This Case Document is meant to be an example of cases which teams could have run at CNDF Nationals 2024. This document is not intended to be considered the “right” case for any of these motions, many other arguments may exist. The purpose of this document is to help teams who debated at CNDF Nationals 2024 reflect on their performance in the rounds, and use these cases to learn so that they can debate even better in the future. These cases are simply a skeleton for you to build off of, as all the contentions contained within should be run with many additional lines of analysis. This document is intended to be completely free, so you should not have paid for it in any capacity. If you have any thoughts about this resource or would like to reach out with any questions, please feel free to do so at: seedtournaments@gmail.com
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Proposition
Framing: History education is not the only way which knowledge about local history and culture can be acquired: traditions, hearsay, museums, and news references are good methods of learning about recent and topical events
1: Global centric history education teaches people about the world. This is valuable because it enables people to become more involved and educated when interpreting global issues (i.e. Israel/Palestine or Russia/Ukraine), an increasingly prevalent skill especially in developed nations. This is also valuable because individuals can familiarize themselves with foreign systems, offering a wealth of applicable knowledge both domestically and for travel.
2: Nationalism brews negative sentiments toward people who do not subscribe to the culture taught within history. Most people find pride in their own history as they are able to take ownership of a wealth of culture that becomes the foundation of their identity. The downside to this is that it contributes to ideas which oppose external cultures and traditions, perhaps creating an anti-immigrant environment.
Opposition
Framing: Both global and national centric history can be done poorly if the leaders have bad intentions. This debate can be about which system inherently lends itself to more accurate education, but the incentive analysis is symmetric.
1: Being taught the history of your country creates a sense of national identity and pride. Even if not all of the history is positive, acknowledging these things collectively still creates the same community effect. This is valuable because people then buy into the social systems, and are more willing to contribute to their own community.
2: Global history ranks pretty low in relevance to most people in the world, who have much more important issues of deconstructing their own colonial history or must deal with the roots of conflict in their country. National centric history is a point of access for students to learn about these issues, and for future students not to forget about the systems that created peace in the country. National centric history education is instrumentally valuable because learning about one’s own country’s history allows them to improve the country.
3: The ability to have their stories told within the history of a nation is often the last possible way to pay reparations to those deeply oppressed by the nation. The thing is, the Burmese civil war or the history of residential schools are just not big impactful things to a collective global history, so they are unlikely to get coverage at all. This forgets about decades of historical oppression and trauma, which is a principled harm.
Proposition
1: All large corporations rely on a large degree of exploitation in order to remain large. This could be price fixing or colluding as monopolies, planned obsolescence, privacy invasions (data harvesting), tax havens, and many step into grounds of child labor, sweatshops, environmental exploitation, and resource depletion. The reason they all rely on these practices is because their size uniquely enables the worst practices: long chains in corporate hierarchy are difficult to dismantle, monopolies always have leverage, being publicly traded enables corporate growth without any positive impact, and there’s a race to the bottom – especially for top executives – to maximize share value to maintain their fiduciary responsibility. Even if the harms committed by these corporations are reasonably small compared to the benefit they may provide to the LGBTQ+ movement, pride parades principally should not be allowed to benefit from the exploitation of others through these corporations; it is bad to take dirty money.
2: The practical tradeoff of upholding this principle is reasonably small: there are still high political incentives to maintain the prevalence of pride parades, as even indifferent politicians have an equal incentive to rainbow wash their campaign. This means it is still highly likely for pride parades to access things like street closures and funding for merchandise, especially if a politician can now frame their campaign as “saving the pride parade”. Additionally, while smaller businesses won’t be able to donate as much money, the ways they support the pride parade are likely much more authentic and meaningful.
Opposition
Framing: It’s on prop to prove why ALL large corporations are bad and shouldn’t be allowed to participate. Good companies like fashion brands that uplift LGBTQ+ models shouldn’t be banned from participating because that harms both them and the pride parade. It’s possible to ban only the bad apples from participating since organizers may turn down sponsorships.
1: Pride parades are only able to reach their mass in both participants and organization (road closures, floats, merch sales) through the sponsorships from these corporations. The sponsorship of these corporations is directly responsible for the explosive media exposure the pride parade receives throughout June.
2: Banning all companies is unpopular, and will result in backlash/opposition to the LGBTQ+ movement. This because the LGBTQ+ community becomes viewed as adversarial to the rest of the world’s interests.
3: Banning companies does not stop them from doing bad practice. They are able to virtue signal support for other social movements to remain popular, and the vast majority of their clients are likely agnostic to whether their support is legitimate. Additionally, being banned from the pride parade does not necessarily prevent companies from claiming to support pride.
Proposition
Framing: This motion is only applicable to publicly traded companies
1: When CEOs are profiting off of financial instruments like stock options, the so called “performance based rewards” do not actually reflect CEO performance. Out of the many ways to improve a company, creating stable, long-term successful products is the least efficient way to balloon share value – and opp needs to defend the significantly worse ways CEOs will try and increase their own income. In the context of a stock option, for example, CEOs are offered a fixed rate to purchase a share, which is higher than the current market value. The only way for CEOs to profit from this share is thus to increase their EPS (earnings per share) before the share expiry date. This incentivizes bad practices: CEOs might make risky decisions with short term profit and long term harms, or manipulate quarterly earnings by hiding losses or temporarily cutting costs.
2: Stock options get taxed at the lower capital gains rate only when they’re sold allowing CEOs to effectively avoid taxes, whereas salaries are always subject to income tax. Collecting taxes from the world’s wealthiest CEOs (tech giants are the biggest companies) accounts for a sizable chunk of tax revenue; in fact the reason stock options became such a popular means of compensation is because they enabled tax avoidance.
3: The CEO reports to the board of directors, and the board of directors is responsible for the shareholders. This motion creates a conflict of interest between the firm and its shareholders, because CEOs often become major shareholders within a company, influencing/becoming the board of directors that hires the CEO. This is an alternative mechanism that undermines the already limited accountability that keeps CEOs in check.
4: Salaries make being a CEO at newly publicly traded companies that are still reasonably small much more accessible. This is because these companies have very uncertain futures, and stocks are simply too volatile for someone who might have financial expertise but depend on a stable salary to earn their income.
Opposition
1: When more capital is invested within a financial market, it becomes more liquid, meaning it becomes more efficient, there is greater ease of transaction, and investors can buy and sell assets at stable prices. The CEO often has a pretty substantial stake in the shares of the company, and when all CEOs are doing this in an entire industry, it is enough to move the needle on liquidity in the market. This increased liquidity is a positive feedback loop and attracts more investors. Among the impacts of liquidity, the most important one is that it creates way more data points about the price of a share, leading to better price discovery and preventing the growth of asset bubbles.
2: Performance based incentives create strong incentives to increase the stock price, which is a good proxy for the success of the company
Proposition
Model:
Framing:
1: Civilians have reasonable criticisms of invasions which decision makers in the government often don’t consider. This is because the discussions within the government often include parties with a vested interest in invasion – top military generals only get their budget from ongoing conflicts, and executives of defense companies need active clients. Additionally, the government is disconnected from the interests of people, meaning that even the most well intentioned discussions often make assumptions about certain civilian interests in invasion (i.e. Iraq after 9/11) that are unbelievably incorrect. Civilians should have an opportunity to challenge governmental sentiments on invasion because they are things that could not have been foreseen during the election, and war has long lasting impacts on people’s families, social contexts, and economic well being.
2: Referendums are excellent opportunities for people to voice their concerns about the invasion. Even though the ballot only includes a “yes” and “no”, media coverage over discussions between experts, discussions, and public forums will escalate the more nuanced opinions about how the war should be held. These escalations are then translated into political will, where politicians now understand how best to represent their voters when challenging the trajectory of conflict within the government, leading to plans that are generally way more agreeable to the people in the country.
3: When civilians are more personally involved in the happening of a war, the government is held to a higher degree of accountability and transparency to reflect that civilian demands are being met. At the very least, this means avoiding some of the most immoral things that happen during conflicts, because most people in the country are probably opposed to that, and will demand reports to prove it didn’t happen.
4: The idea of target countries getting a chance to prepare for the invasion doesn’t make sense for a few reasons. First, they symmetrically understand there is some risk of intervention and that the country might/is likely to invade, now there’s just also a referendum. Second, even if they somehow gained conclusive knowledge that something is coming, it’s impossible to prepare – the logistics necessary to prepare for a sudden defense against a ground invasion, or more realistically the construction of a missile defense system are not things that can happen overnight, or even over the course of weeks. Third, even if there was legitimately the capacity to prepare for the particular invasion that is happening, the target country has no means of identifying which plan is being used, and thus they don’t even know how to prepare to begin with. If anything, the “additional time the target country gets” has a way bigger impact on civilians being able to evacuate the nation prior to the invasion.
Opposition
1: People make bad decisions about whether war should occur and how it should happen, and when their concerns are held in primacy within decisions, they could draw out wars or lead to increased loss of human life. For example, if civilians take a hardline stance on the maximum budget for the invasion, the government must obey the general political sentiments in order to stay in power. However, weaker helicopters or a lack of personnel might lead to increased loss of human life, or a drawn out war that harms more civilians. Instead, opp defends civilians only being listened to sometimes – they can still protest and escalate political representation for other stances, but the movement is less collective than a broad societal belief.
2: Referendums politicize and polarize uncontroversial things. In order for parties to differentiate from each other and antagonize others, it is in their interest to take a particular stance behind how the war should be conducted. While there might have otherwise been objectively good takes, like don’t go to war or don’t send boots on the ground, voters are inclined to vote with their party, leading to worse outcomes of the conflict.
Proposition
Framing:
1: Opp is right that women sections for tournaments are often the only way for women to participate at tournaments, since if a chess federation were only choosing a single team of people to send to a mixed gender tournament, even at double the size, the higher rated men will almost always outqualify women for these spots. However, I clarified in the framing that almost all women sections will likely be retained, meaning the only tournaments which become mixed gender are WGM norm tournaments becoming FM norm tournaments. These tournaments specifically avoid the problem of women getting outcompeted by men for spots, because the entire point of norm tournaments is that they feature a lot of similarly rated players competing for a norm, thus nullifying the point of sending a federation’s best players. Having women play in the open section is good because a lot of women have deflated ratings from only getting to play women lower rated than them, and from the net ELO amongst women being quite slow-moving from a lack of newcomers and active players.
2: The existence of a special WGM title for validation creates the sentiment that women are worse than men at chess. This is bad because it’s obviously not true; men are not biologically advantaged at chess.
Opposition
1: Chess is not a sport that pays very well; even grandmasters are often relegated to working a second job to supplement a volatile and small income stream of prize money and federation sponsors. The WGM title uniquely brings sponsorship opportunities and federation grants to female players because it recognizes their accomplishments in isolation to privileged and male-dominated achievements. For instance, a FIDE Master title (the mixed-gender equivalent of the WGM title) does not stand out because it’s an achievement that is valued compared to other mixed gender titles. If funding gets worse for titled female players, attendance of female players also declines.
2: Abolishing the WGM title creates a ton of precedent to abolish other titles as well, FIDE and top players would declare it makes little sense why the reasons for removing the WGM title don’t also cross apply to other woman-only titles. While the WIM (Woman International Master) title has a mixed gender equivalent of Candidate Master, WFM and WCM titles (Woman FIDE master and Woman Candidate Master) do not. This means existing titled players, WFMs and WCMs, are literally stripped of their titles as a downstream impact of the motion.
3: Women’s chess tournaments/leagues are substantially reduced by this motion. WGM norm tournaments are the first to go, replaced with mixed gender FM norm tournaments. It becomes less sensible to host things like the Women’s World Championship, or hold women’s sections for the Chess Olympiad, when FIDE itself denies that women should have a distinct axis of rating competition. Beyond all other impacts like federations prefering to send higher rated men to these now mixed-gender tournaments, it’s bad to remove the best foundations for building a women’s chess community.
Proposition
1: Social media fashion influencers make the vast majority of their money from corporate sponsors, and they secure these for the long term by continuously driving interest to these corporations. They also build their career off showing off all types of clothes, building a consumerist sentiment amongst their fans that they must update their wardrobes very often (part of why fast fashion is so successful). This is bad because consumers often purchase things which are unnecessary for them, wasting money, but also because a humongous part of the fashion industry produces clothes unethically, sourcing child labour or sweatshops, or at least contributing heavily to environmental damage.
2: Fashion influencers are responsible for perpetuating unrealistic beauty and lifestyle standards, like idealized body types and perfect skin. Additionally, part of the mirage of authenticity to sell the fashion aura is dependent on lavish lifestyles like perfect relationships, extreme productivity, and effortless success. Viewers often internalize these things in negative ways.
Opposition
1: The rise of fashion influencers allowed more diverse backgrounds within fashion to gain significantly more visibility. The image of ideal body types represented by traditional media in the counterfactual is actually challenged by successful plus size influencers, and influencers of more racial backgrounds have found success by not having to appeal to conventional standards.
2: Fashion influencers are often points of identification for people within a particular community. It is an empowering experience to feel that you represent and can signal to others the beliefs, identities, communities, and aesthetics you subscribe to.
Proposition
Model: NASA’s alibi for Neil Armstrong’s death would be that while the moon landing was successful, the spacecraft had been hit by an asteroid on the return path. No one involved in the faking of the moon landing would be allowed to reveal the truth, enforced by deep and unthinkable punishments if they do.
1: If NASA faked the moon landing successfully, NASA would continue to receive investments, allowing the institution to exist. Frankly, it’s quite easy to detect an asteroid even with the technology that existed during this era. If NASA were known to make such a silly mistake, the government would opt for changes to NASA as an institution. This could mean swapping the entirety of the NASA assembly, smart people responsible for building NASA up from nothing, or cutting off investments for NASA and giving up on space exploration altogether.
2: At the peak of a space race against the Soviet Union, a successful moon landing demonstrates unwavering technological and ideological superiority over the rest of the world. If this image were instead replaced by something as stupid as not detecting an asteroid this close to Earth, NASA would be humiliated for decades to come, a career ending shift of the institution’s identity.
Opposition
1: The fake moon landing would eventually be discovered for a few reasons. First, it’s just incredibly difficult to film something like this. There is no prior video footage of astronauts being anywhere even close to the surface of the moon, so a successful NASA recreation is unlikely. Second, NASA researchers and scientists not involved and thus not morally implicated in the faking have a high likelihood of discovering. Even if no one spills a word, evidence like accounting for a fake spacecraft, camera crew, the disappearance of prototype astronaut suits, are likely to spill out. Third, NASA will have to build a convincing alibi to deal with all the interview questions about what happened to the crew, which is quite difficult to fabricate. Last, there is no footprint/flag on the moon, so decades down the line someone will grow suspicious. At least if NASA were open about its failure it’d continue to exist, maybe with a bit of shame.
2: NASA was created in order to discover true things about space, and faking the moon landing is an encroachment of the fundamental purpose of NASA. The name “NASA” becoming wealthier or staying alive for longer isn’t valuable for NASA if its life was only valuable for discovering things in the first place.
Proposition
1: Some countries, like China at table tennis and badminton, are just unshakable on the world stage. They are so good that 58 year old Zhiying Zeng made her Olympic debut in Paris representing Chile, tying a beautiful personal story of mishaps like rule changes that stopped her from succeeding in China, and also becoming one of the strongest players in South America even at this age. There is no Chinese loss of pride when these players are naturalized; it only comes to prove how dominant China is at the sport. Chinese people across the world fell in love with the story about how she finally reached her dream to compete in the Olympics, and Chileans cheered on their coach turned superstar. Frankly, the world doesn’t care about who is playing for who as long as there are inspiring stories behind the athletes they support.
2: There are certain countries which simply wish to participate in the Olympics because their representation in the Olympics is incredibly limited to begin with – perhaps they only participated in 2 or 3 sports. Since the Olympics require all participants to receive a certain performance benchmark before being allowed to participate, it is sometimes just impossible for a nation to participate even if they wanted to. Therefore, even if the players being naturalized are not competitive enough to score impressively against other countries, it is still valuable to the people in the country to see their nation being represented on a global stage.
3: Athletes most prone to take naturalization offers are ones who could not find competitive success within their own nation – because they’re now taking on a drastic shift to their life, potentially facing unwelcomeness in order to have a second shot at their sport. Getting a second chance is a good thing because these are people who likely didn’t have many other preferable career opportunities, whereas they are now offered a cushy position spearheading the development of a sport in a wealthy nation.
Opposition
Framing: The countries which are willing to spend the money to buy out an internationally competitive team need more than just civilian interest to do so – they are mostly motivated by immense gains to soft power, especially if it’s a country which has a bad reputation for things like oppression.
1: International sports success for these countries is a bad thing, because it allows them to smokescreen domestic oppression, instrumentalizing the oppressed to drive foreign investment. Additionally, if this builds interest domestically within the sport (i.e. UAE succeeding drumming up interest in soccer), these countries will invest in new stadiums and sports infrastructure using migrant labor.
2: There’s a beautiful narrative behind underdog stories that generates viewership, which depends on the authenticity of reflecting the hard work of a nation’s will. The Olympics are the exclusive place where competition is across nations, not just sports for the sake of competition – so upholding the authenticity is highly valuable.
3: The motion damages the sports circuit within the country the athletics board hires from. This is because the only way to “spawn in” a sports interest along with success is to buy top players; these players would have been highly valuable to the home country they’re now playing against. The loss of a player from a circuit which cared and valued them outweighs the gain of a player to a circuit that has substantially less interest in the sport.
Proposition
Model: Implement a very good set of Uniform Civil Codes, like where sons and daughters inherit the same amount, the legal age of marriage is pushed up to 18, and divorce does not exploit protected classes. These civil codes are agnostic to the religion of the citizen. These civil codes will be enforced by community leaders, with regular checks and balances to ensure proper enforcement, and resources will be provided to facilitate legal issues. This will come out of the Indian military budget.
1: The uniform civil code will instantly protect thousands of young girls about to be married off, stop a religion from defending an abusive husband, and do tons to alleviate civil oppression. Most of these new rules don’t step on religious beliefs, and really just deal with deep rooted oppression that was defended by religious institutions. However, even including ones which might infringe on religious beliefs, the massive utility benefit for marginalized communities outweighs the utility loss for entitled oppressors.
2: When India is perceived as a more progressive country on civil standards, and as Indians open up to accepting the UCC over time, India is able to further progressive outside of civil standards as new beliefs become less and less foreign to the nation. Liberalizing thought in India also creates significant cultural similarities between India and Western nations, allowing India to tap into soft power benefits and a massive pool of wealth, bringing 300 million people above the poverty line.
Opposition
Note: Case 1 is about backlash, meant to deal with a perfect model from proposition. Case 2 is meant to deal with a missing proposition model.
1: The community leaders, religious leaders, oppressors, etc. are likely to be mortified by these policy changes, as the civil code will directly legalize things which benefit the oppressed who have granted them power for such a long time. This leads to extensive backlash from these actors, of which two major impacts are notable. First, those who despise these policies are likely to be very large in number – as even if, for example, a mother benefited from divorce policies that granted her voluntary custody of the child, she might still despise the UCC for how it is legalizing her gay child to have a gay marriage. The next Indian election will be won by a far-right party which thrives off campaigning oppressive hatred toward everyone in the country, meaning the UCC enrages people into doing more harm than its initial benefit. Second, although gay marriage may now be legal through laws, religious leaders will just raise the homophobia in order to ensure that gay marriage doesn’t happen in their community. Other protected classes will receive equally increased oppression and hate crimes due to heightened community policing of their class.
2: (If prop doesn’t model what the Uniform Civil Code will include) The UCC will not be implemented well because India has a lot of diverse needs between different communities, and the UCC will prioritize the areas which have the greatest electoral influence. This comes at a direct tradeoff of liberty of other regions, and tramples the freedom of exclusively minority religions.
Proposition
Note: there are primarily 2 models prop can strategically take in this motion; I would personally pick the first model since it evades the most annoying opposition arguments.
Model 1: The scientist would disperse this knowledge anonymously to a trustworthy and powerful set of actors (maybe from multiple countries so they don’t fight over it), and use them as the mechanism for releasing the knowledge to humanity. These trustworthy and powerful people are likely to impose alternate systems to regulate things like overpopulation, i.e. euthanization at the same age for all people, or policies that legislate no more childbirth. If the scientist wants to, they can reveal that they were the ones who discovered the cure shortly before death, and refer to their evidence of the event that taught them this secret to prove it.
1: By not releasing this knowledge to humanity, you are directly subjecting hundreds millions of elderly people to suffering, and millions more people to random deaths from incurable illnesses. There is literally not a single moral system that says it is morally permissible not to release the information, let alone at 0 personal expense. You came across this information at complete random, so you are not entitled to it.
2: Knowing you’ve single handedly made an impact on the trajectory of humankind is one of the most cathartic things a person can experience. People donate to charity knowing that they would never be personally acknowledged in gratitude, and they are happy to see the smiles on other’s faces; this scientist is no different.
3: The scientist effectively has a get-out-of-jail-free card, as they became the person at the highest perceived moral high-ground on the planet. If it ever becomes necessary, the scientist can reveal that they were the one who cured the planet and provide evidence and completely shift the judgment casted on them by other people.
4: Holding onto this information makes very little sense, because at best you effectively become a vampire and outlive everyone around you. Maybe your short term preferences overtime will align to make this life desirable, but right now, you’re a scientist brimming with hope and love for research, who probably has valuable friends and family and you don’t want to become a monster.
Model 2: The scientist would leverage this information over others smartly, making intelligent decisions to the best of their ability not to make enemies of important people. Since we can’t meaningfully speculate what type of desires and morals this scientist abides by, this model just generally supports leveraging it for the best causes the scientist believes in. This is also a reasonable model because it does eventually share the cure with the rest of humanity, just in an unclear timeframe.
1: This cure can be used as leverage to solve global issues. Leaders gain vast political advantages if they can offer immortality to their constituents.
2: This cure can be a path to a ton of individual money and fame by selling it to governments or receiving media coverage.
Opposition
Note: The first two arguments are stronger when dealing with the first model, and the third argument is a good way to beat the second model.
1: Dying naturally is an inevitable part of life that no human has control over, which is a very important reason for why dying people are able to accept their death. We convince ourselves with things like “the universe willed it”, etc. Meanwhile, dying artificially by the hand of the government, even if more fair, is an experience filled with suffering, because people who don’t want to die and love their experiences know that their death can be avoided. The feeling that making an exception on ending your life has 0 impact on overpopulation means people never come to accept their death.
2: Lots of people are selfish and are willing to extend their own life at the expense of others. Policies regulating overpopulation are obviously going to be unpopular, so massive efforts will be expended on constructing the infrastructure to support additional life. Over a few decades, as population sizes increase in the magnitude of billions, dwindling food supplies, natural resources, and climate change become the cornerstones for human suffering. It would have been better for people who lived till 150 to die naturally 50 years ago than suffer poverty and starvation.
3: Political organizations will forcibly remove the information from you, so it is impossible for the scientist to actually accumulate leverage. In fact, if it’s publicly known that you’re withholding this knowledge, you will lose more than you otherwise would have through threats to your family and friends. Even if you do this leveraging amicably, and are somehow able to succeed, if government agencies know you have secret technology that is far advanced compared to the scope of human capabilities, and you will forever lose a huge chunk of your autonomy as they try and milk more valuable information out of you.
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