Vigilantism is justified when the government has failed to enforce the law

Though all you've asked for is a rip-apart of your case for this term's LDV resolution, I have to establish a negative advocacy to make this work. I will do so when necessary to refute one of your contentions. Also, to make this easier, I've essentially added numbered arguments to your original case and posted below. I've also argued this as if I were critiquing an LDV case, competitively speaking. It won't follow informal norms of debate. Standards: V: Societal Welfare 1) What is this? How is it that I'm supposed to strive for something or achieve it if I don't have a definition and analysis for the most important standard in the round? 2) Human rights will always outweigh, as they are a precursor to all welfare, and societies must uphold them to achieve welfare; 3) The negative advocacy can achieve this value better, as it advocates a true change, rather than a negligible, dangerous bandaid fix. (Note: my negative advocacy is to propose violent revolution as an alternative point of solvency to vigilantism). C: Will to Power 1) Will to power does not guarantee societal welfare because individuals will not always act for social good. See Paulo Fereire (oppressed often become oppressors), and you have no warrants as to how you can guarantee a vigilante will work for only social good. 2) The will to power referred to by Nietzsche is not grounds to affirm. He isn't giving you a link to societal welfare in his analysis; your card doesn't tell me how the will to power will lead to more welfare, just more power struggles. 3) Turn: Will to power will cause more unrest and lead to less overall stability, which in turns leads to less welfare as individuals squabble over who has the power to portion out justice. Factions ensue, as the quotation states. In my negative case, I have specific cards that prove vigilantes and vigilante committees, drawn together by commonalities, will squabble between each other to deliver justice and end up fighting each other more than establishing justice. Furthermore, these vigilantes are often funded by a corrupt gov't so that they kill each other off, rather than making headway against an illegitimate state. Thesis: 1) The will of the people is not upheld through vigilantism~ the will of the vigilante or his committee is upheld, with no check on judicial power and no procedures by which to conduct justice. I have cards that detail human rights violations perpetrated by these vigilantes due to their volatile and unstructured foundations. Procedural justice cannot be maintained because there are no checks to bias (esp. since vigilantes gather in like groups...what a criminal is of a different race or religion than those who seek to punish him?) Observations: I lumped these together. What impact do they have on the round? You are so unclear about why it is that these issues affect ground or interpretation that, as a debater, I'd just skip them. These win you no favor, nor do they help us understand the round any better than we did before. You need terminal analysis that actually finishes up these and turns them into cohesive thoughts. After writing cases for this resolution, I found no resolutional analysis necessary. At all. Contention 1: While the progression may be true, this path leads inevitably to some sort of anarchical state. By #3, we've lost our liberties, and the government has become illegitimate and oppressive. My negative advocacy would be that, at this point, retaining the gov't but reinforcing its laws only serves to reify a bad system of gov't which clearly needs to be overthrown. Hence, revolution will solve for justice and societal welfare infinitely better than vigilantes, who won't be able to succeed in reestablishing liberties in the first place due to their inherent violation of human rights and their inability to maintain stability as a procedural justice system will be able to. That, and the warrants you have here don't establish much of anything, except that the US seems to favor a social contract. This smacks of being US-specific, which is patently abusive. And where'd the Yoo guy come from? Did you give a card for that? Contention 2: 1) Warrants? What historical or empirical evidence can you give me that proves vigilantes will be able to establish or maintain social order? I can give an impressive list of failed attempts at establishing a new order via vigilantism, mostly because of the myriad problems vigilantes encounter when trying to be just on an individual level. Not only that, but saying that a vigilante will be able to establish a new order is contradictory to your position: vigilantes work within an existing system. They make little attempt to change the system. Revolution is clearly not vigilantism, and you are joining them.