Hooch v. Milton Round 6 Pace RR

Negative: Milton

RFD: I expected to vote affirmative after the 1AR and after the 2NR. Chattahoochee was, in my mind, soundly beating Milton on the core questions of this debate. Regardless of various consideration of frameworks, my ballot’s going to reflect my judgment on whether I should endorse massive federal funding of SPS or reject space exploration entirely through individual instances of power. The 1AR, in my mind, successfully defended the affirmative’s method of empiricism as a means of truth seeking. Even if the aff leads to objectionable political effects, I would still feel compelled to vote for them if their 1AC claims and/or addon advantages are true. Case supercedes the criticism. Alternately, if the negative claims about the aff’s irrelevance or untruth are true, I’m probably voting for them. Until the last rebuttals, I feel the aff’s grappling with these core questions far more effectively than the negative.

Unfortunately for Chattahoochee, the 2AR shifts focus from these questions into a less relevant discussion of fiat and framework. I’m not compelled by these questions in either direction in this instance. The negative has conceded that the affirmative’s able to claim their impacts – they aren’t theoretically precluded from advocating for the truth of these advantages. Conversely, the negative’s objection isn’t theoretically precluded either – if they impact turn the affirmative, they moot questions of the alternative’s theoretical legitimacy. Opening with a rousing defense of speed and policy debate thus seems largely non sequitur.

On a micro level, the affirmative simply drops a number of devastating (albeit spurious) negative claims. The 2AR never explicitly answers “all of your evidence is lies because it’s fabricated to prop up a certain system of power relations.” The 2AR also doesn’t answer the racialization of science, which taints the way you derive your conclusions. The 2AR doesn’t answer the claim that considerations of race are a prior decision rule. The aff claims about empiricism might implicitly answer this, but the affirmative neither teases out the relationship between the two sets of claims nor develops their empiricism and science claims beyond the barest and most elliptic assertions.

Chattahoochee does not need much to beat this. I don’t mind embedded clash – but there’s too much embedding and not enough actual clash. 3-4 sentences starting with “empiricism trumps their claims of bias because..” would probably reverse my decision.

The affirmative also suffers from some related problems because of the quality of their evidence. I think their evidence may well have made some impressive arguments before it went under the knife, but Chattahoochee most definitely cuts away muscle as well as fat. These cards verge on incoherence. Here’s a sample sentence from your Jarvis evidence: “Revisionism…be unconnected to the world postmodernists.” Really? That be pretty good. I don’t drop the affirmative out of exasperation, but this does hurt you. Strength of evidence might redeem the 2AR’s analytic gaps, but it can’t when you generally have a claim at best. Paragraph length explanations can compensate for bad evidence. Good evidence can compensate for sketchy extension. If there’s not much story and word salad cards, however, it’s difficult to assemble an affirmative ballot.

This problem haunts Rawls and Jarvis; I don’t really see where the aff’s going with these cards. Your intent might be clearer if you read more of the evidence in the form of complete sentences. Nansen [sp?] doesn’t address the core question of methodology. Taft-Kaufman is definitely the closest, and it’s warranted. The absence of spin prevents this card from being dispositive, however. Specifically, it says I should prefer an emphasis on material problems and solutions to purely discursive considerations. That’s a fair point, and might push me to prefer the aff to the alternative, all other things being equal. They aren’t, though. An effective material solution’s preferable, but Taft-Kaufman can’t convince me that the aff is that effective solution. The argument presumes the advantages as a premise, but the negative’s undermined that. Put simply, you aren’t effective if your impacts are all bad racist lies. Discourse is worse than a good plan, but the neg proved your plan’s advantages are dirty dirty lies, so it’s probably better than that.

I can discuss line by line questions with that – that governing framework really determines the resolution of any remaining questions. The aff’s a lie, and it distracts from more important questions of racial and economic justice. My natural inclination is that the aff’s a survival question, which outweighs, and their add-ons turn the K, but you need to dispense of the prior question of methodology with some more substantive analysis to get there.

1ac:

Your highlighting is suboptimal. I frequently hear sets of noun phrases unconnected by verbs. For future reference, I’m violently opposed to the sacrificing coherence for the sake of brevity; I often disregard cards entirely if they’re splattered with the blood of the English language.

You need to pause between cards, for under .35s, but for enough of an interval to distinguish between claims and pieces of evidence. Your delivery isn’t exactly passionate – I’m fine with that, but your bland neutrality really makes it necessary that you use some technique to delineate between your robot word sets.

When you say “PUT YOUR DAS AWAY” – people laugh at you. That can be good or bad, depending on your perspective on comedy. Personally, I’m a fan, but I want to make sure I’m laughing with you, not at you.

1NC:

1. Your tech breaks, hahaha. So much for your song now! You should definitely have a test run.
2. I’m not a big fan of this performance. You aren’t performing it. We’re all just watching your laptop, reduced to passive spectators. Recorded performance always seems antithetical to debate. Sampling is cool – I’m a fan of tech that enhances expression, but not a fan of tech that substitutes for expression entirely. Short samples = good, long samples where we all stare awkwardly at a machine = meh.

I mean, I’m not sure how I’d really filter this competitively, either. I generally feel that art exists, in part, to express something that can’t be expressed more efficiently in straightforward expository discourse. A poem that restated the politics disad in rhyme wouldn’t serve much purpose, aside from satire or irony.

What does this performance really say that couldn’t be said in three minutes with some cards?

2AC:

Sometimes you are incomprehensible. Most of the time you are clear. 2ACs against a one-off K should do more than read. They should adapt their responses a bit. For example, you argue that the alternative’s vague enough to merit a negative ballot without a saying a word about their alternative. Moments like this make it more difficult for you to respin your answer toward their specific argument later on.

1AR:
Very good. I like the parts about empiricism – relationship between the neg and truth claims is pretty good to highlight.

2NR:
Loses some focus due to time pressure; I think that you’re probably better on an explanatory level in the 2NC, but this breaks down some here. I view this as a structural problem with the position more than a failure in execution. You have a narrow 1Nc that puts very little pressure on the 2AC, because it really only says a few things. In this circumstance, the 2NR is The Reckoning. You’d have to be very good on performativity rendering their straightforward truth claims irrelevant to justify setting yourself up like this. You aren’t – you largely sag away from those claims – so you probably wish your 1AC was different in some ways.

2AR:
RFD.