1/31-2/7: LD & PF Tournament Results and a Defense of Plantext in a Vacuum
Lincoln Douglas Debate
Tournament Results
This weekend, LD debaters competed at two bid tournaments: the Pennsbury Falcon Invitational and the Golden Desert Debate Tournament at UNLV.
Congratulations to Ridge’s Meera Shah for championing the 2024 Pennsbury Falcon Invitational. In finals, Meera defeated Newark Science’s Ava McCune on a 3-0 decision (Kelley, Lu, Manaker). Additional congratulations to Harrison’s Elizabeth Nicaj for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Congratulations to Peninsula’s Sterling Utovac for championing the 2024 Golden Desert Debate Tournament at UNLV. In finals, Sterling defeated Marlborough’s Maya Jen on a 3-0 decision (Clark, Taylor, Waters). Additional congratulations to Marlborough’s Wyeth Renwick for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Public Forum Debate
Tournament Results
This weekend, PF debaters competed at three bid tournaments: the Pennsbury Falcon Invitational, the Golden Desert Debate Tournament at UNLV, and the Jasper Howl.
Congratulations to Ishaan Banerjee & Sasha Caracalos from Princeton for championing the 2024 Pennsbury Falcon Invitational. In finals, they defeated Sadie Wolf & Caroline Izmirly from Chapin on a 2-1 decision (Trinh*, Chin, Diarra). Additional congratulations to JR Masterman’s Josh Cohen for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Congratulations to Aumrita Savdharia & Stavan Shah from Fairmont Prep for championing the 2024 Golden Desert Debate Tournament at UNLV. In finals, they defeated Angela Wu & Ali Fehmi from Canyon Crest on a 3-0 decision (Pimpton, Johnston, Jimenez).
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Congratulations to David Cui & Jaival Patel from Plano West for championing the 2024 Jasper Howl. In finals, they defeated Amey Kashyap & Hannah Kim from Flower Mound on a 2-1 decision (Boyapati*, Ali, Wevodau). Additional congratulations to Flower Mound’s Amey Kashyap for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Best of luck to everyone competing next weekend! Stay tuned for future tournament results.
VBI 2024 Staff Announcement
We are so excited to start announcing our instructors for VBI 2024! Every week, you’ll get a chance to learn more about the talented staff working at VBI this summer. This week’s staff feature is LD instructor Temitope Ogundare.
Temitope Ogundare debated in high school at Newark Science and then in college at Rutgers University-Newark! Her career started in 2016 in policy at Newark Science before transitioning to LD in her sophomore year. At Newark Science, Temitope was invited to multiple Round Robins, in many late elimination rounds, and qualified to and competed at NSDA Nationals in both policy and LD. At Rutgers, Temitope competed in NDT/CEDA policy, NFA-LD, Public Forum, and British Parliamentary. During her time there, she championed multiple tournaments across the varying formats and worked to better the debate community such as engaging in competition with the Bard Prison Initiative. She is excited to be working at VBI and is ready to teach about and talk through most things under the sun!
A Defense of Plantext in a Vacuum
by Amadea Datel
What is plantext in a vacuum?
“Plantext in a vacuum” (which I’ll abbreviate as PTIV) is the idea that the plantext should determine whether an aff is topical, as opposed to other factors such as the aff’s evidence or CX specifications.
Some debaters misunderstand the term to mean that all affs that include resolutional language are topical. For example, I’ve heard people respond to T-subsets with PTIV, explaining that their plan uses all the words in the resolution while adding one. However, their plan would not be topical under PTIV because including the specification changes the plan's meaning—if the neg's interp states that subsets are not topical, then a plan that defends subsets does not meet that (unless one somehow believes that words exist in a strange, meaningless realm).
Why is plantext in a vacuum the best model for debates?
The best argument for PTIV is that the plan’s mandate is a consistent and predictable basis for determining topicality compared to the much more ambiguous alternatives. Rejecting PTIV opens us up to two other options: either 1) the entire aff becomes the aff’s advocacy, which makes every aff untopical because the neg can point to random lines in solvency evidence that advocate for untopical proposals; or 2) the aff reserves the right to clarify the process and substance of the plan beyond the words of the plantext, which can create strange contradictions between different parts of the aff and turn the aff into a moving target that exacerbates the shiftiness concerns that critics of PTIV often raise (more on both of these below).
Moreover, topicality arguments not based on the plan conflate topicality and solvency. For example, if the aff defends the text of a resolution with a U.S. actor and the neg reads the argument that the aff is untopical because the solvency evidence references international bodies acting, the aff has not become untopical—after all, the aff has committed to defending the resolution. Instead, the neg has read a solvency deficit since the plan does not include international bodies acting, which the evidence seems to indicate is necessary to solve the aff’s impacts. (As a side note, I do believe the tendency to reject PTIV and resort to topicality in these cases is indicative of a broader pattern in LD to call debaters out for “cheating” while overlooking the more straightforward reasons an argument might fail on a substantive level).
Answering Counterarguments
Here are the three main counterarguments I’ve heard against PTIV.
1. The sentence of the plan cannot capture its process or substance, which are encapsulated in a second, “floating” plan that determines disad links or counterplan competition.
This is perhaps the best argument I’ve heard against PTIV, but it still falls short for several reasons. First, most people would agree that the plantext is the basis for counterplan competition and disad links—as far as I know, judges would be hesitant to accept a counterplan that competes off normal means alone (since the common understanding of “perm do the counterplan” is that the counterplan could be a way the plan could be done, even if it’s not the most likely way). If a neg read definitions of the words in the plan to establish links to disads and the aff claimed the disads didn’t link because the plan didn't reflect the process of the aff, judges would likewise remain skeptical.
Of course, just because judges’ understanding of debate centers around the plan doesn’t mean that interpretation is correct. In this case, though, I believe it’s the most logical because the plan's purpose is to express the mandate of the aff. If the 1AC could include “addendums” to the plan that deviate from the definitions/normal means understanding of the plan's words, then the aff could read two contradicting—and thus incoherent—advocacies (the meaning of the plan's words and the specification in other parts of the 1AC).
One might argue for a middle ground that limits the aff’s specification outside of the plan—the aff might be allowed to clarify the aspects of the plan that are open to multiple interpretations but not those that have one clear meaning e.g., the “United States Federal Government” cannot become “the 50 states” in another part of the aff or CX. However, the arbitrariness objection is strong: how can we determine what constitutes a “reasonable” clarification given that there are often hundreds of mechanisms for one plan (and perhaps even one fringe article out there that defines the “USFG” as “the 50 states”)? Could the aff defend one obscure process that no one would interpret the words in the plan to mean even if the words do not theoretically exclude that process?
Furthermore, an aff that can “clarify” the plan in other parts of the 1AC becomes incentivized to write vague plantexts and hide parts of its mechanism to trick the neg into reading disads that don’t link or counterplans that don’t compete, especially since the neg won’t know which parts of the 1AC constitute the aff’s advocacy until CX. After all, there’s a reason the aff reads a plan in the first place—to provide the neg with a stable point to negate.
2. Shiftiness: PTIV incentivizes the aff to write vague plans that don’t do anything so the 1AR and 2AR can shift advocacies to no link disads and perm counterplans, which makes establishing stable neg ground impossible.
PTIV does not grant the aff free reign in defining or redefining the meaning of the plan—it confines topicality to the words in the plantext, which further clarifies the meaning of the aff because the neg can read definitions of terms in the resolution as links to DAs that the aff can contest with counter-definitions. If anything, a model in which the aff's mandate is not confined to the plan opens the debate to new characterizations later in the debate (see above). In addition, because most people also believe the plantext is the basis for counterplan competition and disad links, the incentive to write vague plans that can perm counterplans is a much larger alt cause to vagueness since all affs want to perm counterplans, whereas a limited number of affs face serious topicality concerns.
3. K affs: PTIV encourages K debaters to slap a plan on an otherwise non-topical aff to win an “I meet” on T-FW.
PTIV is not a shortcut for making untopical affs topical. Rather, it does the opposite because it holds affs to the plantext regardless of what one would want the plan to mean. If a debater decides to slap a plantext on their otherwise untopical K aff, then the aff might become topical but at a high cost: the aff’s advantages will be disconnected from the plan, so the aff won’t have reasons the plan is good and will easily lose to a PIC out of the topic (engage in the aff’s method while rejecting the plan).
I hope this article helped both clear up some of the common misconceptions around PTIV and defend the model of debate. If anyone has any questions or disagrees with this stance, feel free to reach out!
Amadea Datel is a senior at Dartmouth College who debated college policy at both Columbia and Dartmouth. She reached the quarterfinals at the Gonzaga Jesuit Debates and won the University of Minnesota College Invitational, the Crowe Warken Debates at USNA, and the Mid America Championship, ranking as the 25th team nationally her sophomore year. In high school, she built and coached her school’s LD debate team, won several tournaments in Massachusetts, and was the top speaker and a semifinalist at the MSDL State Championship and the first student from her school to qualify for NSDA and NCFL Nationals, clearing at the former. She is an Assistant Coach at Apple Valley High School and a Newsletter Editor and former Director of LD at the Victory Briefs Institute.