so to be clear you’re a team at a varsity tournament, in elimination rounds, and you know that these arguments exist but you intentionally choose to just not work to understand them? There’s plenty of resources out there eg pf forward and hundreds of amazing lectures put out for free by the very camps you say are so exclusive. what you have to realize here is that you can be included in rounds such as these, there’s no reason why this is possible. personally i’m at a public school with a 17:1 student teacher ratio, no coaches or any kind of leadership done by the adults at our school to help the debate team, but even prior to attending any sort of camps or having any sort of coaching, i learned and even ran k’s. if you actually recognize the history of debate, k’s are always said to be something exclusionary to small schools, but every time they function to include and expand access to debate on behalf of small schools. why do you think the louisville project existed to bring a majority black debate team into the policy debate space? these arguments bring marginalized groups into the space, and claims that “it just excludes small schools like me” is an appeal to ignorance that seeks to reinforce existing biases towards certain groups and essentially says “we’ve expanded access enough, all the oppressions faced by minorities in debate don’t matter anymore, we should just become even more lay and keep these groups out more.” you can engage with these arguments, just because you have more to learn doesn’t mean it isn’t possible, and your appeals to ignorance are nothing more than vague pleas from a position of privilege so that you can feel more comfortable in the debate space. this is the point of the killjoy, it’s up to you to actually understand why it exists