Tournament: Grapevine | Round: 1 | Opponent: Northland Christian CS | Judge: Wyatt Hatfield
The role of the ballot is to determine the truth or falsity of the resolution. Prefer:
1 Text – five dictionaries define negate as to deny the truth of and affirms to prove true which means the only obligation of the judge is to vote on the resolution’s truth/falsity. Outweighs on commonality – it is abundantly clear that our roles are verified. Any other ROB enforces an external norm on debate, but only truth testing is intrinsic to the process of debate, i.e., proving statements true or false through argumentation. Constitutivism outweighs because you don’t have the jurisdiction to not test the truth of the resolution – if someone says you should break the rules of the game to have more fun ten you should ignore them as a competition only makes sense when it has rules.
2 All other ROBs collapse – any property assumes the truth of the property, i.e., if I say, “the sky is blue” it is the same as me saying “it is true that the sky is blue”, which means they are also a question of truth claim’s because it’s intrinsic. It also means that their ROB warrants aren’t mutually exclusive with mine.
3 Anything else moots 7 minutes of the 1NC and strengthens their pre-round prep since I need to be able to compensate by choosing my own offense.
4 Resolvability – scalar methods like comparison between DAs and advantages increase judge intervention – truth testing solves because it’s a yes/no question of whether the resolution is logically true or not.
Now negate –
1 Intellectual is defined as “possessing or showing intellect or mental compacity” (Dictionary.com) but property can’t possess intellect so the resolutions incoherent.
2 Inherency – either a) the aff is non-inherent and you vote neg on presumption or b) it is and it isn’t logically going to happen.
3 member means “a body part or organ” (Marriam Webster) but a nation cannot have bodily organs so the resolutions incoherent
5 To means “indicate movement” (Merriam Webster), but that means the resolution is incoherent because the word ought cannot move to the word reduce. Means you negate on face because you can’t even know what the resolution looks like and an incoherent claim can’t have truth.
6 Trade means “a publication intended for persons in the entertainment business”(Merriam Webster) but a world entertainment business cannot reduce intellectual property making the resolution incoherent.
7 Medicine means “a spell, charm, or fetish believed to have healing (Oxford Languages)” so reducing intellectual property protections for spells is incoherent.
8 Property means “a building” (Oxford Languages) so reducing intellectual buildings is incoherent
9 Aff has an absolute burden of proof – any doubt means you negate since a claim not that claim can’t be true, so any risk of falsity is entirely false.
Permissibility and presumption negate –
1 Semantics – Ought is defined as expressing obligation which means absent a proactive obligation you vote neg since there’s a trichotomy between prohibition, obligation, and permissibility and proving one disproves the other two. Semantics outweighs – A. it’s key to predictability since we prep based on the wording of the res B. It’s constitutive to the rules of debate since the judge is obligated to vote on the resolutional text.
2 Logic – Propositions require positive justification before being accepted, otherwise one would be forced to accept the validity of logically contradictory propositions regarding subjects one knows nothing about, i.e., if one knew nothing about P one would have to presume that both “P” and “P” are true
3 Intuitions – A. We assume statements to be false until proven true. That is why we don’t believe in alternate realities or conspiracy theories; B. Statements are more often false than true because any part of the resolution could be false.