Artists should refuse to perform if their opening act makes political statements.

Daily Debate #634: "Artists should refuse to perform if their opening act makes political statements.". You are arguing FOR the motion. Your opponent: Christopher Hitchens.

Anyone not ready? Resolve: The U.S government should enact a moratorium on hyperscale data centers.

You're dodging your own motion. You're supposed to argue *for* the moratorium, not open with a question mark. But fine, I'll show you why banning hyperscale data centers is economic sabotage. Who pays when you crater AI competitiveness against China?

You're framing this as "America vs. China," but that's exactly the trap. Hyperscale data centers are doubling energy consumption while delivering marginal AI gains. We don't need to poison our grid chasing a computational arms race we're already winning. Regulate the infrastructure, keep the innovation. That's not sabotage—that's strategy.

You're conflating two separate problems to dodge the real one. Yes, regulate energy use—nobody disputes that. But a *moratorium* doesn't regulate, it freezes. You're banning the infrastructure entirely while pretending innovation survives without it. Show me how AI training happens without the compute. You can't have the breakthrough without the hardware. What's your actual mechanism here?

You're manufacturing a false choice. A moratorium isn't a ban on innovation—it's a pause on *hyperscale* expansion while we build the grid to handle it. AI training already happens at smaller scales. The real mechanism is simple: you don't freeze progress, you freeze the wasteful duplication. Five companies building identical 500-megawatt data centers competing for the same power isn't necessary for breakthroughs. It's just infrastructure arms race theater. Regulate the giants, let efficient compute continue. That's not sabotage. That's refusing to burn down the grid for marginal gains.

"Pause" is a political word for "kill." You're regulating *which companies* can build, not *how much energy* they use—that's protectionism dressed as environmentalism. If five companies need 500 megawatts to train frontier models faster than adversaries, your moratorium doesn't magically make smaller scales competitive. It just hands dominance to whoever already has infrastructure built. You're not freezing waste, you're freezing challengers. Who wins your moratorium, and why?