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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The school choice movement supports legislation that allows students and families to select alternatives to public school education. For instance, education vouchers are a form of school choice legislation that provides subsidies to students at schools chosen by themselves or their parents.
Proposition
1: School choice is effectively a subsidization of private schooling systems, as it redirects funding from public schools to education vouchers and grants which the public schools will never see. This is bad because it exacerbates the issues with underfunded public schools, and the most vulnerable students for whom a voucher isn’t enough, or selective private systems filter out, will be left worse off. One illustration is that the most experienced teachers will be poached from public schooling, especially as diminishing budgets mean these schools can offer lesser wages to staff.
2: In many communities, public schools are the hub for engagement between students and local organizations. A private school attracts the wealthy students by offering to show them a wealthier portion of the world, but this just undermines the otherwise strong community bonds of a shared identity between all the students. An illustration for this is private schools offering lavish field trips to the city, and indoctrinating an identity of superiority into the private school students, whereas the public school enjoys their field trip on a local beach cleanup.
Opposition
Framing: With most school zones, communities of varying socioeconomic status are included. One reason for this is just that schools are often massive since they benefit from economies of scale – and there simply aren’t enough nearby communities of congruent socioeconomic status to service that many students.
1: Bad schools fuel a negative feedback loop, where wealthy taxpayers choose to settle away from these schools because they’re bad and these schools then degrade further because they receive less funding. However, if these wealthier people can opt out of the bad public school and go to private schools, they have no reason to leave their otherwise rich community anymore, and will still continue to pay taxes which benefit the public school. This puts a tourniquet on the capital flight — since the wealthy taxpayers are not deterred from living in these neighborhoods, as education isn’t a dead end anymore. Coupled with other policies, this is the only way a city can retain its wealth and slowly recover.
2: Some public institutions handle special needs education in very horrible ways. For instance, autistic students often have to put up with repetitive curriculum between grades taught by the most impatient and underpaid teachers, who also otherize these students from the mainstream ones. These are the truly most vulnerable actors, and their families should be provided maximum optionality and ways out of such situations.
Proposition
Framing:
1: Presenting the top talent within sports leagues is the best way to attract outside attention, especially when viewers who are huge fans of the sports mainly don’t watch the league due to perceived inferiority.
2: Viewers prefer to follow player narratives over league team narratives in most sports, because players are drafted from all over and they feel little attachment to regional teams. Player narratives are also strong because individual rivalries between players, the improvement arcs, and all the eventful parts of a player’s career are clearly narrated by that player’s words and emotions. This is compared to teams, which no one even cares about if they accomplish big things.
Opposition
1: There are tangible benefits to being promoted by the league, and these benefits are spread to substantially more people when the league promotes its constituents as a whole. First, if the promotional budget were distributed to the entire team, then way more sports fanatics would be interested in obtaining the stabler job. Downstream, this is a chain reaction that causes more young girls to become interested in the sport in the first place. This is a mechanism to gain very devoted viewership and have a more competitive playing field of players. Second, if managers of women’s sports teams perceive that their pay and opportunities will continue to be higher in women’s sports leagues, then being a manager within this team gains a profit potential over time. This causes more managers to also invest their time into such teams.
2: There is mitigation on players also growing their own name outside the league to become more attractive to sponsors.
Open banking is a practice which allows third-party financial service providers access to financial data from both banks and non-bank financial institutions through the use of APIs. These service providers offer services including but not limited to personal finance management tools, account aggregation services, credit scoring and loan pre-approval, and customized financial products.
Proposition
1: Open banking technology increases competition in banking. Since customer data is now openly accessible through APIs, large and established banks need to compete with smaller banks by lowering costs, improving technology, and improving customer service.
2: Financial products are difficult to understand and use, and financial markets are thus accessible only to a small quantity of financially literate people in the global south. Open banking makes it possible to model the best financial products for consumers, which thus makes these products accessible to way more people. This will drastically increase the number of potential investors in developing countries, increasing market liquidity and investment efficiency. This also has significant downstream impacts on FDI, business growth, employment rates, and price discovery.
3: Open banking offers lenders a better idea of the consumer’s financial situation, meaning they can offer more profitable loans. Open banking also offers consumers a better image of their potential risk before they take on debt.
Opposition
1: This investment would be a huge waste of money, since a large portion of developing countries are highly disinterested in digital banking. Even in economic hubs like Mumbai or New Delhi, where digital banking is somewhat of a norm, the average citizen is relatively uneducated about financial instruments, and likely only use one bank. This is because the financial markets there are immature due to a lack of strong domestic firms.
2: Open banking services are reliant on big data accumulation, meaning the fast-growing economies of scale due to the benefits of consolidation in this industry. The effect of this is that the industry will likely become monopolistic, leading to greater consumer costs.
3: Open banking poses a threat to financial security, since malicious third parties are difficult to track if they’re great in number. There is potential for these third parties to completely clean out a customer’s account, also introducing liabilities to financial institutions.
The creator economy is a digital economy that allows creators to earn revenue from their content. Examples of creator economy platforms include Twitch, Substack, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Patreon.
Proposition
Framing:
1: Being a creator before YouTube was very difficult — as demand was highly centralized, meaning the only way to attract enough attention to make a career was to enter traditional routes like Hollywood or big record labels. The creator economy democratized the creator environment, by decentralizing demand to hundreds of thousands of channels, making it much easier for each individual creator to participate.
2: The creator economy has democratized access to political expression, as creators embody the collective will of their viewers and can escalate these discussions. These creators are important community leaders who internally empower their viewers and externally carve a niche where their viewers’ ideas may be represented.
Opposition
Framing: There would be less creators without the creator economy, and the attention capital creators have would be redistributed to more traditional media and other daily tasks.
1: While some of the creator economy incentivizes organic revenue i.e. With Twitch donations and Substack subscriptions, a large portion of the economy is funded by sponsorship content from big corporations that want nothing more than to exploit the authentic bond viewers have with the creator. Without the rise of the creator economy, it would not be nearly as easy for corporations to push their consumerist agenda, making viewers feel like they don’t own enough clothing or need some product. There are plenty of ways to impact this, including but not limited to fuelling monopolization, exploiting laborers, and squandering viewers’ income.
2: Donations are bad. Large streamers tend to be the ones who get the most donations, and small streamers find it difficult to get started. Viewers who might be in a weak financial position themselves are driven to donate by coercive rewards for donations and attention from their parasocially related creator. In the worst cases, viewers dump their life savings to get explicit videos or images from a streamer on explicit websites, which is bad for the viewer among other things.
3: The consumption of TikTok and YouTube is a largely individual activity. Individuals replace real relationships with instagram doom-scrolling time, which is both a waste of time and contributes to loneliness.
"Systematic Ethics" is a metaethical theory which encourages people to determine what is "right" or "wrong" based on a system of moral principles (i.e stealing is wrong, sharing is good).
Proposition
1: Systematic ethics are slow to change with evolving moral norms. This is because these ethical ideas are justified by their existence rather than through some consequentialist outcome.
2: Systematic ethics are shaped by systems of power, where dominant groups impose moral standards that align with their interests, reinforcing existing hierarchies and marginalizing alternative ethical perspectives that challenge the status quo.
Opposition
1: Systematic ethics allow for institutional coherence by reducing ambiguity behind ethical guidelines. This is good because it reduces conflict and misunderstanding.
2: There are certain people who don’t have the time or mental capacity to puzzle through difficult moral conundrums. Systematic ethics enable morally less discerning individuals to follow established ethical rules, offering a clear framework that guides behavior without requiring deep moral reasoning or personal judgment.
Divestment is the reduction of an asset by a firm for ethical, financial, or political reasons. For instance, selling shares of stock.
Proposition
Framing: In most cases, universities don’t have major stakes in fossil fuels. This is both because it’d be risky to do so and because it would be optically very unpopular. Empirically, the proportion of the total investments going into fossil fuels is around 2-5%.
1: Fossil fuels are a volatile investment, since their prices can fluctuate significantly due to geopolitical tensions and currency fluctuation, and its usage is constantly being flushed out due to a transition into green energy. Investments into green energy companies fulfills a similar market portfolio for the purpose of hedging risk, but reduces volatility since interest in green energy is growing and the industries tend to be contained domestically.
2: Divestment helps to combat climate change in a number of ways. First, if the university had invested a large portion of its funding into a particular company, divestment would cause that share to plummet, either forcing the company to change its ways to win back the favor of the university or shut down. Second, this sends a powerful optical message that even gas apologists must accept, as the far-right institutions will have divested as well. Last, this prompts internal change within the universities, as they lose support from oil and gas companies.
Opposition
1: Energy costs rise during inflation, and they can therefore perform well during economic booms, counterbalancing other assets that might struggle during downturns. Fossil fuels are therefore important for hedging risk in the investment portfolio of universities. Funding losses impact the ability for universities to fund research – which is a pretty big impact compared to very limited chip damage to the share price of fossil fuel companies.
2: Remaining invested in companies allows universities to engage with them as shareholders. While the university alone is unlikely to sway large companies, smaller ones can be meaningfully changed by this. If the university were to sell the shares, they’d likely be bought up by much more morally ambiguous actors for which public pressure will not work against.
Note: This motion is about comparing snapshots of today and the world in 50 years. Whether there is a general trend of improvement or deterioration in between is not an impact on its own.
Proposition
1: Climate change shuts down entire ecosystems, as a slight raise in temperature disturbs the natural balance between predators and prey. In 50 years, the rate of climate change is likely to be much more drastic, because the crisis caused by climate change are negative feedback loops: an extreme drought, for example, is sometimes solved by rerouting rivers, which then commits catastrophes in a different ecosystem. Given that a full transition to green energy is nowhere in sight, fossil fuels are still a stepping stone to industrialization, and half the world has yet to properly industrialize, the world in 50 years will be much worse than today for the trillions of animals on the planet.
2: The prerequisite to the concept “mutually assured destruction” is a pair of rational actors. Over the next 50 years, many more nuclear nations are going to rise, with many tense relationships, especially if the bilateral power centers of US and China are fractured. The odds of peace deriving from mutually assured destruction failing is compounded by this, society will likely have perished/shrunk substantially from nuclear armageddon.
Opposition
1: In 50 years, a huge portion of the global south will have substantially better qualities of living. Given diminishing returns on technological advancement, this means society 50 years from now will be much more equal than today even if wealth disparities remain as is.
2: Society will undergo a number of existential threats over the next 50 years. While it’s difficult to fathom currying the political will to deal with these threats today, the uniting power of humankind will deal with them if they were to come around. The world in 50 years will be better because humankind will have united.
3: The technological development over the next 50 years will substantially increase an individual’s autonomy, perhaps popularizing out-of-womb-births, or enabling the elderly to have full control over their bodies until their last breath. This technological development can also contain the existential threats that we currently face, leading to a future society that’s much more equal and full of hope.
Proposition
1: Emotional vulnerability is more effective for empathizing with empathetic viewers, as it displays graphic scenery of tragedies and viscerally points fingers at the perpetrator. Viewership of this type of media is substantially more likely to convert to donations and collaborative advocacy, expanding the size of the movement and its ability to actually do things.
2: Emotional vulnerability is something all victims can participate in sharing, whereas parodies often rely on some artistic creativity and skills to effectively convey a message. Messaging being democratically accessible is valuable because this means the movement can create more media, and because it allows individuals the most affected to personally tell their story and directly receive humanitarian aid.
Opposition
1: A sizable amount of people are overwhelmed by polarizing opinions, and prefer to have neutral fact-based discussions. Parodical media thus spreads substantially faster across social media, due to its lighter approach that stems from some form of logic (exposing a contradiction or hypocrisy). This is valuable because it curries much more attention for political critique.
2: Satire unites the movement from within compared to emotional content, because it is valuable to consume for people both internal and external to the movement. This looks like the production of shared identities, “inside jokes”, and trendy messaging which solidifies the stance of the movement over time. For example, The Onion’s satirical headline “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens’” has become a slogan for its viewers on American gun reform.
3: Malicious third parties can fake emotional sincerity relatively easily and trick viewers into donating to completely unrelated people.
Georgia, a post-soviet union state, has been engaged with EU ascension talks. On 8 November 2023, the European Commission issued an official recommendation to grant candidate status to Georgia, which was confirmed on 14 December 2023.
Recently, Georgia recently passed a law requiring all NGOs with 20% funding internationally to register as "foreign agents". This law has been nicknamed the "Russia law" as Russia recently passed a similar law. The purpose of this legislation was to deter all foreign news agencies (mostly American/Western Europe) from reporting on the government's corruption. This policy has been incredibly unpopular with most EU officials, and Georgian ascension talks have been paused for now as a result of this policy.
Proposition
Framing:
1: During the Soviet era, Georgia was infinitely repressed by Russia which seeked to collectivize its labor, assimilate its culture, and repress/divert political control. In World War II, Soviet authorities deported the Chechens and Ingush as a part of broader Soviet policies of ethnic cleansing. In more recent memory, Georgia was invaded by Russia in 2008 to disturb its ability to join the EU and to create a buffer zone by trying to enable Abkhazia and South Ossetia independence. Even if some Georgians might still have family in Russia, alignment with Russia poses a direct threat to Georgian sovereignty which harms most Georgians.
2: The EU heavily defends democratic institutions and opposes backsliding on democracy, whereas Russia continuously exhibits authoritarian tendencies. Aligning with the EU definitionally means creating policies which better represent what members of the nation want, as opposed to accruing decision making power to those on the top.
3: Aligning with the EU positions Georgia to join the EU in the future, which grants Georgia access to a large single market for economic activity through currency harmonization, infrastructural development, and improved relationships. Political confidence also incentivizes foreign direct investment to pump into Georgia, allowing it to experience the economic miracle the rest of East Europe experienced after the fall of the Soviet Union. Comparatively, Russia is a much smaller and much more volatile market, and while Russia can survive sanctions, cross application of these sanctions could be fatal to little Georgia.
Opposition
1: The EU is unlikely to dedicate lots of resources to Georgia, because Georgian alignment is just a low priority issue to the EU. On the contrary economic activities with Russia are easier due to proximity, and Georgia is deeply entangled with Russian trade. Therefore Georgia gets deeper economic benefits from aligning with Russia.
2: This is possibly the best way for Georgia to get Abkhazia and South Ossetia back, or at least achieve open borders with them. This is because alignment with Russia would highly reduce separatist opposition within these regions, and increased ties with Russia increases Georgian negotiation leverage. Even if none of this is achieved, though, Georgia still quells resistance from Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which contributes to Georgian political stability.
3: There are a number of ways Russia could poorly react to Georgian-EU alignment. First, Russia could retaliate economically by imposing sanctions and trade embargos on Georgia. Although Russia doesn’t account for a majority of Georgian trade, the 30%-40% it does account for is enough to trigger a massive economic crisis with significant business shutdown and capital flight. Second, Russia will stop major supply lines that are important for Georgia, inflicting short term harm on Georgian gas and food supplies.
Equestria refers to a community where many of the negatives of life have been wiped out through remedies. Racism has been eliminated by making everyone color blind. Pain, poverty and strife by converting to "Sameness", a plan that has made everyone exactly the same socioeconomically, and which has also eradicated emotional depth from their lives. Every member of this society is assigned a career by the Elders, and are made to believe that the Elders are always right. Equestria is isolated from all, except for a few similar nearby towns.
Proposition
Framing: Although the vast majority of a person’s agency has been sucked up, people likely still have the most fundamental desires, like wanting to eat when hungry and sleep when tired. If happiness derives from fulfilling desires, then some baseline happiness is still achieved from this.
1: Without epistemic access to the life they would embody, the average person would prefer for society to be as equal as possible, because even the slight possibility of experiencing living hell is a fate no one would like to bear.
2: War is the single greatest catalyst of suffering in the world. The traumas of losing loved ones, having your life constantly at risk, and being forced to make the decision to potentially kill another human being weigh on one’s conscience and ability to remain human. Despite the relative safety of Western liberal democracies, the mere possibility of conflict must be weighed incredibly highly when considering whether we choose to live in Equestria.
Opposition
Framing: Emotional plasticity is something prop needs to defend, and it literally means the amount of happiness one can experience, the desires they may formulate, and their range of autonomy will be substantially limited.
1: The human rights infringed on by Western Liberal Democracies are far outweighed by the oppressive structure of Equestria, which strips your vision and your ability to think for yourself. If the response from prop is simply that you don’t have epistemic access to the oppression you face in Equestria, then prop is suggesting that revealing or discovering one’s oppression is a moral wrong – since otherwise, no one would have epistemic access to the oppression. This is obviously not the case, though, and it would be wrong to commit suffering on the entire planet to achieve equality.
2: Western Liberal Democracies are happy places for the vast majority of people, because humans get to experience the world of being human. In fact, it’s quite condescending to say a minority should prefer to be stripped of their vision if it made them equal with the rest of the world.
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