WODC Round Two - Energy

A quick note before we begin, my opponent has not contested the point that we should seek to join OPEC. His concession of this means I've already fulfilled half of my BOP.On The BoPFirst, his argument for why I have the BoP is pointless. I'm arguing that through a single year of having the oil nationalized, we'll make $1 trillion. His $25 million would be pocket change to that. Second, he ignores the nature of the resolution implying we're comparing worlds, a world in which we nationalize oil and try to join OPEC and a world in which we don't and the harms and benefits of both worlds. This means that, by the way the resolution is set up, the burden of proof is split. But I don't even see why this is a debate because he provides arguments of his own anyway.On ContradictionUhh....what?To avoid running a theory shell on this statement alone, no, my opponent is not allowed to contradict himself willy nilly so long as one of his arguments holds up. This is a) an attempt to shot-gun argument out (which he's doing rather poorly, ironically), and b) a violation of the fairness of the debate. Forcing me to adhere to a standard that my opponent doesn't have to stick to is like saying that I can only type without using any vowels and if I make a grammatical error I lose, but my opponent can type like a 12 year old with their first phone and not get punished. Fairness in debate is important because debate is entirely about a contest between two sides to see who the better debater is, but this becomes impossible if one side is skewed. Now before I get into the meat of the debate, there's one thing I need to mention really quickly. My opponent makes no response at all to any word that I wrote in my case. His entire last round was constructing his own arguments. Hold these dropped arguments against him.On the NAP:There's a number of reasons why you don't look to the NAP here.First, the NAP is a horribly flawed philosophy. There's nothing about it that actually binds actors into following it. Furthermore, even if there are people who follow the NAP, there's no protection or recourse in the inevitable situation where someone doesn't follow the NAP. Secondly, the NAP is insufficient to make moral judgments. Saying that I ought not perpetuate violence is all well and nice, but when someone comes at me with a gun and says that they're going to shoot me, what am I supposed to do under the NAP? I can't fight back, since that would be in violation of the gun-totting criminal's right to self-ownership. My opponent would probably argue that people have a right to defend themselves if their life is being threatened, but there's nothing in the NAP that allows this kind of exception to occur. It requires some higher moral framework in order to make these kinds of delineations, which is why you prefer my framework over his. I can make these kinds of choices under my egoistic framework. The NAP can't. Third, extending out the NAP to apply to property rights is a misapplication of the NAP that takes it out of context and only justifies using real, literal force in response to a "perceived" threat. If someone tresspasses on my property, therefore violating my property ownership and my rights to that extent, how am I supposed to react in line with the NAP? I can't just tresspass on the tresspasser's property as equal payment, as that doesn't actually do anything. I have to go over the aggression that they came forth with and threaten them (often times with deadly force) if they don't comply with our wishes. This just perpetuates the same aggression it seeks to prevent. So at the end of the day, you can't look to the NAP to justify anything. You're preferring my framework of egoism, which actually justifies moral actors taking actions and explains those actions. On The Environmental "Counterplan":First off, no, he can't just say "Oh hey guys I'll post a counter-plan to my opponent's arguments eventually saying why he's wrong, but just trust me that he is!". It's inherently unfair to give me less time to react to new arguments when I've presented all of mine in full from the start. If he actually wanted to run this counter-plan, he could've a) put it in since he used 8k out of the 10k characters alloted for the debate, or b) even if he didn't have run, he easily could've made room by shortening up the unnecessarily long block quotes to give himself some more space. Don't let him actually get away with this, that's unfair to me.On The Negative Environmental Impacts:This contention is easy enough to get out of by just saying that I don't bite into these harms. There's absolutely nothing in the resolution saying that by nationalizing the oil industry that I have to continue burning more and more oil. There's no reason for why I can't just say that the USFG should take control of the oil industries and start implimenting greener measures to reduce green-house gas emitions and reduce the damage on the environment. He's trying to stick words in my mouth that I've never said. This entire contention just fails to link to my case.On The Constitution:This argument is laughably flawed. His argument that it's unconstitutional for the USFG to nationalize an industry is just blind to the fact that this has already happened in the recent past. Multiple times. The banks, railways, steel mills, coal mines, and foreclosed homes have all been nationalized at one point or another[6]. If his argument was true and that it wasn't constitutional, these things wouldn't have happened. But even if I buy that his argument here is true, it's just the is/ought fallacy. His argument here is that because it is illegal, it should stay illegal, but that begs the question of why it's illegal in the first place or even if it should be illegal. He provides no warrant at all in this argument for why it should be illegal, meaning that I can still advocate for this nationalization. And what about that Underview?Up to this point in the debate all of the impacts of my opponent's case have been utilitarian in nature: he's trying to weigh harm to the environemnt and monetary cost against the proposed resolution of nationalizing the oil industry. The problem is he never addresses the underview where I explain why Utilitarianism fails entirely. Extend out the Bostrom and Tegmark cards explaining that, because the universe is spacially infinite, that there's always going to be an infinite amount of good and an infinite amount of bad in the universe. Subtracting some finite quality from an infinite quality will still be infinite. This makes utilitarian calculus impossible to actually do, meaning that utilitarianism fails. What impact does this have on the debate? Simple: all of his impacts become meaningless. There's no way to weigh them agaisnt each other anymore if utilitarianism fails. You default to my framework of egoism which says that we should act in accordance to our own self-interest. This means that the resolution becomes affirmed because if egoism is true, the USFG can do whatever they want so long as it's within their own self-interests. It falls to my opponent, since he dropped the egoism framework, to explain why it isn't in their self-interest to affirm the resolution. The problem with this is that because he also dropped the underview, he can't actually do that: he doesn't have any kind of way to weigh different impacts without it devolving into meaninglessness. This means it's physically impossible for him to negate the resolution. But let's take a step back and say that you as the voter aren't buying this. You aren't buying the util underview and you aren't buying the egoism framework. That's still fine, because I'm still winning the debate. The NAP is shot as a philosophy, I don't link into his environmental harms, and his constitutional argument is just flat out wrong. I'm creating the economic incentive to nationalize the oil industry with a trillion dollars a year in profits for the USFG, which more than outweighs the economics harms coming off of his case. I can even outweigh the environmental harms coming off of his case (since $1 trillion/year is more than $500 billion/decades according to his own evidence) and go back and fix the harms that nationalizing the oil industry would create while still having profits. There's just no level of this debate that I'm not winning on. So let's recap real fast.1) My opponent didn't touch on a single argument of mine. Literally 100% of my case was dropped. 2) You can extend out my egoism framework as a sufficient reason to affirm the resolution. If egoism is valid, then the USFG ought to act in whatever way fits their best interests meaning if they want to nationalize the oil industry then there's no reason they shouldn't. It's on my opponent to provide the reasons for why they ought not nationalize, which he can't actually do since he doesn't respond to the underview. If Utilitarianism is flawed and can't actually account for anything, then there's no way to leverage impacts against my framework as reasons to not affirm. 3) Even if you're not buying into my framework, I'm still winning on the contentional level since the economic benefits of nationalizing a) outweigh the negative impacts coming off of his case, and b) can be used to go back and solve for the negative impacts coming off of his case, meaning that he has no unique offense to extend out and negate with.4) Don't let him stand up in the next round and come up with some funky environmental counterplan since he had plenty of opportunities to make that argument in the last round. It's inherently unfair to me to have presented all of my arguments in favor of affirming in the first round while he gets to sit back and choose what round he wants to fully flesh out his case. And fairness is important because without it the entire debate becomes pointless. Sources:[6] - http://www.cbsnews.com...