9/20-9/27: LD & PF Tournament Results and the Importance of Impact Defense in PF
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9/20-9/27: LD & PF Tournament Results and the Importance of Impact Defense in PF
Lincoln Douglas Debate
Tournament Results
This weekend, LD debaters competed at the 2023 Mid America Cup. Congratulations to Strake Jesuit’s Justin Wen and Lake Highland Prep’s Harris Layson for co-championing the tournament. In semifinals, Justin defeated American Heritage Broward’s Mason Cheng on a 3-0 decision (Evnen, Johnston, Achten), and Harris defeated American Heritage Broward’s Spencer Swickle on a 3-0 decision (Castillo, Hertzig, Koslow). Additional congratulations to Spencer for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Public Forum Debate
Tournament Results
This weekend, PF debaters competed at two bid tournaments: the Mid America Cup and the Stephen Stewart Memorial Invitational. Here are some notable results:
Congratulations to Josh Cohen & Henry Anastasi from JR Masterman and Alexander Margulis & Ishaan Banerjee from Princeton for co-championing the 2023 Mid America Cup. Additional congratulations to Lakeville North’s Austin Siefken for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Congratulations to Armaan Sharma & Anushree Samsi from Alsion Montessori for championing the 2023 Stephen Stewart Memorial Invitational. In finals, they defeated Ivan Shah & Nethra Dhamodaran from Dougherty Valley on a 3-2 decision (Carrillo*, Pandya*, Chiang, Schletzbaum, Thakkar). Additional congratulations to Dougherty Valley’s Ashna Gandhi 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.
Topic Voting Open & Previews Available
Topic voting is now open! To vote: log in to your NSDA account, click the “Topic Voting” red bar on the left, and click the blue “Vote” button in the “2023 November/December LD Ballot” or 2023 November/December PF Ballot” row. Voting closes on 9/30/2023.
Topic Previews for the potential November/December topics are now available to our brief subscription members! The day topic voting opens we release a sneak peak of the potential topics with one full topic brief and starter evidence that gives a sampling of topic literature. Our intent is to help teams make informed decisions when voting and to jumpstart topic preparation. As usual, the full brief for the chosen topic will be sent around ten days after the topic is officially announced.
Unlocking the Power of Impact Defense: A Game-Changer in Public Forum Debate
by Cherie Wang
Impact defense is easily one of the most underutilized tools of debate in Public Forum. Since the COVID era civil war impact magnifiers, it’s become increasingly popular to tack on stock big impact scenarios to every argument possible. Though the efficiency in case writing is respectable, this has made a lot of case impacts terribly put together in a way that should open them up to a huge risk of losing to defense that is “true”--except seemingly no one reads impact defense.
Here are some cool situations in which hearing impact defense would make debates less frustrating to judge:
The impact and impact scenario/internal link/whatever absolutely do not match
The biggest example of this that comes to mind is the high speed rail (HSR) climate argument (Septober 2022). So many people were just vibing reading an argument about how reducing car emissions would prevent extinction from climate change (arguably for this example you’re very loosely defining impact defense but it is defense and it is addressing the impact so it counts). Obviously, building HSR would not end enough emissions to prevent extinction from climate change at the current rate we’re going at. And yet many people were letting aff teams do “extinction outweighs poverty” weighing (cringe) that should never have been viable. Put the GPP evidence down please.
The dates are out of order
This most often applies to weird or niche impact scenarios, not reused ones, though it can work for both. Especially with regard to impacts or topics that are heavily reliant on the current geopolitical situation or related to tech development, paying attention to the dates on evidence can be useful. An example of this is an argument on the Artemis Accords topic (March 2023) about ballistic missile defense. The impact was about advancing tech from collaboration with the US and as a result, India developing boost phase missile defense systems. The evidence for the impact scenario was from 2013 and talked about how India developing a missile defense system would cause war between Pakistan and India. It was, obviously, not specific to a boost phase missile defense system and would not be triggered by the impact, which was specific to boost phase tech (functional boost phase missile defense does not exist yet, which is why there was no evidence considering the possibility of India using it). Using evidence dates is a really easy way to find potentially terminal defense for impacts that are too good to be true or being repurposed and don’t fit well.
Their argument is weird
Especially for arguments with weird links but stock impacts, the impact level is often the easiest part of the argument to look at and respond to. Even when it comes to niche arguments, it’s unlikely that there would be good literature about an impact so specific that you have no idea how to respond. For arguments that you know well, including some impact defense can still be useful as a way to segue into weighing in your rebuttal, add some analytical responses, and improve your coverage.
You’ve heard this impact literally 10 million times
The best part about impact defense, generally speaking, is that you can often use it on multiple topics. In the last two years, we’ve had 4 topics that obviously have US-Russia/NATO-Russia war scenarios and probably more where a US-China war over Taiwan scenario was read in ~80% of rounds. At the point where you can bet that multiple arguments can be taken out with the exact same impact defense, it’s just way less work to write impact defense in Septober and read it all year long.
I think a lot of people stray away from impact defense because it doesn’t always feel terminal, but it definitely can be (I would even say that most of the time it is). Honestly, the concept of defense being terminal is mostly about how you phrase it (save for responses that are specifically mitigatory—e.g. “the war doesn’t kill THAT many people”). That’s what’s so awesome about debate; if you say it’s terminal and your opponents do not contest that then it’s terminal! Hearing good impact defense in round is so refreshing and I’d love to see more of it. It’s such an easy, simple way to gain an edge in round.
Cherie Wang debated at Westlake High School in Texas for 4 years, where she was captain her junior and senior year. Throughout her career, she has earned 3 bids to the Tournament of Champions and reached quarterfinals of Plano West, Apple Valley, and TFA State and co-championed James Logan and Grapevine.