Impact Turns (Other Than Spark)

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Intro to Tech by Shaurya Kasi

Metaweighing/Advanced Weighing by Abigail Chung

Also relevant

Common Framing by Aiden

SV vs. Extinction Outweighs

Spark

Impact Turns (other than spark!)

What are impact turns?

Impact turns are fundamentally the same as any other turn in debate: you say that your opponent’s impact (which they claim is bad) is actually a good thing. With impact turns, you say that your opponent’s impact (like extinction, economic decline, climate change, nuclear war, etc) is good.

Why are impact turns strategic?

Impact turns are extremely versatile, and can be used against almost every case you’d come across. This is helpful because even against squirrely arguments, you’re still going to have something you can read against it. Additionally, as of date, impact turns are less common than conventional impacts, meaning that they might catch some teams off guard.

What are the drawbacks to running impact turns?

Because the best/most popular impact turns are limited and remain stagnant throughout every topic cycle, many teams will have large backfiles and prep outs meant to counter them. Consequently, impact turn rounds can become repetitive, and sometimes solely dependent on which team has better backfiles (which might be something you want, to be fair).

Furthermore, most impact turns are intuitively problematic. For example, arguing that extinction is good usually results in implications that suicide or genocide might also be good, even though both are objectively not. While it is certainly possible to prove that your impact turn does not support these things, it can be hard to do so.

How to win using impact turns:

1. Break the clash—because impact turn rounds are usually repetitive and consist of two teams spamming backfiles at each other, breaking the clash really with evidence comparison, weighing, etc is instrumental for success.

2. Don’t double turn yourself—if you want to run an impact turn while also introducing other contentions, be sure that none of your own impacts link into the impact turn! Also, make sure that you don’t have an impact that your opponent has linked into a separate impact—for example, if your impact is economic decline into poverty, but the opponents have linked economic decline into extinction, then running wipeout probably isn’t a good idea.

3. Make sure to extend—when going for an impact turn, it’s technically not good enough to just say “we both agree X happens if we affirm.” Instead, you have to extend their link FOR them! Notably, this is something you should always be doing if you’re going first in both the summary or FF, or else your opponents could just not extend their link and take out your turn.

   1. Some judges don’t require you to extend your opponent's link when impact turning. Make sure to spot that on their paradigm (or ask them before round!).

The most popular impact turns:

Spark (not covered by this guide): nuclear war is good

Wipeout: extinction is good

Dedev: economic decline/dedevelopment (or technological decline) is good

Climate Change Good: exactly what it sounds like

Wipeout

At its core, wipeout arguments always say that extinction is good. And while there are infinite ways to argue this, the most common arguments are:

• Animal suffering: humans cause way more pain than happiness because we do stuff like factory farming. Thus, to maximize wellbeing for all life, humans should cease to exist

• Future technology: future humans are going to invent something like sentient simulations or malicious AI, and these inventions will cause a lot of suffering. Better to bite the bullet now than suffer for eternity.

• Life is bad: life is inherently full of pain and unfulfilled desires, so there’s really no point in living anyways.

Note that none of these arguments are inherently mutually exclusive, meaning that you can (and probably should) mix them together if you’re arguing for wipeout.

Dedevelopment

Dedevelopment, or “Dedev” arguments are somewhat similar to wipeout: they claim that right now, human technology/economy is doing a lot of damage (factory farming, dangerous tech development, climate change, etc), and we should damage our economy in order to deal with these impacts.

Climate Change Good

This impact turn says that climate change is good, while also (usually) including defense that says climate change won’t cause extinction (because of things like adaptation). Impacts range from geopolitics (eg. splitting the Russia-China alliance) to farming (warmer climates are good for farming).

Responding to Impact Turns

1. Take everything from “How to win using impact turns” and use it to help yourself! Break the clash, check if your opponent links into their own impact, and catch them when they forget to extend (and it helps you)!

2. Disprove each of their points/links. There’s no reason to be scared of impact turns—they’re fundamentally the same as any other argument (arguably most of them are weaker than typical arguments), and can be taken down by good rebuttals! Just win that their claims are false and you should be able to win easily.

Original guide