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I think I remember enough of what I said that you're asking about. I'm trying to make sure I understand your question properly though. My point on RVIs is that being accused of cheating should not be a viable path to winning. One of reasons for that, although not the only reason, is that all a team would need to do to win in certain circumstances would be to force the opponent to read theory and then run RVIs. Your question, if I'm understanding it correctly, is what if the one team (let's say the neg team) is just cheating by reading bullshit theory positions. Doesn't that give them a big advantage because they can read bad theory arguments and still win? I think the arguments that people usually read in their RVIs (time suck, that the theory position is frivelous, etc) are all legitimate criticisms of the team reading the theory position. I just thing it should be a "drop the argument" situation. If the other team is reading so many theory positions that just answering the theory positions is going to lose the aff the debate, then I think they can read a separate theory position. Maybe on speed, for instance. The difference would be that this theory position would the need to have an interpretation, a violation, standards, and voters. Absent this, you're essentially allowing aff to read an argument that's a one shot kill the way a theory argument is, but it's a one sentence long position. It takes 5 seconds to read and there's no limit on how many RVIs they can come up with. In addition to that, I think it takes less time to respond to bad theory than it takes to read bad theory. So, if hypothetically you have two teams of equal skill and speed, it would take 100 seconds for the neg to read a frivelous topicality, but that topicality needs all 4 of its parts to work in order for the judge to vote for the theory position. Let's call that 25 seconds on each part. The aff only needs to refute one of those 4 parts in order for the theory to be thrown out. Even if it takes the same amount of time to read an argument as to refute it, that's still 25 seconds vs 100 seconds. In other words, I think it's always going to be harder to read an arbitrary number of cheating theory positions than it would be to read an arbitrary number of cheating RVIs. If an RVI is truly called for, I think it should be read as its own separate theory position and not just a blip that can easily be dropped. Hope that was an accurate understanding of your question and a decent answer to it!

​@@proteusdebateacademy I generally agree with RVI's bad and I think you summarized it in a way that made me understand it more, but specifically I don't understand the argument on baiting. People say if we had RVI's people would get really good at theory and then be super abusive so the other team HAS to run theory and they would win on the RVI. But even if there is no RVI, if you are so good at theory that you can win the argument even if you are being super abusive I feel like that abusive would let you win the round even if you don't get the RVI. For example if the resolution is "We should get a dog" and my plan is "We should drink water" You obviously have to run topicality because that isn''t even close to topical. But if I win that I'm topical even if I don't get an RVI I should easily win the round anyways because its super easy to argue that drinking water is good. Sorry if that didn't make any sense and I appreciate the response

@@carternelson7462 oooooh, okay. You’re saying is if you’re super good at theory can’t you just win by cheating and then beating the allegations that you cheated? And the answer is yes. That’s a fundamental problem with debate as it exists. If the system for saying your opponent did something unfair is a part of the game itself, then yes, getting good at the game makes it possible for you to just cheat with impunity. I personally don’t think that that implies anything about RVIs. In other words, in a scenario where the aff team either (a) cheats and wins because the other side did not couldn’t prove they cheated, or (b) cheats and wins because the other side accused them of cheating and they read an RVI on it, I think option a is still better. If nothing else, the neg still has other options. If you have an unfair aff plan, they can read the plan, but then they can also read a K, or solvency, or a disad, or whatever. “Getting away” with an unfair aff doesn’t guarantee a win. It makes it more likely, and i hear you on that that (and don’t love it). But I think “getting away with” a bullshit RVI *would* guarantee a win. It’s just a categorically stronger advantage. Even if the more cheatery side has an advantage regardless.

@@proteusdebateacademy Ah I see thank you so much for clearing that up.

@@carternelson7462 my pleasure! Feel free to reach out any time I can elaborate on something in one of our videos.

It is actually fantastic. Good work.

There's a lot of 2 hour "Gonna keep this to like 45 minutes" Sasan videos on our channel lol.

@@vylinhnguyen9389 Hey! Good to see you in here! Thank you and best of luck to everyone doing Parli over in your neck of the woods. Always happy to help out if I can.

Straight up: Haven't put any thought into the topic at all yet. My team this year has like 50 kids and something like 15 to 20 of them are debaters and of that group 2 are returners so I haven't put a high priority on getting LD work since we are likely to not compete until later in our semester. This weekend is the opener at Washburn so I will probably check out where the top schools are headed in terms of the topic. My issues with the topic is that we are going to have to wait and see where the community lands with regards to how much of the areas the aff has to effect. Under law enforcement is banning the US of AI in traffic cameras substantial enough? under privacy, arguably the broadest area, the fact that we can prohibit develop as well as use seems to beg a similar question. If my aff is just "prohibit AI automated taxis" is that sufficient? I am not saying any of these are great affs, but until there is a broader consensus about how small the aff gets to be I try not to even waste my time. I will let Tanya know that someone asked this question and see if she has thoughts because she is better than me at LD and much closer to that circuit.

just wait until we get bucc-ee himself on the channel ...

I used this today when I was teaching this lecture to the second group of students, thanks.

1. Office/Studio, not a bedroom. 2. Hating? I feel like I say these kids are objectively good at debate no less than 4 times in this video, I even say one of them is "cracked" 3. I don't have eligibility anymore but I was a two time national semi-finalist and coached the most successful college parliamentary debate team of all time (4 consecutive national championships) so I feel qualified to provide criticism on debate. Tanya is very demure, very mindful. 4. Feel free to not watch the video (seems like you already didn't...) if you found it overly negative, but that definitely was not our intention. Congrats to these 4 students on successful careers.

What specifically did you not like about it? Was it the part where we both thought that the team that won the debate won the debate?

Why tho??

no just calling children “dogwater” and “outmatched”, when you’re 30+ and have not made that stage is just wild. COD lobby bs.

@@sashaextempI don’t know if this is your first time watching a round analysis or especially watching one of our round analysis videos but I think you’re operating under a flawed assumption of how this works. This is a video of 4 kids in the national championship final round. As we say multiple times in the video, by that virtue alone all of these students are objectively pretty good at debate. With that said, OF COURSE all of them have things they can get better at. The second aff speaker did, in my expert opinion, a very poor job at cross-X. Most of the debaters did a poor job of sign posting, the negatives case and approach is like 95% defense, the aff got stuck in this loop of thinking the weird first cross and the title of that article were these damning lines of offense. That is because being in finals doesn’t mean you are good at everything in debate and even if you were peoples performance varies from round to round. The NPTE (college parli) national final this year was between a Berkeley team that won it and the last 3 natties before it and a Whitman team that outside of Berkeley was essentially unstoppable. Berkeley read the most dogwater advantage of all time about aliens. It was so bad that before the first speech was over I was already texting their prep coach (Alex Li, also a national champion) about how it was all time bad. And then the negative came up and read the exact same politics disad they had been reading all tournament including against a different Berkeley team the round before. But then some how Berkeley didn’t have answers prepped to this despite know what would be read. And then Tristan, who I think is the greatest parli debater of all time, read an answer that essentially no linked the entirety of their own advantage, it was like watching two teams see who could throw the most. And these were two ELITE teams, all 4 debaters are fantastic. But this channel does analysis and provides free coaching and educational resources. So if I watch the NPTE finals and just sit there saying “wow, golly gee, these really good debaters are all really good and never make mistakes” then instead of my audience learning from the mistakes of others and learning that even the best debaters make mistakes they just assume everything was perfect and go back to pretending debate is an anime where the heroes always win and are perfect. They don’t learn that even teams that seem unbeatable or completely out of reach for the average competitor have weaknesses that can be exploited. So, for the 10th time I’ll say: all of these students clearly are good at debate, all of them should be immensely proud of their accomplishments and, not for nothing, but if this was a tech panel I think the aff probably crushes based on what I saw and that the second aff speaker might have the most technical skill overall. But since that isn’t what happened in this round, I’ll stick with the second aff speaker was perceptually bad at cross-x in this debate from my perspective as a judge and a coach, and if they aren’t out of eligibility and want to win NSDA next year it’s probably any area I would significantly focus on.

@@superpaulycat why did tristan and brenna catch a stray lmao 😭

@@Shabazz859 If I’m understanding your request correctly, I think probably the original BUTTON video. This video more Paul extrapolating on those ideas a bit, so if you haven’t seen that video then it’ll probably be what you’re looking for. It’s possible I’m misunderstanding what you mean by defensive strategy, though. If you have seen the original video already, or if you watch it and it doesn’t satisfy what you’re looking for, then let me know and tell me a bit more about what you’d like like to know.

@@proteusdebateacademy thanks for responding so quickly, I'll be sure to look at that video!

What an excellent, reasonable, and difficult to answer question, lol. Let's get into it. The concept that you're referring to is called "parametricizing". I think all debate jargon is dumb, but that's gotta be one of the dumbest. I don't choose these terms. "Para-metri-sizing." In plan-based debate format, it's the idea that the aff gets to defend only a specific part of the resolution. Using the Septober topic, "Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially expand its surveillance infrastructure along its southern border.", these could be non-combat drones to monitor water contamination or, say, track animal migration patterns. The key concept in debate theory is that in plan based debates, the negation isn't linking to the resolution, they're linking to the aff's plan. What this means is that the negation has no burden to reject the entire concept laid out in the resolution, they just have to negate the aff's specific plan. So they're allowed to say oh, surveillance is great, but your specific method is harmful. This has a few practical benefits for the neg, such as not forcing them to defend the status quo (and allowing them to run counterplans). But it also has a downside. If the negative prepared an argument that says ICE is very harmful and abusive to migrants, well, now they literally can not use that argument. It's completely irrelevant in the debate because it's not a negation of the aff's specific proposal. The only recourse the negative team has is to read a topicality argument that says, "In order for this to have been fair, the affirmative should have read a plan that allowed me to use this argument about ICE." They would then give a few justifications for that, like, "It's the most predictable ground, it's what most of the literature base talks about, and it provides the most educational debate." And finally they would say, "If you buy this argument and believe that the aff made this debate less fair and worse for the quality of education in the round, vote them down." But now let's get into PF. We have a lot of videos talking about the "flaws" of PF. Depending on who you are, you might not view these as flaws at all. It was part of how the activity was designed more or less on purpose. But PF was designed so that "technical" arguments like topicality could not be read. Tricky and cheaterish strategies like counterplans can not be used. And one of the ways they did this was make it so that the negations arguments link to the resolution itself, not the advocacy of the aff. Some techy PF teams might try to argue against that, but in the vast majority of cases that's just going to be treated as fact. What that means on the plus side is that the negation team never has to worry that the aff team's strategy is going to make their arguments irrelevant. But the down side is two things. First, it makes it so the aff and the neg can spend the whole debate talking about completely different things. You can have the aff saying, "Tracking water contamination would be good!" and the neg saying, "ICE abductions would be bad!" without there ever being any actual clash. How is a judge supposed to resolve that round? Which leads us to the second thing. Second, it makes it so that you get much less mileage out of clever strategies and niche research. To answer your question directly, yes, you can absolutely write an aff that says X, Y, and Z are excellent forms of "surveillance" of the border. But there's nothing to stop the negative from saying, "And here are bad examples of surveillance." At that point it partly become about which scenario is more likely. But really, beyond the surface level, it just becomes about what the stronger impact is. Probability is just one facet of an impact's strength. What that means is that if your niche scenario has massive magnitude in some way, it might still stand a chance. But it also means that most rounds are going to come down to cliche argument has the biggest impact. Of all the major debate formats, Public Forum centers the most around weighing impacts. And that's because it's really bad for doing the only two other ways you can respond to an argument: 1. Challenging the accuracy of someone's arguments (topics are only 1 month long, no disclosure required, evidence paraphrasing allowed, most teams are really bad at sharing evidence), 2. Challenging the relevance of an argument to the overall debate (which, again, is because when the aff doesn't get to set any parameters on the scope of the debate you end up with pretty much every argument linking). That was a very long answer to a very simple question. I hope it wasn't too much of a wall of text. If I can elaborate on anything, don't hesitate to ask. All the best, Sasan

I ate dinner while reading this about four times. It was extremely helpful. First of all I had heard from other videos on your channel about the structural issues of pf but not until i started hitting them myself did i realize just how broken as a format is. Second this actually brings a ton of meaning to things I have heard pf debater say. Since my introduction in middle school I have heard "weighing wins debates" and now the story makes a lot more sense Third I'd like to thank you again for your incredibly in depth and thoughtful response. People like you make the debate space worth being in, and your help is really meaningful to people like me. Have a great day, and keep up the great work Mr. Proteus

@@proteusdebateacademyit’s called parametricizing because your are setting the parameters of aff ground. Also, tldr version of Sasan’s answer: you don’t get plans in PF so unless you can win claims that your pro immigration tech or climate change monitoring tech or whatever is likely the neg probably beats it back. My advice is just defend like interdiction/stopping trafficking good and that increased border surveillance would address that, this plus args that border security is inevitable or that Kamala winning means immigration gets more lax or whatever probably the easiest aff on a somewhat neg skewed topic Edit: this is Paul from Proteus

@@superpaulycat a little slow with the tldr, Paul. He already read it 4 times.

Thumpers are link uniqueness arguments that answer common negative positions. - They say: DA: Business Confidence, econ growing now, you make it worse, that is bad - You have like 5 reasons the economy is bad prepped that you can quickly read to takeout or at least scare them off the position by hiding behind what may appear to be quality ink. The premise of most disads is "we are 5 units of X away from our disad impact happening and wouldn't you know it, the plan is 6 units of X". Thumpers basically say "here are a bunch of other things that have happened or are going to happen that are also at least 5+ units and therefore should have or will inevitably trigger your link" OR thumpers say "we are 0 or a bajillion units away from X so it doesn't matter" Edit: and crucially, these are super easy to prep a file of ahead of time ( i have my kids do it every thursday or friday before a tournament) and then you can just prep them every round in case you need them.

To “front” is to pretend to know things you don’t or to be able to do things you can’t. As slang it can refer to if someone buys flashy things they can’t afford to pretend to have more money than they do. Paul here is talking about learning to just sound like you know what you’re talking about. It really goes a long way and it’s the skill from debate that I probably use the most often (lol). -Sasan

Sasan explained but basically, despite what they tell you, judges are not flowing robots. They absolutely are persuaded by the performative element of the round independent of the words on their flow and you should exploit this. Sounding like you are winning matters, seemingly like you aren't pressed when really you are dying inside matters. I think this is why I view cross-x as being so under utilized in national circuit debate, most people just figure the judge doesn't flow it so it is just filler time or free prep but cross-x lets you really control the ethos debate. At a minimum, we want the judge in every round to have to pause at the end of the round and question whether we really lost or not, no matter how far behind we are on the flow.

I some how didn't see this comment until today so here are my thoughts: First and most important, the entire premise of this video was comparing nationals winners and like... they never won nats. Ignoring that for a second, calling UTT KR a top 10 team of all time IS INSANE. Oregon GL dog walked them in finals and was the 14th seed of this bracket. Rice TR beat them in finals and was the 19th seed. I think independent of that, KR was never dominant on the national circuit outside of nationals (which, again, they never won). I remember the first year they made finals it was a huge upset and we were all talking about how they came out of nowhere to do it. Obviously the minimum requirement to make this list is winning nats but if we put that to the side, I don't think there is a single year of the UTT KRs career where anyone thought they were the best team in the country and if you aren't the best in your own era then surely you can't be top 10 of all time. There are teams on this list I think they would probably be favored to win debates against but that's not the point of the list, all of these times lost rounds to very good teams, but none of those teams won nats.

on full volume, of course

Thanks bud.

I heard they had a guy who didn’t even have a degree coach for like a decade…

@@superpaulycat yikes

That’s not a bad suggestion. Just a few weeks ago I was at the Parli TOC in New York and a lot of East Coast/APDA Parli folks were there and we chatted for a while. I don’t wouldn’t say we know nothing about APDA, but I think it’s fair to say it would be good to review an APDA round or something. If you have suggestions let me know. It’s gonna be a few weeks before I can make videos because my laptop has official gone kaput, but upside is that when I get the replacement it should be way less of a hassle for me to make videos than it has been for the lifetime of this channel.

Sick DOOM profile picture, by the way.

@@proteusdebateacademy thanks! I can send you suggestions if you have an email or something but TH-cam will filter it out if I post a link here

@@getgot27 proteusdebate@gmail.com

There’s definitely more people making online content now than when we started! I don’t closely monitor stuff so I can’t make any specific suggestions off the top of my head, but I recommend trying to search for specific topics you want to find videos on and seeing what’s out there, then clicking around the channel and see what else they have. Super vague answer unfortunately, lol.

@@proteusdebateacademy I genuinly appreciate the tight knit community the channel creates (like replying to comments: thank you so much). If you have any videos you can recommend for LD (specifically voters and the 2AR) I will be sure to check them out!

@@georgeshubitidze3324 that’s really kind of you to say! Our videos aren’t really organized by debate style and specific speech. We typically focus more on the underlying concepts that will apply across various debate formats. I took a look at what we have and I would recommend checking out our “How to Collapse” video first. It’s relatively short-ish (20 minutes ish). If you find that useful, you might eventually be interested in watching parts of our video on writhing good impacts (because that’s ultimately what your voters are about) and the video on “Round Vision”. These videos are a lot longer though and talk about bigger subjects than just giving voters and 2ARs, but I think there’s important information there for eventually getting a more “zoomed out”/“big picture” understanding of effective voters. None of it is, like, a checklist of things you should include in your 2AR. It’s possible another channel has something like that but I’m not personally familiar with one. And maybe a video like that is something we’ll eventually make. But the short answer is watch the collapsing video. Hope that helps!

@@proteusdebateacademy Absolutely. I just watched the round vision video and it was very helpful. I will definitely check out other videos as well. You got a subscriber for sure!

Brenna and Tristan just won NPDA for the second consecutive year. The hype train is still chugging.

that is hype!! i just won state as a jv and part of that is because i binged like every video on this channel last year lol

@@merhy5509 that’s amazing! Congratulations! We’re really flattered at your kind words and proud to have played some small role, but as you know, the whole point of this video is that that’s all your hard work. Plenty of people watched those videos and didn’t win a state championship. Great work, champ!

Hi! I made a video on writing cross-ex/cross-fire questions a couple weeks ago, but for this topic I think a good line of questioning if they’re saying to destroy the UN is to keep asking them why its bad until they something like because of global super powers/hegemony, and then ask if abolishing the UN means that sec council members can no longer interact with other countries (it doesn’t) then follow up with “so these countries still exist, and still have those resources”. Importantly, don’t ask why the UN collapsing hurts these superpowers because they probably have an answer and you don’t wanna let them make their own arguments in crossfire lol. If they’re saying UN good, I would try and get them to admit there are problems with the UN beyond permanent membership, and that there are ways for perm members to circumvent the aff (“will these countries have money after the aff happens? So they could issue bribes if they wanted?” Etc etc) (note that I asked if they COULD issue bribes, not if they will. There’s only one answer to the first question, but the second one gives them more wiggle room). The CX video explains what I’m saying in more detail, and I think it’ll be more helpful for coming up with questions setting up your specific case. Let me know if you have any more questions!