Breaking News: The First Fellows Debate
THE ROAD GOES ON FOREVER AND INSTITUTES NEVER END
Lexington, KY, June 24, 2008
GOOD EVENING MR. AND MRS. NORTH AND SOUTH AMERICA AND ALL SHIPS AT SEA, LET’S GO TO PRESS.
“In the first Fellows debate of the 2008 Kentucky National High School Debate Institute, Fellows Robin Gray from Fullerton Union, CA and Craig Smeyser,from the Kinkaid School, TX affirmed the resolution against Tyler Boykins from Ft Lauderdale, FL and Brian Shim from Berkley Prep. Following the debate Brian Manuel, coach at Cathedral Prep and 2 week lab director, filed this report.
“During the debate both students and staff witness a hard nose fight with some unseen events. The 1AC was delivered by Robin “Death Ray” Gray, where she spoke about the need for NASA to incentivize the development of Solar-Powered Satellites by the private sector. She argued there were five advantages for enacting the affirmative. The first was the lack of incentives for renewable energy is hurting the US competitiveness and that NASA specifically could use Solar Powered Satellites to boost this competitiveness. Also there were advantages to “GET OFF THE ROCK”, the credibility of NASA, why SPS would replace nuclear energy, and lastly that the SPS will help us develop fuel for the military and decrease our reliance on fossil fuels, that without the aff would collapse our leadership.
Tyler “T-Boi” Boykins delivered the 1NC with such blazing speed you could feel the heat getting turned up in the room. He began with a CP to only incentivize space use of energy and exclude terrestrial use. He claimed that the microwave transmissions needed for terrestrial use would tradeoff with military telecommunication transmissions which are critical to overall military readiness, solving the aff and turning the leadership advantage. He also include some postmodern mumbo jumbo talking about the teachings of Martin Heidegger and also a discussion of NOMADS. You get the point!
After that he spent a significant amount of time arguing that the SPS would fail and that its terrestrial uses are bad. After this heavy 1nc filled with tons of evidence, Craig “Why Do I Have To Defend Realism and Hegemony Simultaneously” Smeyser took the podium. He
gave his best attempt to defend his realist affirmative and took the stance that the negative needs to defend a policy option in the debate and that their criticisms of modernity and technology and war are all non sensical and that policy debate was good…well at least for this debate. Along with his Death to the K protest he argued that the CP would be bad because it would lead us to rely on space based weapons which culminate in the death of everyone.
At this point Brian “The Asian Dragon” Shim stepped up looking spiffy to deliver his hippie filled 2NC where he extend the discussion of Martin
Heidegger and how horrible our management of the environment is and why we should reject our use of technology to do so. He threw around buzz words such as “ontology” and “being” and argued that you couldn’t be affirmative if you took this approach. He was able to flip Craig’s framework arguments around and made argument for why their discourse and representations come before enacting the affirmative. “T-Boi” had to pick up the rest of the slack for his partner by taking the case debate and the CP flows which at this point had the majority of evidence on them. I think T-Boi could tell that this wasn’t where the focus of the rest of the debate was going to be.
Well after the block “Death Ray” Gray got up to clean up the wreckage the block laid waste to. While flying through the 1NR arguments with ease and discussing why space weapons will end the planet, she then entered hippieville and started to build up why the affirmative was the better policy option and why the lack of a consistent framework for debate was bad and why the neg should be rejected. She then also advocated why they could still do the plan why rejecting technological managerialism.
This clearly put the pressure on “The Asian Dragon” who was so heated at this point he removed his shirt and thought he’d show his masculinity by going for the Heidegger criticism and reasons why the affirmative was flawed and that the view of debate that defending a stable advocacy was for the birds. He claimed that the “framework” the aff was forcing the negative into was the same types of control and managerialism that they were kritiking which then was another reason to reject the aff. At the end of the 2nr I could feel Heidegger looking on with delight as the “Dream Team from Florida” were pleased with their performance.
With all eyes up front “Mr Realism” himself to the podium. With an empassioned plea to the institute that the negative be rejected for not
falling within his constructs of policy debate and going for the permutation to do the plan and reject technological thinking, “Mr Realism” took a seat to allow the on lookers to cast their ballots.
The ballot count in this debate didn’t represent the hard work and hard fought debating that took place during the round. When all the ballots were collected the negative won on a 27-6 vote, with all the fellows agreeing with the rest of the camp.
Signing off from Lexington,
Brian Manuel
2 Week Lab Director
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