EMORY HS DOUBLE-OCTAFINALS: Greenhill vs. GBN

EMORY HS DOUBLE-OCTAFINALS: Greenhill vs. GBN

NEGATIVE: Greenhill

This round really demonstrated the importance of controlling framework or meta-questions – questions about how the way that I perform my evaluation. Greenhill issues some clear and articulate criteria for my decision. Glenbrook North, while articulately discussing some of the micro questions, neglects these 2NR decision criteria to their detriment.

More concretely, the 2AR drops the offense/defense paradigm, and also drops the (faintly absurd) assertion that structural side bias compels negative presumption on counterplans. Therefore, I only need to assess the two pieces of Gearing evidence to decide the debate. Even if there’s some internal problem with the net benefit, there’s no disadvantage to the net benefit. The negative’s set up a situation in which they only need to win EQUIVALENT solvency.

If you really think through this theory, of course, you’ll see that Greenhill’s arguing plausibly for an absurdity. If word PICs don’t need an offensive net benefit – or if they’re held to an extremely low standard for the evaluation of presumption – the affirmative absolutely cannot win. An affirmative can answer disads to their wording, but it’s absurd to think they’d have a defense of every word against every EQUIVALENT synonym. I’m a fan of word PICs (at least relative to my colleagues) but even I recognize that this would be the zero point; debate would have no value.

Presumption against counterplans must go affirmative. Negatives that counterplan with an identical synonym is not an equivalent remedy for the apparently dizzying power of the last speech. GBN should also refute offense/defense with a story about the “margin of error.” I honestly believe that debate is just not a finely enough calibrated instrument of social science to measure infinitesimally small risks. Extremely small risks should be discounted as unknown if they fall outside our activity’s predictive capability, for the same reason that a poll might discount a 2 point lead with a smallish sample size – overestimating our predictive capability leads to poor decisionmaking by overinterpreting essentially random results.

That’s not the debate that occurs, though.

I’m unimpressed with these Gearing cards. I don’t understand the link to your “common word” argument; Greenhill has evidence that renewable is a less common term, and isn’t a term of art. This evidence definitely doesn’t delineate a positive benefit to using terms together. There’s a risk of a backlash, and Greenhill adumbrates a number of unanswered disadvantages to that backlash, including case effectiveness, direct case rollback, and an independent survival impact.

GBN, you should have gone for “perm – do the counterplan” in the 1AR. I thought the 2AC was good on this. Your theory arguments sounded intelligent and nuanced. I expected this to be the nexus point of the debate, and I felt that the affirmative had roughly equal chances here given correct 1AR diagnosis of the debate. You could also productively fit a number of the arguments that you do pursue under this category heading. For example, the card that you read about subsequent Congressional revision and spell-checking sounds random and disconnected by itself, but, as a further defense of your permutation’s correspondence with real world policymaking, it would be smart and nuanced argument development.
You can effectively center your offense by positing a particular role of the ballot to refute their emphasis on language. A number of your cards about taboo and dirty words don’t really apply to counterplan as a disad, but might make more sense a disad to their framework.

Greenhill, I don’t have many complaints. Although this round’s well-debated by both sides, it’s technically clean, and you display a good understanding of all of the bases you need to touch to win on your strategy. You also display excellent focus and vertical development in the block, which I appreciate. For future reference, I don’t think non-USFG fiat is legitimate, because a variety of different decisionmakers doesn’t make sense, and it tends to make policy discussions contrived and artificial (see Dylan Keenan’s rant on state counterplan fiat – I believe that too.)