I keep remembering funny stories from debates. This note serves as a bare bones reminder to me when I’m telling stories, but also a helpful reference for others. Order is as I feel appropriate. I might try to sort it better someday.
My First Double-Turn
In my second debate round ever at a tournament, the other team double-turned themselves in the 1NC and said:
- Prolif is good
- Our aff causes prolif
After taking five minutes of prep, I convince my partner to concede these two things, though he isn’t sure why. (I also have him read a prolif link on ourselves because they didn’t finish reading the card lol) After we win, my partner says that I have “turbo-autismo” energy for having noticed the contradiction.
Not the smartest counterplan
The ICBM aff wasn’t great, but the answers were sometimes worse.
One such proposal was the Deep Underground Missile Basing counterplan where the US would bury its ICBMs with digging machines to ensure both survivability and delay launches to guarantee that there was an actual attack to prevent accidental war.
Did I mention that the counterplan was Deep Underground Missile Basing, and, as my partner said in the finals of the Harvard debate tournament:
That’s D. U. M. B., the counterplan is dumb!
A more careful read by the card cutter would have noticed that the author of the article notes that:
If one loved acronyms but hated the idea, then the proposal was called Deep Underground Missile Basing.
Novice Nationals Final
The JMU Aff is really really bad, and an advantage counterplan solves the entire thing with no deficits,1 because their advocates are actually advocating for the advantage counterplan, and somehow we’re the only people that noticed, so they’re now in the finals of nationals.2
They change their aff, and swap out an advantage to something that we can’t solve with the CP.
As they’re reading the 1AC, I realize that the advantage they swapped out, had their plan text included under its header. I tell Gabe, he looks through the doc. No plan text.
This is not mentioned in cross. I put in our beefy T-USFG shell for K-Affs and skip the yellow submarine counterplan.3 As Gabe reads the 1NC, he gets the end of the 1NC T shell and looks at:
“do I tell ‘em”
“sure”
“they don’t got a plan”
The look on the opponent’s face as she started scrolling through her document was unforgettable. Suffice to say, they didn’t have a plan.
2AC comes around, they read a plan, say “we read a plan, solves all abuse” and move on. No apologies, no nothing. The die is cast.
straight from the doc, and all that’s in there
1NR, Gabe stands up and says a bunch of nonsense about how 2AC replanning is terrible, and they could replan in the 2AR and all that and then, in a stroke of genius, starts explaining how, because this is the finals of novice nationals, this will set an eternal precedent that will ruin novice debate forever if the judges vote for it.
1AR has a few more, better arguments, but it’s too late.
2NR: “save novice debate!”
2AR: A bunch of good, new arguments, that would have saved them a lot of trouble if they had gone for them in the 2AC
3-0
Giving South Korea Nukes is the Best (Everyone Agrees)
Debating Samford (in JV, despite being a novice). Get smoked in the prelims by a different Samford team because they straight turn the prolif impact on the South Korean assurance DA. Not great, but they also gave a bunch of decent cards on the topic.
Hitting a new Samford team in the semi-finals of the elimination rounds. Going neg again. The aff is about giving North Korea an NFU agreement in order to deter North Korea somehow and stop a war.
I cut a counterplan earlier in the year about encouraging South Korean proliferation to solve advantages about North Korea going to war. This became “give South Korea nukes.” In the past our teams had read a counterplan (comprised of rehighlighted evidence from the Samford aff) to create a bilateral NFU with North Korea. We also had a version of the assurance DA without a prolif impact (apparently US/South Korea cooperation is key to stopping climate change lol).4
1AC: North Korea NFU, same old same old
1NC: Give South Korea nukes CP, Assurance DA but the impact is climate change
2AC:
- AT: Give South Korea Nukes CP
- Perm do both
- Perm do the CP
- North Korea says no
- Unilateral NFU is better than bilateral NFU
- AT: South Korea would get mad at an NFU
- South Korea proliferating is literally the best thing ever
2NC: Concede that South Korean prolif is good. Concede that North Korea says no; that’s the point. Judge, you vote neg lol
We also had solid case defense, thumpers, whatever, so that helped too. Long story short, conceding an entire DA was not good for them.
Move the Nukes to South Korea
Cornell had six million non-topical affs my novice year. I think I beat all of them. One of the most annoying was the argument to disarm the tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. It wasn’t a great aff, but it was ok, and we didn’t have a ton of evidence to answer it.
What I did have, was a counterplan that said that it would be good if South Korea had tactical nukes stationed on the peninsula. In one glorious moment, I had my idea:
Counterplan: move the nukes from Europe to South Korea.
For some reason, this worked.
Do not speak of the deep magic to me
We’re in semi-finals of novice nationals, and we’re hitting the Cornell team that has been the entire novice team’s ops the entire year. The Cornell teams, and this is our fifth consecutive debate with a Cornell team this tournament, have successfully knocked out a large number of our other novice teams, who, had they been winning, would have meant that Gabe and I would have had walks straight to finals. Oh well.
Cornell has a number of nontopical affs that they’ve been reading: get rid of European tactical nukes, the brand new counter-factual Japan NFU where you go back in time and don’t nuke Japan, and the disarm retired nuclear aff. We flip neg, and they disclose the retired nuclear weapons aff.
We are filled with inexplicable glee. This aff is painfully nontopical, and also poorly constructed. Unfortunately, we low-key also have zero links to it.
I start cooking.
First, I recall that there was once a plan to nuke asteroids that used a warhead that has been retired. I can’t find any good, cuttable evidence about this plan except the Wikipedia article on asteroid deflection, so I just use that.5 I also have the Texas DA6 because the Pantex plant that dismantles nuclear weapons is in Texas. Finally, I recall that the program that their main advantage is based on was ended ten years ago. The T shell is already prepared.
We go into the round. Semi-comprehensive case defense, clearly winning T, and they say that “civil war is inevitable.”
2NR: Vote neg on presumption, civil war is inevitable, means the aff can’t solve. Also, they aren’t topical, not even close lol.
3-0
All of the judges voted on T. The peak moment though, was when Danielle O’Gorman, who was on the topic committee looks over in her RFD and says that this aff was never considered as even a possibility when they were writing the topic.
It was if Aslan had come down to say “Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch! I was there when it was written.”
Also, one of the judges would have voted on presumption, even aside from T lol.
Condo Outweighs T
We won on condo bad with a facially nontopical aff. It was really funny.
This RFD is peak:
I vote affirmative — The practice of conditionality is damaging to debate and prevented the affirmative from properly answering topicality in this particular debate.
The 1NR made two arguments on topicality — 1: that the interp was 2 condo, and that the neg meets, and 2: that I should be permissive because there were three aff scenarios. Both of these are false, and the 1AR and 2AR point this out to me. I had the 2AC as saying counterinterpretation is dispo — This was abundantly clear to me, and I even recall the 2AC going slow at this part of the condo block as if trying to pick out on-the-fly what to say. The second argument was a non-starter — On my tabroom page, I am making no attempt to tell you a precise number of permissible conditional advocacies, I am attempting to give you a mathematics lesson. Three conditional counterplans represents eight possible 2NR worlds — a world where they go for zero counterplans, three worlds where they go for 1 counterplan, three worlds where they go for 2 counterplans, and one world where they go for all three counterplans. The 1AR hedges against whatever the 2NR is going to turn this argument into by pointing out that I should stick to the flow and set aside my preconceived biases on theory arguments, and I am very much able to do so. The 1NR and 2NR are making no attempt to defend the practice of conditionality, and are making no attempt to convince me that I should evaluate topicality as a prior issue to conditionality, which means I am unable to consider any other offense in the round as being more important, no matter how much I might want to do so.
He goes on to say that we lost the T flow lol.
You don’t meet your own T interp
Western Kentucky was reading an affirmative where the government would take liability for certain carbon capture and storage projects. Their card justifying this was from an author who said liability schemes were market-based instruments.7 Unfortunately for them, the unhighlighted part of their card said that such liability schemes made companies recognize increased liability, which was the opposite of what their aff did.
That did not end well for them.
Texans don’t understand Texas (and I didn’t go for it 😭)
We’re hitting a team in semis of the Kentucky tournament which is reading a fun aff about electricity markets which relies on FERC action. I found out about a funny Texas secession DA that had terrible links to carbon tax the day before.
In a moment of inspiration, I realize something: FERC has no jurisdiction in Texas, but their aff probably needs to be cross-country to be topical. James and Emmalee very kindly cut the Texas DA evidence, and we shell it as a PIC out of Texas because 1) ERCOT already has all of the things the aff wants to do handled 2) FERC has no jurisdiction and 3) if you assert jurisdiction over Texas, it’ll, maybe, secede and cause a civil war lol.
We also shell T-adopt means that you need to be a law not a regulation.
1AC CX: we apply to the whole country
1NC: The aff minus ERCOT
2AC: The PIC gets preempted by the federal government because FERC has authority (several cards that aren’t relevant)
2NC: brother, ERCOT isn’t under FERC lmao, also you didn’t answer the DA
1AR: bombs topicality arguments
2NR: goes for T-adopt 😭
3-08
Kicking the Aff
We’re in a K round. We have decent offense on an unconditional alt, and they’ve made zero solvency, nonenforcement arguments on the case. I have an idea, and John likes it.
1AR: Concede no solvency of the aff, it does literally nothing, doesn’t get enforced, means that there are zero links to the plan. This 1) proves that the perm works, because if the Aff does nothing, the alt can’t be exclusive with the plan and 2) there’s only a risk of offense on the alt.
Somehow the 2NR spins this, somehow the 2AR spins harder.
JV Nationals Quarters
George Mason is reading an Aff that says the US should adopt a policy of cap-and-trade after the completion of a national emissions inventory.
1NC: “The AFF plan fiats that the government should adopt a cap-and-trade only after the establishment of a “national emissions inventory” but does not fiat the emissions inventory.”
2AC:
2NC: “Vote neg, conceded that the plan literally never happens, etc. etc.”
1AR:
2NR: “Judge, I’m so sorry, but you’re voting neg on presumption because of the plan flaw. Neither you nor I expected this, but here we are. The plan never happens (also, the Texit DA)”
3-0
This is why flowing is so important. (mostly because the plan flaw analytic was very much not in the document that we sent, but very much was read.)
Footnotes
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The counterplan had a brand new plank about keeping submarines away from South Korea at a distance of 300 nautical miles, and my partner had, in prep, tried to find out how many Samsung smart fridges that would be equivalent to. I then referenced that number when extending the counterplan in an actual speech (it was funny) ↩
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The actual reason for this, if I recall correctly, is that they were somewhat better on the Neg, and the novice teams they were up against, while the terrors of the novice circuit that year, were still novice teams. ↩
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This skip was tragic. The yellow submarine counterplan had the US repurpose nuclear submarines as underwater refuges and as a sign of their peaceful nature, the author of the paper literally advocated painting them yellow. ↩
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The strategy originally was to read all of the South Korean prolif good cards as net benefits to the counterplan when they read prolif bad on the CP. ↩
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No one at all calls us on this. I also vaguely recall cutting this card in the middle of the round lol ↩
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Described by my coach (when he finally learned of its existence two months after I first read it in a round) as “the most abysmal politics DA [he had] ever read” ↩
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MBIs were the bane of my existence for most of that year ↩
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Also they dropped severance lol ↩