Framing:
Considering how critical this area of the debate is to both side's offense, I'm surprised by just how little time is spent in this area of the debate by both sides. While it's easy at a surface skim to say "sure both sides want util so let's use util to evaluate the round", the difference between how much leeway we give to short term harms in favor of long term benefits is critical to access to offense and weighing for both sides, especially considering that it's the crux of Con's case (accepting that there may be short term difficulties that enable long term boons). I would've loved to see more work done on this section of the debate by both sides, but as it is there's enough work being done for me to evaluate.
Ultimately, the framing debate ends up being a bit of a wash, which more or less favors Con by a margin. Pro isn't doing enough to show me why short term harms matter more than long term benefits, and Con is doing enough to give me reason to want to evaluate long term benefits, so they can weigh offense under their framing against offense under Pro's framing. To go a bit further in depth:
The framing debate comes down to two areas:
1. How reliably can we predict these long term benefits.
2. How much short term harms matter.
Pro starts with a pretty typical Util framing. Con's argument is a pretty typical Util argument - number go up good, number must go up, do whatever it takes to make number go up. Pro's responses are that a) hard to predict and quantify, b) we shouldn't sacrifice people now to make number go up, and c) por que no los dos.
C is more or less a wash because this is just saying that Pro can weigh offense under either framing, which Con doesn't really contest (and why would they? Con wants this framing to be the default. If they try to weigh offense under Pro's framing while admitting that short term things might be more difficult, they'll get massacred.) This line also more or less gets dropped by both sides in R3, so I'm not really seeing any reason to evaluate this as anything but Pro saying they can access both frameworks, which at the end of the day is ultimately whatever/slightly Pro favored - if it *does* end up being a weighing debate under Con's framing, Pro's going to need all the help they can get.
B is easily my favorite of the three responses, because it opens up the window to a potentially fun philosophical side-debate to compliment the main dish of number crunching, and there's insane practical potential for this argument within the realm of the debate: if Pro is winning that short term harms matter more than long term gains, then this creates a precluding effect that makes it so Con *MUST* answer *EVERY* harm in the status quo within Pro's case before I'm even allowed to read Con's case. Granted there are ways for Con to try and tackle this task (more on this in a sec), but more likely than not this would almost guarantee a Pro win.
Unfortunately, this argument just doesn't get enough ink on the flow for me to want to accept it. R2 is just a base assertion of it without much/any kind of analysis to warrant it, and R3 is more or less just a re-extension of the argument without much further elaboration or warranting, and Con's doing enough work on this area of the debate via just explaining util logic that I'm willing to grant Con access to their framing without having to jump through this additional hoop.
Admittedly there *was* an interesting route to attacking Pro's framing and solvency for Con in that Pro's case is explicitly *not* a return to the pre-Brexit status quo: Pro's case makes two concessions that didn't exist pre-Brexit. Are these concessions realistically possible for the UK to manage? Would these lead to more/greater harms in the short/long term than the reasons to return to the UK? Idk, I'm not an economist/foreign policy expert, but it *is* a pretty glaring achilles heel within the Pro's case and in that regard I think Con lets Pro get away with highway robbery (granted Con does briefly mention these points in the literal last round of the debate, but that's way too late. These needed to be brought up R1 preferably, R2 at latest, for me to want to evaluate them). If this had been more explored/won on the flow by Con, then this would sever pretty much any kind of link Pro has to solving the harms of the squo, and I can probably just vote Con here regardless of anything else happening in the debate. Alas...
Which leaves us with A, and this is where things get a little tricky. It calls into question Con's solvency, which is a fine argument to make even if it's not my favorite. Con's response in R2 is to show that, from R1, historically looking future forward has worked for other countries, which I think Pro correctly challenges in R2 on whether this is actually applicable to the UK or not. This also puts me in an interesting position where I have to resolve some levels of the contention level debate before I can even finish resolving the framing debate.
Con's response to this in R2 is that while the specific levers are different, the general principles are the same and the UK's version of this is tailoring to their own strengths, which is what the other countries did. It's hard to quantify if this *will* work from this argument, but the minimum argument of it *can* be done is being made, which I'm a fan of.
R3 is where I think this area of the debate ultimately falls apart from Pro because while Pro is making the argument I think they need to be making in that the UK has some pretty unique challenges in front of it and some pretty unique options for addressing problems that they're facing that these other countries didn't have, it's not as strong as I would like it to be. I don't think that Con is making the assumption that all the circumstances are the same - Con is openly stating the differences in the specific policies and what UK is doing that's similar is following the same basic principles while tailoring them to fit their unique situation, so more or less just rehashing the point that the circumstances between the examples are different isn't really a sufficient enough response, and I think that Con is doing enough work in R3 rebuilding the similarities and establishing the projections of the UK's investments in AI (that I *really* would've preferred to see in R2, though is still fine specifically here since it's more or less just a re-extension of the points from R2/answering Pro's R3 point of specific weighing against the harms of the squo) that, without diving too much deeper into contention level offense prematurely, that it's at least possible for Con to access solvency, provided that Con is actually winning on the contention level debate.
With that all out of the way, let's look at the contention level debate.
Overview:
I'm going to be pretty straightforward here and say that this was a bit of a nightmare to evaluate, and for more reasons than numbers make my head hurt. I think both sides could've done a much better job of weighing impacts in a way that allows me to evaluate how offense from, for example, trade agreements compares and interacts with offense from wage growth or labor deficits or security concerns. As things stand now, there's virtually zero weighing being done on offense outside of the specific issue that it's addressing to the point where not only do I have to personally step in multiple times to try and decide how certain contentions interact with one another, but I also have a really hard time finding a specific area of the debate that's actually a voting issue because there's almost no analysis being done as to what issues matter most. The closest thing to it only comes from Pro in R3, but this realistically needs to be happening at every stage of the debate. The easier you make a judge's life, the more likely they are to vote for you, so it would behoove both of you to be a lot clearer with your impact weighing and make it very clear what the voting issues are in the round.
Specifics:
I'm going to address the illegal trafficking debate first because that's the most straight-forward part of this debate to evaluate because, ultimately, it's a wash for a few reasons:
1) As weird/cruel as this is to say, at the end of the day I don't know how to weigh the impacts of illegal human trafficking other than a generic "slavery bad" implication, and neither side is doing anywhere close to enough work to quantify this in a way that I can evaluate if this is more/less/equally important to all the economic impacts being thrown around in the remaining 90% of the contention level debate. I needed to see a lot more/clearer impact calc from either side if I'm going to make this an issue worth pulling the trigger on one way or another.
2) It's also a bit of a case of two ships passing in the night. Both of you are talking about the mechanisms that your case has to solve this issue (Pro through the various EU-based tracking systems and Con through country-specific deals) without any kind of comparison about which is better or more effective. Con more or less just drops Pro's method, and while Pro's trying to contest Con's method, Con's doing more than enough work to show that the deals that UK signs are working, and just calling it a "band aid solution" or "whack-a-mole" is no where near a strong enough refutation to make me doubt this won't continue to be the case.
The labor debate is also a bit of a wash for a similar reason:
1) There's zero impact calc and weighing being done as to what this means in terms of the economy. Are we talking about a GDP growth increase/decrease? Are we just talking about more people having jobs? If the latter, what does that mean in terms of the economy? If I were to evaluate this argument in favor of Pro or Con, realistically, with neither side giving me any analysis as to how these arguments function, I could see this section of the debate functioning as an impact magnifier or mitigator depending on the area/which side's argument I buy, but I'm not particularly inclined to do that work myself.
Which leaves us with the actual economy debate (of course it's going to be the most number-dense section that I end up having to vote on...):
I'm kind of with Pro here in that I'm not really seeing anywhere within the debate Con is making argumentation that rejoining the EU doesn't solve for the harms of the squo. The closest thing to it is a lot of reasons why staying separate solves better as well as some reasons for why rejoining slows things down, but there's a pretty sizable difference between the claims "I solve better"/"They solve worse" and "They don't solve". This means that if I have a reasonable doubt about Con's solvency here, I probably default vote Pro.
Below is a list of all the issues that, at the end of the debate, seem the most relevant to address:
1. Supply chains/Trade Partners
2. Subsidies re-AI growth
For the purposes of my growing headache and decaying sanity (not to mention I need to wake up for work in ~4 hours) I'm going to keep this part short and elaborate further in the comments when I wake up. Poke me if I haven't elaborated by 12pm PST.
In short, I end up buying Pro's argument that the UK needs the EU as a trade partner and that it'd be difficult for the UK to shift their trade elsewhere. I also buy Pro's argument that looking to the historical examples here isn't sufficient evidence that the UK will experience the same growth (the burden of proof here is much higher than when I granted the argument a strength of link in the framing debate). I like Con's argument that AI growth does solve back for the economic harms of the squo and that re-entering the EU makes that growth impossible, but a) it only really shows up in R3, which is way too late for me to want to grant it offense, and b) is still pretty reliant on winning the subsidies debate. I don't see any direct response from Con to Pro's argument that imposing subsidies harms the markets, so it becomes really challenging for me to want to grant Con the solvency they need.
Which means at the end of the day, I'm left with enough reasonable doubt that I'm not sure that Con solves for the harms of the squo. Hence, I vote Pro.
I'm happy to answer any and all questions either side may have. And again, this was an excellent debate that both sides should be proud of.
Considering how critical this area of the debate is to both side's offense, I'm surprised by just how little time is spent in this area of the debate by both sides. While it's easy at a surface skim to say "sure both sides want util so let's use util to evaluate the round", the difference between how much leeway we give to short term harms in favor of long term benefits is critical to access to offense and weighing for both sides, especially considering that it's the crux of Con's case (accepting that there may be short term difficulties that enable long term boons). I would've loved to see more work done on this section of the debate by both sides, but as it is there's enough work being done for me to evaluate.
Ultimately, the framing debate ends up being a bit of a wash, which more or less favors Con by a margin. Pro isn't doing enough to show me why short term harms matter more than long term benefits, and Con is doing enough to give me reason to want to evaluate long term benefits, so they can weigh offense under their framing against offense under Pro's framing. To go a bit further in depth:
The framing debate comes down to two areas:
1. How reliably can we predict these long term benefits.
2. How much short term harms matter.
Pro starts with a pretty typical Util framing. Con's argument is a pretty typical Util argument - number go up good, number must go up, do whatever it takes to make number go up. Pro's responses are that a) hard to predict and quantify, b) we shouldn't sacrifice people now to make number go up, and c) por que no los dos.
C is more or less a wash because this is just saying that Pro can weigh offense under either framing, which Con doesn't really contest (and why would they? Con wants this framing to be the default. If they try to weigh offense under Pro's framing while admitting that short term things might be more difficult, they'll get massacred.) This line also more or less gets dropped by both sides in R3, so I'm not really seeing any reason to evaluate this as anything but Pro saying they can access both frameworks, which at the end of the day is ultimately whatever/slightly Pro favored - if it *does* end up being a weighing debate under Con's framing, Pro's going to need all the help they can get.
B is easily my favorite of the three responses, because it opens up the window to a potentially fun philosophical side-debate to compliment the main dish of number crunching, and there's insane practical potential for this argument within the realm of the debate: if Pro is winning that short term harms matter more than long term gains, then this creates a precluding effect that makes it so Con *MUST* answer *EVERY* harm in the status quo within Pro's case before I'm even allowed to read Con's case. Granted there are ways for Con to try and tackle this task (more on this in a sec), but more likely than not this would almost guarantee a Pro win.
Unfortunately, this argument just doesn't get enough ink on the flow for me to want to accept it. R2 is just a base assertion of it without much/any kind of analysis to warrant it, and R3 is more or less just a re-extension of the argument without much further elaboration or warranting, and Con's doing enough work on this area of the debate via just explaining util logic that I'm willing to grant Con access to their framing without having to jump through this additional hoop.
Admittedly there *was* an interesting route to attacking Pro's framing and solvency for Con in that Pro's case is explicitly *not* a return to the pre-Brexit status quo: Pro's case makes two concessions that didn't exist pre-Brexit. Are these concessions realistically possible for the UK to manage? Would these lead to more/greater harms in the short/long term than the reasons to return to the UK? Idk, I'm not an economist/foreign policy expert, but it *is* a pretty glaring achilles heel within the Pro's case and in that regard I think Con lets Pro get away with highway robbery (granted Con does briefly mention these points in the literal last round of the debate, but that's way too late. These needed to be brought up R1 preferably, R2 at latest, for me to want to evaluate them). If this had been more explored/won on the flow by Con, then this would sever pretty much any kind of link Pro has to solving the harms of the squo, and I can probably just vote Con here regardless of anything else happening in the debate. Alas...
Which leaves us with A, and this is where things get a little tricky. It calls into question Con's solvency, which is a fine argument to make even if it's not my favorite. Con's response in R2 is to show that, from R1, historically looking future forward has worked for other countries, which I think Pro correctly challenges in R2 on whether this is actually applicable to the UK or not. This also puts me in an interesting position where I have to resolve some levels of the contention level debate before I can even finish resolving the framing debate.
Con's response to this in R2 is that while the specific levers are different, the general principles are the same and the UK's version of this is tailoring to their own strengths, which is what the other countries did. It's hard to quantify if this *will* work from this argument, but the minimum argument of it *can* be done is being made, which I'm a fan of.
R3 is where I think this area of the debate ultimately falls apart from Pro because while Pro is making the argument I think they need to be making in that the UK has some pretty unique challenges in front of it and some pretty unique options for addressing problems that they're facing that these other countries didn't have, it's not as strong as I would like it to be. I don't think that Con is making the assumption that all the circumstances are the same - Con is openly stating the differences in the specific policies and what UK is doing that's similar is following the same basic principles while tailoring them to fit their unique situation, so more or less just rehashing the point that the circumstances between the examples are different isn't really a sufficient enough response, and I think that Con is doing enough work in R3 rebuilding the similarities and establishing the projections of the UK's investments in AI (that I *really* would've preferred to see in R2, though is still fine specifically here since it's more or less just a re-extension of the points from R2/answering Pro's R3 point of specific weighing against the harms of the squo) that, without diving too much deeper into contention level offense prematurely, that it's at least possible for Con to access solvency, provided that Con is actually winning on the contention level debate.
With that all out of the way, let's look at the contention level debate.
Overview:
I'm going to be pretty straightforward here and say that this was a bit of a nightmare to evaluate, and for more reasons than numbers make my head hurt. I think both sides could've done a much better job of weighing impacts in a way that allows me to evaluate how offense from, for example, trade agreements compares and interacts with offense from wage growth or labor deficits or security concerns. As things stand now, there's virtually zero weighing being done on offense outside of the specific issue that it's addressing to the point where not only do I have to personally step in multiple times to try and decide how certain contentions interact with one another, but I also have a really hard time finding a specific area of the debate that's actually a voting issue because there's almost no analysis being done as to what issues matter most. The closest thing to it only comes from Pro in R3, but this realistically needs to be happening at every stage of the debate. The easier you make a judge's life, the more likely they are to vote for you, so it would behoove both of you to be a lot clearer with your impact weighing and make it very clear what the voting issues are in the round.
Specifics:
I'm going to address the illegal trafficking debate first because that's the most straight-forward part of this debate to evaluate because, ultimately, it's a wash for a few reasons:
1) As weird/cruel as this is to say, at the end of the day I don't know how to weigh the impacts of illegal human trafficking other than a generic "slavery bad" implication, and neither side is doing anywhere close to enough work to quantify this in a way that I can evaluate if this is more/less/equally important to all the economic impacts being thrown around in the remaining 90% of the contention level debate. I needed to see a lot more/clearer impact calc from either side if I'm going to make this an issue worth pulling the trigger on one way or another.
2) It's also a bit of a case of two ships passing in the night. Both of you are talking about the mechanisms that your case has to solve this issue (Pro through the various EU-based tracking systems and Con through country-specific deals) without any kind of comparison about which is better or more effective. Con more or less just drops Pro's method, and while Pro's trying to contest Con's method, Con's doing more than enough work to show that the deals that UK signs are working, and just calling it a "band aid solution" or "whack-a-mole" is no where near a strong enough refutation to make me doubt this won't continue to be the case.
The labor debate is also a bit of a wash for a similar reason:
1) There's zero impact calc and weighing being done as to what this means in terms of the economy. Are we talking about a GDP growth increase/decrease? Are we just talking about more people having jobs? If the latter, what does that mean in terms of the economy? If I were to evaluate this argument in favor of Pro or Con, realistically, with neither side giving me any analysis as to how these arguments function, I could see this section of the debate functioning as an impact magnifier or mitigator depending on the area/which side's argument I buy, but I'm not particularly inclined to do that work myself.
Which leaves us with the actual economy debate (of course it's going to be the most number-dense section that I end up having to vote on...):
I'm kind of with Pro here in that I'm not really seeing anywhere within the debate Con is making argumentation that rejoining the EU doesn't solve for the harms of the squo. The closest thing to it is a lot of reasons why staying separate solves better as well as some reasons for why rejoining slows things down, but there's a pretty sizable difference between the claims "I solve better"/"They solve worse" and "They don't solve". This means that if I have a reasonable doubt about Con's solvency here, I probably default vote Pro.
Below is a list of all the issues that, at the end of the debate, seem the most relevant to address:
1. Supply chains/Trade Partners
2. Subsidies re-AI growth
For the purposes of my growing headache and decaying sanity (not to mention I need to wake up for work in ~4 hours) I'm going to keep this part short and elaborate further in the comments when I wake up. Poke me if I haven't elaborated by 12pm PST.
In short, I end up buying Pro's argument that the UK needs the EU as a trade partner and that it'd be difficult for the UK to shift their trade elsewhere. I also buy Pro's argument that looking to the historical examples here isn't sufficient evidence that the UK will experience the same growth (the burden of proof here is much higher than when I granted the argument a strength of link in the framing debate). I like Con's argument that AI growth does solve back for the economic harms of the squo and that re-entering the EU makes that growth impossible, but a) it only really shows up in R3, which is way too late for me to want to grant it offense, and b) is still pretty reliant on winning the subsidies debate. I don't see any direct response from Con to Pro's argument that imposing subsidies harms the markets, so it becomes really challenging for me to want to grant Con the solvency they need.
Which means at the end of the day, I'm left with enough reasonable doubt that I'm not sure that Con solves for the harms of the squo. Hence, I vote Pro.
I'm happy to answer any and all questions either side may have. And again, this was an excellent debate that both sides should be proud of.