it requires arguing obvious nonsense, with failure to accept such nonsense as the baseline of discussion, or insisting that it is irrelevant to the topic, treated as a de facto automatic loss.
On the contrary, an argument that [insert K here] is irrelevant to the topic, this is bad for debate, and the Neg should suffer an instant loss (we’d call this “framework”) is bog-standard in the Aff reply. Only rookies get caught without their framework file.
On one hand, this is mostly the sort of nonsense flak that the Neg’s topicality argument was—spend 30sec setting up the skeleton of an argument that you can put real meat on if the other side really flubs their reply. But in a very real sense, if the Neg spends 13 minutes dumping critical Marxist theory on you, it is entirely valid to spend 4.5 minutes of your 5-minute reply on some flavor of “this is off-topic and bad for debate, this judge-is-a-revolutionary-historian bit is a fiction, we are high school students and you are a debate coach and I wanted to debate military policy because debate in high school is important for shaping a future generation of political leaders who can solve real problems so can you please give this Neg team the loss to avoid this whole activity going off the rails?” I have done exactly that, multiple times. Won on it about as often as we won on any other off-case stuff.
The biggest thing that makes policy different, as a format, is that it’s expected that it’s valid to debate the rules of debate. The majority of TOC judges in 2010 would vote for a K—if the Neg won the debate-about-what-debate-is-for to put the K in-bounds—or vote against a K, if the Aff won that it should be out-of-bounds. I’d bet at 1:1 odds that that’s still true today.
4b) Some judges gonna judge judge judge judge judge, but that’s why teams get (or at least got—I’m not current) a fixed number of “no, not that judge” vetoes at most tournaments. We called these “strikes”, and yes they were used by K-disliking teams to avoid being judged by the most K-friendly judges, and by K-liking teams to avoid being judged by judges that wouldn’t ever vote for the K even if their opponent was a dead fish.
4a) This is a misinterpretation:
On the contrary, an argument that [insert K here] is irrelevant to the topic, this is bad for debate, and the Neg should suffer an instant loss (we’d call this “framework”) is bog-standard in the Aff reply. Only rookies get caught without their framework file.
On one hand, this is mostly the sort of nonsense flak that the Neg’s topicality argument was—spend 30sec setting up the skeleton of an argument that you can put real meat on if the other side really flubs their reply. But in a very real sense, if the Neg spends 13 minutes dumping critical Marxist theory on you, it is entirely valid to spend 4.5 minutes of your 5-minute reply on some flavor of “this is off-topic and bad for debate, this judge-is-a-revolutionary-historian bit is a fiction, we are high school students and you are a debate coach and I wanted to debate military policy because debate in high school is important for shaping a future generation of political leaders who can solve real problems so can you please give this Neg team the loss to avoid this whole activity going off the rails?” I have done exactly that, multiple times. Won on it about as often as we won on any other off-case stuff.
The biggest thing that makes policy different, as a format, is that it’s expected that it’s valid to debate the rules of debate. The majority of TOC judges in 2010 would vote for a K—if the Neg won the debate-about-what-debate-is-for to put the K in-bounds—or vote against a K, if the Aff won that it should be out-of-bounds. I’d bet at 1:1 odds that that’s still true today.
4b) Some judges gonna judge judge judge judge judge, but that’s why teams get (or at least got—I’m not current) a fixed number of “no, not that judge” vetoes at most tournaments. We called these “strikes”, and yes they were used by K-disliking teams to avoid being judged by the most K-friendly judges, and by K-liking teams to avoid being judged by judges that wouldn’t ever vote for the K even if their opponent was a dead fish.