About me: I was a former member of Parliamentary Debate at Berkeley, and ranked 3rd in the nation at NPTE. I used to be a public health major and now work in health care.

For Parli: Super down for spreading/speed, I'll clear or slow you if necessary but I seriously doubt I'll need to. I'm usually a K debater so I'm down to hear anything you want to read assuming it's not gross or prejudiced in any way. I'm cool with non-topical affirmatives, but I will evaluate FW-T in response, so be ready for that to play out. I also enjoy case debate if it's well fleshed out, and am more likely to prefer well-done or detailed affirmatives over generics. Theory is fine, I'll evaluate any theory you put forward. I default to competing interpretations unless you have specific warrants for reasonability; if you give me the warrants for reasonability, I'll absolutely evaluate that.

Tl;dr: I'm down for anything. It's your debate, not mine. I know some people say they're down for anything and really just want case debate, but bring me your crazy rounds and I'm very down to evaluate. I'm a flow judge that doesn't care about presentation unless your performance is specifically affective or you want me to evaluate your in-round rhetoric, so my speaks usually just hover around a 28.

PLEASE DON'T SHAKE MY HAND; not super down for that

TOC:

Evidence and Docs: There was a little confusion about evidence exchange and prep time this morning in the Judges Meeting. PF Tab clarified in an email that page 56/57 PF rules still stand and if Team A calls for Team B's evidence they can get free prep until Team B produces that evidence. When Team A gets that evidence in hand then prep time starts. Please let your judges know they got an email with the clarification. But please just send the evidence ASAP.

Let me stress again... I think it is an intervention to look at speech doc during a speech if you cannot understand the speaker. This incentivizes 2,000 word cases. I will not look at the speech doc until after the speech to read evidence only if it is relevant to a discussion in the round. If I clear you twice it probably means I am not going to be able to effectively flow what you want.

Emails: Please put gabriel.rusk@gmail.com on the email chain as well as fairmontprepdebateteam@gmail.com

Uniqueness: If you are running an argument that is based on some fairly recent dynamic or fluid geopolitical scenario you prob should have UQ updates from this week. Postdates aren't automatic evidence triumphs please still implicate why they matter.

Gabe Rusk

☮️

Background

Debate Experience: TOC Champion PF 2010, 4th at British Parli University National Championships 2014, Oxford Debate Union competitive debater 2015-2016 (won best floor speech), LGBTQIA+ Officer at the Oxford Debate Union.

Wanna come hang with me this summer? Sign up for the Summer Speech & Debate Think Tank at Stanford University.

NSDA PF Topic Committee Member: If you have any ideas, topic areas, or resolutions in mind for next season please send them to my email below.

Coaching Experience: Director of Debate at Fairmont Prep 2018-Current, Senior Instructor and PF Curriculum Director at the Institute for Speech and Debate, La Altamont Lane 2018 TOC, GW 2010-2015. British Parli coach and lecturer for universities including DU, Oxford, and others.

Education: Masters from Oxford University '16 - Dissertation on the history of the First Amendment. Religion and Philosophy BA at DU '14. Other research areas include Buddhism, comparative religion, conlaw, First Amendment law, free speech, freedom of expression, art law, media law, & legal history. AP Macroeconomics Teacher too so don't make econ args up.

2023 Winter Data Update: Importing my Tabroom data I've judged 651 rounds since 2014 with a 53% Pro and 47% Con vote balance. There may be a slight subconscious Aff bias it seems. My guess is that I may subconsciously give more weight to changing the status quo as that's the core motivator of debate but no statistically meaningful issues are present.

Email: gabriel.rusk@gmail.com

Website: I love reading non-fiction, especially features. Check out my free website Rusk Reads for good article recs.

PF Paradigm

Judge Philosophy

I consider myself tech>truth but constantly lament the poor state of evidence ethics, power tagging, clipping, and more. Further, I know stakes can be high in a bubble, bid, or important round but let's still come out of the debate feeling as if it was a positive experience. Life is too short for needless suffering. Please be kind, compassionate, and cordial.

Big Things

• What I want to see: I'm empathetic to major technical errors in my ballots. In a perfect world I vote for the team who does best on tech and secondarily on truth. I tend to resolve clash most easily when you give explicit reasons why either a) your evidence is comparatively better but also when you tell me why b) your warranting is comparatively better. Obviously doing both compounds your chances at winning my ballot. I have recently become more sensitive to poor extensions in the back half. Please have UQ where necessary, links, internal links, and impacts. Weighing introduced earlier the better. Weighing is your means to minimize intervention.

• Weighing Unlike Things: I need to know how to weigh two comparatively unlike things. If you are weighing some economic impact against a non-economic impact like democracy how do I defer to one over the other? Scope, magnitude, probability etc. I strongly prefer impact debates on the probability/reasonability of impacts over their magnitude and scope. Obviously try to frame impacts using all available tools. I am very amicable to non-trad framing of impacts but you need to extend the warrants and evidence.

• Weighing Like Things: Please have warrants and engage comparatively between yourself and your opponent. Obviously methodological and evidentiary comparison is nice too as I mentioned earlier. I love crossfires or speech time where we discuss the warrants behind our cards and why that's another reason to prefer your arg over your opponent.

• Don't be a DocBot: I love that you're prepared and have enumerated overviews, blocks, and frontlines. I love heavy evidence and dense debates with a lot of moving parts. But if it sounds like you're just reading a doc without specific or explicit implications to your opponent's contentions you are not contributing anything meaningful to the round. Tell me why your responses interact. If they are reading an arg about the environment and just read an A2 Environment Non-Unique without explaining why your evidence or warranting is better then this debate will suffer.

• I'm comfortable if you want to take the debate down kritical, theoretical, and/or pre-fiat based roads. I think framework debates be them pre or post fiat are awesome. Voted on many K's before too. Here be dragons. I will say though, over time I've become increasingly tired of opportunistic, poor quality, and unfleshed out theory in PF. But in the coup of the century, I have been converted to the position that disclosure theory and para theory is a viable path to the ballot if you win your interp. I do have questions I am ruminating on after the summer doxxing of judges and debaters whether certain interps of disc are viable and am interested to see how that can be explored in a theory round. I would highly discourage running trigger warning theory in front of me. See thoughts below on that. All variables being equal I would prefer post-fiat stock topic-specific rounds but in principle remain as tabula rasa as I can on disc and paraphrasing theory.

Little Things

• (New Note for 2024: Speech docs have never intended to serve as an alternative to flowing a speech. They are for exchanging evidence faster and to better scrutinize evidence. Otherwise, you could send a 3000 word case and the speech itself could be as unintelligible as you would like without a harm. As a result there is an infinite regress of words you could send. Thus I will not look at a speech doc during your speech to aid with flowing and will clear you if needed. I will look at docs only when there is evidence comparison, flags, indicts etc but prefer to have it on hand. My speed threshold is very high but please be a bit louder than usual the faster you go. I know there is a trade off with loudness and speed but what can we do).

• What needs to be frontlined in second rebuttal? Turns. Not defense unless you have time. If you want offense in the final focus then extend it through the summary.

• Defense is not sticky between rebuttal and final focus. Aka if defense is not in summary you can't extend it in final focus. I've flipped on this recently. I've found the debate is hurt by the removal of the defense debate in summary and second final focus can extend whatever random defense it wants or whatever random frontlines to defense. This gives the second speaking teams a disproportionate advantage and makes the debate needlessly more messy.

• I will pull cards on two conditions. First, if it becomes a key card in the round and the other team questions the validity of the cut, paraphrasing, or explanation of the card in the round. Second, if the other team never discusses the merits of their opponents card the only time I will ever intervene and call for that evidence is if a reasonable person would know it's facially a lie.

• Calling for your opponent's cards. It should not take more than 1 minute to find case cards. Do preflows before the round. Smh y'all.

• If you spread that's fine. Just be prepared to adjust if I need to clear or provide speech docs to your opponents to allow for accessibility and accommodation.

• My favorite question in cx is: Why? For example, "No I get that's what your evidence says but why?"

• Germs are scary. I don't like to shake hands. It's not you! It's me! [Before covid times this was prophetic].

• I don't like to time because it slows my flow in fast rounds but please flag overtime responses in speechs and raise your phone. Don't interrupt or use loud timers.

Ramblings on Trigger Warning Theory

Let me explain why I am writing this. This isn't because I'm right and you're wrong. I'm not trying to convince you. Nor should you cite this formally in round to win said round. Rather, a lot of you care so much about debate and theory in particular gets pretty personal fairly quickly that I want to explain why my hesitancy isn't personal to you either. I am not opposing theory as someone who is opposed to change in Public Forum.

- First, I would highly discourage running trigger warning theory in front of me. My grad school research and longstanding work outside of debate has tracked how queer, civil rights advocates, religious minorities, and political dissidents have been extensively censored over time through structural means. The suppression and elimination of critical race theory and BLM from schools and universities is an extension of this. I have found it very difficult to be tabula rasa on this issue. TW/anonymous opt outs are welcome if you so wish to include them, that is your prerogative, but like I said the lack of one is not a debate I can be fair on. Let me be clear. I do not dismiss that "triggers" are real. I do not deny your lived experience on face nor claim all of you are, or even a a significant number of you, are acting in bad faith. This is always about balancing tests. My entire academic research for over 8 years was about how structural oppressors abuse these frameworks of "sin," "harm," "other," to squash dissidents, silence suffragettes, hose civil rights marchers, and imprison queer people because of the "present danger they presented in their conduct or speech." I also understand that some folks in the literature circles claim there is a double bind. You are opting out of trigger warning debates but you aren't letting me opt out of debates I don't want to have either. First, I will never not listen to or engage in this debate. My discouragement above is rooted in my deep fear that I will let you down because I can't be as fair as I would be on another issue. I tell students all the time tabula rasa is a myth. I still think that. It's a goal we strive for to minimize intervention because we will never eliminate it. Second, I welcome teams to still offer tw and will not penalize you for doing so. Third, discussions on SV, intersectionality, and civil rights are always about trade offs. Maybe times will change but historically more oppression, suppression, and suffering has come from the abuse of the your "speech does me harm" principle than it benefits good faith social justice champions who want to create a safe space and a better place. If you want to discuss this empirical question (because dang there are so many sources and this is an appeal to my authority) I would love to chat about it.

Next, let me explain some specific reasons why I am resistant to TW theory in debate using terms we use in the literature. There is a longstanding historical, philosophical, and queer/critical theory concern on gatekeeper shift. If we begin drawing more and more abstract lines in terms of what content causes enough or certain "harm" that power can and will be co-opted and abused by the equally more powerful. Imagine if you had control over what speech was permitted versus your polar opposite actor in values. Now imagine they, via structural means, could begin to control that power for themselves only. In the last 250 years of the US alone I can prove more instances than not where this gatekeeping power was abused by government and powerful actors alike. I am told since this has changed in the last twenty years with societal movements so should we. I don't think we have changed that significantly. Just this year MAUS, a comic about the Holocaust, was banned in a municipality in Jan 22. Toni Morrison was banned from more than a dozen school districts in 2021 alone. PEN, which is a free press and speech org, tracked more than 125 bills, policies, or resolutions alone this year that banned queer, black, feminist, material be them books, films, or even topics in classrooms, libraries, and universities. Even in some of the bills passed and proposed the language being used is under the guise of causing "discomfort." "Sexuality" and discussions of certain civil rights topics is stricken from lesson plans all together under these frameworks. These trends now and then are alarming.

I also understand this could be minimizing the trauma you relive when a specific topic or graphic description is read in round. I again do not deny your experience on face ever. I just cannot comfortably see that framework co-opted and abused to suppress the mechanisms or values of equality and equity. So are you, Gabe, saying because the other actors steal a tool and abuse that tool it shouldn't be used for our shared common goals? Yes, if the powerful abuse that tool and it does more harm to the arc of history as it bends towards justice than I am going to oppose it. This can be a Heckler's Veto, Assassin's Veto, Poisoning The Well, whatever you want to call it. Even in debate I have seen screenshots of actual men discussing how they would always pick the opt out because they don't want to "debate girls on women issues in front of a girl judge." This is of course likely an incredibly small group but I am tired of seeing queer, feminist, or critical race theory based arguments being punted because of common terms or non-graphic descriptions. Those debates can be so enriching to the community and their absence means we are structurally disadvantaged with real world consequences that I think outweigh the impacts usually levied against this arg. I will defend this line for the powerless and will do so until I die.

All of these above claims are neither syllogisms or encyclopedias of events. I am fallible and so are those arguments. Hence let us debate this but just know my thoughts.

Like in my disclaimer on the other theory shell none of these arguments are truisms just my inner and honest thoughts to help you make strategic decisions in the round.

*Last updated 11/7/19*

Background:

Schools Attended: Boca '16, FSU '20

Teams Coaching/Coached: Capitol, Boca

Competitive History: 4 years of PF in high school, 2 years of JV policy and 2 years of NPDA and Civic Debate in college

Public Forum Paradigm:

TL;DR: You do you.

General:

1) Tech > Truth. If you have strong warrants and links and can argue well, I'll vote off of anything. Dropped arguments are presumed true arguments. I'm open to anything as long as you do your job to construct the argument properly.

2) The first speaking team in the round needs to make sure that all offense that you want me to vote on must be in the summary and final focus. Defense in the rebuttal does not need to be extended, I will buy it as long as your opponents don't respond and it is extended in the final focus. The second speaking team needs to respond to turns in rebuttal and extend all offense and defense you want me to vote on in BOTH the summary and the final focus.

3) If you start weighing arguments in rebuttal or summary it will make your arguments a lot more convincing. Easiest way to my ballot is to warrant your weighing and tell me why your arguments are the most important and why they mean you win the round.

4) I don't vote on anything that wasn't brought up in final focus.

Framework:

Frameworks need clear warrants and reasons to prefer. Make sure to contextualize how the framework functions with the rest of the arguments in the round.

Theory:

I will listen to any theory arguments as long as a real abuse is present. Don't just use theory as a cheap way to win, give me strong warrants and label the shell clearly and it will be a voter if the violation is clear. Also, if you're going to ask me to reject the team you better give me a really good reason.

If you are running theory, such as disclosure theory, and you want it to be a voter, you need to bring it up for a fair amount of time.

Kritiks:

I was primarily a K debater when I competed in policy in college, so I am familiar with how they function in round. However, I don't know all the different K lit out there so make sure you can clearly explain and contextualize.

Offense v. Defense:

I find myself voting for a risk of offense more often than I vote on defense. If you have really strong terminal impact defense or link defense, I can still be persuaded to vote neg on presumption.

Weighing:

I hate being in a position where I have to do work to vote for a team. Tell me why your argument is better/more important than your opponents and why that means I should vote for you. Strength of link and/or impact calc is encouraged and appreciated.

Evidence Standard:

I will only call for cards if it is necessary for me to resolve a point of clash or when a team tells me to.

Speaks:

- If I find you offensive/rude I will drop your speaks relative to the severity of the offense.

- I take everything into consideration when giving speaks.

- The easier you make my decision, the more likely you are to get high speaks.

Misc:

- I'm fine with speed, but if you're going to spread send out speech docs.

- Keep your own time.

- I will disclose if the tournament allows me, and feel free to ask me any questions after my RFD.

- I only vote off of things brought up in speeches.

Bottom line: Debate is supposed to be fun! Run what you want just run it well.

If you have any questions email me at joshschulsterdebate@gmail.com or ask me before the round.

Debate experience: 4 years HS policy, 2 years HS PFD, 1 year college policy at UT Dallas, judge experience 4 years.

Topicality- I love T. Topicality is one of my favorite arguments. However, a lot of teams do things with topicality in which I don't think is strategic. To win T, you must win the interpretation, standards, and voters. Often, a team will focus on one section of T and try to win the argument. Similarly to winning the UQ on a da, it's not enough alone. If you want to go for T, go for T.

Framework- If there is a ROB/ROJ please extend it throughout the debate. Nothing is worse than having a team present one then not talk about it again until the 2AR/2NR.

K- k's are fine, but please be clear on terminology. There are several instances when a team will use a term that doesn't mean what they think it means. Reading philosophy is cool, understanding the philosophy wins debates.

Da- I'm not sure why any judge would have issues with Da's. I'm not a huge fan of politics, but if politics is your thing don't let this scare you away from it.

Cp- Cp's are fine. If you can solve the aff better by all means do it.

K/Performance Affs: For specific questions, ask. If this is your style of debate, then do it. On issues of "you have to be USFG" just tell me why you don't need to be. Although, I love T debates, they boil down to a question of which method/model is best for debate (where the bulk of my decision making takes place) so tell me why yours is better.

General housekeeping: open cx is cool, speed is okay. I will say "clear" if I can't understand you, and I will not be responsible for time keeping. Please don't shake my hand, I hate germs. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.

Email: m.smalley316@gmail.com

Debate is a subjective activity, so I try to make it as objective as possible by evaluating rounds as follow:

1) I buy any argument at all as long as it has strong warrants and links.

2) Everything in final focus MUST be in summary. If you want it to be evaluated at the end, its got to be there.

3) Use summaries to respond to the responses to your case.

4) Please, for the love of all that is holy, weigh arguments. Specifically what I mean by that is tell me why one argument matters more than your opponents. If your opponent is winning 3 arguments and you're only winning one but you tell me why thats the most important one, you will win the round. (This is by far the easiest way to my ballot)

5) If you extend the argument/warrant I will extend the card for you where it comes up, you don't need to say "extend johnson" so long as you extend johnson's argument.

6) Also, if you make me laugh I bump your speaks.

7) If you win the coin toss and pick 1st, I likely bump your speaks

8) If you read any card from the University of Florida and Gator Chomp, I bump your speaks

9) Please make this debate fun for me. Have energy. Have a firey crossfire. Use sass.

10) Don't steal prep!!! If you're asking for a card, I won't run prep so long as you aren't actually prepping.

11) I don't flow cross, if it's important I expect it to make it into speech

Win the coin toss and flip first. I will increase your speaks.

Hello!

Fundamentally, I just want debaters to respect each other and debate what they do best. I've been involved with debate for 11 years--debated policy in high school and NPDA parli in college. During that time, I've coached most college styles of debate. Definitely was a K hack in college but love any type of debate that's done well. Currently finishing my masters at UNT

Some specifics:

-I'm not heavily involved with the topic so please keep that in mind with your strats

-I'm good with speed but am a little rusty so maybe don't go full super saiyan

-Speed, Ks, procedurals, etc. are all fine.

-Please don't assume that I know your lit lol

-I default to competing interps unless given a different framing on procedurals

-It's hard for me evaluate 1AR/NR theory because of aff side bias