Caroline Erickson

cm.erickson2521@gmail.com

I'm somewhere in between a lay and a flow judge these days: I did policy debate, but it's been quite a while. I cannot emphasize this enough—don’t spread. I will not be able to keep track of the round if you do.

Kritiks: Your arguments must be understandable to someone unfamiliar with your literature--I will say, my grounding in fem/gender/queer theory is decent, but still, you want to be going really slow and careful in front of me, no matter what the K.

K Affs: I'm willing to hear a K Aff, but you do risk losing me in the framework debate. See the above about unfamiliar literature.

Disads/Case: Pretty much all the usual fare for DAs and case arguments are fine by me, including generic links (within reason).

Evidence: It should be good, it should support your arguments, and if the other team’s ev does not support their arguments, call them out on it.

Counterplans: I'm EXTREMELY rusty on CP theory, so make sure you make your theory arguments are VERY clear if this is what you're going to try and win on.

Theory: I value theory in the debate, and will listen closely to it. In-round abuse needs to be reasonably proven, and potential abuse will probably be hard to win in front of me, unless you can explain really, really well why this team’s actions don’t hurt your ability to debate, necessarily, but do still hurt the debate space in possible rounds that aren’t actually happening right now.

Topicality/FW: I’ll be entirely honest, I love a good T debate and, while I’m less familiar with FW, I will still listen carefully and enjoy it. These both will play a big role in my decision making process. Again, potential abuse as a voter will still be difficult to win.

DO:

• Create clash. Make my job easy!

• Frame in terms of offense and defense. Whichever team has the most offense by the end of the round is the team I will vote for.

DON’T:

• Be rude.

• Steal prep.

LD Paradigm

I did LD a couple years in high school, but 1) I’ve been out of high school for two years now, and 2) the LD circuit in Kansas is pretty small and not the most competitive. With those things in mind, your best approach in front of me is SLOW, above all else, and more in the vein of traditional LD, if you can. LD is about deciding an ethical question, not passing a plan, and I will approach it as such.

I judge on an offense/defense paradigm, so make sure you’re articulating why your offense trumps your opponent’s and why your defense holds up against your opponent’s offense. Basic stuff, I know, but I want to make it clear.

For any theory arguments, assume I have no prior knowledge, because I don’t for LD. See the theory section under my Policy paradigm for further information.

Blue Valley Southwest '18

USC '22

Email: holzer@usc.edu

Updated Sept 2021

I did policy for four years in high school, mostly on the ToC circuit my junior and senior years. I've judged a few tournaments since then and done a little bit of coaching, but I haven't been actively part of the community since 2018.

I was a policy kid in high school. My 2nrs were typically topicality, neolib, or a disad and a counterplan.

I'll almost always prefer interesting, well-developed arguments over a "throw out as many blippy arguments as possible and hope they drop something" type of approach. Quality over quantity for cards as well.

I heavily value clarity, organization and kindness.

Avoid jargon.

Inappropriate or rude behavior will result in low speaker points. Debate is supposed to be a fun learning experience for everyone involved!

Below are my general thoughts on a few arguments. Take all of this with a grain of salt. I'm a few years removed and my opinions aren't as strong as they used to be.

Topicality

I'm relatively unfamiliar with this topic, so complex T violations might not be the best strategy in front of me, but I do enjoy watching topicality debates. I will generally err towards a more limited topic and default to competing interpretations. Rarely do I find reasonability persuasive. Limits and precision are often the most persuasive impacts, but I've started to value education more since I stopped debating.

Kritiks

I'm most familiar with common Ks like neolib and security but am certainly not opposed to others as long as terms and concepts I may be unfamiliar with are adequately explained. Feel free to read whatever arguments you are most comfortable with in front of me and I will do my best to evaluate it. Links to the plan are best. I'm typically skeptical of frameworks that tell me to evaluate things that happened outside the round, but I could be convinced otherwise. Not the best for pomo stuff. I will of course evaluate it, I just won't enjoy it much.

Counterplans

I don't love judging theory debates, but I'm highly skeptical of any counterplan that results in the entirety of the aff. I will default to judge kicking a counterplan unless told to do otherwise. Perms aren't advocacies. Conditionality is good.

Framework

Some sort of stasis point seems necessary for productive debate. Affs should probably be in the direction of the resolution. If you'd asked me about framework when I first started judging, I would've said I leaned neg. Now that I don't debate, my bias isn't nearly as strong.

I'm a high school debater at the Barstow school, I have been debating for 3 years now. 

Aff

I like it when the Aff team has good impacts that they explain and extend through the whole debate.

I don't mind a K Aff as long as you explain it and make sure that the Neg team and I understand what is going on.

Neg

I don't mind a K as long as you explain it and make sure that the Aff team and I understand what is going on.

When you are explaining your impacts make sure you make the links and the impacts of your arguments clear.

I will vote on whatever as long as it is explained. WARRANTS ARE A MUST, I want to hear how you interpret these things, not just names. Don't be obnoxious or rude, this leads to immediate loss of speaker points.

-paradigm is essentially arranged from most to least useful to you so if you're reading and start feeling like it's no longer helpful for prefs or pre-debate adaptation you could probably stop bc it'll only get worse lol

-please put stephenlowep@gmail.com on the chain

-I really like when debates start on time. If your 1ac is on the wiki I don't see any disadvantage to sending it out before start time so that you can start speaking at start time. You don't have to start reading the 1ac as soon as its sent. You could send it as soon as you get the pairing and then just start reading it at the start time. I get not sending if its a new aff.

-please send a doc with the ev you want me to read after the round

-I try hard not to intervene in any way(note abt this at the end)

-best t-usfg impact for me is fairness. It doesn't matter to me a bunch if debate is valuable for clash type reasons bc we are all here afterall. We are doing debate for some reason however varied those reasons may be.

-best aff way to beat a fairness impact in front of me would involve winning some kind of subjectivity change. If aff can win a solvency claim for any kind of impact like racism or war then the aff will probably end up winning. I just think it's really hard to win that solvency claim given how important competition is to debate.

-I will provide clarification abt an argument if asked during your own speech or anyone’s prep time, e.g. I will answer “did you flow conditionality bad?”

-i encourage you to challenge my decisions if you disagree. I'd rather hash it out and have someone's opinion change than mutual disagreement. I don't take it personally and I won't judge any future debate based on what has happened in a previous one.

-if never mentioned judge kick is okay(and this means judge kick of individual planks if the neg says they can kick planks)

-i will reject the argument and not the team unless the aff explicitly argues their non-conditionality thing is a voting issue before the 2ar

-i lean towards competing interps over reasonability

-i lean limits over precision

-competition over theory

-perms aren't advocacies but perm do the counterplan does demonstrate that the aff could be implemented in such a way that there is no net benefit

-perm double bind seems to make a lot of sense absent the neg winning framework, but if the neg wins framework it seems they can win by convincingly criticizing the aff

-i suspect I care about impact uniqueness more than most

-i try not to be visually reactive. i don't want to effect the decisions you all make

-any questions at all ask over email. I believe you should have the opportunity to know enough about me to strike me if you'd like

-I think a lot of speaker points/my general disposition in debates is driven by how interested I am in what's happening. I'm more interested when both teams are reading a lot of cards and there's a high rate of arguments being made. Bold choices are also fun like impact turning in latter constructives, 2nc counterplans, etc. You shouldn't do these things just bc you have me and I like chaos but if it serves some strategic purpose go for it. Like I'm better for ev that's less highlighted, lighter explanation, and higher breadth strategies than most.

---non-intervention note

What I'm trying to say here is I will try hard not to dismiss an argument because it clashes with my personal beliefs or because it's offensive or anything like that. I'm not going to vote against any kritik, any style of death good, or pretty much any argument at all just because it was read. I will intervene on some line by line issues if the debating forces me too. For example if there is a t debate where both sides are making internal link arguments about education but they don't directly clash then my hand is forced and I will have to intervene to decide which internal link is better. Similarly there are certain arguments that don't require responses not because they are ideologically bad but because they are logically incoherent however this is rare. I will not vote for an elections DA if the election has already happened and I won't vote on a DA to space elevators if it's been read against a CJR aff. This isn't because I'm offended or am truth over tech or something. This is because these DAs are simply not arguments that prove I should vote neg whereas most death good args or kritiks are. Like if every part of these DAs were true by virtue of concession the most they could prove is that space elevators cause extinction or that the aff would've shifted an election which can be true and all but I couldn't possibly explain to a team why it means they should lose.

---other note

Everything below has nothing to do with how I judge debate. I’ve had a lot of conversations with high school debaters and I think many could benefit from reading what’s below. It’s not THE TRUTH but it’s my thoughts and I think some people may be able to get something useful out of them. I don't think reading what's below will help you with prefs or anything though.

-I enjoyed most of my time debating. I stopped debating because I wasn’t enjoying it. There were still times when I did debate and I didn’t enjoy it. After all there’s more to life than a search for what brings the most enjoyment. People who climbed Mount Everest didn’t do it because it was fun. They did it because it was Everest. Still, debate is a lot less cool than Everest and that’s also worth remembering.

-I recently learned that me quitting was evidence that I lied about my commitment level to debate. Commitment levels can change overtime. It seems the best thing I could do for the team and myself was stop. This was informed by people I spoke to on and off the team that advised me this was true. I’ve been a lot happier since I’ve stopped and my former team has been incredibly successful. This seems like a win-win to me. I don’t think anyone should feel any obligation to stay in what is in all reality an extracurricular club that they don’t enjoy because at one point in their lives they enjoyed it and they told other people they enjoyed it.

-Any monetary rewards I received from competing in debate were far outweighed by the money I spent attending tournaments on food, transport, and registration costs. I never got scholarship money in high school or college or for attending camp but I do get paid to judge/coach debate. I didn’t do debate as a survival strategy. I did it because I thought it was fun and I liked being good at something. Maybe the benefit of the connections and skills I’ve acquired through debate made participation a financially good decision. It’s impossible to say.

-I don’t know all of the different factors that can make someone’s relationship to debate unhealthy. I don’t know what it means in any clear sense to have an unhealthy relationship to the activity. I do believe there are people that are in debate that have intense anxiety and depressive episodes related to their participation. I’m not subtweeting here. This is just a thing that happens in debate. This seems bad but I’m not a doctor and I’m not saying you should stop if this is the case for you but it’s worth thinking about what you get from debate.

-There are a lot of interesting people in debate. Not all of them want you to feel good or feel good themselves. Being a good debater doesn’t make someone an admirable person. I don’t think there’s a negative correlation either but debate is an activity that selects naturally disagreeable and competitive people. Debaters hang out with other debaters and often times will not have good friends outside of the activity. Good and bad debaters want to hangout with good debaters. Outside of debate people want to hangout with people who are fun to be around. Being good at something is not a sustainable strategy for building strong relationships with other people.

-I also don’t think being a good debater means you’re any smarter. There are a lot of smart people that do debate but I don’t think there’s any reason to idolize debaters who are competitively successful as being ultra intelligent. Being really good at debate will cause people to believe you’re really smart and it may cause you to believe you’re really smart but this isn’t the same thing as being really smart. The flip side of this is that if you aren’t good at debate, you shouldn’t stay up at night wondering if you’re good enough. You are good enough and you would’ve been even if you had never heard of debate in the first place.

-No one becomes famous from debate. There are some debaters with famous parents but that fame came from elsewhere. People in debate will know of other debaters. Almost no one outside debate will know of any debaters. Even less people care. There are also other non policy debate events like mock trial, model UN, parliamentary debate, and even LD. Policy debaters like to make fun of these events but its worth remembering that however little we know about these things, people outside of our activity know even less about policy debate. My point is that there are far better ways to chase clout than convincing college students and high school teachers to tell you that you won an argument with other high-schoolers.

-Debate is not a game about logic. It’s a game about convincing another person to vote for you. There are some people who are trying to treat it like there’s always a right and wrong decision but there’s not. Different people have different ways of coming to conclusions and there are infinite arguments to be had about who won a given debate. There are logical games that exist like chess where there cannot be arguments about who won. Debate is not one of these games.

-Debate is not the most useful thing you can do for college applications. It certainly helps but there are far better activities to leverage in a similar way to debate if getting into an elite college is your goal. Again, debate helps but I wouldn’t recommend committing to debate purely as a strategy for college applications especially given all of the aforementioned baggage.

-debate is not separate from the world. It is in the world. One thing abt the world is that people with more money have an advantage over people with less. There is a reason the same schools are consistently good at debate in both college and high school. There are other things in debate that probably matter that can’t be controlled by the people that are both helped and hurt by these factors: race, gender, sexuality, etc. Debate is not an escape from these imbalances. I think it should be. I don’t think these imbalances should exist in debate or the real world. I don’t think any decision anyone will ever make in any debate will change this.

-I don’t know if debate participation is decreasing or not. People tell me that it is. If debate can’t successfully make a case for its own existence and usefulness to high school students then I don’t really know what the point is. That doesn’t mean I like this trend. I would prefer if debate grew. I think debate is better when it is bigger and I like debate.

I'm a high school policy debater at Barstow and I vote on the flow. 

1. Explain more cards, more explanation the better. Distinguish between tag and text. 

2. Staying on case is good because it creates good clash and engagement, but I do like analytical arguments. Give explanations of how you interpret arguments. 

Neg: 

I like Ks, but only if you understand and explain them well. I will vote on theory, but show me that you understand it. Don't take 5 off into rebuttals, feel free to kick out and go for your strongest ones. 

Aff:

Make answers and analytical arguments to theory. You should win case. I need to hear warrants. I am open to all kinds of debate but please focus on the topic at first.

haley.turner@barstowschool.org PLEASE include me in e-mail chains

I am a former high school debater. I participated in policy debate at Barstow from 2012-2017, and I have judged many policy rounds.

AFF: I want warrants in rebuttals - don't just extend names, tell me why I should care about these things. I prefer plan texts. I am open to all kinds of debate, but I think the debate should start by addressing the topic, how that looks is up to you.

NEG: I will vote on Theory if it is well explained and not dropped. No need to keep 5 off case into rebuttals, kick out of args if you are losing them GO FOR YOUR STRONG ONES, rebuttals should focus on 1-3 off. I weigh case first, (no need to weigh off case arguments if case has not been addressed) so do not forget to address case arguments.

I will vote on anything, as long as it is explained. I like Ks if you can explain them (DO NOT ASSUME I HAVE READ THE LITERATURE) and if your opponents and I understand what is going on. Analytical arguments are GOOD, don't just let args drop. WARRANTS ARE A MUST, I want to hear how you interpret these things, not just authors. Please don't attempt to change my mind during my RFD. Do not be obnoxious, rude, racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or offensive in any means. This will lead to immediate loss of speaker points and probably loss of the round.