Lincoln-Douglas Debate from First Principles

A short primer for the activity.

Ethan Nathaniel Elasky

Chapter Contents

The Disadvantage

What is a disadvantage?

The first thing I’ll talk about is a disadvantage because it’s the simplest complete position in debate. A disadvantage has four main parts: uniqueness, link, internal link, and impact (you might read more than one card for some parts). Assuming an affirmative advocated the passage of a carbon tax, a sample disadvantage might read something like:

(only claims [tags] shown; cites and evidence text omitted)

The uniqueness for the disadvantage is the part that makes a claim about the status quo—in this case, it’s saying that the economy is recovering but vulnerable to disruption. The next part is the link, which is the part that’s connected to the plan. In this case, it’s the argument that a carbon tax would be bad, more specifically that it would increase consumer prices. The internal link is what connects the link to the impact. It states that increased consumer prices would cause a recession. And then the (terminal) impact is the reason why a recession would be bad, which in this case is that it would cause a nuclear war.

What happens when arguments are missing pieces?

One thing to note is that some arguments within this disadvantage are missing uniqueness. The internal link is missing a uniqueness argument, but if it had a uniqueness argument, it would be something like “consumer prices are stable now.” The link argument is missing a uniqueness argument about how a carbon tax hasn’t passed yet, but it wouldn’t make much sense for the aff to argue that a carbon tax has already passed because that would defeat the purpose of the plan and the aff wouldn’t be inherent (don’t worry if you don’t recognize that word, there’ll be more on it later). Impact uniqueness is supplied by the first argument about how the economy is growing now, but it’s missing uniqueness for the claim that nuclear war is not happening right now. Obviously it isn’t, which proves that obsessing over uniqueness is sometimes counterproductive, but it makes for a good teaching moment. This might seem like a bunch of extremely technical distinctions, but it’s extremely important to understand how uniqueness works so you can effectively counter poorly researched positions.

Sometimes people read entire positions that are missing obvious pieces. One example might be something like:

This disadvantage is missing uniqueness. There’s no evidence that proliferation is not happening now. If you’re the affirmative, you should argue that the judge should reject this disad, which might sound something like this:
“Reject the disadvantage—a disad has to have uniqueness evidence and they’re missing it—anything else justifies them sandbagging impact or link evidence until the 2NR which makes it impossible to be aff.”

Note that this disad doesn’t have an internal link – but that’s because it doesn’t need one. Occasionally the link will make a good enough claim that it doesn’t need a stepstool internal link to look scary.

What are some examples of disadvantage jargon?

Now let’s go over some additional disadvantage jargon.

First, I want to talk about what a thumper is. A thumper is a link nonuniqueness argument. The basic argument is that something should have already triggered their link. Using the previous example about Saudi prolif, I might bring up some instance of recent foreign intervention, which should empirically disprove their claim about foreign intervention causing Saudi Arabian nuclear proliferation.

Next, let’s talk about offense, defense, and turns. To review, an offensive argument is a proactive reason to prefer one side. A defensive argument is a reactive reason to reject one side. Offense : good :: defense : not bad. Both have roles to play in debate. The two kinds of offense (a.k.a. turns) that you can put on your opponents’ positions are straight turns and impact turns.

I’ll give an example that illustrates what a straight turn is.

Let’s say you have the previous Saudi Prolif disad except you add one piece of uniqueness evidence:

Reading a card that says The aff prevents Saudi prolif would be offense, right? Nope. It’s actually defense. Think about it. If the chain of events is No Saudi Prolif now, The aff prevents Saudi prolif isn’t an argument a judge can vote for. The judge would not disrupt the status quo in which there is no Saudi prolif in order to prevent Saudi prolif that isn’t happening now. For this to be offense, the aff would also need to have uniqueness go the other way. In other words, the aff also has to say Yes Saudi Prolif now in addition to the aff prevents Saudi prolif to gain offense here. This is what is called a straight turn.

Now we’re going to learn about what people mean when they say “link controls uniqueness” and “uniqueness controls the direction of the link.” Imagine that the negative read the same Saudi Prolif disad and the aff read the straight turn (Yes Saudi Prolif now and the aff prevents Saudi prolif). If the uniqueness evidence that the neg read is weak but the link evidence is very strong, the neg might argue that link should control uniqueness. The argument is something along the lines of “the uniqueness debate is muddled so you should let the link control the direction of uniqueness since there’s a decent chance we’re at the brink now.” Conversely, if the aff uniqueness evidence is strong, they might argue that the uniqueness should control the direction of the link (meaning that there’s zero risk of link turn offense/there’s only a risk of aff offense insofar as the aff has won uniqueness, which is basically the explanation I made above for why the link turn needed uniqueness to be a straight turn.

Now let’s discuss the impact turn. It’s pretty simple. Your opponent says something is bad, and you say it’s good. Warming bad -> warming good, economic collapse bad -> collapse good, nuclear war bad -> nuclear war good. A lot of these positions are a bit counterintuitive, but they’re funny and a lot of fun to read. Even better, you don’t need to be acquainted with a topic for these to work since people read the same impacts no matter the resolution.

The thing to note with turns is that you can’t just read a turn and call it a day. Reading a turn doesn’t get rid of the other side’s offense, and the difficulty in reading them is that you have to be great at evidence comparison. Doing impact turn debates is a great way to get better at debates because they don’t allow you to avoid clash.

Most constructive positions are mainly offensive in nature (i.e. K, T, DA) although most counterplans and critique alternatives are not. This is because while judges can vote on critique links plus framing or disadvantages or topicality on their own, counterplans and critique alternatives need to answer to the permutation (either a reason why the perm doesn’t make logical sense, like the ICJ counterplan supplies, or a net benefit, i.e. a DA or some case turn/link argument. More on the ICJ counterplan under the Position Examples chapter). If this last paragraph doesn’t make sense, don’t worry, because I’ll explain it further later.

Disadvantages in Practice

There are lots of types of disadvantages, most of which are specific to a given topic. However, the same types of extinction impacts tend to come up since there’s only so many things that can cause planetary destruction. Not only that, there are also entire disadvantages that can be ported from one topic to another with little modification. We’ll tackle the impacts first.

People always read the same internal links to planetary destruction (usually nuclear war, climate change, or artificial intelligence). I’ve seen water insecurity, high food prices, drought, lack of phosphorus, global warming, loss of biodiversity, US-China war, terrorism, US-Russia war, India-Pakistan war, aliens, economic collapse, loss of US hegemony, and pandemics (list is by no means inclusive) in debate before. Some (e.g. hegemony, economic collapse) are more common than others (aliens, phosphorus loss), but it’s useful to keep a file full of impact defense in case you’re ever short for answers.

The next thing to discuss is generic disadvantages (and while I implied multiple, I actually just mean one: the politics disadvantage). The politics disadvantage is ubiquitous. There are a few different flavors, but they all have to do with the passage of the AFF interfering with politics.

Examples include:

This is by no means an exhaustive list of politics disads. They’re usually badly warranted and almost always not worth running alone. But they do have great strategic utility which I’ll talk about in the next chapter.

If you’re interested in seeing Scotty talk more about why politics DAs are bad, see the following three part series: [1]( https://hsimpact.wordpress.com/2014/11/20/politics-and-case-is-not-a-strategy-part-1/), [2]( https://hsimpact.wordpress.com/2014/12/08/politics-and-the-case-is-not-a-strategy-part-2/), and [3]( https://hsimpact.wordpress.com/2015/05/06/politics-and-case-is-not-a-strategy-pt-3-pt-a/).

I’ve introduced you to disadvantages and some key concepts regarding offense and defense, as well as how to think strategically about what disadvantages to write (hint: generic ones are a must-have!). The next thing I should introduce is how debate works from the perspective of affirming.