At this point, Bryan was superior to Wallace in every way. We saw more of his personality than we ever knew of Wallace’s through Discord messages in the server, and we would use strange Snapchat filters on his face while he was lecturing during online practices. The guys felt comfortable enough to jokingly flirt with Bryan, and looking back, I could tell that he genuinely cared about the team because during tournaments, he would give us emergency prep and lectures that he wasn’t being paid for.
And we desperately needed it—Discord tournaments being online meant that a lot of judges were high school students or first-year-outs, debaters who had just graduated, and the most outrageously niche arguments that would never be read at an actual tournament appeared here. These arguments took two forms: “meme cases” (e.g. a universal basic income would increase the demand for milk, causing a shortage, which leads to resource wars that go nuclear and cause human extinction, but plot twist! human extinction is good) and progressive arguments, which exceeded the boundaries of traditional argumentation that simply negated or affirmed the resolution and instead took a more philosophical viewpoint.
The first of these progressive arguments that SpiderSmart had to interact with was a kritik (K) called afro-pessimism, or afropess. I didn’t learn it until years later, but there are five parts of a K: the thesis, which describes the issue that the K team is “kritiking” (critiquing); the link, which explains how the opponents “link” into that issue, perpetuating it; the impact, which is pretty self-explanatory; the alt, which introduces an alternative world that solves the aforementioned issue; and the role of the ballot, which boxes out what the jurusdiciton of the judge’s ballot should be, how they should use the ballot to vote in the round.
Afropess described racism against African-Americans in our contemporary world to be too ingrained into society and a lost cause, and the alt was to create a “new horizon” where racism simply did not exist. Bryan, upon hearing that we were hitting this argument, sent us dozens of pages that responded to specific parts of the argument, but because my partner Rosie and I’s 13-year-old brains simply could not comprehend the language—what the heck is “ontology”?—we hardly used evidence from those files by the back half of the round. Instead, our refutations centered around skepticism, i.e. “how would two high schoolers possibly create the so-called ‘new horizons’ that completely eradicated racism?”
I know now just how invalid that response was, at least in the world of technical debate, because of a debate phenomenon called “fiat.” By passing the resolution, the judge is affirming, but that doesn’t mean the resolution is actually coming to fruition, just like if the judge votes for the K, it doesn’t mean the alt is actually happening. Thus, it doesn’t matter that it’s impossible for two high schoolers to create a new world because the alt is, in imaginary-debate-world, inherently created. Just like the aff is advocating for a world where the resolution passes, the K team is advocating for a world where the alt passes.
Needless to say, Rosie and I did not win that round, and thus Ks were ingrained in my mind with a negative connotation. The concept of an “alt” world was ridiculous to me then, and it wouldn’t be until two and a half years later that I started reading these arguments myself.
The second type of argument SpiderSmart hit was what the opponent called “locks”: through these arguments, they said, they had locked our offense, and we would first have to respond to these locks before being able to get access to our own arguments. Fortunately, it was my teammate, not me, who hit these locks. Unfortunately, this argument was so obscure that even Bryan didn’t have prewritten responses, or blocks, against it.
I learned nearly three years later that these locks were philosophical paradoxes that fell under the category of “trix.” The name is self-explanatory; these arguments were cherry-picked tricks that meant the judge had an obligation to vote for a certain team. For example, since the topic is worded “Resolved, [x],” it meant the topic was already resolved, and the judge should just vote for the affirmative. Silly but convolutedly reasonable. To quote a retired famous debater’s judging paradigm, “tricks are for kids.”
Since then, I’ve debated three trix rounds, none of which I’m confident that I won. When such complex philosophical arguments are brought up, it’s essential to have out-of-round knowledge about it—you have to first understand the literature before you can figure out how it’s applied to debate, after all. It’s for these reasons why progressive argumentation, originally developed in policy debate but quickly becoming even more prevalent in Lincoln-Douglas (LD) debate, has become so popular in an event called public forum: many PF debaters simply don’t understand the text, but when the judge does, it’s an easy win on the ballot for the team that initiates it.
It’s interesting how the people at the head of the overall debate institute, the people calling the shots, are constantly trying to escape the trend of increasing progressivism. After Black debaters in policy debate started using rounds to read Ks like afropess as a form of both advocacy and protest, they created LD, a single-debater event focused around the morality of decisions. After progressive arguments, especially trix, started taking over LD as well, they created PF, blatantly named to prevent complex philosophy, with drastically shorter speech times to prevent the necessary elaboration on complex literature. But inevitably, when progressive arguments started to infiltrate PF as well, they created World Schools Debate. Even now, I still don’t know anyone who genuinely takes World Schools seriously, yet the other day, I saw a Reddit post concerning Ks in World Schools. The pattern has proven thrice over to be inescapable—and three makes a trend—yet I have no doubt the higher-ups will continue to try in futility.
Still, and especially in PF, most judges disallow teams to read progressive argumentation on novice or middle school teams, and to an extent, I agree with this. There’s so much jargon, structure, and norms that make up debate even aside from prog, and to prevent novices from being overwhelmed and discouraged by the extremely steep learning curve. That’s why in policy debate, novices debate a separate, more limited topic so that they can learn how to debate first before they learn the true depth of the debate iceberg.
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