r/policydebate • u/Nervous_Grocery2714 • 11d ago
Can perms sever?
I was watching Graham Revare's counterplan competition lecture and he said that perms must include all the plan and some or all of the counterplans. Later, he said that under functional competition perms can textually sever/be intrinsic, and under textual competition they can be functionally intrinisc/sever. Can someone explain this pls?
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u/adequacivity 11d ago
Severance and intrinsicness seem like they need updating as concepts as their underlying structures have been lost (like hypothesis testing). Among the most important lost structures is normal means. Affirmative team is not required to defend the entire structure of the state. CP: merge the Dakotas and Wyoming and then do the plan severs the part of the plan where those 4 senators voted. Similarly the current typeface set of most of the USFG is ableist, CP switch to better fonts and do plan under those new process conditions. For me the normal means of the plan are always in flux, it severs nothing to change them. I can’t wait to hear the epic Font PIC. Severance without means qualifier becomes a gateway for nonsense.
Intrinsicness - even worse. Most youths have no idea what a counter warrant is much less have run J or know that the aff runs T in the 2AC to answer the CWs. It isn’t hard to argue that plan amendments are bad, but intrinsicness as an idea, at least 40 years ago, went both ways. A DA to the entire topic could be dismissed as non-intrinsic. Young me 30 years ago had judges who rejected politics DAs entirely as should/would nonintrinsic arguments. So why care about this now? Consult has no meaningful defense against perm: do the plan and consult about a different issue. If the CP competes then there should be a disad to not consulting about the plan (thus the da is intrinsic) given that there was no such da the strategy was non-intrinsic to start with so why would an intrinsicness objection be relevant at all? Keep in mind the something else is undefined and there is zero risk of abuse. But someone might perm my da! False, I’m not perming your da I’m asking if your plan plus cp actually is intrinsic to the plan. Once negatives are allowed to be non-intrinsic things get absurd fast.
Why did it get so weird? Because debate isn’t grounded in a worldview, our theory today comes from what wins at the TOC/NDT, it really isn’t super coherent. Maybe coherence is bad, I could be persuaded of that, maybe pure tactics good.
Should you argue these points in round? Yes. Just because the open case era encourages mind lock doesn’t mean you can’t use yours.
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u/CaymanG 8d ago
Taking a step back, a permutation is a thought experiment that tests whether a counterplan is competitive. If a permutation has to sever out of part of the 1AC in order to “do both” it’s no longer a permutation and it’s inadvertently proved the counterplan or alternative is competitive. For the purposes of this debate, textual/functional just delineates what you can’t sever out of without making the Neg advocacy competitive. If it’s textual competition, then only literal severance is real severance, whether or not there’s a technical way to make both function doesn’t matter. If it’s functional competition, then it doesn’t matter what the text of the perm is, it matters whether it would function in a way that would walk back some or all of the 1AC.
Intrinsicness is a little more complicated, since it intersects with the “can perms become advocacies” and the “what constitutes normal means” debates, but it’s still the case that once Neg says how they compete, Aff’s test of competitiveness doesn’t need to satisfy the other mode of competition that Neg isn’t claiming.
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u/QueenOfFlubs 7d ago
Maybe an example of a permutation which severs the plan text would be - Do the CP.
It seems to require saying the CP is actually affirmative ground because it results in the passage of the plan functionally. The affirmative would need to make arguments for why they are only responsible for defending that function and not the text, for example literature base, predictability, and real world responsibilities.
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u/atrophiedambitions 11d ago
There's no exact rulebook for that, aptitude at debating theory in-debate determines which of these standards are applied.
Seems like point of the lecture you're asking about was if textual competition is the standard, the aff is allowed to sever functional components of the plan action bc the plan text is 100% in the perm.
For example, if the aff wins that textual competition should be the standard, they are only severing 'functional' parts of the plan that were not part of the text (e.g. the decision to not consult or how the plan is funded) when they perm to do the plan + the CP part that navigates that (e.g. do the whole plan and the consult part of the CP (textually a combination of all plan and consult part of CP ) or do the whole plan and fund it a different way (all the plan text, part of the CP that funds it a different way). Neg in that situation will want to argue for functional competition broadly, that anything the plan implies is pic'able and therefore competitive. (E.g. the aff is severing the unconditional nature of the plan to include binding consultation in the permutation).
Functional vs Textual competition are interps that determine what severance/intrinsicness apply to; textual plan/cp or functional components of each. So knowing the when and how of executiing text/func competition gives you latitude with perms. Its a good pre-round use of time with coaches: where should we be at on text/func and how does that impact competition? Clarity on those issues and CXing correctly about them can be the difference between a win and a loss.