76,587,800,000) * 2 million.
 
The way this CP works is that the current value of the formula is $2 trillion, but the plan would diminish the monetary value of FMS over two years such that FMS – 76,587,800,000 < 0, meaning that doing the plan text and CP text together would not allocate $2 trillion to a space elevator. Space elevators are good for reasons.
 
Crafting a legitimate perm requires you to think critically about the functions of the plan and CP. The NEG wants you to think of the CP as one action: fund a space elevator according to the CP’s formula. However, hidden within that are several other actions that can be permuted.
 
One way to break it down is to separate the calculation from the funding. Step one of the CP is to calculate the amount of money that should be allocated to the space elevator. Step two is to give the space elevator $2 trillion. If you do the plan and spend $2 trillion on a space elevator, you are permuting the part of the CP that gives money to the space elevator. The NEG will say this is intrinsic, because it uses a different formula. That is wrong – the perm doesn’t use any formula, it just allocates the same amount of money as the CP to a space elevator. This is undoubtedly a step of the CP – the answer to the question “does the CP allocate $2 trillion to space elevator investment” is undeniably yes. The NEG would then be forced to rely exclusively on textual competition standards to argue that synonyms aren’t synonyms, putting them in the same theoretical boat as a Word PIK team. This yields the permutation:
 
The United States federal government should reduce arms sales to Saudi Arabia and allocate $2 trillion to space elevator investment.
 
Another way to break it down is to separate the calculation into its component parts – literally the mathematical “functions” it performs. Step one of the CP is to find the monetary value of FMS over two years – let’s call that number α. Step two of the CP is to subtract 76,587,800,000. Steps 3 through 2,000,003 add the result of that calculation to itself. Step 2,000,004 allocates the resulting sum of money to space elevator investment. This yields any number of perms, for example:
 
The United States federal government should reduce arms sales to Saudi Arabia and anchor space elevator funding to α * 2 million.
 
The United States federal government should reduce arms sales to Saudi Arabia and anchor space elevator funding to α * 20. (only perform 20 of the CP’s 2 million addition functions – avoiding a potential budget DA)
 
Arguably another step involves retrieving the monetary value of Foreign Military Sales over two years and converting it into a number – that’s distinct from and precedes the specific mathematical operation performed by the CP, which is: (76,588,800,000 – 76,587,800,000)* 2 million. Permuting all parts of the CP except the part that looks up the total FMS for the past two years yields:
 
The United States federal government should reduce arms sales to Saudi Arabia and anchor space elevator funding to (76,588,800,000 – 76,587,800,000)* 2 million.
 
You can also think at a higher level of abstraction. The CP includes the step of funding the space elevator – specifying the level is a distinct action. This yields:
 
The United States federal government should reduce arms sales to Saudi Arabia and fund a space elevator.
 
You could go even further. Step one of the CP is to “anchor space elevator funding,” and the steps after that specify what the funding should be anchored to. “Anchoring” – connecting space elevator funding to a firm metric – is a premise the CP clearly includes.
 
Anchoring alone arguably solves the net benefit
Google.com dictionary no date
verb
verb: anchor; 3rd person present: anchors; past tense: anchored; past participle: anchored; gerund or present participle: anchoring
1. moor (a ship) to the sea bottom with an anchor.
"the ship was anchored in the lee of the island"
secure firmly in position.
"the tail is used as a hook with which the fish anchors itself to coral"
provide with a firm basis or foundation.
"it is important that policy be anchored to some acceptable theoretical basis"
 
This yields:
 
The United States federal government should reduce arms sales to Saudi Arabia and anchor space elevator funding.
 
Hopefully the above will give you all the tools you need to see through the NEG’s smoke and mirrors when they present an artificially competitive CP, as well as put you in the correct mindset to devise bullet-proof permutations against a wide variety of other CP strategies.

By Eric Short

I’m leaving debate. There, I said it. While ripping off the band-aid makes the process easier, as an introduction, the sting lingers in its awkwardness. All the better, then, that this is goodbye. I know you don’t believe me; I’ve left before and since returned, the proverbial prodigal son of debate. I hope you can forgive me, as I have this habit of returning to the activity I started nearly 25 years ago. But I am leaving debate, and before I embark on the journey (again), I want to muse about my time in debate, and what better place than Debate Musings! However, instead of curating this site as a museum with ramblings about policy debate (Lincolns words, not mine), I want to take seriously the possibility of muse until you are so utterly unamused with my wordplay that you curse my name to all nine Muses. In that vein, this reflection won’t correspond to success or failure, friend or foe. These are not even my favorite moments from debate. Rather, they represent my (messy and out of order) attempt to make sense of my debating musings and why I am leaving.

Four years ago, when I began coaching at Niles West, Val McIntosh, Brad Meloche and I started the Olive Garden Trio. There is no story here, this is the amuse bouche, a little food served before the meal to stimulate the appetite. Bon Appetit!

The year prior, Maddie Langr and Erica Duff (Wake DL) were mooing at tournaments. Yes, moo, like the cow. I still have no idea how or why this originated, but the moos would echo down the halls of every tournament, and soon I mooed back. I have embraced that mood ever since, even though I’m still uncertain of it’s meaning.

After my senior year of high school (a lady never reveals her age), I thought I had left debate forever. I graduated and left for college to study engineering. My last high school debate was against a team from Montgomery Bell Academy at NFL Nationals (The TOC of South Dakota debate). We got absolutely wrecked in that debate, and MBA went on to lose to Glenbrook North in the finals. “At least we lost to a great team,” I thought at the time. A few months later I opened The Rostrum (required reading for debaters in South Dakota) to an article titled “The Scars of Winning,” written by one of the GBN debaters, Dan Shalmon. “At least we didn’t have to lose to him,” I thought after I googled his name + results. A legend.

Engineering lasted for about a semester. I was homesick, not for my family, but for debate, so I left South Dakota and transferred to the University of Northern Iowa, where the website said “we welcome novice debaters.” I (wrongly) assumed my lack of national circuit experience in high school qualified me to the novice division. Cate Palczewski, my college debate coach and muse in her own right, had other plans. UNI hosted the college season opener (yes, GSU has not always been the first travel weekend), and she told me to go watch Berkeley LS to see what good college debate looked like. It took me three rounds of watching to realize the S in Berkeley LS was Dan. I watched every debate of his at that tournament, trying to figure out how to get better. Observing was the only way I ever knew Dan, as he was in the “twice won the Copeland” bracket and I was in the “barely got four wins at a major” bracket.

During my sophomore year of college, I told Cate my goal was to win a speaker award at the NDT. I never qualified. Many, many years later I did get to judge a break round at the NDT on a panel with Dan, during which I mused why teams who wanted him to judge would also want me. A legend. We voted the same way.

Ten years ago, writing arguments for Wayzata High School, I stumbled across and then became obsessed with the theories of Luce Irigaray. 1000 pages of evidence later, I had a critique that links to almost every critique. Her theories of wonder (muse?) and difference influence my debate thinking still, even if my teams do not read her in debates. Her critical inhabitation of other theories to demonstrate their internal inconsistencies has been a motivating force in how I approach writing negs to k affs.

My Slack profile currently reads “K, gay, and lay whisperer” for whatever that is worth. But I have now spent way too many hours (weeks? months?) in the depths of databases like Project Muse. I need a break. I’m leaving debate because I don’t belong here. Don’t worry, I survived my imposter syndrome years ago, crying, alone in the rental car in a parking lot in Bloomington, IN after a very stressful Monday of judging at the National Debate Tournament. This is not “I don’t belong here” but instead “I don’t belong here,” I belong somewhere else. I don’t belong here, in that debate and I have taken everything we can from each other.

For 25 years, I have been a muse bemused. See, muse (I couldn’t help the alphabetics there) isn’t just about reminiscing, though the memories are great. To muse is to become confused yet eloquent and thoughtful; to feel like an imposter and nonetheless be an inspiration; to become absorbed in though, but to still find your way home. Leaving debate is a way to correct for those internal inconsistencies that musing surmises.

The last high school debate I coached was against a team from MBA (I guess debate is more cyclical than linear). I had judged this team earlier in the tournament and mused “that is what great debate looks like!” But, isn’t great debating itself a muse? Debate motivates us to be better. Debate forces us to dream and deliberate. Debate is the mood you make it. Moo!

All these years, I had the parable wrong. In debate, I’ve squandered my mental and physical health, and the return home is to friends, to family, and to a social life. My many returns to debate symbolized not my return home, but to the extravagance at the expense of all those other relations (in every Irigarayan sense of the word). That’s not to say it has to be that way, as the Olive Garden Trio continues to teach me (thanks Brad and Val!)

Dan was right in his article; I just didn’t know how to read it in high school. Debate hard and nurture harder. Or, as Cate used to tell us before every debate, “Have fun, be smart, listen to your partner, don’t fuck up, and if you do, fuck up less than the other team.” If you do that, debate will give you something to muse about. 

An entire topic’s worth of takes in one post? Let’s get to it.
 
However, I always have to say (one would think people have gotten the drill by now) how these posts need to be read. I am not dunking on 16-year-olds. I am here to give props where I think people earn them and to tell people how to do debate better. It is ultimately just my opinion, though if you look at the scoreboard in high school and college since September 2018 you might see a common theme that warrants listening.
 
Bad Camp Affs Means Nothing
 
High school policy debate is very interesting given the existence of debate camp and its evolution with open evidence project. The spirit of open source is great. What people do with the information is not great.
 
What you see on the NDCA evidence project means very little. Where did these files come from? One to eight students spend like a week researching. Adults chip in sparingly. Oversight is aggressively ad hoc and filtering for quality is avoided in favor of publishing everything to preserve feelings. Argument selection and strategic choices are deemphasized in favor of brute force card-cutting. The end result is usually a poorly thought out pile of slop.
 
I think smarter teams know this. They probably do try to look at files, take out good cards and delete bad ones. However, what I think is happening is that people see a file of all slop and conclude that area is trash.
 
The other thing at work at camps is people are saving their best ideas and arguments for the regular season. This pretty much guarantees the camp version will never arrive at the best version of anything.
 
The livestream chat of the semifinals and finals of the TOC is instructive on this. MBA read an aff that conditioned sales to Mexico on human rights accountability. The chat couldn’t believe a conditions aff was being read (more on this later). The camp files on Mexico were all about guns going into Mexico. Camp did conclude (correctly) that this version of a Mexico aff sucks because there is no good way to control the flow of guns into Mexico.
 
That isn’t the aff we read. “Lots of guns in Mexico” doesn’t matter because the internal link is about justice systems being able to hold human rights violators accountable. These systems solve corruption better too, so it solves advantage 2. Turns out there was a Mexico aff after all.
 
We read drones in finals. The chat opened the 1AC and said “wow, this is like not that bad.” Of course it is not that bad! It is the finals of the TOC. We weren’t planning to win it with slop. Everyone thought China fill-in zapped the aff because that was true of the poorly thought-out camp version . However, we had several China models the plan cards, cards that say China’s drones suck/countries have buyer’s remorse, and impact scenarios not implicated by fill-in. Another instance of folks writing off an area for no real reason.

Aff Selection Was Terrible
 
I do not understand this. Usually high schoolers are very reliable at not defending the biggest Affs and avoiding links. The exact opposite seemed to happen on this topic. People read Saudi Arabia and Taiwan for so many debates. I like big Affs so that part was cool.

It doesn’t make it strategic though. The Aff should have simply dominated this topic. The fact that you could proliferate single country and/or conditions affs in combination with politics being terrible meant the Aff should have never lost an important debate.
 
What Aff teams decided to do instead was read arguments that linked to reasonable DA’s like assurance. Why so many Japan and Europe affs? Why Saudi Arabia and Taiwan for the entire year? Why India? That is not to say any of these areas were on-face terrible. You could craft strategic versions. The point is you didn’t have to bother, you could have read things that linked to absolutely nothing.
 
Process affs also missed the mark because they never had any reason why reducing the sale was key to any of the process-based offense.
 
The four kind of affs you should have been hunting for:
a. we should completely break up with a country that is not an ally
b. the US is forcing this sale on the country, the country doesn’t really want it, the sale does bad stuff/trades off with other things.
c. offsets
d. conditions
 
If you just rotated through the above you probably would never lose.
 
People Give You Big Affs But You Don’t Innovate? Shame!


The Neg really compounded the error. I hate it when people complain about Neg ground. One part of it is agenda DA nostalgia when those debates weren’t that hot. The other part, which reveals the bullshit of the opinion, is when given an aff you can really sink your teeth into and Neg the hell out of it, people didn’t fucking do it.
 
There were five pretty prominent areas: Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Japan, Europe (mainly BMD) and India. The Neg innovation across these areas was terrible.
 
First, you don’t have to always go for the assurance DA. You could cut other stuff. Shout out to Westminster. They had a clear pulse on this front. They broke many new Neg arguments across these areas.

Second, when you do read the assurance DA you can provide variety. Similar to how you read new impacts on the Aff hoping the Neg drops them, throwing Aff teams curveballs is a good way to win more. Wadsworth 19 and the re-reading of said card is not the gold fucking standard.
 
Why So Much Saudi Arabia?
 
I didn’t do debate camp this summer. I started a little slower and behind. I thought Saudi Arabia would be a good aff based on the college military presence. Then I read all the camp files. Then I did a little searching. Then I gave up on that assessment. I became a Taiwan guy. You saw how that worked out.

I just don’t get the appeal. Yemen war escalates? Sucks. Could you read a bunch of advantages? Not really. Did people figure out the relations DA? Didn’t seem like it.
 
I will concede Neg innovation on this front was basically non-existent. I know some people who claim to be deep in the Saudi lit disagree with me on this, but I just thought this area was Neg-leaning and Negs did the least innovating here.
 
Naming T After the Author. Again.
 
I swear on all that is holy if we do this shit again next year, I am going to lose it. Not only is calling T by an author name always stupid (which has been going on for four years now) this iteration was the worst. T-Pearson (a stupid name) was the worst staple T argument in the last 5 years.
 
This was in EVERY 1NC. Like I will give you a $100 if you show me a 1NC speech doc against a policy aff that did not have this card in it.
 
The odds of winning on this argument were ZERO. It was fucking terrible. There is no way on God’s green Earth this is the way the topic should work. You would have done more productive work filling the speech with variations of SPEC arguments.
 
Conditions: No One Knew Anything
The Aff could definitely condition sales. This was a butt crush T wise. There were many many viable countries. I think HR condition all arms sales and Egypt were the only two camp affs that conditioned sales. A crime to the notion of previewing the topic.
 
Condition affs would have been better debate. Positive vs negative. State department resources becomes a real factor. Relations DA’s. Spillover DA’s about countries thinking they are next. That would have been reasonable debate.
 
Condition CP’s need real net benefits with real impacts. You can’t just read we should leverage the Aff and call it a CP. You have to complete the strategy. Don’t think anyone ever did.
 
Taiwan Was Good. Not That Good.
 
BM lost one debate with the Taiwan aff to spark. That was it.
 
We highlighted three things differently compared to camp. First, Heer 19 and structural parity arguments. Nobody ever answered this part. It was supposed to be sneaky the first couple tournaments, not all year. Second, good relations solve war/encroachment. This is where not innovating on the Neg and only going for deterrence/assurance bit you. You forgot what you were taught on the China topic about such an argument. Third, Yoder 19, concessions now are good because we can still contain later. Revealing Chinese thinking though a concession is key. It obviously paired very well with structural parity. Nobody answered this part either.
 
Blamo! Doing a couple of targeted reforms can also cause you to have really high winning rates.
 
Stop Reading CP’s Without Cards
It isn’t smart. It makes you look dumb. Things that you can’t beat a good team on that make you look dumb when you do them should be avoided. I am not saying don’t read CP’s based in 1AC evidence. That can be smart. I am talking about the advantage CP you think “is smart.” I am talking about reading con con with no evidence. Stop it.
 
Wiki is Garbage. Please Fix.
I promise high school debate would be a lot better if everyone was open source. It doesn’t tradeoff with winning (MBA the last 4 years proves). It makes it so much better. If you only post cites, you suck, sorry. If you don’t post every round, also sucky. Get with the program.
 
Stop Reading Double-Digit Off
I am sure you could trace this trend to who did it first to make it cool. It is really, really stupid. First, you aren’t even really doing it because you are inflating the total with stupid procedurals and no card CP’s that don’t make any sense. It is not like you have 10+ things that are unique, actually link and provide a path to win all at the same time.
 
It also seems to just melt the brains of the Neg. I would hope in a world where a judge would instantly vote against you if you read more than 8 you would spend your time coming up with 8 that didn’t suck, and you would answer the case. That’s what we are looking for. 7 to 8 real arguments and answering the case. You can even do it against new affs if you prepare well. Give it a try.
 
2A’s—if you are a real debater you should practice against this double digit off scenario. The first time you might copy and paste 10 2AC blocks and try to read straight down. That time is going to suck. What you need to do:
 
a. figure out how you can answer multiple pages with the same argument
b. streamline redundancies, mainly on T and CP theory stuff
c. swap long cards for shorter cards
d. When you read a card in the 2AC that should mean you can read a lot more in the 1AR if the block collapses and win a debate on that argument. If you read a card and it doesn’t meet that standard, you are fucking up.
e. Make smart analytics that completely answer an argument.
f. straight turn the throw away stuff
g. make analytics you can read cards on later.
 
Practice that a few times and this lots of off strategy melts away. It also has the added benefit of if you write blocks like this and the Neg reads a reasonable number of off the 2AC can drop the hammer with double digit distinct answers. This is contrary to the  current industry standard of six total answers, maybe four of which are different.
 
2AC/1AR blocks
 
People seem to be writing 2ACs, but I am not sure they know exactly what that entails. Your goal should be to say the Neg is wrong. It shouldn’t be to “be skeptical” about the Neg. It shouldn’t be to nitpick the Neg. It shouldn’t be to read cards that tangentially relate to the Neg. You should read cards that address the thesis of the Neg argument and say it is incorrect. Offensive arguments would be cool too.
 
You research all the possible answers you could make to a thing. You then rank them in order of goodness. You then think about what the Neg is going to say in response. You then figure out what in total you need to win the argument evidence-wise. You then figure out how to distribute that evidence between the 1AC/2AC/1AR so as to not drop other important stuff while setting up the 1AR’s ability to choose and vertically develop 2AC arguments
 
You do this again and again for every Aff you write until the end of time. It is the 2A life. It is not for everyone. Don’t half-ass it though. That’s no fun for anyone.
 
New Age Debate Memes
 
If you ever interact with other speech and debate events, you figure out pretty quickly that they have their own lingo and they sound funny. I am sure if your parents hear you talk about policy debate, they think you sound like a freak. In my debating time the big risk was you would use too much debate jargon substituting for real arguments. A dead giveaway for someone like this is if they ever say the phrase internal link turn earnestly. Debate has rotted their brain.
 
I don’t think debate-specific jargon is the real issue recently. The issue is people have taken academic-sounding phrases and turned them into memes and buzzwords. Speeches are lacking in any real substance because it is full of words like miscalc, escalate, sacred commitments, revisionism, etc.

You aren’t actually saying anything. This gets really funny when the archetypical 2N stands up in CX and asks “what countries would go to war” and then crickets. Or the Aff says some countries and then 2N raises an eyebrow and asks “geez idk, wars cost a lot why would they do that?” Then crickets again.
 
I don’t fault anyone for debating like this. The subjects at hand are very complex and folks are just high schoolers after all. Also, good teams sound like this so I should sound like this, I get it. One of the best ways to win college debates fast as you transition is learning more about the world so you can call out bullshit. People in college basically self-filter out crap arguments because the other side reliably points out the weakness. This is not the case in high school. There is a big win percentage edge to be gained if you can do this.
 
A corollary to this is: rehearse explaining your shit. Practicing real CX’s against a coach should still be a thing. Knowing who would go to war and why is a real thing you need to explain. “Somebody miscalcs and it escalates cuz nationalism and sacred commitments” is drivel.
 
Revisionism
 
Dan has been mad about the following point in high school and college all year. Here is his take below:
 
 
Judging debates that revolved around this premise was unspeakably bad for my value to life. I’m not really sure how it started, but someone at camp told everyone that the surest way to win a debate was to spam as many cards as possible regarding whether or not China/Russia was “revisionist”.
 
It seemed like the following argument became a generic DA on the topic that everyone took seriously: Card 1 – china is revisionist and evil, Card 2 – nuke war. This was awful. Whoever told you this at camp should be held publicly responsible for the damage they’ve done to the community’s collective intelligence. It seemed like every debate I judged about Taiwan included 6 cards on each side about whether China was “revisionist”, and the team that won the debate was the team that read the most.
 
This is totally ridiculous – “revisionism” isn’t some permanent and fixed category that determines every action a state will take, it’s a strategy that certain actors within certain states sometimes utilize for specific goals. Whether or not powerful actors within China, for example, will take “revisionist” actions regarding the plan is entirely a question of link evidence and arguments. This was the real tragedy about these debates – both sides read usually 1 or less link cards, but read a million revisionism cards!
 
NONE OF IT MATTERS without detailed and specific link/internal link debating. And even then – states can want to “revise” the global order and still make security-based calculations in their regional spheres of influence that are entirely separated from their “revisionist” global ambitions – so winning that China is “revisionist” vs the Taiwan F-16s aff means basically nothing absent link evidence connecting F-16 sales to broader Chinese adventurism (and evidence saying such a thing is bad for strategic stability). If you were one of the people who told kids this was a thing at camp, you should feel bad for misleading everyone.
 
 
The TOC was High Caliber
People brought their A game. It seemed liked entourages were easier to access because people had time and it was cheap (no travel) so people could focus more on the args. Nobody who showed up slouched.
 
Special congrats to Kent Denver. Closing out a quarterfinal at the TOC is a monumental accomplishment for a program.
 
Thank you to all the folks who popped in to judge as hires. It might have been for the cash, but I think the more likely explanation is your love of the game. You helped create some of the most preferred panels in TOC history.
 
High School History
102-5. Won New Trier, St. Marks, Glenbrooks RR, Emory, CPS RR, Berkeley and the TOC. Finals of Ghill RR, Ghill and Glenbrooks. Won 49 straight debates since the finals of Glenbrooks. Didn’t lose in the second semester. I am open to suggestions of a team that had a more dominant single season in high school history compared to MBA BM.
 
Aden made it to the TOC 4 times. He was in the Quarters, Semifinals, Finals and Champion.
 
Aden as a freshman was 4-0 vs Peninsula TW and McDonough JN, the two TOC finalists that year.
 
During his sophomore (education), junior (immigration) and senior (arms sales) topic, Aden did the following:


Won: the Ghill RR (2x), New Trier, St. Marks (2x), Michigan (2x), Glenbrooks RR (3x), MBA, Pace RR, Emory (2x), Cal RR (2x), Pine Crest, Berkeley (2x), NDCA and the TOC.
 
Finals: Ghill RR, Ghill (2x), Glenbrooks, the TOC.
 
He set the record for Baker points his junior year and then broke it his senior year.
 
If anyone wants to offer up a more accomplished high school debater, I am listening. The fact that he continued to have the fire and remained inclusive of teammates and so humble is astonishing. I have flexed way more in this post than Aden has probably done in his entire life.
 
It has been incredible to be able to help him these last 4 years. I won’t forget it.

Feedback from yesterday’s post was interesting. It definitely taught me that we all don’t share identical social media feeds and screenshots would help a lot. Also have to keep the writing in these posts tight when trying make a narrow argument, lest the asides get taken as the main point. There isn’t much to debate about, people said reasonable things generally and the dispute would be about degree of link to what I actually said and intended to say. Ultimately, poor writing on my part if the way it hits people is very far from my intention. That's on me, not them. 
 
Some folks said voting was a civic responsibility and seemed to imply that responsibility should extend to engaging nonvoters (maybe I am reading into this last part). I would have to hear more about that. Not well read enough for that mere statement to mean anything to me.
 
I am here to talk about what I found to be a novel defense of Vote Blue, No Matter Who that came as a reaction to yesterday’s post. I thought it worth passing along.
 
I stated yesterday that a vote mattering is the odds it proves pivotal in the election (causing a tie or breaking a tie). There is reasonable consensus that this number approaches zero. A more nuanced way to think about voting via political science is the following:

People choose to vote based on the probability their vote is pivotal, their direct utility from voting (civic duty, social network pressure) and the costs of voting (be they psychological or economic transaction costs). So, if someone is going to vote the direct utility of voting has to outweigh the costs because the probability of being pivotal is not adding anything.
 
Here are the two main studies that establish that social pressure works:
https://isps.yale.edu/sites/default/files/publication/2012/12/ISPS08-001.pdf
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/todd_rogers/files/social_pressure.pdf
 
Taking those insights, the defense of Vote Blue, No Matter Who as a social media talking point:
 
1. Social pressure from peers about voting is a pivotal factor in getting people to vote. Also, one of the cheapest ways to impact things.
 
2. Voting becomes habitual, once people do it once they are more likely to do it in the future across many elections
 
3. Boosting turnout helps Democrats’ chance of victory.
 
4. The average Democratic candidate is better than the average GOP candidate for the purposes of mitigating harm regardless of the election in question.
 
5. Thus, pressuring people from nonvoters into habitual voters is likely to improve the chances Democrats win over time which is good because they do less harm than GOP candidates. The mantra “Shut up about voting” would forfeit the above.
 
This is certainly a more coherent case for voting backed up by social science than I was aware of yesterday. Here are some clarifications.
 
What is “social pressure”
 
Highlights from the articles:
 
“Exposing a person’s voting record to his or her neighbors turns out to be an order of magnitude more effective than conventional pieces of partisan or nonpartisan direct mail”
 
“Personal, unhurried appeals are usually far superior to impersonal, mechanical and rushed communications (Gerber and Green 2000).”
 
The field experiments communicated to voters one of four options:
A. Do your civic duty
B. You are being studied, but the results are going to be confidential/no one will know if you voted or not.
C. We’ll tell other people who live in your house whether you voted or not.
D. We will tell your neighbors if you voted or not.
 
B, C and D all increase the social pressure. D had the biggest impact on getting people to vote.  
 
All to say, internet randoms talking at each other probably doesn’t do anything. The person has to be in your network/a social leader to make social pressure work. I would say the social media posts I see are a mixed bag. Some are earnest/targeted at a peer. A good chunk is just shouting into the void/sharing polarizing stories or drivel from blue checkmarks .
 
Biden is as bad or worse than Trump
 
These arguments likely fall flat in the final estimation. Don’t get me wrong, Biden sucks. It is just very difficult to suck more than Trump. A Biden administration would save more lives (while still doing bad things) than a Trump administration. I am open to arguments on these fronts, but it seems like a high bar to clear.
 
For instance, you could say I am not going to vote, the Democrats will eventually lose enough elections and they will change course much closer to my policy/candidate preferences. How likely is that to work out? Unclear. Are there spillover effects from propagating notions that disengage and disaffect people? There does seem to be backing for such a notion.
 
It branches into a murky conversation about structural change that is beyond my current scope.  
 
Biden is a rapist and that’s a d-rule
 
I find this argument to be eminently reasonable. What percentage of No Biden voters holds this particular view is unclear. The above framework is mainly geared toward Bernie supporters who don’t want to vote for neoliberal shills.
 
I did ask for someone’s response to this position and a summary is:
a. You don’t vote for people as people.
b. You vote for the candidate who has the least distance between their position and your ideal policy standpoint.
c. You are making a strategic choice to reduce harm
 
That is not the most inspiring slogan for a candidate. Wouldn’t want to put it on a sticker. It does, however, bolster the idea that Biden is going to need some extra turnout juice from social pressure to mitigate adverse enthusiasm gap concerns.
 
I do not like either major national party. Neither of them endorses a politics with which I personally identify. We need new organizations.
 
However, for what it’s worth, when faced with a choice in November about which party will do less harm, I will formally submit my opinion on the matter, and it will be that Democrats do less harm (we have a Democratic governor in Kentucky who won by like 5,000 votes who is mitigating the hell out of harm right now despite not being a full blown comrade).  
 
Will I vote for Biden despite the accusations of sexual assault? Probably not. I live in Kentucky so my vote on that matter does nothing. I want other people to vote for Biden (mainly in PA, WI and MI and a couple other states) for harm reduction (but maybe someone will flip me on that). I am going to need some more thoughtful takes on the matter because I am not there yet and Biden probably needs all the help he can get. 

​My social media feed has been a dumpster fire since Bernie Sanders suspended his presidential campaign. There are two main camps. First, people saying they will never vote for Biden (myriad of reasons, but him being a rapist seems to top the list). Second, people saying you must vote for Biden because Trump is bad. I imagine this bottom-of-the-barrel discourse will continue off-and-on for the next seven months.
 
This conversation is stupid, but not for the reasons stated to date (from my vantage point, at least). Let’s investigate and see if we can shut people the hell up, or at least move the conversation onto things that matter.
 
Let’s start with the Biden over Trump people. A vote for not Biden is a vote for Trump. Everyone has to band together and vote for Biden. Something something Bernie bros. Something something suck it up. The ultimate implication being that every vote matters and every vote not for Biden is courting disaster.
 
The issue with this position is math. A very common definition of a vote ‘mattering’ is the odds it results in a tie or breaks a tie. Here are some bullet points on that notion:
 

• A 2001 study examined 40,000 state legislative elections and 7 were decided by a single vote.

 

• A random voter in a presidential election has about a 1 in 60 million chance, 1 in 10 million if they are in a swing state (there are increasingly fewer of those since this study was done).

 

• Some economists are much more aggressive: “the odds of his vote mattering were about 161,000 times less than the odds of him buying a winning Powerball ticket.”

 

• “On one of the models that people use—it's called the Brennan-Lomasky model—the chances that your vote would be decisive in a major national election in the US are vanishingly small. They're on the order of the chances that your phone is going to spontaneously quantum tunnel through your desk.”

 
The only way you can make the math work in favor of voting is if you shift to expected value/utility theory. If there is a trillion dollars of difference between Trump and Biden and you have a 1 in 10 million chance of swinging the entire election, the expected value of your vote is +$100,000.
 
Issues with that: One, impossible to really calculate. Two, promotes a sort of existential risk/precautionary principle/utility maximizing style of reasoning that you really wouldn’t care about in other areas of life. Three, a Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 was won by proving that humans are very bad at the expected utility thing. The real kicker is that ultimately, when an outcome or event is the same regardless of your participation, your participation did not matter.
 
Does that mean voting does nothing? Certainly not. It does do something. What it does is say something about the person casting the vote. For the reluctant Biden voter, it expresses that they are fine voting for imperfection/lesser of two evils to promote a notion of the common good. Never Biden people jump in at this point and start explaining why Biden is bad (possibly as bad as Trump, maybe worse based on some takes I saw).
 
Here, again, we have the same issue. Granting the illusion that someone’s vote for Biden matters and saying Biden is bad is not doing anything, for the same reason trying to guilt Never Biden people into voting is stupid. In the realm of social media, you are not haggling over any political influence/power that can register on any scale. Everyone was always already merely expressing themselves with their voting preference, not allocating units of political power. The winner of the election gets all the political power if they get to 270 electoral votes and your vote doesn’t do anything about that.
 
So, when someone says “I am never in my life going to vote for a rapist,” the response should be “good for you, I hope that helps you/makes you happy.” Responding with “but what about judges/kids in cages/tax credits” is delusional. One vote has nothing to do with any of that.
 
As a complete aside, politicians should just earn the vote from voters. If they do a bad job, that’s on the politician, not the voter. Nobody owes their vote to anybody. One of the main selling points of Biden was his electability, so he should be able to persuade voters. No one has to do it on social media for him.
 
I need to clean up several things at this point, because if we have some Reluctant Biden people reading they are likely losing their shit.
 
Mobilizing people to vote could have an impact (the more votes you are responsible for, the better odds you have). Clogging social media doesn’t do any of that. Face-to-face contact or phone calls are necessary—that’s studies. Could one individual divorced from a broader organization/strategy ever mobilize enough voters to make it worth the effort? Probably not.
 
If everyone thought voting didn’t matter, then no one would vote. True! Except, every election ever proves that people do not think like that! They vote for reasons other than the “purely rational” ones recognized by social sciences. Some would call it irrational. A paradox, even. They vote to express themselves, or because they have made a calculation about what their immediate peer group/social circle will think about them.
 
Another issue with the “all voting will collapse” argument is that elections have not been going so hot. Voters are very low information. A lot of them are consistently racist/xenophobic. If I could trick 100 Trump voters into not voting by saying it is stupid, that’s pretty good bang for the buck. Oh no! All voting will collapse if you point out math! Whatever will society do without more 2016’s or centrists or neoliberal assholes??

Voting can be good. Especially if it were way easier to do. Like what if the US was like Estonia and you could vote online? Pretty cool. It can bring a noticeable amount of personal satisfaction. It can generate social capital for an individual that they can invest into other endeavors. It can signal a sense of belonging to a community, like when you clap at a performance or shout at a game.
 
The tradeoffs are real, though. In some states, you have to wait an hour or longer to vote on average. Ridiculous, almost impossible to justify for care-takers or working-class people. For God’s fucking sake people in Wisconsin were forced to risk their lives to vote. It says a lot about them as people, and I respect their character even though the math was not in their favor.
 
The real time sink is the pointless typing at your computer, the consumption of articles, and the emotional toll it takes when you read someone say something that pisses you off because you think it influences an election.
 
I am not saying people have no agency or political power. It is a question of scale. Go out and contribute to a political organization that can achieve enough scale to make a thing happen in the long-term while creating a network of care in the short-term. Never Biden vs Reluctant Biden contributes nothing to that other than getting everyone pissed off at each other and exhausting them to the point it doesn’t happen.
 
 
Sources
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/todaysdebate/2020/01/17/your-vote-almost-certainly-wont-matter-editorials-debates/4449482002/
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/avaek4/voters-dont-know-anything-and-your-vote-wont-matter
https://reason.com/2012/10/03/your-vote-doesnt-count/
https://arcdigital.media/your-vote-doesnt-matter-a735a55ac14d
https://hbr.org/2011/07/the-unselfish-gene
https://www.apa.org, https://www.apa.org/monitor/2008/06/vote
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/07/15/how-to-mobilize-reluctant-voters/
http://www.indiana.edu/~koertge/H205/vote.htm
https://freakonomics.com/2008/09/12/can-you-vote-your-way-to-happiness/
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-good-the-bad-the-economy/201811/why-you-should-vote
https://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2012/11/the-paradox-of-voting-posner.html
 

I have some takes as they concern critical debate in 2020. I wanted to prove these notions come from a place of good faith, that they are not reactionary. I’ve put in my time. So, like with any good critical discussion I provided a genealogy first. The history section may not be necessary, so if you just want the takes, skip below it. 
 
History with the K
It was September 2008. Lehman Brothers had filed for bankruptcy the previous Monday. This fact did not resonate with me whatsoever. I was too busy focusing on my first college tournament, where I was debating JV at GSU. The topic was reducing agriculture subsides, the cards were on paper, and we had a biofuels affirmative of unknown origin (I don’t remember where the original cards came from, but this was when Gonzaga happened the weekend before and involved a lot of potential bid teams so we stole their cards aggressively).
 
Round 1 we debated Case Western (that is a university in Ohio that used to have a policy team). They read the Global Local K. How did I know it was the Global Local K? Certainly not from prior knowledge. I did high school debate in Colorado, where they had 4-minute rebuttals at the time. K’s weren’t really a thing, although I was introduced to the idea at the two summer camps I attended.  The only one-off debate I had ever experienced was at camp; I think that happened once or twice and mainly involved the Cap K.
 
I cracked the code on Global Local because the file header said Global Local when they passed us cards. I dug around my accordions, found “Global Local Answers,” read some, two hours of nonsense ensued, and we emerged victorious. College debate proved very easy as we proceeded to go a casual 15-0 on ballots. We even defeated another one-off team from Florida State in the finals, although it was the Cap K and hard to distinguish from de-dev.  
 
But rocky waters lay ahead for Liberty GW. Fast forward to the Richmond tournament (Richmond was another school that used to have policy debate and hosted a substantial regional tournament – the kind with three divisions, attended by the whole district and a few schools from just outside, and an overall strong weekend).

Round 2 we were Aff vs Pittsburgh. They hit us with the big Nietzsche. I imagine it wasn’t much more sophisticated than suffering good. Did I know what May 2k5 was? Sure didn’t. We took the hard L. My coaches tried to explain to 18-year-old me what a Nietzsche was for what felt like an eternity. It did not take. A typical irrational hatred of critical arguments from getting popped on something you are too dense to understand was starting to develop.
 
The lumps didn’t stop there. Round 7, Aff against Binghamton. They went for Heidegger. I flopped around for two hours trying to figure out what technological thought and calculative reasoning is. Didn’t go well. Another L against a German K! My JV world was falling apart. A brief reprieve when we debated the same team in the semifinals, they read a Heidegger aff with a plan and we beat them on ASPEC. Fucking love 2008 debate.
 
The dynamic between myself and K debates didn’t change very much over four years. It was bad. Lots of people go through undergrad not being good at researching critical subjects. I compounded that problem by not really having any clue what people were saying. I don’t know how I filled up speeches. I don’t know why judges didn’t always vote against us when we were Aff and why they gave me higher than a 26.
 
The funny thing was, it wasn’t that big of a deal at the time. Looking back on the first semester of the nukes topic (2009-2010), I believe we went to 6 tournaments and had 11 debates involving critical stuff out of 48 total. On immigration it was 7 out of 32 in the first semester. We are talking less than 25% of the debates. For a team that just wanted to figure out how to clear at a major and then get lucky, being terrible at K stuff only hindered us some, didn’t derail everything. Did we lose on rocks are people, knocking us out of our junior year NDT? Yup. Did we win the first NDT elim in Liberty history by beating the imperialism K? Yes, we did (somehow).
 
A related trend was developing during my time in undergrad: identity debates, which are commonplace now. By no means a definitive history, but this is what I recall from my vantage. Red White and Black drops in 2010. Liberty FH is an early adopter (not sure if it ever got read during the nukes topic, don’t remember that part). Wilderson is definitely a thing on the immigration topic. I remember very clearly practice debating FH in those early days and they kept saying “the black body.” I kept asking if they were talking about black people or something else and the answer never clarified anything for me (this could be on me, this could be on Eddie Fitzgerald being obtuse as hell (love you Eddie)).

I would say I held normal, wildly mistaken views concerning how race and racism worked for the first 19 or 20 years of my life, being a product of the public education system in America and all. The first presidential election I voted in I voted for Obama. I thought that cleared up a lot of racism. I thought you actively had to hate people of color. I thought it was interpersonal, I thought you had to be explicit in your bias, etc. Structural racism, afterlife of slavery, time accumulates, etc. did not cross my path or resonate until the debates I had my junior and senior year of college.
 
Fast forward to my first year out of college. I was the argument coach for Liberty. It was the energy production topic. I set out to cut my first K thing, the neolib K. In the grand scheme of things, it is hot garbage. In the scheme of first tries? Eh, still garbage.
 
The thing that makes this topic critical is what I learn from judging. In the octafinals of Kentucky I judge WGA DF vs Wake HQ. It’s me, Fisher and EShort. I had watched some debates in my undergrad days when a policy team was answering the K, but never really sought out framework debates.
 
This debate obviously blows my mind. What am I doing here? What is happening? K’s are stupid/sleight of hand. Ugh, I remember the L’s on Nietzsche and Anthro and Heidegger and Complexity and on and on. Get me out of here. I am an aspiring policy hack after all.
 
I watch the debate and a few minutes in, as I am looking things over, it dawns on me: “oh shit, WGA probably should win.” I’d given an RFD like this before, let’s see how this goes. 2-1 for the Aff. Fisher and I sit EShort (sidebar: WGA DF was so fucking good. I always appreciate them because we debated them at Wake when we were seniors and they were frosh and they explained to me what Wilderson was in a way I actually understood for the first time).
 
I judged a lot of WGA DF that year. They taught me a lot about the back and forth on framework. In an NDT prelim they just read original poetry and then a Sexton card and then sat down. I was like damn are we taking this too far? Whatever, 3-0 Aff.
 
The other noteworthy experience from this topic took place at Northwestern when I judged Oklahoma CL (Rashid and George) for the first time. Never seen them debate before. Not really sure who they are. George got up and started rapping the 1AC. This doesn’t strike me as odd, lots of 1AC’s started with music, rapping, or poems at the beginning. In my experience it was unclear if they typically ended up mattering later in the debate, but nothing too wild going on.
 
After about 90 seconds it dawned on me, he was not going to stop rapping. This was the whole thing. And OU CL continues to rap throughout the entire debate. They made their arguments about code switching and told me, for the first time, not to judge the debate like a white person. They maybe read one card formally. Maybe. Never seen anything like it up until that point.
 
First year out ended. Moved from Liberty to Kentucky. Judged a little Oklahoma, Towson and West Georgia. Still didn’t know how to research K’s. Any insight I have as a coach is coming from judging K debates. In the spring of the war powers topic I thought a few things. First, I had a crisis of confidence on the viability of framework as a strategy.  Everybody goes through this phase. Second, I wanted to learn what K’s actually said. As a corollary I wanted to cut cards to answer them. This mainly involved reading books where somebody explains an author (not reading the author directly).
 
Through this process I stumbled upon Jean Baudrillard: Against Banality by William Pawlett. I read this book three or four times to grasp what the fuck was being said. That was necessary since I was starting from a pretty low/caveman baseline. The other thing I did was consult my good buddy Paul Johnson frequently (sidebar: PJ kicks ass. He is a professor at Pittsburgh. Great guy. Pretty verbose academic at this point so we were hit and miss on explaining Baudrillard to an idiot like me. I would love for debate to be structured in such a way that folks like PJ could be a little more involved in some way.)
 
This turns into the first K I cut against K’s. You can check the receipts too. Before Michigan KM made Pawlett cards a household thing, there is a debate at Harvard between Wake and Kentucky with Varda judging. Kentucky wins this debate on the Baudrillard K of identity. I claim we were the first squad to read Pawlett. I am not 100% on this but feel pretty good about it. After this debate Varda asks where these cards come from, GN tells them Lincoln did it and I have been judging so much Baylor ever since.
 
During the next three topics (legalization, military presence and climate), I was mostly free riding off of Donnie who was cutting all of our K stuff. I chipped in here and there, but nothing substantial of note. I had gotten over the hump of being able to cut K cards at all. I had turned the corner on being able to actually explain the ideas behind K’s. I could read people’s articles and know what is going on. Was becoming less of a clash judge in this period, more of a policy debates + Baylor judge (judged a lot of Harvard BS it felt like on legalization too). Donnie moved on after climate and I then free rode/chipped in lightly with BT over the next two topics (healthcare and executive power).
 
What does this very long story have to do with anything?  Due to BT retiring and adding Casey and Caitlin this was the first year I could do some specializing and I focused predominantly on K stuff. I have some thoughts about it. Before I shared them, I wanted people to have a richer context of my history.

The takeaways from the history lesson: I began from a position of profound ignorance. There was soooo much I didn’t know. I appreciate the critical element of debate being present to force me to figure such things out. It definitely made me a lot smarter of a person, even though it took me a while to figure it out. The other thing to note is, I have put in the work/time. Whenever we used to talk about K stuff on Facebook (when that was in fashion) there would always be someone playing the “go read the books” card. I have read the fucking books. I have judged the debates. I have watched the debates. I have coached people to wins. I have coached people to L’s and thought about why. All to say, these thoughts aren’t really reactionary, but a product of spending a good amount of time dwelling on the issues, even if, ultimately, just one person’s opinion.
 
Scouting
A large amount of time was spent figuring out what people said. What you get from the wiki is a bit of a crapshoot. How much people update and how much they include (only 1AC’s, just cites, etc.) varies a lot.

And as we all know, the bigger issue is that the crux of a debate comes out towards the middle of a round, usually tied to a card previously read and not a new card. The 2AC applying the 1AC or the block making their moves on framing, framework or impact calc arguments to nullify parts of the 1AC.

You mainly get this in the form of what people remember, a rough translation indeed.

I felt we had a reasonable idea of what people said. I would give us about a B+. I would say we dedicated noticeable resources to that pursuit. Squads with less coaches dedicated to the grind could not reasonably duplicate it in my mind.
 
Framework debates were boring, but why?
I don’t think framework debates have to be boring. I think they were pretty interesting on healthcare and resulted in good back and forth.
 
One might counter and say going for framework is up to the Neg and it is inherently boring, therefore it is the Neg’s fault. I don’t agree with the premise, but for now let’s assume it is boring on face. The only justification left for the Neg is if they are forced into it.

I think the Neg has demonstrated a reasonable willingness to go for other stuff when presented with the opportunity. Teams win on heg good, space weapons good, satellites good etc. The issue with this is it mainly depends on the good graces of the Aff team. “We will defend X” “You can say Y” etc. is a strange way to divide ground. Sometimes I learn something is an impact turn to the 1AC in cross-x that I would not fathom based off the tags and cards in said 1AC.
 
The better way to divide ground is likely to lock in a floor for what an Aff has to defend that is controversial. It seems better than dividing ground based off the whims of the Aff, and in a way that obviates all uniqueness and link questions to devolve into a “random impact good/bad” debate.
 
But isn’t the Neg just being lazy going for framework? Maybe. It is difficult to figure out what is going on (that is above). You would also have to write a specific idea that improves your chances of winning more than framework. This is a high bar. Not simply because cards and premises can change swiftly (thanks Cal NR), but when pushed, Aff teams are going to do what Aff teams do. Dodge, dodge, perm, not our thing.

Like I get it, sometimes the Neg accusations are wildly off base. And there is no judgement here for when an Aff team tries to limit what a Neg can say. That’s just good strategy. But what Neg teams are unlikely to do is engage in work that requires nailing down the meaning of an abstraction to generate speculative link arguments when the link to another position is guaranteed.
 
And let’s not assume that these 1AC’s are works of art that just can’t get no engagement. People blame the Aff for shallow debates by accusing them of “dodging links” and “being noncontroversial,” but I think this analysis is a little superficial.

My issue with the K Affs I read this year (and I read them all) is that they weren’t interesting. Space was a shoehorned conversation. Why the resolution was bad was not very intrinsic or thought-provoking. The 1AC did not set up intricate inroads to problematizing framework.

I am sympathetic; this topic didn’t give people much to work with. It had a weird list of space stuff and then had this IR kind of conversation about working with enemies. 

A lot of that has to do with the fact that space policy is stupid. No one cares (although Grondin 7 is a heater, good job dml). I am surprised more people weren’t up front about saying fuck talking about this. Or went deeper and tried to come up with something more intricate and specific to space. But it seemed people settled in the unsatisfactory middle.
 
I thought Aff teams were worse at Framework this year
In typical debate musings fashion, I didn’t muse on this at all. I collected a lot of data on the question. I looked at the last 5 topics (so starting with military and ending with space).
 
I looked at when a first-round team did not read a plan vs another first round team that went for framework. I logged all the results. Here is what happened: