Disorganized thoughts from the weekend

Big ol' shout out to the U for letting us host the round robin there. And while I'm at it...

Minnesota Policy Debate is awesome
This probably deserves a little background. While I was moving through high school, there were more than a few public and private declarations that MN policy debate would die in the near future. There were many causes for alarm, some systemic, some temporary. It's nice to come back after a nice hiatus and see a very strong Round Robin field. It's even nicer to see that not only was the "old guard" well represented in the RR and the main tournament, but no less than 5 round robin programs either did not exist or were in various stages of "starting up" during my senior year in high school.

I wish I had some data to say that this has corresponded with a vertical and horizontal growth in MN policy debate, but I don't think that there is even a coordinated attempt to collect that data. And there is probably a big caveat to this "good news" to note that there is still a worrying trend towards concentration in the metro area at the expense of outstate debate circuits. But good news is scare around this topic, and I'll take it where I can get it.

My other observation is more substantive:

Affirmatives are all answering Cap Bad wrong:
The way I see it, there's three things you can say to generate offense against cap bad:
1. We reform capitalism, reform good
2. We break down capitalism (crash the economy, cause the revolution, etc)
3. Cap is good.

In the debates I've seen, 1 and 2 are the most popular, sometimes in combination. The wording of the resolution makes it rather hard for topical cases to cleanly claim 2. Incentives are pretty darn capitalist, after all. And 1 is just a suicide march against a strong 2NC. It's the most predictable debate there is on capitalism. It's got mountains of literature written for it. And you run into some complex structural biases in the debate process that can best be described as "Any risk of a link..."

So that leaves us with cap good. What's so bad about cap good? It's not like there's a lack of strong cards on this point. Sure, the neg is going to be prepared with a lot of cards, but at least the 2NC won't start with "group the 2ac 1-6, and I am going to read my perm block."

I'd also like to bring up a pretty great point that doobs made while we were chatting about this over the weekend. Most affs on this topic are 8-minute answers to the "capitalism is unsustainable" argument. New tech, alternative energy, solving warming, all of these are answers to the most powerful argument the neg has in this debate. You've gone this far, why not dig in and win it?