Paperless. We love paperless! Email chains are great or I can do whatever new thing has come out since then - my email for debate purposes is invariably aleemdebate@gmail.com. It's worth noting that I’m only flowing what you’re saying so please be clear. I’ll read your cards after the round.

Overview:

Retired from the debate world and perhaps not up to date with the latest of topic literature. It’s been a while since I’ve heard speed so I’d really prefer if you didn’t spread your heart out. I will be more than happy to let you know if you are either too fast or unclear.

I think students often spend too much time reading these but absent a real voting record this is your best bet at figuring out if I am a strike or not. Your personal intuition is probably a much better vibe check than my own self-representation.

As a judge, I am first and foremost a critic of arguments and an educator. I believe debate is an educative arena for students to test advocacies and engage with their competitors with arguments. I will do my best to resolve a debate based on these very arguments and advocacies and not let my own perspectives affect the argument, although in my experience as a debater, tabula rasa is rarely a true trait in a judge.

Far too often, an RFD will describe a round as “two ships passing in the night” and the statement is rarely incorrect. Frame your clash through the lens of the ballot and show me where you want me to vote for you. A well-debated round will have multiple places where I could have voted, but will contain one ballot that you told me to vote for.

Make effective and neat line by line arguments. Don’t expect me to put cards where they are most convenient for you. I flow on paper and will use your speech document to review your evidence after the round, so don’t drop arguments you don’t want to and don’t misquote your evidence. Flowing on paper means that I will not flow your overviews or your tags verbatim, but can jump between sheets if you signpost effectively. Again, organisation is key.

This one’s stolen from Tim “The Man” Alderete but: “It's either Aff prep or Neg prep - No one preps for free.”

I find that speaker points should reward creative strategies through argumentation and effective articulation. Intelligent choices paired with the best of evidence makes a debate great. Being reasonably funny and enjoyable helps too. Getting below a 28 is difficult, getting a 28-29 is common, and anything in the 29-30 range means I believe you are among the best debaters at the tournament.

I read a lot and watched a lot of debates, but there is a distinct possibility that I am unfamiliar with your literature base. I find that if your explanation of your argument wouldn’t pass muster at the dinner table, it is not well-explained enough. Keep reading your literature until you can contextualise it better.

Policy Debates:

These debates made up a little over half of my debates when I competed. A good policy debate occurs when you weigh your impacts and show me how it's advantageous to vote for your world, whether that is the affirmative or the negative.

I’d appreciate it greatly if your world involved fewer, but more thought out positions with bulletproof link chains and well analysed impact probability scenarios rather than thirty-eight disadvantages with esoteric ramblings about the harm of great power war.

I never thought I’d have to say this, but your disads continue to need uniqueness cards that should be found squarely in the middle of the 1NC, not stuffed down the tail end of the block. Reading turns will always be to your advantage. Make them and answer them. I can vote for the affirmative on a decent risk of an advantage combined with solid impact defence, but a case turn allows me to go negative even if there is a large risk of the affirmative.

Slinging a salvo of a half-dozen counterplans at the affirmative is also not particularly compelling. Take the high road and pick a good CP strategy. Don’t just read something that does all of the aff - be smart and do good things! Find textual and functional competition in your counterplan strategies and tell me you’ve got an outright better idea than the affirmative. Permutations are a test of competition and not an advocacy, and therefore do not need a net benefit. A quick reminder that absent a judge kick argument, you’re stuck with your advocacy.

As for T, interps and definitions really matter. As do counter-interps. Try to have more than one. Counter-defining words would probably benefit you. I default to competing interps but am open to other possibilities if I am given a reason to be, like reasonability combined with functional limits and strong indicts of the negative’s evidence.

Kritikal Debate

These were the other half of my debate career. Baudrillard, McGowan, Bataille, Derrida, you name it, I found myself reading it in rounds. This is not, however, to say that you can read your backfiles’ selection of acroamatic postmodern rubbish in front of me without real application and expect it to stick. Find a way to apply your K to the discussion at hand and I’ll be a happy camper - I know you can do it!

Build a world through your framework that lays out salient links to the plan’s actions. Doing so can mean that affirmative frameworks get thrown away because the plan is functionally a bad idea. Doing this in conjunction with solid impact framing, a unique alternative, and case defence can ensure a very difficult 1AR. If you’re feeling fruity and want some neg flex, put this work in the 2NC and go for a disad in the 1NR.

I also find that aff teams often need to check out this wild tool known as the wiki and start preempting the block’s attempt to prevent the weighing of the aff. You will find me to be very unwilling to buy the “I wasn’t prepared!” cry. Remember that impact framing is your friend, and thoroughly examine the K’s links. You’ll often find a link turn or a no-link argument. Defend your vision of the plan and any incremental progress it makes in the face of the alternative.

Okay, let’s talk about T/FW for a moment… These were often my favourite debates as an affirmative. I find that the negative has to effectively articulate why they feel debate should be “predictable” and “fair”, and this means that you need to contextualise what fairness/education/etc. means to the round and to the activity, and what effect the ballot will have on your voting issues. The same applies to the K. If it is your belief that your form of articulation and framing in relation to the resolution is better/must come first/etc., you must articulate why the world under your advocacy is preferable and leads to a ballot in your name. This extends to performance debates as well, and there should be a distinct reason why I should vote for your story in relation to the topic and the ballot.

I think that TVAs and SSD are negative counterplans meant to prove that the affirmative could access a large swathe of their literature base or offense under a “traditional” model of debate. It is the negative’s job to prove that this swathe is enough, and it is the affirmative’s burden to prove that what they do specifically is key.

Framework can often be an uphill battle for affirmatives that do not effectively present a well-formulated alternate world for debate and do not weigh this world against that of the negative’s. Do not take away the notion from this section that I am not down to hear your kritikal affirmative - I am very much down to do so. I just need you to defend it well and not expect me to be swayed by the fact that the literature is cool. I do believe that negative’s who are overly rude and dismissive of these arguments when reading T can find themselves losing very quickly to exclusion offense. Conduct yourselves accordingly.

Conclusion:

I will do my best to make the debate round accessible and a safe place for you and your arguments. Please email if you have any needs and how I can fulfil them.

Stay organised and tell me where/why you want me to vote and you’ll find a ballot signed in your name.

Oh, and don’t steal prep. As Joe Patrice says, it’ll make me die inside a little. There’s very little left to kill.

The time has come for my yearly overhaul of my paradigm

Crystallegionaires@gmail.com

Debating
Weber State University- 5 1/2 years included attending the NDT and breaking at CEDA
Alta High School- 3 years

Judging
Judging and helping at West High- 5 years
Current Judging for Weber State

"I know in your heart of hearts you hate [policy arguments] but you also vote for that stuff all the time."
-Mike Bausch

The more I judge, the more I find that the way that I debated and the way that I judge are fairly different. I love kritik debate and I find it to be some of the most educational debates and research that I have found personally with inserting and forefronting real life impacts and experiences into debate especially for me as a disabled transgender woman. I also find that "kritik" or "performance" or "nontraditional" teams or what have you are bad at answering policy arguments from framework to simple extinction outweighs. It's incredibly frustrating but despite my reluctance, leads me to voting a fair amount for policy arguments. Let me make this clear though, I'm not a great judge for your super technical line by line on a politics disad though I won't be opposed to voting on that for you if you win.

One of the main reasons I present this with a caveat is because I have a **sensory processing disorder.** If you want to spread through and get as many arguments out no matter what, I will be unable to keep up with you and I will tell you to slow down. It is in your best interest to do so. The more time I struggle to hear the less I'm hearing and writing down. Furthermore if you refuse to slow down, **I will stop writing down arguments and start removing speaker points.** I'll tell you to slow down 3 times and then I will stop flowing. Further speeches will have 1 warning before that happens. Whatever speed I lower you to, go one lever below that to account for speeding up in the speech later. Trust me, you don't need that last argument more than you want me to understand the debate. 1 card I do understand is way better than 10 cards I don't. I almost never read cards unless necessary or if I'm looking for feedback so reliance on cards won't get you that far. If you want me to read a piece of evidence, it needs to be on an important part of the debate that can't be resolved otherwise and needs to be impacted out.

I'm a truth over tech judge one good/"true" argument can beat ten terrible cards. However, that doesn't mean you can't get me to vote on tech, you just have to impact it out more. If there is a strategic messup by your opponents and you explain why that should grant you and argument eg if they concede a permutation and you go for it even if it doesn't make sense outside of debate, if you explain it, I'm willing to grant it to you. You need to explain your shit. Cards and dropped arguments aren't inherently true and round ending. You have to tell me why all your shit matters for me to weigh it. I find teams are especially light on their impact level of the debate and on the solvency of their arguments so I would make sure to have emphasis there.

Postmodernism, psychoanalysis and the like aren't my cup of tea. I often spend these debates trying to wrap my mind around the terminology rather than the argument in question which can be a detriment to the debaters in round, just how my mind processes new information. I won't straight tell you I won't vote on it but I also find these arguments struggle to have applicability that can be explained in the "real world."

I believe there can be zero risk of impacts. I don't believe in assigning .1% risk of impacts to extinction. Either way the impacts go you need to tell me why that is the case.

I also don't believe that you just saying so means that you solve 100% of the aff with your counterplan. You need to explain in depth why that is the case

I default that the ballot does have meaning and that debate isn't just a game. I can be persuaded otherwise but I feel you need to explain why the community and activism that happens in debate is more of a side effect instead of debate actually having meaning

I think nontopical affs are often really cool and bring extra insight into the topic. For framework teams, i can be persuaded that these teams are cheating if it's impacted out and the education is bad but there is often a lack of legalistic warrants or topic specific education warrants to these arguments which needs to be present. I generally think it is better for the aff to be resolutional eg if it's an immigration topic, talk something about immigration but I won't penalize you for not doing so.

If you run a nontopical aff, you need a disad to the topical version of the aff on framework. I can't stress this enough. Many of my decisions have been made because the TVA solves the aff meaning the offense goes away or the aff forget to extend offense or impact out that disad. This is THE point that I find myself voting on over and over again on framework/t

I do find the evidential debate on disads and counterplans especially to have unique education and debate benefits that don't exist elsewhere and look forward to how debaters utilize them

I think theory debates are really useless. Everyone runs condo and severance perms and it's more of a flow check. I have a high threshold for a theory argument and there better be a damn good reason why you are turning the debate into a theory debate. I also find debaters being exceptionally bad at impacting out theory and explaining the standards. For these reasons I don't see myself voting on theory in the near future. Exceptions to the rule are 50 State fiat, world government fiat and other ridiculous multiactor counterplans and possibly utopian fiat on absurd kritiks.

I think "performative" arguments are really important to the activity and bring pathos that the event often badly lacks. Because of this, I often find myself giving better speaker points to performative teams. I don't think it is cheating or undebateable for someone to bring in their or other experiences and I look forward to these debates. That being said, I can often be persuaded to vote on framework because performative teams often struggle with what to do with their performance once they have performed.

NYU 26' and College Prep 22'

add me to the chain please, callum.theiding [at] gmail.com

I did 4 years of policy in high school and I'm currently in my second year of college policy. I'm happy to judge anything you wanna read, barring anything bigoted and harmful. I think debate is an awesome community where you can show off whatever you've been researching.

There's a fine line in cross between being confident and being rude or mean. Err on the side of being nice.

Note for PF at the bottom

LD/Policy

T

people should go for T more. I like it. good T debates are beautiful

-I think fairness is an internal link to education, more education happens pre round during prep and research

-aff creativity has always been kind of ridiculous to me, affs that say this usually do explode the neg research burden, but i will vote on it if you can effectively weigh it

-love love love when affs on the fringe of topicality have a clever c/i or w/m, its smart and strategic

Ks

-links of omission are kinda lame, find specific lines or instances where the aff actually links

-i prefer a more material and defined alt but this not all at required. that said, if you're reading a rejection/inaction alt please have a specific warrant for why inaction is key

-lowered speaks if you're reading an incommensurability alt and say the k is conditional, either stand by what your authors actually say or don't read it

-i do not want to hear your high theory buzzword soup

CPs

-love a creative adv cp

-i think more than 3 condo is pushing it but if you can win your interp, do what you want

-not a fan of the 2ac perm shot gun

-please explain your process cp, a good chunk of these are way wonkier than they need to be. theres definitely a huge advantage to confusing your opponents but a confusing cp is hard to vote for

Theory

-be clear, if i can't flow it and you try to weigh it, good luck

-please impact your arguments out early

-prefer condo or process cp bad over things like a 5 sec vague alts bad that get exploded in the 1ar

Case

-for the neg, those hard right aff link chains are often very dubious, your speaks will be rewarded if you use a badly written case to your advantage instead of just spamming CPs and DAs

-2As, I get the need for speed but gimme at least half a second between answering 1NC case args to let me move my pen

DA

-pls pls pls do your impact calc, earlier the better, give me in depth comparison of impacts, not just "it happens faster, vote neg"

-not a fan of ptx, but if you win it, ill vote for it. it's been a hot second since i've seen a decent one.

K affs

I think the best ones are related to the topic but effectively articulate what the resolution is missing/why it's bad.

I'm more familiar with the cap debate than the fw debate. If you're going for fw, don't blitz through your blocks and slow down for your standards. Actually debating on the line by line and not just reading a script is mega ethos boost.

PF

-I will flow each round. If something is new in the last two speeches, it's much better if you flag it and implicate it. The more work you do yourself, the less I have to intervene.

-You don't have to ask to take prep. It's your prep time. You decide when you want to take it.

-I think teams should probably send speech docs. It's a good norm for ev ethics. Also it wastes less time than calling for cards.

-Impact calc is what wins round, not buzzwords. However, I think more people should be doing internal link work. It seems like most people don't have great defenses of their cases besides basically saying "nuh-uh".

-I do not want to be in theory rounds in PF. PF is too short to have meaningful theory debates with depth. If you want to read theory, I'd recommend switching to policy. There probably are cases where theory is warranted but the threshold for that is so insanely high. Also, RVI is not a thing.