ILRGL3300 class notes for final

Negative assignment options

direct refutation, disadvantage, critic/kritik

Direct refutation

• probably the easiest one, but requires the most evidence

  • Needs 8 pieces of evidence that says that the evidence from the 1AC is wrong either factually or the opinion is wrong

  • Must be directly against what your 1AC says

  • Ex: saying your solvency doesn’t work, or that theres no inherency, or that its not a problem

  • Don’t need to cover the entirety of the 1AC. You could have multiple pieces of evidence against the same point - like saying the solvency is wrong or plan doesn’t work

  • Number evidences, put tag, citation, and then evidence

  • Don’t need to say what point its trying to go against

Disadvantage

• Says that the affirmative plan will cause more harm than good — that some unforeseen consequence will make things worse

• And the small good the plan will provide does not outweigh the bad it will cause

• Less evidence than direct refutation, but your evidence actually needs to link up with each other

Old school disadvantage - Sam’s way

• A) Link - tag

  • Citation

  • Evidence

    • Explains what affirmative does to cause domino effect and bad thing

• B) Brink - tag

  • Citation

  • Evidence

    • The edge… show that the situation is very fragile

• C) Impact - tag

  • Citation

  • Evidence

    • Stating the bad thing that will happen

New school disadvantages - Armands’ way

• A) Uniqueness/Brink - tag

  • Citation

  • Evidence

    • Same as old school brink, says we are in a unique situation that hasn’t existed before that is very fragile

• B) Link - tag

  • Citation

  • Evidence

    • What affirmative does to cause domino effect and bad thing

• C) Internal link - tag

  • Citation

  • Evidence

    • Explains next bad things that happen after the first bad thing

• Can have as many internal links as you need to reach the final thing

• D) internal link

• E) Internal link

• May be a slippery slope fallacy tho

  • Cause like a lot of things could happen to stop the next step

  • Assumes the very bad thing happens and all these things must line up for it to happen

differences between old and new school disadvantages

• New school is more nuanced with more information because internal links spell out the domino chain

  • Old school tries to explain everything with one evidence

• New school is more persuasive - follows PCAN method more closely than old school

  • Ex: brink explains problem, then link explains how its gonna happen

Critic/Kritik

• the one with the least amount of evidence, but the evidence tends to be longer, and this is the hardest one…

• A philosophical objection to the affirmative plan that asserts it is morally repugnant and should be rejected, not because it does something bad, but because it is wrong

• Argues a moral or philosophical assumption that the affirmative makes and is problematic – everything is already not fine and the affirmative plan adds to it and makes it worse

  • Tries to reframe what the affirmative does 

• Categorical imperative: there are some things that we should just not do no matter what → something

  • Ex: We can’t just give Ukraine aid and then all of sudden stop and leave them to be slaughtered

    • If you can stop a genocide, would it be wrong not to do it??

    • If Russia wins, they will kill everyone in Ukraine

• Doesn’t have to solve the problem, just has to point out a philosophical inconsistency

• A) Link - tag

  • Citation

  • Evidence

    • Says the affirmative plan suggests something that is philosophically wrong and explains what it is

• B) tag

  • Citation

  • Evidence

    • Says rejecting this (affirmative) mindset is imperative… we should no longer think this way

Sam vs Armands style critic

• Sam’s critic

  • 2 part structure

  • Link: affirmative plan perpetuates some problematic mindset, the connection to the affirmative plan

  • Decision rule to rejection of the mindset

  • Similar to Angela Davis in that they do not provide an alternative

• Armands’ critic

  • Link

  • Mindset implication

  • Alternative - what is the social formation of society or the way the world should organize itself that we should aim for even if unlikely

Clincher and hook

Hook gets the reader interested in your piece

Clincher is a reverse attention getter to make them remember it → tie it to the hook

Ikigai

• A reason for being, content

  • Venn diagram b/w what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can get paid for

  • What you love + what you are good at → passion

  • What the world needs + what you love → mission

  • What you are good at + what you can be paid for → profession

  • What you can be paid for + what the world needs → Vocation

  • Ikigai is the center of all 4 bubbles, where they interconnect

Just a minute game

• A BBC radio show - comedians and diff guests

• Talk for 1 minute without hesitating, repeating, or deviating from the topic

  • And you can challenge if a person does any of these things so that you can talk next

  • Every minute you get a new topic

  • Every person who finishes off a minute gets 1 pt

Alex Just and his story

• Alex Just had to talk about sausages for a minute… and thats how he got started at debate

• Met Sam Fall 2006 

• invited by queen of Qatar to host debate Fall 2008 

  • There is a movie about the Qatar thing or something - Team Qatar

  • Teaching the children debate

• Vocalise Fall 2012 - first national prison debate organization in UK

  • Get college students to debate against prisoners

  • Different people to go in and teach debate to prisoners

• Labour party Spring 2024

  • Candidate for labour party (liberal progressive party) in UK to selected to be member of Parliament

    • 3 way race, they finished third

  • Now he lives in Farnham… typically more conservative

Balloon Debate

• what he has tried in all the times he used debate

  • Why is it important?

    • You must think about the audience, the context (what’s going on in the balloon)

  • Write down a person you admire

  • Scenario: everyone we admire is on a hot air balloon and its starting to sink!!! You must throw out some of the people in there…. defend the person you wrote down

  • Then we all vote on who should be thrown out… and then keep going until there's only 2 people left

Haldaine

can’t spell haldaine without AI… he uses AI to do background work like invoices or something

named after 19th century British politician Richard or Viscount Haldane

Co founder John Watts? background in politics

A consultancy that will only work with clients bringing in claims (claimants) or challengers (people who try to disrupt things and shake things up) → focus on basis of 3 disciplines: Law, media, politics → debate is the golden threat: the right arguments for the right audience, delivered in the right way

Services: Help clients with media and reputation (helping build campaigns), government affairs (lobbying), and crisis and litigation (handling media and fallout)

Law firms make money by taking a percentage of what the people they represented got + a fixed monthly fee they work on
Waterfall: after case settles, lawyers get most cut, but money also goes to others work contributed to the case, like investors

Tort law

addresses harm done to victim

• Must prove that there is a duty of care - the offender was responsible for the victim’s environment in a particular way

• Then prove there was harm

• Then prove there was causal link between the harm and the environment

Astroturfing

paying people to go protest to make it seem like there is public outcry

Case study: Aerotoxicity scandal

• Aircrew and passengers report illness after cabin air fume events

• Claimants link it to engine oil fumes (outside air) entering the cabin air supply

• Airlines and manufacturers dispute causation, and the science is contested

• How to get the airline to settle?

  • Do not risk reputation drop… 

  • Don’t risk losing customers

  • Aircrew is affected.. May inspire strike

  • Procurement? - Boeing

Counterclaim/counterplan

A type of negative arguments

• Not all debate rounds feature the negative team presenting a counterclaim

• Usually the affirmative presents their change and plan (a momentous change)… 

• The negative typically defends keeping things as they are (the status quo) because the world of change is worse than keeping things as they are

  • Because that change will lead to a disadvantage that outweighs the advantage of the affirmative plan

• But sometimes the affirmative has very large advantages or multiple that are hard to overcome or the moral high ground… so then the negative saying lets not do anything seems pretty bad

• So then we use the counter plan: negative is like okay we see your change… we will propose a different change as a response to your change!

  • The counter plan must be different and better than the affirmative proposal

How do we know if the counter plan is better?

• The counter plan will claim to resolve the problems outlined by the 1AC without triggering a disadvantage that it would cause.

• So every counter plan must be paired with a disadvantage

• Ex: there is an event off campus with alcohol involved.

  • Someone is like im gonna drive home. Everyone’s like no you’re drunk

  • Someone else is like I can do it I am sober. Yay solved. (Affirmative)

  • Someone else is like no… i will do it I am sober!! → this will not be a good counter plan because its solving it the same way… no reason to prefer the second proposal

  • While it is true that the other person is sober… they don’t have a license! What if she gets pulled over and then everyone gets in trouble. Person 2 has a license → good counter plan because they solve the plan and avoid a disadvantage 

What is different and better about counter plans? old vs new debate styles

• When sam debated centuries ago… there was a rule that the counterplan must be not topical (they must do something other than what the resolution said)

• Island = where affirmative resides… must follow the resolution 

  • The resolution directs what the affirmative can plan… they’re stuck on the island

  • So in older debates, the counterplan could not be on the island… they must do anything not outlined by the resolution

  • If the negative also said something on the island… the affirmative could be like the negative just supported us!! Because our job was to prove the resolution to be true… 

• Progress? Debate rules have changed…

  • Now judges believe the affirmative is bound to the resolution (must be topical), but when they encounter a negative team, the negative team is responding to the affirmative team. So if they can come up with any counterplan, as long as it is different and better than the affirmative plan, then the negative team can win (they must beat the other team)

• Older counterplans had to solve all of the affirmative. It must solve the same problems and solve disadvantages…

  • Modern counterplans can solve part of the affirmative in order to avoid a bad enough disadvantage → so net advantage…

What does it mean when we say a counterplan must be competitive?

• A forced choice (either or)

  • No venn diagram where you can fuse the two. Being mutually exclusive is one way of being competitive → it is impossible to do both options

    • Ex: group studying hard studying hard and they are all studying on North. Then someone says we should take a 45 minutes break because we need to recharge! Then they discuss what to do

      • Someone says lets go get food at Morrison to recharge

      • Someone else says we should go be active because we’ve been sedentary 

      • But you only have 45 minutes so you cannot do both. 

  • Other way of being competitive is to say that combining the two plans is undesirable because it triggers a disadvantages

    • Ex: wolfing down food at morrison and then running to go be active would probably make you not feel good…

    • Then the affirmative can be like can we do both in some way? And then in that way the counterplan is not mutually exclusive → Permutation 

      • Permute! → what they say when they want to do a test of competition or a test of permutation

      • Basically if they’re not mutually exclusive, then the negative is not disproving the affirmative

  • Another example of mutual exclusivity…

    • Ex: friend is like lets go to movies… you’re like let’s eat popcorn!

      • Friend is like.. We can do both… so your idea of eating popcorn is not a reason to not go to the movies

Agent counterplan

• who is doing the policy?

  • Congress should decrease arms sales to Saudi Arabia… Then agent counterplan would be US Supreme court should rule that selling arms to saudi arabia is illegal instead

  • This is a “clean kill” - same action, just changing who does it…

  • But then you must explain why it is preferred for this agent to do it instead… pair it with a disadvantage

    • Ex: Midterms disadvantage

      • Have a piece of evidence that says.. We looked at all the latest polls and we see that democrats will win. Yay. That is good. However if affirmative plan wins, that's a popular policy that Republicans could spin in a way that looks good and would flip the election. NOOOOO!!!! We don’t want that

      • Then you need an impact evidence → what happens if republicans continue to control congress instead of democrats

      • If the supreme court does it instead, that won’t help Republicans and they won’t be able to spin that. An external reason why 

      • The affirmative can respond to this by being like actually that’s not bad

Mechanism counterplan

• What is done?

  • Affirmative is like. Saudi Arabia is bad because of human rights abuses, so we should decrease arms sales to punish it for human rights abuses. 

  • Negative is like. Is the mechanism of decreasing arms sales the best way to address human rights abuses? Counterplan! Lets economically sanction Saudi Arabia, and keep the arms sales. And then they prove why arms sales are still good like telling our allies that we are not in retreat and reducing arms sales will have allies lose faith in us

Advantage counterplan

• Wait a minute, if there’s a multiple advantage plan, then can we use the counterplan to focus on just one of the advantages?

  • Ex: USFG should legalize one or more of the following - marijuana, prostitution, online gambling

    • Ex affirmative - legal prostitution to normalize it so that women in these positions don’t feel afraid to seek help

      • Other advantage for the economy!! Then you can tax the prostitutes and give more revenue to the states… 

      • Bad economy = war and conflict??

    • Ex negative - disadvantage - human trafficking

      • If you legal prostitution, it blurs the boundary between prostitutes who choose to do it, and those that are coerced.. And the police can’t tell 

      • And legalizing it would increase supply and demand… 

      • But this is kind of blurry cause you can’t say how many prostitutes are trafficked vs by choice and can’t outweigh both advantages

    • So the negative then used an advantage counterplan that only targets the economy argument → so they were like increase the minimum wage to help the economy! → Neutralizes that argument

      • Not mutually exclusive competitive, but competitive in that it cannot be permuted because if that happened it would trigger the human trafficking disadvantage

    • But it is possible that the affirmative could then do a backfile check and counter that and be like no raising minimum wage bad and then the negative is back to square one… anything can happen i guess

    • Now they can only focus on the human trafficking argument

  • Really effective when the affirmative spams advantages and some are like things you would not think of immediately to solve that problem

Plan inclusive counterplans (PICs)

• useful for all of life… when people propose things they sometimes propose too much and then must defend every part of what they propose. Negative can then be like, can we get by by doing less?

  • Ex: cheating crisis… affirmative plan says we will expel you and also we will have drones to watch you and armed police officers

  • So counterplan would be to send an email to remind people they can be expelled for cheating because we don’t wanna militarize campus…

  • So life lesson, affirmative should only propose a plan they can defend the whole of

  • Ex: banning all nuclear weapons

  • Negative is like yeah we can ban almost all of them but lets keep these kinds of nuclear weapons so that we can deflect an asteroid if necessary

    • So that we still get the advantage but do not have the disadvantage of being unprepared for asteroid attacks or something

  • Sam thinks they should be called plan exclusive counterplans instead because they are excluding something..

    • Armands thinks PICs is fine because he explains what he includes. Restrict A and C.

      • Because this avoids the argument being non textual

    • Sam’s would write. Restrict A and C. BUT NOT B!

      • May bring up functional or textual arguments

    • Doesn’t matter either way though

Process counterplans

• When an affirmative says to do something it is kind of implied that you should do it right away. The negative assumes the affirmative plan is certain and immediate… the negative says lets just wait to do this

  • Ex: China would like it if we decreased arms transfers to Taiwan because China wants to annex Taiwan. So US decreasing arms transfers to China would benefit them. So the counterplan would be instead of immediately and certainly decreasing arms sales to China, they go to China and be like we wanna decrease arms, but only if China agrees to stop attacking us with cybersecurity - “quid pro quo” is a type of process counterplan

  • Delay counterplan - back to the legalizing prostitution example… how about instead of doing that now we wait until after midterms so the Republicans can’t use it

Backfile check

things you research that carry over year by year

Tabula rasa

Judges in debate are tabula rasa. Blank slates. They do not bring in their own POVs

Ruth Collins Guest Lecture PCAN

• Problem: nobody’s pants fit

• Cause: because math… everybody’s bodies are different but pants sizes are standardized so that big pants can make more money → it would be commercially impossible to make the 100s of sizes necessary to accommodate everyone

• Answer: Make your own pants - use patterns and adjust them to your exact fit

• Net benefit: Explore your style, democratize fashion (make the inaccessible accessible), better fit, cheaper for better quality, sustainability (clothing industry is #1 polluter), human rights (fashion industry has poor labor practices… abuse)

6 reasons to embrace DIY slow fashion in the 21st century

• It is within reach of everyone. If you can make an omelette, you can make a garment

• Making clothes is a sustainable option. You bypass the unsustainable human rights and environmental problems

• Democratizes fashion - makes the inaccessible (elite high fashion) accessible

• Enables style exploration

• Gives you agency - no need to make do → have the clothes you need right now and live in the present

• Clothing, along with food and shelter, is a fundamental necessity

  • Making empowers you to fulfill basic needs in a manner that also promotes mental-well-being

George Lakoff’s metaphors/frames

• So many metaphors true around the world. Learned early on. 

• You learn them as a baby

  • When mom pours milk into bottle you see that. Two parts of brain activated together → activation spreads, more spread, stronger → form circuit, shortest path to each other, the metaphor

    • Primary metaphors - part of the physical brain

  • Basically you find associations between things and find meaning between them

    • If your mom picks you up and holds you, you feel warm and associate that with love → warm person = loving person

  • Brain gets programmed to associate things using frames/metaphors → influence the way you think about arguments

Parts of a frame and frame boundaries

• Every institution is structured by frames with two parts

  • Roles: frame elements

  • Situations: what happens in the frame

• You know the boundaries of the frame → breaking the frame is like when something doesn’t make sense

  • Ex: you go to doctor and they give you a scalpel and say you will be operating on the doctor

Strict father vs nurturing parent

• Strict father: James doson → need strict father to protect and support family, mom can’t do it, no gay families, kids are born bad and wanna do what feels good → must be disciplined via physical pain → then if they are disciplined they can use it to become prosperous

  • Father is the decider. No moral authority above the father. Just like the market…? Nothing is above the market. Regulation, taxation, unionization, tort cases

• Nurturing parent: Barack Obama → empathy, responsible, teach child to be empathized and responsible toward others, nurture others, ethic of excellence → you must be best person possible and nurture child to be best person possible

  • Basis of democracy is empathy

  • Citizen’s job is to take care of one another → job of government has two moral missions: protection and empowerment

Purpose of the 2 family worldview model

• In our country there are people who think about government back to their earliest memories of their experience with government → family. A metaphor

  • As a kid you realize you don’t have power and you do what the adults tell you to do. You realize there is someone in charge

  • This is why we are so divided in politics in America. People that understand government as strict father don’t understand don’t understand people who are nurturing and vice versa

  • How you think about government is not about which one you had

  • If you wanna persuade someone, you must talk in their frame so they understand you. You must think like they do

• Use this model to understand what conservative vs liberals think on a topic and how they vote → voters don’t vote for their self-interest, the vote based on their values