Sea lions are seals

A – Interpretation: Debaters ought to instigate resolutions with fair burdens and ground available for both sides arguing. B – Violation: The resolution’s a truism. He’s literally asking a question that you can goggle the answer for in Wikipedia. C – Standards: First is ground skew. The way he has constructed his resolution leaves the other side with physically no possible arguments for why sea lions are not considered seals. There’s physically no possible argument I could construct because that’s literally what they’re scientifically classified as. This leaves me with no possible substantive way to argue the resolution, which is inherently unfair and harms the educational value of debate. It harms fairness because if he’s constructing a resolution that leaves one side with zero room to make substantive arguments, there’s no fair way to debate the resolution. It harms education because instead of having a debate about biology and scientific categorizations of animals and the various levels of classifications, we have this debate because I have no room to actually make a normal argument, which means less learning is taking place. Second is reciprocity. By creating a resolution that’s a truism, he gives himself a massive advantage while not allowing any kind of reciprocal advantage for the other side to even things out and create an even playing field. Reciprocity is important to fairness because if I just keep making things easier and easier for me without doing anything to help the other side, the debate can’t ever really be classified as fair. D - Voters. He ought to lose the debate because:- Fairness is a voter because the role of the judge is decide on who did the better job debating but that’s not possible if one side has an unfair advantage. - Education is also a voter because the only thing that gives debating value is what we learn from the debate. It’s the entire reason why competitive debate exists in the first place. - And, vote him down for this because a) I had to spend time checking the abuse, so the round can never be evaluated fairly again, and b) to disincentivise bad debating - he’s always going to continue to do this until he gets punished for doing it. And, don’t buy the “don’t accept the debate” response that’s going to come because this creates an awful precedent for debating because a) debating is entirely about challenging people’s mindsets and exploring different ideas and ways of approaching problems, so saying people can’t use different methods to approach a topic is entirely counter-productive to debating, b) this only encourages people to make stricter rules to narrow who can argue for what and how they can make arguments in general, which hurts creativity and only encourages people to specifically design rules and definitions around ways to make it easier for them to win (i. e. violating the rules results in him just straight winning without any discussion of the topic) and c) just saying I shouldn’t have accepted doesn’t mean that his rules aren’t abusive and harmful. If anything I’m specifically the person who should’ve accepted as I’m one of the few people on here who not only knows to call him out on this kind of behavior, but also on how to call him out. And, theory comes before his case because a) theory aims to establish how we ought to carry out debates in the first place, which means before we can even go about evaluating arguments in a debate setting we need to evaluate the impacts of the theory argument and whether or not he loses off of it, and b) it's nonsensical to say that his case comes first because his case operates in the very setting that I'm challenging i. e. this debate. If I'm winning on theory, then he automatically loses the debate before we even evaluate his case. So, this makes the debate super easy to evaluate:The interpretation is the overarching rule or principle I'm arguing ought to be applied to debates to ensure better debating. There's no way he's not violating this rule since the resolution is literally a truism -- there's no fairness in substantive ground for both sides in any way. His violation of my proposed interpretation is bad because of the two standards I proposed -- being ground skew and reciprocity. These standards are important to debating because they ensure the continuation of the two principles that are essential to the activity of debate -- fairness and education. I explain why he ought to lose the debate straight up because of his violation of these two principles. You vote against him because the loss is the only real way to punish him for this kind of abuse: he created this debate as a way to get a free win, so punish him by giving him a loss instead.