An example Kritik: the affirmative fails to address white supremacy, ethnocentrism, and patriarchy, and their failure to address those more pressing issues means you should vote negative
Some more terms
Uniqueness: Let's say an asteroid is heading towards Earth. That disadvantage is not "unique" to the affirmative's plan to reduce the military. Another example: Republicans being pissed off and refusing to pass important legislation is not a unique disad of the aff's plan to reduce the military as the military is already being reduced.
With kritiks the aff does not need to uniquely trigger the negative effects, the whole point is that they aren't solving them. "the typical kritikal link is one of re-entrenching the philosophy or mindset to be criticized by the argument, be it biopower/biopolitics, racism, militarism, realism in international relations, patriarchy, statism, imperialism/Orientalism, capitalism, gendered language, or other objectionable systems of thought and action."
"The alternative is the core of what separates the kritik from being just a highly philosophical linear disadvantage. The alternative is generally supposed to provide an advocacy other than that which the affirmative has put forward; however, the alternative tends to "reject the criticized philosophy" or "reject the affirmative." More substantive alternatives exist however; a kritik which takes the position of Ayn Rand's Objectivism might include "adopt the Objectivist program" as the alternative."
"Permutations: Permutations are abbreviated "perm" in debate parlance. Perms either test whether or not the alternative of the kritik is competitive (trades off) with the advocacy of the Affirmative or present a 3rd option merger of the two positions that the affirmative might choose to advocate. The latter is often subject to claims of abuse by the negative team. Affirmative speakers make strategic decisions about deploying permutations based on the needs of winning the round overall and claims made by the negative team about the legitimacy of the perm."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kritik#Link
You can also run kritiks on the affirmative although that seems quite likely to run into a big kerfuffle about topicality. It would really suck if you lost the whole debate on aff on something like topicality.
Okay, so if you want to help me, you can help me find cards:
"Evidence in debates is organized into units called cards (because such evidence was originally printed on note cards, though the practice has long been out of favor). Cards are designed to condense an author's argument so that debaters have an easy way to access the information. A card is composed of three parts: the tag, the cite, and the body. The tag is the debater's summary of the argument presented in the body"
An example card, note that much of the formatting is not visible, I'll simulate bold and underlining text with spoilers. Only the text that WILL be read will be NOT spoilered.
1 AC: Cards proving that Hegemony is unsustainable, going down due to counter balancing, loss of authority and credibility, budget cuts, economic problems; this doesn’t mean our planned reduction has no uniqueness- our plan will accelerate the reduction specifically for AFRICOM
Heg Down
US heg already on decline – Obama agrees.
Layne. The waning of US hegemony-myth or reality? A review essay in International security.
Year: 2009 Volume: 34 Issue: 1 Page: 147
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/international_security/v034/34.1.layne.pdf
Whether the United States will be able to continue to act as a hegemonic stabilizer is an open question, because the looming fiscal crisis could compel it to retrench strategically. Economically, it already is doubtful that the United States is still a hegemon. At the April 2009 Group of 20 meeting in London, President Barack Obama acknowledged that the United States no longer is able to play this role, and the world increasingly is looking to China (and India and other emerging market states) to be the locomotives of global recovery.92 Additionally, the United States’ liberal preferences have suffered a setback. Institutions have failed to produce a coordinated response to the financial and economic crisis: through the actions of national governments, the state has been brought back in to regulate economic policy; and states have responded to the crisis by adopting nationalistic policies rather than through increasing international cooperation.93 What these trends mean for the future remains to be seen. Suffice it to say, Robert Keohane’s “after hegemony” thesis and the institutional “lock in” theory will undergo real-world tests.94 It is unclear if international trade will contract in a deglobalized world, and whether states will revert to mercantilist policies, and, if so, whether less economic openness would lead to an increase in geopolitical turbulence. One way or another, however, we are certain to find out.