[Paul-Craft]

That's absolutely untrue, at least in policy debate, which I participated in during high school.

There are 5 of what are called "stock issues" that are the basis for judging a round, and the affirmative side must win all of them to take the round. The negative side need only win one.

One of those stock issues is "topicality." The affirmative wins topicality as an issue by affirming the resolution. The negative is not so bound. This leads to an absolutely classical negative strategy called the "counter-plan." Essentially, what this is is a strategy where, rather than the negative simply saying "nuh uh" to the affirmative's points, they put forth their own plan and argue that it is better than the affirmative's plan.

There is some thought that the negative counterplan must explicitly be non-topical, i.e. not advocate for the resolution. So, for instance, the the resolution might be something like "Resolved: That the United States government should reduce worldwide pollution through its trade and/or aid policies," which was actually the 1992-1993 high school policy debate resolution. The negative could argue that the US should reduce worldwide pollution by means other than trade and/or aid policy, or that the US should do something completely unrelated to pollution reduction, because that action would create bigger benefits than the affirmative plan.

For this strategy to work, it's best if the counterplan and the affirmative plan are mutually exclusive, so it's a common strategy to simply hijack the affirmative plan's funding plank to make it all work.

Absolutely none of this is any sort of bad faith tactic. An affirmative team must always be prepared to argue a comparative advantage case. As I said, this is completely bog-standard, classical policy debate strategy, and in no way constitutes bad faith. But, yet, because the negative has no duty to be topical (and, indeed, could possibly be more convincing if they are explicitly non-topical), they might spend half their time talking about something not mentioned at all in the resolution.

[mellosouls]

In the context of the article here, the tactics are used to derail the agreed proposition - not to contribute to understanding the values or otherwise of it, which is the purpose of any good faith approach.

[Paul-Craft]

If the resolution is about reducing worldwide pollution, and I put forth a counterplan that essentially says "No way. We should take all that funding you want to use for your plan and use it to support animal welfare instead," is that not "derail[ing] the agreed proposition" in your terms? Yet, again, this is a classical and accepted tactic.

[lr4444lr]

I haven't participated in this kind of program, but it seems extremely bad faith to basically expect the opponent to argue that their position is necessary condition to something nothing short of absolute utopia.

As a college admissions officer or employer, if this is what the endeavor had degenerated to, I would place no stock in it as a skill builder or source of any reputable credential.

[Paul-Craft]

In what way? Like it or not, we exist in a world of finite resources. It's wholly appropriate to argue that "No, we should not use our limited resources on X when there is the problem Y out there that we could apply them to instead, and derive a much larger comparative advantage from." These are the types of questions faced in the real world by decision makers every day. If anything, your position is the utopian one.

[tekla]

> I haven't participated in this kind of program

So you have no idea what you're talking about.

[lr4444lr]

So, you can't counterargue a lay perception? That speaks for itself.

Better yet: "this is atypical in-group power play: the misuse of authority in the absence of substance is de facto perpetuation of the institutional dysfunction laid clear by outsiders."

Which "k" is that?

[tekla]

A "lay" perception is not actually an argument.

Your arguments is basically a mediocre elitism K,

[kalkin]

The distinction between derailing and "understanding the values and otherwise" is contestable and in fact routinely contested by debaters - and there is of course no de jure or de facto rule that the person who goes further in trying to critique assumptions and structures wins.

The style of "critique is inherently bad" argument made by this article is also perfectly possible to make within debate. But it's not common, less because of biased judges (who certainly exist, in all directions) than because it doesn't stand up to scrutiny very well in context. Policy debate isn't a great truth-finding endeavor, but it is ruthlessly competitive and as a result pretty effective at weeding out arguments that, like the article's, rely on a low-context audience who have heard a lot about out of control woke college students but haven't just watched a bunch of rounds of vigorous dispute over everything from hypothetical policy details to the boundaries of the year's topic to, yes, critical theory, with practiced advocates on every side.