In order for something to turn the case it must either be a link or impact turn. On a disad when someone says “this turns the case” 99.9 percent of the time they are making a link turn- the case solves warming, the disad impact is hegemony- without hegemony you can’t solve warming. This is a link turn in the same way “winners win” is a link turn on a political capital disad and as such it requires uniqueness to be an offensive argument.
Let that sink in for a minute. If your aff is Saudi and the neg says on the Russia fill in disad “turns case”, unless they have read a uniqueness card that the war is not bad/is getting better (assuming that is your advantage of course) than the negative HAS NOT MADE A COMPLETE ARGUMENT.
Just saying “turns case” at the top of a disad, without a uniqueness card (or lowering the bar further, a uniqueness argument) is NOT something the 1AR has to even respond to.
What? Are you quite mad- the disad turning the case is the locus of all good debates ever- says the mythical PRL strawman. And yes, that is certainly true – in 2020 the disad and whether or not it turns the case does seem to be the focal point of a good many debates. What I’m arguing is that, just maybe, it shouldn’t be.
Let’s look at an example. Bing Bong PRL judges are more than willing to ignore the following
“Sever perms are a VI- they create a moving target and since the aff gets the last speech we can never respond to their final clarification. Theory arguments should be a voting issue for deterrence- cheesey perms take 1 second to make but are make or break issues for the neg”.
Now, certainly this is not the best explained argument in debate history- but it is COMPLETE. It gives a claim and warrant for why an abusive perm should rise to the level of voting issue.
Despite that, many judges have no qualms about saying “reject argument not team” in the post round because they personally don’t like this argument. When pressed, however, they will say “wasn’t a complete argument”. So even the worst of judges understand in some sense that arguments need to be complete when it suits them.
Jump back to our disad example, and not only are they willing to evaluate this argument despite it being incomplete- they are willing to ignore 4+ minutes of solvency evidence from the 1AC and vote on analytic “war turns the case” if its dropped by the 1AR. So why the disparity- why such high bar for one objectively silly argument and then such a low bar for a different but equally silly argument? Well I suspect a great deal of it comes down to the old cowardice thing again- turns the case is widely excepted as a “round ender”, i.e. that argument is viewed as something you can’t come back from when dropped. So judges can “hang their hat” on that kind of argument and be confident in the post round that they can’t be made to look a fool- it WAS DROPPED after all.
To show just how silly these arguments are lets go in depth and look at what a typical Saudi 1AC says
-guns are bad
oh well thats pretty straightforward, I guess the fill in disad does turn that… oh wait they actually say a bit more than that don’t they
-US support for Saudi Arabia encourages violence- various reasons
-US support encircles Iran
Actually I’m already rolling my eyes in disbelief that this needs to be belabored so lets just assume the aff is bad and this is all they say in the 1AC.
So the 2NC is extending the Russia fill in disad and arguing turns the case… what do they say?
“And the disad totally turns the case- Russia will sell weapons with NO STRINGS attached which means the Saudis can do more bad stuff than they can now!”
What part of “the case” did this turn? Nothing. Literally zero. We can look at each aff argument individually to see this more
US support encourages violence
These cards never say “without US bullets, no war”. They say a few things
-US support provides a diplomatic shield for KSA-they can say they have the backing of the “legitimate” members of the international community
-KSA wants to fight a clean/safe war, and to do this they need US PGM
-KSA isn’t worried about escalation because if it occurs they know the US has their back
Again,we could go on but we don’t need to. Russian arms sales solve none of these issues, and thus the disad can’t turn the case.
-Russia isn’t a diplomatic shield- they are a bad cop
-they can’t provide the high tech weapons the US is selling, no card says they can
-no evidence says purchasing arms from Russia means Russia would back KSA in a war with Iran, a much closer Russian Ally
So the disad doesn’t “turn” any of the aff, it only turns stupid internal links like “weapons bad” that the aff did not read.
The Iran advantage- this one shouldn’t need elaboration. The disad doesn’t turn or change US posture in the region, it has no effect on it.
So bypassing the LAUGHABLE lack of uniqueness on these turns the case claims, at the link level they are also objectively terrible. It should never be the case that a judge looks at 1AC solvency evidence, looks at what they flowed from the 2NC on “turns case” and concludes ‘yep’.
Now, this is not to say the negative couldn’t present a BETTER version of their argument. They could obviously say something like
“The terminal impact to the case is Iran war, Russia meddling in the ME accesses this impact in a different way, but its faster”
That is not really “turning” the case but sure its thumping the aff’s impact (see recent analytic CP post for a more in depth discussion of what I mean). This is the same reason I think I mentioned on a podcast recently that “prolif good” is generally NOT OFFENSE. Arguments like “prolif deters conventional war” are only offense if you have a uniqueness card/argument that says “conventional war coming now”, if its not then these are DEFENSE AT BEST because there is no conventional war to be solved.
So, how do you capitalize on these problems in the 1AR? Well obviously don’t drop them- we’ve already mentioned how far judges will go to give RFDs on these arguments so you definitely don’t want to be snooty and just ignore them. Each team/judge will be different, but I think a good start would be something like
“Group Disad turns case
1, No uniqueness- they haven’t even presented an argument, uniqueness is therefore a crush for war continues. Uniqueness outweighs the link- it can’t logically matter if the war is already ongiong
2, Prefer 1AC specific solvency-we have multiple mechanisms related to but not directly about arms sales that the disad can’t access like (explain one in detail like US support)- the 2NC was 5 seconds on this argument we don’t need to explain why it doesn’t turn every internal link in the time pressured 1AR, its their burden to win they do”
Thats only like 10 seconds of 1AR time for most of you and can be made much more efficient with a bit of refinement. I would slow down a bit and try and marshal some ethos here rather than blazing through it at top speed.
I want to close with one caveat however- if you are reading a soft left or K aff- you need to say much more than this. Especially with “policy” judges they will hold your K advantage to an absurdly higher standard than they would a hegemony advantage in terms of what they think turns the case. If you have ever read a “structural violence” impact than you probably know the scourge of goldstein 01 being read and your entire case somehow becoming irrelevant. The thing is these judges have biases- and while the idea that pre – k snacks might solve hegemony by fixing the education system is as if not more ridiculous than the claim that nationalizing the energy sector might promote socialism, they will decide that just about any disad turns your entire case if you let them. This means you need to be calling this logic out early and often- esp if your advantage is like “gender violence” and they say “war causes gender violence”- these kind of implicitly util turns case arguments are very difficult for some judges to wrap their mind around the aff answers and general arguments like “uniqueness” don’t work as well because they aren’t linear.
This may seem unfair, and it is. But part of being successful is realizing where you can get away with things and where you cant, and it just seems to be the case that you are going to have to do a lot more on “turns the case” when your adv is more k than policy, so if you know that in advance then you do more. If you still lose, then you can complain about the judge. But if knowing this higher bar exists you sail under it, then its still on you.
HS Impact 