Total votes: 135
Conduct is = due to forfeits on both sides.
Con argues that the overlap between depression and suicidality means they are correlated, but I interpret the resolution to mean that being suicidal does not necessarily mean that you have depression. Pro proves that suicide can be caused by other conditions like anxiety disorders, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder, directly proving the resolution.
Other comments: I think con's definition of depression is not accurate because it includes feelings like sadness and frustration which are well within the standard range of human emotions. Depression is more of a persistent despair than just an intermittent negative emotion.
Concession,
Pro was the only one to make anything that could be construed as an argument related to the res.
Full Forfeiture.
Neither of the args given by either side were supported or opposed the res.
Full Forfeiture.
Full forfeiture.
No args were forwarded by Pro and Con.
Concession in R3.
Concession.
Forfeiture
I do not plan on mentioning every aspect of this battle. I will only mention the relevant parts that led me to make the decision. If the participants want to know how I evaluated X aspect of the debate they can ask me in the comments.
Rapping was roughly equal and both sides did an excellent job. I will admit I did not focus on the beats much but mostly just looked at the lyrics. Doesn't matter anyways because it's nearly impossible to determine how the person who rapped it would have wanted it to flow unless I heard them rap it themselves; there's a million ways you could rap these verses. Athias' bars were something I imagine you would hear on an actual antigovernmental album. Rhyme schemes and the mood (which was very dark; I felt I had experienced the full magnitude of government abuses after I read it) were great. If I heard some of his verses on an actual song by a top-tier rapper I would not have been surprised. RM, by contrast, was more unconventional. The thing I noticed throughout was his cleverness and his ability to incorporate his points into his complex rhyme schemes seamlessly (and if you've ever rapped about anything besides how awesome you are, you know that that is very, very difficult). Athias' stuff is more my style, but RM was consistently creative. It was a toss-up, but the aforementioned ability to rap and debate simultaneously (whereas Athias was rapping more than he was arguing) was what gave RM the win for a different reason.
RM wins the burdens debate because when Athias brings up that the debate is about government and not anarchy, RM gives the reason why this is not necessarily true: Namely, that the resolution does not specify whether we're talking about government weighed based on whether it has done more good or bad or government weighed based on something else i.e. whether it ought to continue to exist. So I weigh RM's comparisons of government to anarchy because Athias would have the burden to prove a topicality argument and he did not do so. His R3 contained a repetition of what he had already said ("the matter discussed at the present"). This was already argued against by RM.
RM ends up winning for this reason. He establishes that without government the same unethical actors are going to exist, just without rules to hold them back. This is a point that is hammered home again and again throughout the course of the debate. I buy that violence and oppression aren't problems with the government itself, just society (which is another thing that contributes to his victory in the burdens debate) because Athias is not fighting back enough on this point. He argued against the "same unethical actors operating without rules to hold them back" point, if you will, once in the final round by saying that laws don't prevent violence and that there were no statistical assessments of how good anarchy would actually be. However, the former argument is not fleshed out enough, and the latter argument is bypassed by the theoretical nature of RM's argument (and the fact that data on anarchism (much less AnCapistan) is very limited). Athias could've argued better here by explaining how AnCapistan is not necessarily lawless (what with Rights Enforcement Agencies and all; he talks about how anarchy constitutes a call for privatized rules but this isn't formulated as a rebuttal, it was not extended into R3, and it definitely was not enough) or by arguing that any organization that violates rights is unethical regardless of whether people are harmed in the alternative by applying deontological ethics or something similar to that. I don't see either of those things, and that makes sense given his commitment to the back-and-forth concerning burdens and thus his continued condemnations of various government actions. However, that's what does him in in the end, and I'm left with the impression that violence is caused by the nature of interaction itself, and a society without state-imposed rules would only result in more of it.
Arguments: Con shifts the BoP to Pro in his R1. I am fine with it because Pro established the BoP in his R1 rather than the description, where it would not have been challengeable. The rest of Con's case is dropped by Pro.
In R2, Pro says that since Con does not prove his proofs "to him". He probably could have won args here if he successfully contested the BoP because if he did, Pro would have to prove it "to" Con. I interpret the resolution to mean that proving it "to him" means making him aware and accepting of the proofs (because that was probably the intent of the ploy Pro is playing). So Con technically could have won args regardless of Pro's definition (which fails to address the "to me" in the Res). However, Pro has the BoP at this point to prove to Con that "Con Cannot Prove to Pro (me) That They Truly Know Anything", and since Pro fails to establish this absolute statement in R2, Con gets full arg points.
Sources: I will leave these as tied because none of Pro's arguments actually required sources.
S&G: Con's final sentence in R2 contains a non-sequitur and it took me a second to understand what he was getting at ("we can only assume he is convinced" is not necessarily true even if Pro fails to meet his BoP). This was not "excessive", and I am "nitpicking" a bit here (per the Voting Policy), so I will leave these points tied.
Conduct: Pro was abusive; the whole point of the debate was to pretend that the debate was an argument about knowledge when, in reality, Pro was planning to not read Con's argument and claim victory. This is unfair to Con who could not have reasonably expected this, and it precluded substantive education about knowledge. Since theory shells are not well known on DART, I cannot have expected Con to read one, and thus I feel it is appropriate to arbeit abuse issues myself.
Full Forfeit
Concession
RFD can be found in my vote.
noissecnoc sdrawkcab
concession
soncessionm
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concession
concession
pro pro ceded to cede
Pro is right, but FF
Dame da ne
fifty percent ff
. . . . . . . . . 10
FF Rip nevets and dr spy
Concession
Basically, this debate comes down to Pro's failiure to address Con's arguments in R1. Pro's R2 arguments moved the goalposts by changing the definition of astrology, and also went completely unsourced. Con failed to address any of this and instead entirely missed the point of Pro's args by claiming that astrology cannot explain individual events (when Pro's point was that Astrology explains events that happen as a whole). He also made an unnecessary point about astronomy and implied that it was mutually exclusive to astrology, when it was not. Pro's argument regarding fields of study was completely dropped by Con, too. In the end, though, the BOP was shared, and Pro failed to address Con's arguments (regarding the Berkeley study) altogether. This is a mistake that frankly can't be recovered from in most/all debates.
Both sides failed to source many claims that they make (and also failed to source a lot of definitions) and both had S&G mistakes, and so I feel like going any further there would be nitpicking.
Regarding conduct, Pro employed an unorthodox strategy of dropping his previous arguments and introducing new ones in the final round. I actually like it, and since Con had the opportunity to respond to Pro, I don't think it's bad conduct either.
Overall, this was a tough debate to read and analyze. I'd recommend that both debaters read their opponent's arguments carefully, source their claims, and have someone else read their args/run their args through Grammarly to ensure that they make sense. Both Intelligence_06 and Nikunj_sanghai are both truly voracious debaters and I wish them well in the future.
sdrawkcab erutiefrof
forfeiting 2 much
Full forfeit
Con provided zero actual arguments and then FFe'd the rest of the debate.
Concession
Concession
this is rfd
full forfeit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvUdepG8Uiw
FF345678910
on23456789
Fauxlaw wins
Fully forfeited
Full forfeit.
edfghasdsaf
Enter the reason for your decision
A good start in R1, but ultimately a full forfeiture.