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D5 NDT Qualifying Tournament at Northwestern

2020 — Evanston, IL/US

Policy Paradigm List

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Alex Brown Michigan State University 6 rounds

Jeff Buntin Hire 3 rounds

Last changed on Tue March 26, 2024 at 5:33 AM CDT

Jeff Buntin
Northwestern University/Montgomery Bell Academy

Feelings----------------------------------------X--Dead inside

Policy---X------------------------------------------K

Tech-----------------------------X-----------------Truth

Read no cards-----------------------------X------Read all the cards

Conditionality good--X----------------------------Conditionality bad

States CP good-----------------------X-----------States CP bad

Politics DA is a thing-------------------------X----Politics DA not a thing

Always VTL-------x--------------------------------Sometimes NVTL

UQ matters most----------------------X----------Link matters most

Fairness is an impact-X------------------------------Fairness is not an impact

Tonneson votes aff-----------------------------X-Tonneson clearly neg

Try or die--------------x---------------------------What's the opposite of try or die

Not our Baudrillard-------------------------------X Yes your Baudrillard

Clarity-X--------------------------------------------Srsly who doesn't like clarity

Limits--------------------X--------------------------Aff ground

Presumption---------------------------------X-----Never votes on presumption

Resting grumpy face---X--------------------------Grumpy face is your fault

Longer ev--------X---------------------------------More ev

"Insert this rehighlighting"----------------------X-I only read what you read

2017 speaker points---------------------X--------2007 speaker points

CX about impacts----------------------------X----CX about links and solvency

Dallas-style expressive----------X---------------D. Heidt-style stoic

Referencing this philosophy in your speech--------------------X-plz don't

Fiat double bind-----------------------------------------X--literally any other arg

AT: --X------------------------------------------------------ A2:

AFF (acronym)-------------------------------------------X Aff (truncated word)

"It's inev, we make it effective"------------------------X---"It'S iNeV, wE mAkE iT eFfEcTiVe"

Bodies without organs---------------X---------------Organs without bodies

Redistribution affs must tax----------------------X--------Not required to tax

New affs bad-----------------------------------------X-Old affs bad

Aff on process competition--X-------------------------Neg on process competition

CPs that require the 'butterfly effect' card------------X- Real arguments

'Judge kick'----------------------------------X---Absolutely no 'judge kick'

Nukes topic--X-----------------------------------------Any other topic ever

Kristina Curtiss Wayne State University 3 rounds

Last changed on Sat January 21, 2023 at 8:02 AM EDT

did the thing for 3-ish years at wayne state university '20 #gowarriors #d5 and qualified to the ndt twice. i now work in transportation policy so i'm less active in debate (read: capable to keep up with all things debate jargon, not capable enough to know everything about topic nuance) but am excited to watch your round. she/her pronouns.

i'm rather apathetic towards the content of debate rounds, but believe it's my duty as an adjudicator to explain how i decide rounds.

with that being said, here are some things to know about me:

-i was a 2a my entire debate career, so many of my debate predispositions are shaped as a response to being a 2a/1n -- a lot of this is seen in how i judge theory/t debates, and my preferences re: judge kick

-i'm inherently a pragmatist but believe i'm a still good judge for clash debates. with a deep knowledge of k lit due to the research i had to do to give 1nrs on case versus k affs, i believe i have the skills to adjudicate without bias. i also believe there are a lot of problematic assumptions in both policy development and in debate that need to be interrogated. i tend to strongly prioritize offense in framework debates.

-i was a policy argument-leaning debater all throughout college. technical debates are my jam, and good 1nrs on the disad are my bread and butter.

-i strongly reward nuance, argument depth, and strategic argumentation pivots. if your strategy is "we read links in the 1nc but won't really answer your questions or give you aff specific examples of the links until the block," i'm not your judge.

-because of ^^ i do not follow along in speech docs during the debate, and will always try to default to debater evidence comparison and analysis. if i think certain cards are important, i'll always read them after the debate. if you think there are cards that are important, send them in a card doc after your last rebuttal.

-i promise to invest 100% of my energy to all debates i watch and i promise to invest that same energy into helping any team improve as much as they want. i will show up to your debate attentive and ready to enjoy it - i really enjoy this activity, so i hope you really enjoy being in rounds as much as i do.

here's how i decide rounds:

-i'll do flow math as the debate goes on to try and resolve some of the core debate controversies and flag what is important argument resolution. i'm rather expressive, so if i disagree, if i'm upset with how an argument is articulated, or if i agree with you, you'll see me react during prep time or during a speech. this is why i'm not a poker player.

-once the debate is over, i'll determine what i think the main questions of the debate are. for k debates this is often a role of the ballot claim or a framing question. for policy debates this can look like solvency v solvency deficits, direction of the link, etc. having debaters flag these is nice.

-i'll take sub-arguments from the flow that supports/contradicts this question. i'll resolve them, will play devil's advocate to determine if i think how i resolved them is correct, and will thus come to an answer to the question.

-i allocate the average speaker a 28.7 and work up/down from there based on the quality of the round. i would like to think i give fair points (esp after being out of the activity for a while), but i may not be the best judge for you if you're going 5-3 and need speaker points to boost you into elimination rounds.

Cameron Dehmlow Dunne Indiana University 6 rounds

Brian DeLong Indiana University 6 rounds

Last changed on Wed January 3, 2024 at 2:55 AM EDT

Update 4/1/2023

*If you are scanning this philosophy as a nonmember of the community, seeking out quotes to help your political "culture war" cause you are not an honest broker here and largely looking for clickbait. I find your endeavors an unfortunate result of a rage machine that consumes a great deal of quality programs without ever helping them thrive or grow. Re-evaluate your life and think about how you can help high schools and middle schools around this country develop speech and debate programs, core liberal art educational, to improve the quality of argumentation, that otherwise is lacking. In the end, as an outsider looking in, you are missing a great deal of nuance in these philosophies and how they operate in the communities (multiple not just one) around the US and the world.

If you have landed here as a representative of Fox News or an ally or affiliate, I would like to see the receipts of the bias that has and continues to perforate your organization from Roger Ailes to Tucker Carlson and more. Here is my question, when you learned about the Joe McCarthy era of conspiracy theory, along with the hysteria and demonization of potential Americans who are communist (or sympathizers) and "pinko" (gay or sexual "deviants"), is your gripe with McCarthy that he had a secret list without evidence, or do you recognize that a core problem with McCarthy is his anti-democratic fear that there actually ARE communists, gay, trans, bisexual, Americans?

My next question is when and where you think it is acceptable for a person with strong beliefs to exist in democratic spaces. Bias is inevitable and part of this debate game. Organizations attempt to manage types of bias and coaches and debaters learn how to adapt to certain bias while attempting to avoid problematic bias. What do you think? Would right leaning presidential candidates vote for an argument that affirms trans athletes in sports? Should a trans judge leave their identity entirely at the door and embody a leading republican presidential candidate who is against medical care for trans persons? Both answers are no. The issue you seek to lambast for viewership clickbate is much deeper and more complicated than a 3 minute video clip can cover. Thank for reading.

REAL PHILOSOPHY
Background: Indiana University Director of Debate as of 2010. Background is primarily as a policy debater and policy debate coach.

Email Chain: Bdelo77@gmail.com

The road to high speaker points and the ballot

I reward debaters who have a strong knowledge of the topic. Those debaters who can articulate intricacies and relationships amongst topic specific literature will meet what I believe are the educational benefits of having a topic in the first place.

Using evidence to assist you with the argument you are trying to make is more important than stringing evidence together in hopes that they accumulate into an argument. “I have a card judge, it is real good” “pull my 15 uniqueness cards judge” are not arguments. Ex: Obama will win the election – a) swing voters, Rasmussen poll indicates momentum after the DNC b) Washington post “Romney has lost the election” the base is gone… etc. are good extensions of evidence.

Less jargon more eloquence. I get bored with repeated catch phrases. I understand the need for efficiency, but debaters who recognize the need for innovation by individuals in the activity will receive more points.

Speed: I expect I can digest at least 70% of your speech. The other 30% should be general human attention span issues on my part. I firmly believe debate is a communication event, I am saddened that this has been undervalued as debaters prepare for tournaments. If I agree with X debater that Y debater’s speech on an argument was incoherent, I am more and more willing to just ignore the argument. Computer screens and Bayesian calculus aside, there is a human in this body that makes human decisions.

Should affs be topical?

Affs should have a relationship to the topic that is cogent. If there is no relationship to the topic, I have a high standard for affirmatives to prove that the topic provides no “ground” for a debater to adapt and exist under its umbrella. Negatives, this does not mean you don’t have a similar burden to prove that the topic is worth debating. However personally I think you will have a much smaller hill to climb… I find it disturbing that debaters do not go further than a quick “topical version of your aff solves” then insert X switch side good card… Explain why the topical version is good for debate and provides argument diversity and flexibility.

Policy debate is good: When I prep our files for tournaments I tend to stay in the policy-oriented literature. This does not mean that I am unwilling to cut our K file or K answers, I just have limited time and job related motivation to dive into this literature.

K Debate: Can be done well, can be done poorly. I do not exclude the arguments from the round but nebulous arguments can be overplayed and abused.

(Updated 3-2-2022) Conditionality:

1) Judge Kick? No. You made your choice on what to go for now stick with it. 2NRs RARELY have the time to complete one avenue for the ballot let alone two conditional worlds...

I tend to believe that one conditional substantive test of the plan advocacy is good (agent CP, process CP, or ?) and I am open to the idea of the need for a second advantage CP (need to deal with add-ons and bad advantages) or K within limits. I'm not a fan of contradicting conditional advocacies in how they implicate 2AC offense and potential.

Beyond 1-2 conditional arguments, I am torn by the examples of proliferating counterplans and critiques that show up in the 1NC and then disappear in the negative block. There is a substantive tradeoff in the depth and quality of arguments and thus a demotivation incentive for the iterative testing and research in the status quo world of 3+ conditional advocacies. The neg's, "write better advantages" argument has value, however with 2AC time pressure it means that 1ACs are becoming Frankenstein's monster to deal with the time tradeoff.

Plans: I think the community should toy with the idea of a grand bargain where affirmatives will specify more in their plan text and negs give up some of their PIC ground. The aff interp of "we only have to specify the resolution" has pushed us in the direction where plans are largely meaningless and aff conditionality is built into core 2AC frontlines. The thing is, our community has lost many of its fora for discussing theory and establishing new norms around issues like this. Debaters need to help be the change we need and we need more in-depth theory discussions outside of the rounds. Who is the Rorger Solt going to be of the 2020's?

Reading evidence:
I find myself more willing to judge the evidence as it was debated in the round (speeches and cx), and less willing to scan through piles of cards to create a coherent understanding of the round. If a debate is being had about the quality of X card, how I SHOULD read the evidence, etc. I will read it.

Sometimes I just have an interest in the evidence and I read it for self-educational and post-round discussion reasons.

Judging:

I will work extremely hard to evaluate the debate as the debaters have asked me to judge it.

Kevin Hirn University of Michigan 6 rounds

Last changed on Sat April 13, 2024 at 5:09 AM EDT

Email: khirn10@gmail.com --- of course I want to be on the chain

Program Manager and Debate Coach, University of Michigan

Head Debate Coach, University of Chicago Lab Schools

Previously a coach at Whitney Young High School (2010-20), Caddo Magnet (2020-21), Walter Payton (2018, 2021-23)

Last updated: April, 2024 (new FR thoughts in the Topicality section, random updates throughout)

Philosophy: I attempt to judge rounds with the minimum amount of intervention required to answer the question, "Who has done the better debating?", using whatever rubrics for evaluating that question that debaters set up.

I work in debate full-time. I attend a billion tournaments and judge a ton of debates, lead a seven week lab every summer, talk about debate virtually every day, and research fairly extensively. As a result, I'm familiar with the policy and critical literature bases on both the college nuclear forces topic and the HS fiscal redistribution topic. For fiscal redistribution, I gave the topic lecture for the Michigan debate camp and I wrote both the Topicality and Job Guarantee Aff/Neg files for their starter pack

I’ve coached my teams to deploy a diverse array of argument types and styles. Currently, I coach teams that primarily read policy arguments. But I was also the primary argument coach for Michigan KM from 2014-16. I’ve coached many successful teams in both high school and college that primarily read arguments influenced by "high theory", postmodernist thought, and/or critical race literature. I'm always excited to see debaters deploy new or innovative strategies across the argumentative spectrum.

Impact turns have a special place in my heart. There are few venues in academia or life where you will be as encouraged to challenge conventional wisdom as you are in policy debate, so please take this rare opportunity to persuasively defend the most counter-intuitive positions conceivable. I enjoy judging debaters with a sense of humor, and I hope to reward teams who make their debates fun and exciting (through engaging personalities and argument selection).

My philosophy is very long. I make no apology for it. In fact, I wish most philosophies were longer and more substantive, and I still believe mine to be insufficiently comprehensive. Frequently, judges espouse a series of predictable platitudes, but I have no idea why they believe whatever it is they've said (which can frequently leave me confused, frustrated, and little closer to understanding how debaters could better persuade them). I attempt to counter this practice with detailed disclosure of the various predispositions, biases, and judgment canons that may be outcome-determinative for how I decide your debate. Maybe you don't want to know all of those, but nobody's making you read this paradigm. Having the option to know as many of those as possible for any given judge seems preferable to having only the options of surprise and speculation.

What follows is a series of thoughts that mediate my process for making decisions, both in general and in specific contexts likely to emerge in debates. I've tried to be as honest as possible, and I frequently update my philosophy to reflect perceived trends in my judging. That being said, self-disclosure is inevitably incomplete or misleading; if you're curious about whether or not I'd be good for you, feel free to look at my voting record or email me a specific question (reach me via email, although you may want to try in person because I'm not the greatest with quick responses).

0) Online debate

Online debate is a depressing travesty, although it's plainly much better than the alternative of no debate at all. I miss tournaments intensely and can't wait until this era is over and we can attend tournaments in-person once again. Do your best not to remind us constantly of what we're missing: please keep your camera on throughout the whole debate unless you have a pressing and genuine technical reason not to. I don't have meaningful preferences beyond that. Feel free to record me---IMO all debates should be public and free to record by all parties, especially in college.

1) Tech v. Truth

I attempt to be an extremely "technical" judge, although I am not sure that everyone means what everyone else means when they describe debating or judging as "technical." Here's what I mean by that: outside of card text, I attempt to flow every argument that every speaker expresses in a speech. Even in extremely quick debates, I generally achieve this goal or come close to it. In some cases, like when very fast debaters debate at max speed in a final rebuttal, it may be virtually impossible for me to to organize all of the words said by the rebuttalist into the argumentative structure they were intending. But overall I feel very confident in my flow: I will take Casey Harrigan up on his flowing gauntlet/challenge any day (he might be able to take me if we were both restricted to paper, but on our computers, it's a wrap).

In addition, being "technical" means that I line up arguments on my flow, and expect debaters to, in general, organize their speeches by answering the other team's arguments in the order they were presented. All other things being equal, I will prioritize an argument presented such that it maximizes clear and direct engagement with its counter-argument over an argument that floats in space unmoored to an adversarial argument structure.

I do have one caveat that pertains to what I'll term "standalone" voting issues. I'm not likely to decide an entire debate based on standalone issues explained or extended in five seconds or less. For example, If you have a standard on conditionality that asserts "also, men with curly unkempt hair are underrepresented in debate, vote neg to incentivize our participation," and the 1ar drops it, you're not going to win the debate on that argument (although you will win my sympathies, fellow comb dissident). I'm willing to vote on basically anything that's well-developed, but if your strategy relies on tricking the other team into dropping random nonsense unrelated to the rest of the debate entirely, I'm not really about that. This caveat only pertains to standalone arguments that are dropped once: if you've dropped a standalone voting issue presented as such in two speeches, you've lost all my sympathies to your claim to a ballot.

In most debates, so many arguments are made that obvious cross-applications ensure precious few allegedly "dropped" arguments really are accurately described as such. Dropped arguments most frequently win debates in the form of little subpoints making granular distinctions on important arguments that both final rebuttals exert time and energy trying to win. Further murkiness emerges when one realizes that all thresholds for what constitutes a "warrant" (and subsequently an "argument") are somewhat arbitrary and interventionist. Hence the mantra: Dropped arguments are true, but they're only as true as the dropped argument. "Argument" means claim, warrant, and implication. "Severance is a voting issue" lacks a warrant. "Severance is a voting issue - neg ground" also arguably lacks a warrant, since it hasn't been explained how or why severance destroys negative ground or why neg ground is worth caring about.

That might sound interventionist, but consider: we would clearly assess the statement "Severance is a voting issue -- purple sideways" as a claim lacking a warrant. So why does "severence is a voting issue - neg ground" constitute a warranted claim? Some people would say that the former is valid but not sound while the latter is neither valid nor sound, but both fail a formal test of validity. In my assessment, any distinction is somewhat interventionist. In the interest of minimizing intervention, here is what that means for your debating: If the 1ar drops a blippy theory argument and the 2nr explains it further, the 2nr is likely making new arguments... which then justifies 2ar answers to those arguments. In general, justify why you get to say what you're saying, and you'll probably be in good shape. By the 2nr or 2ar, I would much rather that you acknowledge previously dropped arguments and suggest reasonable workaround solutions than continue to pretend they don't exist or lie about previous answers.

Arguments aren't presumptively offensive or too stupid to require an answer. Genocide good, OSPEC, rocks are people, etc. are all terribly stupid, but if you can't explain why they're wrong, you don't deserve to win. If an argument is really stupid or really bad, don't complain about how wrong they are. After all, if the argument's as bad as you say it is, it should be easy. And if you can't deconstruct a stupid argument, either 1) the argument may not be as stupid as you say it is, or 2) it may be worthwhile for you to develop a more efficient and effective way of responding to that argument.

If both sides seem to assume that an impact is desirable/undesirable, and frame their rebuttals exclusively toward avoiding/causing that impact, I will work under that assumption. If a team read a 1AC saying that they had several ways their plan caused extinction, and the 1NC responded with solvency defense and alternative ways the plan prevented extincton, I would vote neg if I thought the plan was more likely to avoid extinction than cause it.

I'll read and evaluate Team A's rehighlightings of evidence "inserted" into the debate if Team B doesn't object to it, but when debated evenly this practice seems indefensible. An important part of debate is choosing how to use your valuable speech time, which entails selecting which pieces of your opponent's ev most clearly bolster your position(s).

2) General Philosophical Disposition

It is somewhat easy to persuade me that life is good, suffering is bad, and we should care about the consequences of our political strategies and advocacies. I would prefer that arguments to the contrary be grounded in specific articulations of alternative models of decision-making, not generalities, rhetoric, or metaphor. It's hard to convince me that extinction = nbd, and arguments like "the hypothetical consequences of your advocacy matter, and they would likely produce more suffering than our advocacy" are far more persuasive than "take a leap of faith" or "roll the dice" or "burn it down", because I can at least know what I'd be aligning myself with and why.

Important clarification: pragmatism is not synonymous with policymaking. On the contrary, one may argue that there is a more pragmatic way to frame judge decision-making in debates than traditional policymaking paradigms. Perhaps assessing debates about the outcome of hypothetical policies is useless, or worse, dangerous. Regardless of how you debate or what you debate about, you should be willing and able to mount a strong defense of why you're doing those things (which perhaps requires some thought about the overall purpose of this activity).

The brilliance and joy of policy debate is most found in its intellectual freedom. What makes it so unlike other venues in academia is that, in theory, debaters are free to argue for unpopular, overlooked, or scorned positions and ill-considered points of view. Conversely, they will be required to defend EVERY component of your argument, even ones that would be taken for granted in most other settings. Just so there's no confusion here: all arguments are on the table for me. Any line drawn on argumentative content is obviously arbitrary and is likely unpredictable, especially for judges whose philosophies aren't as long as mine! But more importantly, drawing that line does profound disservice to debaters by instructing them not to bother thinking about how to defend a position. If you can't defend the desirability of avoiding your advantage's extinction impact against a wipeout or "death good" position, why are you trying to persuade me to vote for a policy to save the human race? Groupthink and collective prejudices against creative ideas or disruptive thoughts are an ubiquitous feature of human societies, but that makes it all the more important to encourage free speech and free thought in one of the few institutions where overcoming those biases is possible.

3) Topicality and Specification

Overall, I'm a decent judge for the neg, provided that they have solid evidence supporting their interpretation.

Limits are probably desirable in the abstract, but if your interpretation is composed of contrived stupidity, it will be hard to convince me that affs should have predicted it. Conversely, affs that are debating solid topicality evidence without well-researched evidence of their own are gonna have a bad time. Naturally, of these issues are up for debate, but I think it's relatively easy to win that research/literature guides preparation, and the chips frequently fall into place for the team accessing that argument.

Competing interpretations is potentially less subjective and arbitrary than a reasonability standard, although reasonability isn't as meaningless as many believe. Reasonability seems to be modeled after the "reasonable doubt" burden required to prove guilt in a criminal case (as opposed to the "preponderence of evidence" standard used in civil cases, which seems similar to competing interps as a model). Reasonability basically is the same as saying "to win the debate, the neg needs to win an 80% risk of their DA instead of a 50% risk." The percentages are arbitrary, but what makes determining that a disad's risk is higher or lower than the risk of an aff advantage (i.e. the model used to decide the majority of debates) any less arbitrary or subjective? It's all ballpark estimation determined by how persuaded judges were by competing presentations of analysis and evidence. With reasonability-style arguments, aff teams can certainly win that they don't need to meet the best of all possible interpretations of the topic, and instead that they should win if their plan meets an interpretation capable of providing a sufficient baseline of neg ground/research parity/quality debate. Describing what threshold of desirability their interpretation should meet, and then describing why that threshold is a better model for deciding topicality debates, is typically necessary to make this argument persuasive.

Answering "plan text in a vacuum" requires presenting an alternative standard by which to interpret the meaning and scope of the words in the plan. Such seems so self-evident that it seems banal to include it in a paradigm, but I have seen many debates this year in which teams did not grasp this fact. If the neg doesn't establish some method for determining what the plan means, voting against "the plan text in a vacuum defines the words in the plan" is indistinguishable from voting for "the eighty-third unhighlighted word in the fifth 1ac preempt defines the words in the plan." I do think setting some limiting standard is potentially quite defensible, especially in debates where large swaths of the 1ac would be completely irrelevent if the aff's plan were to meet the neg's interp. For example: if an aff with a court advantage and a USFG agent says their plan meets "enact = Congress only", the neg could say "interpret the words USFG in the plan to include the Courts when context dictates it---even if 'USFG' doesn't always mean "Courts," you should assume it does for debates in which one or more contentions/advantages are both impertinent and insoluable absent a plan that advocates judicial action." But you will likely need to be both explicit and reasonable about the standard you use if you are to successfully counter charges of infinite regress/arbitrariness.

For Fiscal Redistribution:

I'm probably more open to subsets than most judges if the weight of predictable evidence supports it. The neg is maybe slightly favored in a perfect debate, but I think there is better aff evidence to be read. I generally think the topic is extremely overlimited. Both the JG and BI are poorly supported by the literature, and there are not a panoply of viable SS affs.

Social Security and programs created by the Social Security Act are not same thing. The best evidence I've seen clearly excludes welfare and health programs, although expanding SS enables affs to morph the program into almost anything topically (good luck with a "SS-key" warrant vs the PIC, though). SSI is debateable, though admittedly not an extreme limits explosion.

Topicality arguments excluding plans with court actors are weaker than each of the above arguments. Still tenable.

Topicality arguments excluding cutting programs to fund plans are reasonable edge cases. I can see the evidence or balance of debating going either way on this question.

Evenly debated, "T-Must Include Taxes" is unwinnable for the negative. Perhaps you will convince me otherwise, but keep in mind I did quite a bit of research on this subject before camps even started,so if you think you have a credible case then you're likely in need of new evidence. I really dislike being dogmatic on something like this. I began the summer trying todevelop a case for why affs must tax, but I ran into a basic logical problem and have not seen evidence that establishes the bare minimum of a topicality interpretation. Consider the definition of "net worth." Let's assume that all the definitions of net worth state it means "(financial assets like savings, real estate, and investments) - (debts and liabilities)." "T-FR must include tax" is the logical equivalent of "well, because net worth means assets AND liabilities, cashing a giant check doesn't increase your net worth because you don't ALSO decrease your debts owed elsewhere." For this to be a topicality argument, you'd need to find a card that says "Individual policy interventions aren't fiscal redistribution if they merely adjust spending without tax policy." Such a card likely doesn't exist, because it's self-evidently nonsense.

Of course, I'll certainly evaluate arguments on this subject as fairly as possible, and if you technically out-execute the opposing team, I'll vote against them remorselessly. But you should know my opinion regardless.

4) Risk Assessment

In front of me, teams would be well-served to explain their impact scenarios less in terms of brinks, and more in terms of probabilistic truth claims. When pressed with robust case defense, "Our aff is the only potential solution to a US-China war that's coming in a few months, which is the only scenario for a nuclear war that causes extinction" is far less winnable than "our aff meaningfully improves the East Asian security environment through building trust between the two great military powers in the region, which statistically decreases the propensity for inevitable miscalculations or standoffs to escalate to armed conflict." It may not be as fun, but that framing can allow you to generate persuasive solvency deficits that aren't grounded in empty rhetoric and cliche, or to persuasively defeat typical alt cause arguments, etc. Given that you decrease the initial "risk" (i.e. probability times magnitude) of your impact with this framing, this approach obviously requires winning substantial defense against whatever DA the neg goes for, but when most DA's have outlandishly silly brink arguments themselves, this shouldn't be too taxing.

There are times where investing lots of time in impact calculus is worthwhile (for example, if winning your impact means that none of the aff's impact claims reach extinction, or that any of the actors in the aff's miscalc/brinkmanship scenarios will be deterred from escalating a crisis to nuclear use). Most of the time, however, teams waste precious minutes of their final rebuttal on mediocre impact calculus. The cult of "turns case" has much to do with this. It's worth remembering that accessing an extinction impact is far more important than whether or not your extinction impact happens three months faster than theirs (particularly when both sides' warrant for their timeframe claim is baseless conjecture and ad hoc assertion), and that, in most cases, you need to win the substance of your DA/advantage to win that it turns the case.

Incidentally, phrasing arguments more moderately and conditionally is helpful for every argument genre: "all predictions fail" is not persuasive; "some specific type of prediction relying on their model of IR forecasting has little to no practical utility" can be. The only person who's VTL is killed when I hear someone say "there is no value to life in the world of the plan" is mine.

At least for me, try-or-die is extremely intuitive based on argument selection (i.e. if the neg spots the aff that "extinction is inevitable if the judge votes neg, even if it's questionable whether or not the aff solves it", rationalizing an aff ballot becomes rather alluring and shockingly persuasive). You should combat this innate intuition by ensuring that you either have impact defense of some sort (anything from DA solves the case to a counterplan/alt solves the case argument to status quo checks resolve the terminal impact to actual impact defense can work) or by investing time in arguing against try-or-die decision-making.

5) Counterplans

Counterplan theory/competition debating is a lost art. Affirmatives let negative teams get away with murder. Investing time in theory is daunting... it requires answering lots of blippy arguments with substance and depth and speaking clearly, and probably more slowly than you're used to. But, if you invest time, effort, and thought in a well-grounded theoretical objection, I'll be a receptive critic.

The best theory interpretations are clear, elegant, and minimally arbitrary. Here are some examples of args that I would not anticipate many contemporary 2N's defeating:

--counterplans should be policies. Perhaps executive orders, perhaps guidence memos, perhaps lower court decisions, perhaps Congressional resolutions. But this would exclude such travesties as "The Executive Branch should always take international law into account when making their decisions. Such is closer to a counterplan that says "The Executive Branch should make good decisions forever" than it is to a useful policy recommendation. It's relatively easy for CPs to be written in a way that meets this design constraint, but that makes it all the easier to dispose of the CPs that don't.

--counterplans should not be able to fiat both the federal government and additional actors outside of the federal government. It's utopian enough to fiat that Courts, the President, and Congress all act in concert in perpetuity on a given subject. It's absurd to fiat additional actors as well.

There are other theoretical objections that I might take more seriously than other judges, although I recognize them as arguments on which reasonable minds may disagree. For example, I am somewhat partial to the argument that solvency advocates for counterplans should have a level of specificity that matches the aff. I feel like that standard would reward aff specificity and incentivize debates that reflect the literature base, while punishing affs that are contrived nonsense by making them debate contrived process nonsense. This certainly seems debateable, and in truth if I had to pick a side, I'd certainly go neg, but it seems like a relatively workable debate relative to alternatives.

Competition debates are a particularly lost art. Generally, I prefer competition debates to theoretical ones, although I think both are basically normative questions (i.e. the whole point of either is to design an ideal, minimally arbitrary model to produce the debates we most desire). I'm not a great judge for counterplans that compete off of certainty or immediacy based on "should"/"resolved" definitions. I'm somewhat easily persuaded that these interpretations lower the bar for how difficult it is to win a negative ballot to an undesirable degree. That being said, affs lose these debates all the time by failing to counter-define words or dropping stupid tricks, so make sure you invest the time you need in these debates to win them.

"CPs should be textually and functionally competitive" seems to me like a logical and defensible standard. Some don't realize that if CPs must be both functionally and textually competitive, permutations may be either. I like the "textual/functional" model of competition BECAUSE it incentives creative counterplan and permutation construction, and because it requires careful text-writing.

That being said, "functional-only" is a very defensible model as well, and I think the arguments to prefer it over functional/textual hinge on the implication of the word being defined. If you say that "should is immediate" or "resolved is certain," you've introduced a model of competition that makes "delay a couple weeks" or "consult anyone re: plan" competitive. If your CP competes in a way that introduces fewer CPs (e.g. "job guarantees are admininstered by the states", or "NFUs mean no-first-use under any circumstance/possibility"), I think the neg's odds of winning are fairly likely.

Offense-defense is intuitive to me, and so teams should always be advised to have offense even if their defense is very strong. If the aff says that the counterplan links to the net benefit but doesn't advance a solvency deficit or disadvantage to the CP, and the neg argues that the counterplan at least links less, I am not very likely to vote affirmative absent strong affirmative framing on this question (often the judge is left to their own devices on this question, or only given instruction in the 2AR, which is admittedly better than never but still often too late). At the end of the day I must reconcile these opposing claims, and if it's closely contested and at least somewhat logical, it's very difficult to win 100% of an argument. Even if I think the aff is generally correct, in a world where I have literally any iota of doubt surrounding the aff position or am even remotely persuaded by the the negative's position, why would I remotely risk triggering the net benefit for the aff instead of just opting for the guaranteed safe choice of the counterplan?

Offense, in this context, can come in multiple flavors: you can argue that the affirmative or perm is less likely to link to the net benefit than the counterplan, for example. You can also argue that the risk of a net benefit below a certain threshold is indistinguishable from statistical noise, and that the judge should reject to affirm a difference between the two options because it would encourage undesirable research practices and general decision-making. Perhaps you can advance an analytic solvency deficit somewhat supported by one logical conjecture, and if you are generally winning the argument, have the risk of the impact to that outweigh the unique risk of aff triggering the DA relative to the counterplan. But absent any offensive argument of any sort, the aff is facing an uphill battle. I have voted on "CP links to politics before" but generally that only happens if there is a severe flaw in negative execution (i.e. the neg drops it), a significant skill discrepancy between teams, or a truly ill-conceived counterplan.

I'm a somewhat easy sell on conditionality good (at least 1 CP / 1 K is defensible), but I've probably voted aff slightly more frequently than not in conditionality debates. That's partly because of selection bias (affs go for it when they're winning it), but mainly because neg teams have gotten very sloppy in their defenses of conditionality, particularly in the 2NR. That being said, I've been growing more and more amenable to "conditionality bad" arguments over time.

However, large advantage counterplans with multiple planks, all of which can be kicked, are fairly difficult to defend. Negative teams can fiat as many policies as it takes to solve whatever problems the aff has sought to tackle. It is unreasonable to the point of stupidity to expect the aff to contrive solvency deficits: the plan would literally have to be the only idea in the history of thought capable of solving a given problem. Every additional proposal introduced in the 1nc (in order to increase the chance of solving) can only be discouraged through the potential cost of a disad being read against it. In the old days, this is why counterplan files were hundreds of pages long and had answers to a wide variety of disads. But if you can kick the plank, what incentive does the aff have to even bother researching if the CP is a good idea? If they read a 2AC add-on, the neg gets as many no-risk 2NC counterplans to add to the fray as well (of course, they can also add unrelated 2nc counterplans for fun and profit). If you think you can defend the merit of that strategy vs. a "1 condo cp / 1 condo k" interp, your creative acumen may be too advanced for interscholastic debate; consider more challenging puzzles in emerging fields, as they urgently need your input.

I don't think I'm "biased" against infinite conditionality; if you think you have the answers and technical acuity to defend infinite conditionality against the above argumentation, I'd happily vote for you.

I don't default to the status quo unless you explicitly flag it at some point during the debate (the cross-x or the 2nc is sufficient if the aff never contests it). I don't know why affs ask this question every cross-x and then never make a theory argument about it. It only hurts you, because it lets the neg get away with something they otherwise wouldn't have.

All that said, I don't have terribly strong convictions about any of these issues, and any theoretical predisposition is easily overcame by outdebating another team on the subject at hand.

6) Politics

Most theoretical objections to (and much sanctimonious indignation toward) the politics disadvantage have never made sense to me. Fiat is a convention about what it should be appropriate to assume for the sake of discussion, but there's no "logical" or "true" interpretation of what fiat descriptively means. It would be ludicrously unrealistic for basically any 1ac plan to pass immediately, with no prior discussion, in the contemporary political world. Any form of argument in which we imagine the consequences of passage is a fictive constraint on process argumentation. As a result, any normative justification for including the political process within the contours of permissible argument is a rational justification for a model of fiat that involves the politics DA (and a DA to a model of fiat that doesn't). Political salience is the reason most good ideas don't become policy, and it seems illogical for the negative to be robbed of this ground. The politics DA, then, represents the most pressing political cost caused by doing the plan in the contemporary political environment, which seems like a very reasonable for affs to have to defend against.

Obviously many politics DAs are contrived nonsense (especially during political periods during which there is no clear, top-level presidential priority). However, the reason that these DAs are bad isn't because they're theoretically illegitimate, and politics theory's blippiness and general underdevelopment further aggravate me (see the tech vs truth section).

Finally, re: intrinsicness, I don't understand why the judge should be the USFG. I typically assume the judge is just me, deciding which policy/proposal is the most desirable. I don't have control over the federal government, and no single entity does or ever will (barring that rights malthus transition). Maybe I'm missing something. If you think I am, feel free to try and be the first to show me the light...

7) Framework/Non-Traditional Affs

Despite some of the arguments I've read and coached, I'm sympathetic to the framework argument and fairness concerns. I don't think that topicality arguments are presumptively violent, and I think it's generally rather reasonable (and often strategic) to question the aff's relationship to the resolution. Although framework is probably always the best option, I would generally also enjoy seeing a well-executed substantive strategy if one's available. This is simply because I have literally judged hundreds of framework debates and it has gotten mildly repetitive, to say the least (just scroll down if you think that I'm being remotely hyperbolic). But please don't sacrifice your likelihood of winning the debate.

My voting record on framework is relatively even. In nearly every debate, I voted for the team I assessed as demonstrating superior technical debating in the final rebuttals.

I typically think winning unique offense, in the rare scenario where a team invests substantial time in poking defensive holes in the other team's standards, is difficult for both sides in a framework debate. I think affs should think more about their answers to "switch side solves your offense" and "sufficient neg engagement key to meaningfully test the aff", while neg's should generally work harder to prepare persuasive and consistent impact explanations. The argument that "debate doesn't shape subjectivity" takes out clash/education offense, for example, is a reasonable and even threatening one.

I'm typically more persuaded by affirmative teams that answer framework by saying that the skills/methods inculcated by the 1ac produce more effective/ethical interactions with institutions than by teams that argue "all institutions are bad."

Fairness is an impact, though like any impact its magnitude and meaning is subject to debate. Like any abstract value, it can be difficult explain beyond a certain point, and it can't be proven or disproven via observation or testing. In other words, it's sometimes hard to answer the question "why is fairness good?" for the same reason it's hard to answer the question "why is justice good?" Nonetheless, it's pretty easy to persuade me that I should care about fairness in a debate context, given that everyone relies on essential fairness expectations in order to participate in the activity, such as expecting that I flow and give their arguments a fair hearing rather than voting against them because I don't like their choice in clothing.

But as soon as neg teams start introducing additional standards to their framework argument that raise education concerns, they have said that the choice of framework has both fairness and education implications, and if it could change our educational experience, could the choice of framework change our social or intellectual experience in debate in other ways as well? Maybe not (I certainly think it's easy to win that an individual round's decision certainly couldn't be expected to) but if you said your FW is key to education it's easy to see how those kinds of questions come into play and now can potentially militate against fairness concerns.

I think it's perfectly reasonable to question the desirability of the activity: we should all ideally be self-reflexive and be able to articulate why it is we participate in the activities on which we choose to dedicate our time. Nearly everybody in the world does utterly indefensible things from time to time, and many people (billions of them, probably) make completely indefensible decisions all the time. The reason why these arguments can be unpersuasive is typically because saying that debate is bad may just link to the team saying "debate bad" because they're, you know... debating, and no credible solvency mechanism for altering the activity has been presented.

So, I am a good judge for the fairness approach. It's not without its risk: a small risk of a large-magnitude impact to the ballot (e.g. solving an instance of racism in this round) could easily outweigh. But strong defense to the ballot can make it difficult for affs to overcome.

Still, it's nice to hear a defense of debate if you choose to go that route as well. I do like FWs that emphasize the benefits of the particular fairness norms established by a topicality interpretation ("models" debates). These can be enjoyable to watch, and some debaters are very good at this approach. In the aggregate, however, this route tends to be more difficult than the 'fairness' strategy.

If you're looking for an external impact, there are two impacts to framework that I have consistently found more persuasive than others, and they're related to why I value the debate activity. First, "switch-side debate good" (forcing people to defend things they don't believe is the only vehicle for truly shattering dogmatic ideological predispositions and fostering a skeptical worldview capable of ensuring that its participants, over time, develop more ethical and effective ideas than they otherwise would). Second, "agonism" (making debaters defend stuff that the other side is prepared to attack rewards debaters for pursuing clash; running from engagement by lecturing the neg and judge on a random topic of your choosing is a cowardly flight from battle; instead, the affirmative team with a strong will to power should actively strive to beat the best, most well-prepared negative teams from the biggest schools on their terms, which in turn provides the ultimate triumph; the life-affirming worldview facilitated by this disposition is ultimately necessary for personal fulfillment, and also provides a more effective strategy with which to confront the inevitable hardships of life).

Many aff "impact turns" to topicality are often rendered incoherent when met with gentle pushback. It's difficult to say "predictability bad" if you have a model of debate that makes debate more predictable from the perspective of the affirmative team. Exclusion and judgment are inevitable structural components of any debate activity that I can conceive of: any DA excludes affs that link to it and don't have an advantage that outweighs it. The act of reading that DA can be understood as judging the debaters who proposed that aff as too dull to think of a better idea. Both teams are bound to say the other is wrong and only one can win. Many aff teams may protest that their impact turns are much more sophisticated than this, and are more specific to some element of the topicality/FW structure that wouldn't apply to other types of debate arguments. Whatever explanation you have for why that above sentence true should be emphasized throughout the debate if you want your impact turns or DA's to T to be persuasive. In other words, set up your explanation of impact turns/disads to T in a way that makes clear why they are specific to something about T and wouldn't apply to basic structural requirements of debate from the outset of the debate.

I'm a fairly good judge for the capitalism kritik against K affs. Among my most prized possessions are signed copies of Jodi Dean books that I received as a gift from my debaters. Capitalism is persuasive for two reasons, both of which can be defeated, and both of which can be applied to other kritiks. First, having solutions (even ones that seem impractical or radical) entails position-taking, with clear political objectives and blueprints, and I often find myself more persuaded by a presentation of macro-political problems when coupled with corresponding presentation of macro-political solutions. Communism, or another alternative to capitalism, frequently ends up being the only solution of that type in the room. Second, analytic salience: The materialist and class interest theories often relatively more explanatory power for oppression than any other individual factor because they entail a robust and logically consistent analysis of the incentives behind various actors committing various actions over time. I'm certainly not unwinnable for the aff in these debates, particularly if they strongly press the alt's feasibility and explain what they are able to solve in the context of the neg's turns case arguments, and I obviously will try my hardest to avoid letting any predisposition overwhelm my assessment of the debating.

8) Kritiks (vs policy affs)

I'm okay for 'old-school' kritik's (security/cap/etc), but I'm also okay for the aff. When I vote for kritiks, most of my RFD's look like one of the following:

1) The neg has won that the implementation of the plan is undesirable relative to the status quo;

2) The neg has explicitly argued (and won) that the framework of the debate should be something other than "weigh the plan vs squo/alt" and won within that framework.

If you don't do either of those things while going for a kritik, I am likely to be persuaded by traditional aff presses (case outweighs, try-or-die, perm double-bind, alt fails etc). Further, despite sympathies for and familiarity with much poststructural thought, I'm nevertheless quite easily persuaded to use utilitarian cost-benefit analysis to make difficult decisions, and I have usually found alternative methods of making decisions lacking and counter-intuitive by comparison.

Kritik alternatives typically make no sense. They often have no way to meaningfully compete with the plan, frequently because of a scale problem. Either they are comparing what one person/a small group should do to what the government should do, or what massive and sweeping international movements should do vs what a government should do. Both comparisons seem like futile exercises for reasons I hope are glaringly obvious.

There are theory arguments that affs could introduce against alternatives that exploit common design flaws in critical arguments. "Vague alts" is not really one of them (ironically because the argument itself is too vague). Some examples: "Alternatives should have texts; otherwise the alternative could shift into an unpredictable series of actions throughout the debate we can't develop reasonable responses against." "Alternatives should have actors; otherwise there is no difference between this and fiating 'everyone should be really nice to each other'." Permutations are easy to justify: the plan would have to be the best idea in the history of thought if all the neg had to do was think of something better.

Most kritik frameworks presented to respond to plan focus are not really even frameworks, but a series of vague assertions that the 2N is hoping that the judge will interpret in a way that's favorable for them (because they certainly don't know exactly what they're arguing for). Many judges continually interpret these confusing framework debates by settling on some middle-ground compromise that neither team actually presented. I prefer to choose between options that debaters actually present.

My ideal critical arguments would negate the aff. For example, against a heg aff, I could be persuaded by security K alts that advocate for a strategy of unilateral miltary withdrawal. Perhaps the permutation severs rhetoric and argumentation in the 1ac that, while not in the plan text, is both central enough to their advocacy and important enough (from a pedagogical perspective) that we should have the opportunity to focus the debate around the geopolitical position taken by the 1ac. The only implication to to a "framework" argument like this would be that, assuming the neg wins a link to something beyond the plan text, the judge should reject, on severence grounds, permutations against alts that actually make radical proposals. In the old days, this was called philosophical competition. How else could we have genuine debates about how to change society or grand strategy? There are good aff defenses of the plan focus model from a fairness and education perspective with which to respond to this, but this very much seems like a debate worth having.

All this might sound pretty harsh for neg's, but affs should be warned that I think I'm more willing than most judges to abandon policymaking paradigms based on technical debating. If the negative successfully presents and defends an alternative model of decisionmaking, I will decide the debate from within it. The ballot is clay; mold it for me and I'll do whatever you win I should.

9) Kritiks (vs K affs)

Anything goes!

Seriously, I don't have strong presuppositions about what "new debate" is supposed to look like. For the most part, I'm happy to see any strategy that's well researched or well thought-out. Try something new! Even if it doesn't work out, it may lead to something that can radically innovate debate.

Most permutation/framework debates are really asking the question: "Is the part of the aff that the neg disagreed with important enough to decide an entire debate about?" (this is true in CP competition debates too, for what it's worth). Much of the substantive debating elsewhere subsequently determines the outcome of these sub-debates far more than debaters seem to assume.

Role of the ballot/judge claims are obviously somewhat self-serving, but in debates in which they're well-explained (or repeatedly dropped), they can be useful guidelines for crafting a reasonable decision (especially when the ballot theorizes a reasonable way for both teams to win if they successfully defend core thesis positions).

Yes, I am one of those people who reads critical theory for fun, although I also read about domestic politics, theoretical and applied IR, and economics for fun. Yes, I am a huge nerd, but who's the nerd that that just read the end of a far-too-long judge philosophy in preparation for a debate tournament? Thought so.

10) Procedural Norms

Evidence ethics, card clipping, and other cheating accusations supercede the debate at hand and ask for judge intervention to protect debaters from egregious violations of shared norms. Those challenges are win/loss, yes/no referendums that end the debate. If you levy an accusation, the round will be determined based on whether or not I find in your favor. If I can't establish a violation of sufficient magnitude was more likely than not, I will immediately vote against the accusing team. If left to my own discretion, I would tend not to find the following acts egregious enough to merit a loss on cheating grounds: mis-typing the date for a card, omitting a sentence that doesn't drastically undermine the card accidentally. The following acts clearly meet the bar for cheating: clipping/cross-reading multiple cards, fabricating evidence. Everything in between is hard to predict out of context. I would err on the side of caution, and not ending the round.

'Ad hominem' attacks, ethical appeals to out-of-round behavior, and the like: I differ from some judges in that, being committed to minimal intervention, I will technically assess these. I find it almost trivially obvious that introducing these creates a perverse incentive to stockpile bad-faith accusations and turns debate into a toxic sludgefest, and would caution that these are likely not a particularly strategic approach in front of me.

11) Addendum: Random Thoughts from Random Topics

In the spirit of Bill Batterman, I thought to myself: How could I make this philosophy even longer and less useable than it already was? So instead of deleting topic-relevent material from previous years that no longer really fit into the above sections, I decided to archive all of that at the bottom of the paradigm if I still agreed with what I said. Bad takes were thrown into the memory hole.

Topicality on NATO emerging tech: Security cooperation almost certainly involves the DOD. Even if new forms of security cooperation could theoretically exclude the DOD, there's not a lot of definitional support and minimal normative justification for that interpretation. Most of the important definition debates resolve substantive issues about what DA and impact turn links are granted and what counterplans are competitive rather than creating useful T definitions. Creative use of 'substantially = in the main' or 'increase = pre-existing' could elevate completely unworkable definitions into ones that are viable at the fringes.

Topicality on Legal Personhood: Conferring rights and/or duties doesn't presumptively confer legal personhood. Don't get me wrong: with evidence and normative definition debating, it very well may, but it doesn't seem like something to be taken for granted. There is a case for "US = federal only" but it's very weak. Overall this is a very weak topic for T args.

Topicality on water: There aren't very many good limiting devices on this topic. Obviously the states CP is an excellent functional limit; "protection requires regulation" is useful as well, at least insofar as it establishes competition for counterplans that avoid regulations (e.g. incentives). Beyond that, the neg is in a rough spot.

I am more open to "US water resources include oceans" than most judges; see the compiled evidence set I released in the Michigan camp file MPAs Aff 2 (should be available via openevidence). After you read that and the sum total of all neg cards released/read thus far, the reasoning for why I believe this should be self-evident. Ironically, I don't think there are very many good oceans affs (this isn't a development topic, it's a protection topic). This further hinders the neg from persuasively going for the this T argument, but if you want to really exploit this belief, you'll find writing a strategic aff is tougher than you may imagine.

Topicality on antitrust: Was adding 'core' to this topic a mistake? I can see either side of this playing out at Northwestern: while affs that haven't thought about the variants of the 'core' or 'antitrust' pics are setting themselves up for failure, I think the aff has such an expansive range of options that they should be fine. There aren't a ton of generic T threats on this topic. There are some iterations of subsets that seem viable, if not truly threatening, and there there is a meaningful debate on whether or not the aff can fiat court action. The latter is an important question that both evidence and normative desirability will play a role in determining. Beyond that, I don't think there's much of a limit on this topic.

ESR debates on the executive powers topic: I think the best theory arguments against ESR are probably just solvency advocate arguments. Seems like a tough sell to tell the neg there’s no executive CP at all. I've heard varied definitions of “object fiat” over the years: fiating an actor that's a direct object/recipient of the plan/resolution; fiating an enduring negative action (i.e. The President should not use designated trade authority, The US should not retaliate to terrorist attacks with nukes etc); fiating an actor whose behavior is affected by a 1ac internal link chain. But none of these definitions seem particularly clear nor any of these objections particularly persuasive.

States CP on the education and health insurance topics: States-and-politics debates are not the most meaningful reflection of the topic literature, especially given that the nature of 50 state fiat distorts the arguments of most state action advocates, and they can be stale (although honestly anything that isn't a K debate will not feel stale to me these days). But I'm sympathetic to the neg on these questions, especially if they have good solvency evidence. There are a slew of policy analysts that have recommended as-uniform-as-possible state action in the wake of federal dysfunction. With a Trump administration and a Republican Congress, is the prospect of uniform state action on an education or healthcare policy really that much more unrealistic than a massive liberal policy? There are literally dozens of uniform policies that have been independently adopted by all or nearly all states. I'm open to counter-arguments, but they should all be as contextualized to the specific evidence and counter-interpretation presented by the negative as they would be in a topicality debate (the same goes for the neg in terms of answering aff theory pushes). It's hard to defend a states CP without meaningful evidentiary support against general aff predictability pushes, but if the evidence is there, it doesn't seem to unreasonable to require affs to debate it. Additionally, there does seem to be a persuasive case for the limiting condition that a "federal-key warrant" places on affirmatives.

Topicality on executive power: This topic is so strangely worded and verbose that it is difficult to win almost any topicality argument against strong affirmative answers, as powerful as the limits case may be. ESR makes being aff hard enough that I’m not sure how necessary the negative needs assistance in limiting down the scope of viable affs, but I suppose we shall see as the year moves forward. I’m certainly open to voting on topicality violations that are supported by quality evidence. “Restrictions in the area of” = all of that area (despite the fact that two of the areas have “all or nearly all” in their wordings, which would seem to imply the other three are NOT “all or nearly all”) does not seem to meet that standard.

Topicality on immigration: This is one of the best topics for neg teams trying to go for topicality in a long time... maybe since alternative energy in 2008-9. “Legal immigration” clearly means LPR – affs will have a tough time winning otherwise against competent negative teams. I can’t get over my feeling that the “Passel and Fix” / “Murphy 91” “humanitarian” violations that exclude refugee, asylums, etc, are somewhat arbitrary, but the evidence is extremely good for the negative (probably slightly better than it is for the affirmative, but it’s close), and the limits case for excluding these affs is extremely persuasive. Affs debating this argument in front of me should make their case that legal immigration includes asylum, refugees, etc by reading similarly high-quality evidence that says as much.

Topicality on arms sales: T - subs is persuasive if your argument is that "substantially" has to mean something, and the most reasonable assessment of what it should mean is the lowest contextual bound that either team can discover and use as a bulwark for guiding their preparation. If the aff can't produce a reasonably well-sourced card that says substantially = X amount of arms sales that their plan can feasibly meet, I think neg teams can win that it's more arbitrary to assume that substantially is in the topic for literally no reason than it is to assume the lowest plausible reading of what substantially could mean (especially given that every definition of substantially as a higher quantity would lead one to agree that substantially is at least as large as that lowest reading). If the aff can, however, produce this card, it will take a 2N's most stalwart defense of any one particular interpretation to push back against the most basic and intuitive accusations of arbitrariness/goalpost-shifting.

T - reduce seems conceptually fraught in almost every iteration. Every Saudi aff conditions its cessation of arms sales on the continued existence of Saudi Arabia. If the Saudi military was so inept that the Houthis suddenly not only won the war against Saleh but actually captured Saudi Arabia and annexed it as part of a new Houthi Empire, the plan would not prevent the US from selling all sorts of exciting PGMs to Saudi Arabia's new Houthi overlords. Other than hard capping the overall quantity of arms sales and saying every aff that doesn't do that isn't topical, (which incidentally is not in any plausible reading a clearly forwarded interpretation of the topic in that poorly-written Pearson chapter), it's not clear to me what the distinction is between affs that condition and affs that don't are for the purposes of T - Reduce

Topicality on CJR: T - enact is persuasive. The ev is close, but in an evenly debated and closely contested round where both sides read all of the evidence I've seen this year, I'd be worried if I were aff. The debateability case is strong for the neg, given how unlimited the topic is, but there's a case to be made that courts affs aren't so bad and that ESR/politics is a strong enough generic to counter both agents.

Other T arguments are, generally speaking, uphill battles. Unless a plan text is extremely poorly written, most "T-Criminal" arguments are likely solvency takeouts, though depending on advantage construction they may be extremely strong and relevant solvency takeouts. Most (well, all) subsets arguments, regardless of which word they define, have no real answer to "we make some new rule apply throughout the entire area, e.g. all police are prohibitied from enforcing XYZ criminal law." Admittedly, there are better and worse variations for all of these violations. For example, Title 18 is a decent way to set up "T - criminal justice excludes civil / decrim" types of interpretations, despite the fact it's surprisingly easy for affs to win they meet it. And of course, aff teams often screw these up answering bad and mediocre T args in ways that make them completely viable. But none of these would be my preferred strategy, unless of course you're deploying new cards or improved arguments at the TOC. If that's the case, nicely done! If you think your evidence is objectively better than the aff cards, and that you can win the plan clearly violates a cogent interpretation, topicality is always a reasonable option in front of me.

Topicality on space cooperation: Topicality is making a big comeback in college policy debates this year. Kiinda overdue. But also kinda surprising because the T evidence isn't that high quality relative to its outsized presence in 2NRs, but hey, we all make choices.

STM T debates have been underwhelming in my assessment. T - No ADR... well at least is a valid argument consisting of a clear interp and a clear violation. It goes downhill from there. It's by no means unwinnable, but not a great bet in an evenly matched ebate. But you can't even say that for most of the other STM interps I've seen so far. Interps that are like "STM are these 9 things" are not only silly, they frequently have no clear way of clearly excluding their hypothesized limits explosion... or the plan. And I get it - STM affs are the worst (and we're only at the tip of the iceberg for zany STM aff prolif). Because STM proposals are confusing, different advocates use the terms in wildly different ways, the proposals are all in the direction of uniqueness and are difficult to distinguish from similar policy structures presently in place, and the area lacks comprehensive neg ground outside of "screw those satellites, let em crash," STM affs producing annoying debates (which is why so many teams read STM). But find better and clearer T interps if you want to turn those complaints about topical affs into topicality arguments that exclude those affs. And I encourage you to do so quickly, as I will be the first to shamelessly steal them for my teams.

Ironically, the area of the topic that produces what seem to me the best debates (in terms of varied, high-quality, and evenly-matched argumentation) probably has the single highest-quality T angle for the neg to deploy against it. And that T angle just so happens to exclude nearly every arms control aff actually being ran. In my assessment, both the interp that "arms control = quantitative limit" and the interp that "arms control = militaries just like chilling with each other, hanging out, doing some casual TCBMs" are plausible readings of the resolution. The best aff predictability argument is clearly that arms control definitions established before the space age have some obvious difficulties remaining relevant in space. But it seems plausible that that's a reason the resolution should have been written differently, not that it should be read in an alternate way. That being said, the limits case seems weaker than usual for the neg (though not terrible) and in terms of defending an interp likely to result in high-quality debates, the aff has a better set of ground arguments at their disposal than usual.

Trump-era politics DAs: Most political capital DAs are self-evidently nonsense in the Trump era. We no longer have a president that expends or exerts political capital as described by any of the canonical sources that theorized that term. Affs should be better at laundry listing thumpers and examples that empirically prove Trump's ability to shamelessly lie about whatever the aff does or why he supports the aff and have a conservative media environment that tirelessly promotes that lie as the new truth, but it's not hard to argue this point well. Sometimes, when there's an agenda (even if that agenda is just impeachment), focus links can be persuasive. I actually like the internal agency politics DA's more than others do, because they do seem to better analyze the present political situation. Our political agenda at the national level does seem driven at least as much by personality-driven palace intrigue as anything else; if we're going to assess the political consequences of our proposed policies, that seems as good a proxy for what's likely to happen as anything else.

Douglas Husic Purdue University 3 rounds

Last changed on Mon March 11, 2024 at 3:27 PM EDT

Getting my PhD at Wayne State University in communication studies. Competed at Wayne State, qualified to the NDT twice. Assistant coach for West Bloomfield High School’s public forum and IE team.

Include me on emails chains please: DouglasAHusic@gmail.com

I flow on paper, please give me pen time. Start slower and settle into top speed instead of missing parts early on. I care about clarity more than who reads a few more cards. CX is a speech, I flow it in every debate format. I rarely follow along with docs.

Non-important old man yelling at cloud moment: The 1ac is an opportunity for free speaker points and sets the tone for the debate, a lot of people sound like they don't practice reading it.

----

Whoever controls the framing of how to evaluate offense in a debate generally wins my ballot. This is universally true for all argument styles and debate formats. I am very flow dependent. Specifics listed below, but absolute defense is a hard sell absent drops, strategic concessions, or the argument was poorly constructed to begin with.

Debate is a persuasive and communicative activity first and foremost driven by student research. As a debater research was my favorite part of the activity so I certainly appreciate quality evidence production on unique and different arguments. Communication surrounding the importance of evidence is most relevant to how I evaluate it at the end of the debate. A great card that is undersold and not explained and applied may get my appreciation when you bring it to my attention in the post-round, but absent you directing me to the significance of that evidence or why I need to read it won't be important to my ballot. If it’s not on my flow, it doesn’t register for my decision, and, if the warrant is on my flow and uncontested, it won’t matter if the evidence supporting it is weak. I'm extremely uncomfortable with the lengths many of my peers turn to the docs to verify claims that in my mind are just not being debated. If your arguing on the line by line in no way questions the other team's characterization of evidence, I will never go on a fact finding mission.

I expect debater's to make relevant issues on evidence known in the debate.

Debater's should answer arguments.

You don't get to walk-back win conditions you establish that are conceded.

Thoughts on framework:

Full transparency I went for this argument for the majority of my career as a debater as a one-off position, and can be compelled that there should be some limit on the topic for the purpose of predictable negative ground. So take that for what you will.

However, I am also highly sympathetic given my personal pedagogical and research interests as a scholar of alternative interpretations of the resolution for the purposes of interdisciplinary/undisciplined debates. Teams that have a well thought out counter interpretation and vision for what their model of debate looks like are often in a strategically good place for my ballot. In my mind a counter interpretation provides a useful avenue for resolving both sides offense and is often a place where I wish the negative invested more time in the block and 2nr.

That being said, I have been persuaded by affirmative teams who impact turn framework without a counter interpretation. Iterations of this argument which have been persuasive to me in the past include critiques of predictability as a means to actualize clash, critiques of fiats epistemic centrality to clash/fairness/education, arguments which emphasize styles of play over notions of fairness for the game, as well as impact turning the rhetorical performance of framework.

A frequent line in decisions I vote aff on framework, "I think the negative is winning a link on limits explosion, but has underdeveloped the internal link between limits to clash/fairness/epistemic skills as an impact, and furthermore that impact's relationship to the way the aff has framed insert X DA or X impact from the 2ac overview on case is never once articulated". I'm a big believer in if you want to say T/framework is engagement you should actually engage the language and impacts the aff has presented, I will not fill in these connections for you because you say "praxis or debate is key to activism".

Teams over-emphasize the TVA without fully developing the argument. A core dilemma for the negative in round's I judge is the TVA's interaction with affirmative themes, performances, and theories remain superficial and surface level at best. Even when a great piece of evidence is read by the negative, it is an error in execution for the negative to rely on the judge to resolve these connections. My threshold for the TVA being "sufficient" is often higher then my peers. Given the value of the TVA as a way to resolve affirmative offense it is a spot where I think the negative must dig deep(ala Jeff Probst from Survivor) to put themselves ahead in a debate. There are many ways the negative can do this effectively, but all require a more thorough incorporation of the TVA from the onset of your strategy. It's bad form and a missed opportunity when the negative refuses to give an example/or doesn't know of a TVA in C-X of the 1nc. I'm a believer that there is a benefit in the negative block introducing other TVAs in the negative block, The 2nc should tie TVA's to performances, impact arguments, and theories of the 1ac. Saying you could have talked about X thing as a performance instead often falls flat. Do research pre-round or pre-tournament into the artefacts of the 1ac, be creative, you can incorporate them I believe in you.

I am also not a particularly good judge for negative impact explanations which rely on the assumption that the values of research/clash/fairness/iteration are inherent/exclusive benefits of a limited model. The negative often debates in front of me operating from the assumption the aff will win none of their offense or has abandoned these values in their entirety, this is both a bad move and often just a blatant mischaracterization of aff debating. An example with iterative testing. A premise which is hard to dislodge me from: all research is iterative, full-stop. Even when the aff has no counter interpretation, their research practices and argumentative styles are iterative because they build upon previously written research and arguments. This means arguments like iterative testing require more specificity in their explanation. The framing of "Only the negative model allows room for teams to refine arguments to third and fourth level" often rings hollow because it is more descriptive of the strategic incentives to develop arguments over the course of a season (which likely exist in any research activity), and not describe the actual benefit of the style of iteration of your model. A more persuasive iteration impact to me focuses on the question of quality and utility of each models style of iteration, tending more to questions like: is there an insurgent/epistemic benefit to maximizing iteration of state based politics vs negative critique? Instead of saying "the aff always goes for the perm in K v K debates," delve into questions of how affirmative models might distort the capaciousness of K v K debate? Or shutdown debates that are meaningful in the literature through standards and practices of debate's offense/defense paradigm? Are there moments where the aff contradicts their model or counter interp performatively? What is the significance of these contradictions? Are there potentially negative effects of the aff model for subjectivity? All of this is really my way of pleading with you burn the blocks of your predecessor, make some new arguments, read a book, do something.

Creativity and negative argument development on framework has plateaued.

You all sound the same.

I will be extremely frustrated if you opt to go for framework over any argument that is clearly well-developed and clashes with the aff that they blow off. There are many rounds where the 2nr decision to go for framework shocks me given 1ar coverage. Don't include A+ material if you are not prepared to go for it.

K’s vs Policy teams:

I’m a fan. I like when there is a lot of interaction with the case. I'm an ok judge for specific philosophical criticisms of the plan. I'm a substantially worse judge for "you defend [use] the state." The alternative tends to be the focus of my decision (is it competitive, what does it do to resolve the links, etc). I'm a pragmatist at heart, I believe in real-world solutions to problems and I'm often persuaded that we ought to make the world a better place. How your alternative deals with affirmative attacks of this genre matters a lot to me. I've voted for more pessimistic or alt-less Ks, but, again, mostly due to technical errors by the affirmative. I find myself caring less about alternative solvency when the negative team has spent time proving to me that the aff doesn’t solve their impacts either.

Aff teams are most successful when they have a clear approach to the theme of the negatives K from the 1ac. Either be the impact turn alt doesn’t solve team --- or be the link turn plus perm team --- wishy washiness just gets the aff into more trouble then its worth often allowing the negative a lot of narrative control on what the aff is or isn’t about.

Unless told specifically otherwise I assume that life is preferable to death. The onus is on you to prove that a world with no value to life/social death is worse than being biologically dead.

I am skeptical of the pedagogical value of frameworks/roles of the ballot/roles of the judge that don’t allow the affirmative to weigh the benefits of hypothetical enactment of the plan against the K. You're better served making arguments which elevate the importance of the impacts you've described and undercutting the ability of the aff to resolve their own. I'm totally open to disproving the affirmative's model of predictions - I just think you have to do the work to have my skepticism outweigh their narrative. I don't think its a particularly hard sell for me when the work is done. But I rarely see teams engage the case enough to decrease risk.

I tend to give the aff A LOT of leeway in answering floating PIKs, In my experience, these debates work out much better for the negative when they are transparent about what the alternative is and just justify their alternative doing part of the plan from the get go

DAs:

Links control the direction of the DA in my mind absent some explanation to the counter in the debate

You should invest neg block time into the link story (unless it's impact turned). A compelling link argument is very powerful, and can cover holes in your evidence. "Impact turns the case" is a bit overrated, because it normally lacks uniqueness. Not making the arg is a mistake, but banking on it can also be a mistake.

I miss straight impact turning and link turning strategies from aff teams.

Theory:

theory arguments that aren't some variation of “conditionality bad” aren't reasons to reject the team. That being said, I don't understand why teams don't press harder against obviously abusive CPs/alternatives (uniform 50 state fiat, consult cps, utopian alts, floating piks). Performative contradictions matter less to me in the 1nc especially if they’re like a reps K (stuff like the Econ DA and Cap is more suspect). Performative contradictions carried through as a position in the block grinds my gears and should be talked about more. Theory might not be a reason to reject the team, but it's not a tough sell to win that these arguments shouldn't be allowed. If the 2NR advocates a K or CP I will not default to comparing the plan to the status quo absent an argument telling me to.

New affs bad as a policy argument is definitely not a reason to reject the team and is also not a justification for the neg to get unlimited conditionality (something I've been hearing people say).

Topicality/Procedurals:

By default, I view topicality through the lens of competing interpretations, but I could certainly be persuaded to do something else. Specification arguments that are not based in the resolution or that don't have strong literature proving their relevance are rarely a reason to vote neg. I will say though lack of specification often annoys me on both sides have a debate, cut some offense, defend something please. It is very unlikely that I could be persuaded that theory outweighs topicality. Policy teams don’t get a pass on T just because K teams choose not to be topical. Plan texts should be somewhat well thought out. If the aff tries to play grammar magic and accidentally makes their plan text "not a thing" I'm not going to lose any sleep after voting on presumption/very low solvency.

Points - My average point scale is consistently 28.2-29.5. Points below 27.5 are reserved for "epic fails" in argumentation or extreme offensiveness (I'm talking racial slurs, not light trash talking/mocking - I love that) and points above 29.5 are reserved for absolutely awesome speeches. I cannot see myself going below 26.5 absent some extraordinary circumstances that I cannot imagine. All that being said, they are completely arbitrary and entirely contextual. Things that influence my points: 30% strategy, 60% execution, 10% style.

Cheating - I won't usually initiate clipping/ethics challenges, mostly because I don't usually follow along with speech docs. but if i notice it i reserve the right to call you out when especially egregious If you decide to initiate one, you have to stake the round on it. Unless the tournament publishes specific rules on what kind of points I should award in this situation, I will assign the lowest speaks possible to the loser of the ethics challenge and ask the tournament to assign points to the winner based on their average speaks.

Ethics challenges brought up pertaining to fabrication or out of context evidence submitted into a round end the debate for me. If it is determined that the ev is fabricated or meaningfully out of context then the team who introduced the evidence receives a loss and the low end of my point scale.

Aaron Kall University of Michigan 6 rounds

Director of Debate at The University of Michigan

General Judging Paradigm- I think debate is an educational game. Someone once told me
that there are three types of judges: big truth, middle truth, and little truth judges. I would
definitely fall into the latter category. I don’t think a two hour debate round is a search for
the truth, but rather a time period for debaters to persuade judges with the help of
evidence and analytical arguments. I have many personal biases and preferences, but I try
to compartmentalize them and allow the debate to be decided by the debaters. I abhor
judge intervention, but do realize it becomes inevitable when debaters fail to adequately
resolve the debate. I am a very technical and flow-oriented judge. I will not evaluate
arguments that were in the 2AR and 2AC, but not the 1AR. This is also true for
arguments that were in the 2NR and 1NC, but not in the negative block.

Counterplans/Theory- I would consider myself liberal on theory, especially regarding
plan-inclusive counterplans. Usually, the negative block will make ten arguments
theoretically defending their counterplan and the 1AR will only answer eight of them- the
2NR will extend the two arguments that were dropped, etc. and that’s usually good
enough for me. I have often voted on conditionality because the Aff. was technically
superior. If you’re Aff. and going for theory, make sure to answer each and every
negative argument. I am troubled by the recent emergence of theory and procedural
debates focusing on offense and defense. I don’t necessarily think the negative has to win
an offensive reason why their counterplan is theoretically legitimate- they just have to
win that their counterplan is legitimate. For the Aff., I believe that permutations must
include all of the plan and all or part of the counterplan. I think the do the counterplan
permutation is silly and don’t think it’s justified because the negative is conditional, etc. I
do realize this permutation wins rounds because it’s short and Neg. teams sometimes fail
to answer it. On the issue of presumption, a counterplan must provide a reason to reject
the Aff. Finally, I think it’s illegitimate when the Aff. refuses to commit to their agent for
the explicit purpose of ducking counterplans, especially when they read solvency
evidence that advocates a particular agent. This strategy relies on defending the theory of
textual competition, which I think is a bad way of determining whether counterplans
compete.

Topicality- When I debated, I commonly ran Affirmatives that were on the fringe of what
was considered topical. This was probably the reason I was not a great topicality judge
for the negative my first few years of judging college debate. Beginning this year, I have
noticed myself voting negative on topicality with greater frequency. In the abstract, I
would prefer a more limited topic as opposed to one where hundreds of cases could be
considered topical. That being said, I think topicality often seems like a strategy of
desperation for the negative, so if it’s not, make sure the violation is well developed in
the negative block. I resolve topicality debates in a very technical manner. Often it
seems like the best Affirmative answers are not made until the 2AR, which is probably
too late for me to consider them.

Kritiks- If I got to choose my ideal debate to judge, it would probably involve a politics
or other disadvantage and a case or counterplan debate. But, I do realize that debaters get
to run whatever arguments they want and strategy plays a large role in argument
selection. I have probably voted for a kritik about a half of dozen times this year. I never
ran kritiks when I debated and I do not read any philosophy in my free time. Kritik
rhetoric often involves long words, so please reduce your rate of speed slightly so I can
understand what you are saying. Kritiks as net-benefits to counterplans or alternatives
that have little or no solvency deficit are especially difficult for Affirmatives to handle.
Evidence Reading- I read a lot of evidence, unless I think the debate was so clear that it’s
not necessary. I won’t look at the un-underlined parts of cards- only what was read into
the round. I am pretty liberal about evidence and arguments in the 1AR. If a one card
argument in the 1NC gets extended and ten more pieces of evidence are read by the
negative block, the 1AR obviously gets to read cards. I think the quality of evidence is
important and feel that evidence that can only be found on the web is usually not credible
because it is not permanent nor subject to peer review. I wish there would be more time
spent in debates on the competing quality of evidence.

Cheap Shots/Voting Issues- These are usually bad arguments, but receive attention
because they are commonly dropped. For me to vote on these arguments, they must be
clearly articulated and have a competent warrant behind them. Just because the phrase
voting issue was made in the 1AR, not answered by the 2NR, and extended by the 2AR
doesn’t make it so. There has to be an articulated link/reason it’s a voting issue for it to
be considered.

Pet Peeves- Inefficiency, being asked to flow overviews on separate pieces of paper, 2NRs that go for too much, etc.

Seasonal voting record:

Evan McCarty Hire 4 rounds

Last changed on Mon April 4, 2022 at 12:27 AM UTC

Evan McCarty

I. Introduction

I debated for Northwestern and graduated in 2016. I now work in strategy and biz ops at a legal technology company. I have not researched the [insert name of current topic] topic at all.

II. Top Level

The best debaters are hard-working, strategic, passionate about the activity, and gracious to others in the community.

Tech > truth, but it's often easier to win the tech if your argument is true.

III. Predispositions

I’ll vote on nearly any warranted argument. That being said, here are some predispositions that guide my thinking. All of these can be overcome with a warranted argument to the contrary:

1. Pragmatism > Idealism.

2. Debate should be about evaluating courses of action against their opportunity costs. If the AFF proves that the NEG's counterplan, kritik, or disadvantage is not a germane opportunity cost to the plan, I'm inclined to disregard the NEG's position.

3. Clash is good. Positions that promote clash are good for debate. Positions that avoid clash are bad for debate.

4. The AFF should defend topical action. The judge should vote AFF if a given topical action is preferable to the status quo or a competitive (opportunity-cost) action.

5. Presumption is toward less change from the status quo.

IV. Constraints

Some of my views are not subject to change. These include:

1. A dropped argument (claim + warrant) is presumptively true for the rest of the debate. However, I have a relatively high threshold for what constitutes an argument in the first place. For example, the phrase “conditionality is a voter – time and strat skew, argumentative irresponsibility – dispo solves” is not an argument, because it does not contain an actual warrant (and is not, for that matter, a complete sentence).

2. No take-backs – if you make an argument and the other team does not contest it, then you don't get to retract it.

3. Intentionally intimidating the opposing team, judge, or audience through threats of physical or emotional violence --> loss.

4. Respect for your opponents, the activity, and the community is important.

V. Kritiks

My voting record for critical arguments is better than one may have expected given the arguments I ran while debating. That being said, I would still generally consider myself "good" for framework against non-traditional affirmatives and "good" for the aff against most criticisms.

The efficacy of the affirmative's advocacy/negative's alternative is incredibly important. The more sweeping your impact claim, the more important it is that you have a clear proposal to solve it. Critical arguments that invest time explaining the efficacy of their proposal have a very good record in front of me.

I am a much better judge for affirmatives that are in the "direction" of the topic than those that simply mention the topic in passing (or worse, don't mention it at all).

I am a better judge for identity-based arguments than for anything postmodern/high theory.

Kritiks do best in front of me if they cause me to think implementation of the plan would be a bad idea.

VI. Other

1. Zero-risk is totally a thing.

2. High quality evidence > smart analytics > low quality evidence.

Valerie McIntosh University of Michigan 6 rounds

Last changed on Fri February 16, 2024 at 1:47 PM EDT

Debate Coach - University of Michigan

Debate Coach - New Trier High School

Michigan State University '13

Brookfield Central High School '09

I would like to be on the email chain - my email address is valeriemcintosh1@gmail.com.

A few top level things:

If you engage in offensive acts (think racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.), you will lose automatically and will be awarded whatever the minimum speaker points offered at that particular tournament is. This also includes forwarding the argument that death is good because suffering exists. I will not vote on it.
If you make it so that the tags in your document maps are not navigable by taking the "tag" format off of them, I will actively dock your speaker points.
Quality of argument means a lot to me. I am willing to hold my nose and vote for bad arguments if they're better debated but my threshold for answering those bad arguments is pretty low.
I'm a very expressive judge. Look up at me every once in a while, you will probably be able to tell how I feel about your arguments.
I don't think that arguments about things that have happened outside of a debate or in previous debates are at all relevant to my decision and I will not evaluate them. I can only be sure of what has happened in this particular debate and anything else is non-falsifiable.

Pet peeves

The 1AC not being sent out by the time the debate is supposed to start
Asking if I am ready or saying you'll start if there are no objections, etc. in in-person debates - we're all in the same room, you can tell if we're ready!
Email-sending related failures
Dead time
Stealing prep
Answering arguments in an order other than the one presented by the other team
Asserting things are dropped when they aren't
Asking the other team to send you a marked doc when they marked 1-3 cards
Disappearing after the round

Online debate: My camera will always be on during the debate unless I have stepped away from my computer during prep or while deciding so you should always assume that if my camera is off, I am not there. I added this note because I've had people start speeches without me there.

Ethics: If you make an ethics challenge in a debate in front of me, you must stake the debate on it. If you make that challenge and are incorrect or cannot prove your claim, you will lose and be granted zero speaker points. If you are proven to have committed an ethics violation, you will lose and be granted zero speaker points.
*NOTE - if you use sexually explicit language or engage in sexually explicit performances in high school debates, you should strike me. If you think that what you're saying in the debate would not be acceptable to an administrator at a school to hear was said by a high school student to an adult, you should strike me.

Organization: I would strongly prefer that if you're reading a DA that isn't just a case turn that it go on its own page - its super annoying because people end up extending/answering arguments on flows in different orders. Ditto to reading advantage CPs on case - put it on its own sheet, please!

Cross-x: Questions like "what cards did you read?" are cross-x questions. If you don't start the timer before you start asking those questions, I will take whatever time I estimate you took to ask questions before the timer was started out of your prep. If the 1NC responds that "every DA is a NB to every CP" when asked about net benefits in the 1NC even if it makes no sense, I think the 1AR gets a lot of leeway to explain a 2AC "links to the net benefit argument" on any CP as it relates to the DAs.

Translated evidence: I am extremely skeptical of evidence translated by a debater or coach with a vested interest in that evidence being used in a debate. Lots of words or phrases have multiple meanings or potential translations and debaters/coaches have an incentive to choose the ones that make the most debate-friendly argument even if that's a stretch of what is in the original text. It is also completely impossible to verify if words or text was left out, if it is a strawperson, if it is cut out of context, etc. I won't immediately reject it on my own but I would say that I am very amenable to arguments that I should.

Inserting evidence or rehighlightings into the debate: I won't evaluate it unless you actually read the parts that you are inserting into the debate. If it's like a chart or a map or something like that, that's fine, I don't expect you to literally read that, but if you're rehighlighting some of the other team's evidence, you need to actually read the rehighlighting. This can also be accomplished by reading those lines in cross-x and then referencing them in a speech or just making analytics about their card(s) in your speech and then providing a rehighlighting to explain it.

Topicality: I enjoy judging topicality debates when they are in-depth and nuanced. Limits are an an important question but not the only important question - your limit should be tied to a particular piece of neg ground or a particular type of aff that would be excluded. I often find myself to be more aff leaning than neg leaning in T debates because I am often persuaded by the argument that negative interpretations are arbitrary or not based in predictable literature.

5 second ASPEC shells/the like that are not a complete argument are mostly nonstarters for me. If I reasonably think the other team could have missed the argument because I didn't think it was a clear argument, I think they probably get new answers. If you drop it twice, that's on you.

Counterplans: I would say that I generally lean aff on a lot of questions of competition, especially in the cases of CPs that compete on the certainty of the plan, normal means cps, and agent cps, but obviously am more than willing to vote for them if they are debated better by the negative.

I think that CPs should have to be policy actions. I think this is most fair and reciprocal with what the affirmative does. I think that fiating indefinite personal decisions or actions/non-actions by policymakers that are not enshrined in policy is an unfair abuse of fiat that I do not think the negative should get access to. The CP that has the US declare it will not go to war with China would be theoretically legitimate but the CP to have the president personally decide not to go to war with China would not be. Similarly CPs that fiat a concept or endgoal rather than a policy would also fall under this.

It is the burden of the neg to prove the CP solves rather than the burden of the aff to prove it doesn't. Unless the neg makes an attempt to explain how/why the CP solves (by reading ev, by referencing 1AC ev, by explaining how the CP solves analytically), my assumption is that it doesn’t and it isn’t the aff’s burden to prove it doesn’t. The burden for the neg isn’t that high but I think neg teams are getting away with egregious lack of CP explanation and judges too often put the burden on the aff to prove the CP doesn’t solve rather than the neg to prove it does.

Disads: Uniqueness is a thing that matters for every level of the DA. I am not very sympathetic to politics theory arguments (except in the case of things like rider disads, which I might ban from debate if I got the choice to ban one argument and think are certainly illegitimate misinterpretations of fiat) and am unlikely to ever vote on them unless they're dropped and even then would be hard pressed. I'm incredibly knowledgeable about politics and enjoy it a lot when debated well but really dislike seeing it debated poorly.

Theory: Conditionality is often good. It can be not. Conditionality is the ONLY argument I think is a reason to reject the team, every other argument I think is a reason to reject the argument alone. Tell me what my role is on the theory debate - am I determining in-round abuse or am I setting a precedent for the community?

Kritiks: I've gotten simultaneously more versed in critical literature and much worse for the kritik as a judge over the last few years. Take from that what you will.

Your K should ideally be a reason why the aff is bad, not just why the status quo is bad. If not, you're better off with it primarily being a framework argument.

Yes the aff gets a perm, no it doesn't need a net benefit.

Affs without a plan: I generally go into debates believing that the aff should defend a hypothetical policy enacted by the United States federal government. I think debate is a research game and I struggle with the idea that the ballot can do anything to remedy the impacts that many of these affs describe.

I certainly don't consider myself immovable on that question and my decision will be governed by what happens in any given debate; that being said, I don't like when judges pretend to be fully open to any argument in order to hide their true thoughts and feelings about them and so I would prefer to be honest that these are my predispositions about debate, which, while not determinate of how I judge debates, certainly informs and affects it.

I would describe myself as a good judge for T-USFG against affs that do not read a plan. I find impacts about debatability, clash, iterative testing and fairness to be very persuasive. I think fairness is an impact in and of itself. I am not very persuaded by impacts about skills/the ability for debate to change the world if we read plans - I think these are not very strategic and easily impact turned by the aff.

I generally am pretty sympathetic to negative presumption arguments because I often think the aff has not forwarded an explanation for what the aff does to resolve the impacts they've described.

I don't think debate is roleplaying.

I am uncomfortable making decisions in debates where people have posited that their survival hinges on my ballot.

Dustin Meyers-Levy University of Michigan 6 rounds

Last changed on Sun April 14, 2024 at 12:31 PM CDT

Misc procedural things:

1. He/him/his; "DML">"Dustin">>>"judge">>>>>>>>>>"Mr. Meyers-Levy"

2. Debated at Edina HS in Minnesota from 2008-2012, at the University of Michigan from 2012-2017, and currently coach at Michigan and Glenbrook North

3. Please add me to the email chain: dustml[at]umich[dot]edu. College debaters only: please also add debatedocs[at]umich[dot]edu (note that this is not the same as the community debatedocs listerv).

4. Nothing here set in stone debate is up to the debaters go for what you want to blah blah blah an argument is a claim and a warrant don't clip cards

5. Speaks usually range from 28.5-29.5. Below 28.5 and there are some notable deficiencies, above 29.5 you're going above and beyond to wow me. I don't really try to compare different debaters across different rounds to give points; I assign them based on a round-by-round basis. I wish I could give ties more often and will do so if the tournament allows. If you ask me for a 30 you'll probably get a 27.

6. If you're breaking something new, you'll send it out before your speech, not after the speech ends or as it's read or whatever. If you don't want to comply with that, your points are capped at 27. If you're so worried that giving the neg team 9 extra minutes to look at your new aff will tip the odds against you, it's probably not good enough to win anyway.

7. You will time your own speeches and prep time. I will be so grumpy if I have to keep track of time for you.

8. Each person gives one constructive and one rebuttal. The first person who speaks is the only person I flow (I can make an exception for performances in 1ACs/1NCs). I don’t flow prompting until and unless the assigned speaker says the words that their partner is prompting. Absolutely no audience participation. If you need some part of this clarified, I’m probably not the judge for you.

9. I am a mandatory reporter and an employee of both a public university and a public high school. I am not interested in judging debates that may make either of those facts relevant.

10. If you would enthusiastically describe your strategy as "memes" or "trolling," you should strike me.

11. Online debates: If my camera's off, I'm not listening. Get active confirmation before you start speaking, don't ask "is anyone not ready" or say "stop me if you're not ready," especially if you aren't actually listening to/looking at the other participants before you check. If you start speaking and I'm not ready or there, expect abysmal speaker points.

TOC notes:

I cannot express just how bad I am at economics. It is my kryptonite. I am an extremely unreliable judge for any debate that involves treating anything more complicated than the supply-and-demand graph as a given. What's a bond? No idea. Keynes? Never heard of him. Gini coefficient? Sounds like a bad coffee shop. I will be lost in any debate that is more complicated than your freshman year econ class (I'm talking pre-AP) without a lot of explanation. Conversely, it will be much easier to impress me by walking me through your arguments and breaking them down as simply as you possibly can, telling me what it means when your evidence references basically any economic concept, etc. More explanation can only help. This also means you can probably convince me of just about anything if you make it simple enough and line it up with what your evidence says.

Good judge for:

Process counterplans that are topic-specific, especially versus new affs.
Presumption arguments against affs without a plan. I prefer depth over breadth--I'm more likely to vote for one well-developed presumption argument that sets up a clear burden for the aff than I am three or four "vote neg on presumption" one-liners scattered across the flow without a warrant.
K affs that explicitly redefine what being "topical" means, especially when paired with reasonability arguments about what I should choose to understand as a "reasonable" affirmation of the topic. I think affs should be topical, but I'm open to arguments about why being "topical" doesn'tneed to be based in definitions.
Ks with developed alternatives that you're willing to defend the details of. I'm an easier sell on Ks that let the aff weigh the plan and give the neg some leeway on what they get to defend with regards to the alt than "you link you lose"-adjacent framework pushes.

Not a fantastic judge for:

Complicated econ DAs. I'm very sorry. While you were studying the markets, I studied the blade (by which I mean Deleuze).
1ACs/1NCs that are largely opaque or obfuscatory, especially when the team in question is unwilling to clarify in cross-x. If you aren't willing to answer basic clarification questions about your argument from an opponent who isn't following, strike me.
Neg framework blocks that don't change based on the aff. I think framework is best deployed as an internal link turn to the aff's method and appreciate when neg teams use the aff's language/phrasing to explain that. When that's not happening, I think it's a lot easier for the aff to characterize the neg's arguments as exclusive.
Arguments about anything other than the things that both teams say during the span of the round that I'm judging. If you can connect some external thing to an argument that your opponent is making, that's fair game. If you want to win (or your opponents to lose) based purely on that external thing in a vacuum, you may want to focus on the other judges on the panel.
Fiat Ks.

Top-level:

When making my decisions, I seek to answer four questions:

1. At what scale should I evaluate impacts, or how do I determine which impact outweighs the others?

2. What is necessary to address those impacts?

3. At what point have those impacts been sufficiently addressed?

4. How certain am I about either side’s answers to the previous three questions?

I don’t expect debaters to answer these questions explicitly or in order, but I do find myself voting for debaters who use that phrasing and these concepts (necessity, sufficiency, certainty, etc) as part of their judge instruction a disproportionate amount. I try to start every RFD with a sentence-ish-long summary of my decision (e.g. "I voted affirmative because I am certain that their impacts are likely without the plan and unlikely with it, which outweighs an uncertain risk of the impacts to the DA even if I am certain about the link"); you may benefit from setting up a sentence or two along those lines for me.

Intervention on my part is inevitable, but I’d like to minimize it if possible and equalize it if not. The way I try to do so is by making an effort to quote or paraphrase the 1AR, 2NR, and 2AR in my RFD as much as possible. This means I find myself often voting for teams who a) minimize the amount of debate jargon they use, b) explicitly instruct me what I need in order to be certain that an argument is true, and c) don’t repeat themselves or reread parts of earlier speeches. (The notable exception to c) is quoting your evidence—I appreciate teams who tell me what to look for in their cards, as I’d rather not read evidence if I don’t have to.) I would rather default to new 2AR contextualization of arguments than reject new 2AR explanation and figure out how to evaluate/compare arguments on my own, especially if the 2AR contextualization lines up with how I understand the debate otherwise.

I flow on my computer and I flow straight down. I appreciate debaters who debate in a way that makes that easy to do (clean line-by-line, numbering/subpointing, etc). I’ll make as much room as you want me to for an overview, but I won’t flow it on a separate sheet unless you say pretty please. If it’s not obvious to me at that point why it’s on a separate sheet, you’ll probably lose points.

Consider going a little bit slower. I prefer voting on arguments that I am certain about, and it is much easier to be certain about an argument when I know that I have written down everything that you’ve said.

Presumption always initially goes negative because the affirmative always has the burden of proof. If the affirmative has met their burden of proof against the status quo, and the negative has not met their burden of rejoinder, I vote affirmative.

I am "truth over tech." I will not vote for something if I cannot explain why it is a reason that one side or the other has done the better debating, even if it is technically conceded by the other team. Obviously, this is not to say that technical concessions do not matter--they're probably the most important part of my decisionmaking process! However, not all technical concessions matter, and the reasons that some technical concessions matter might not be apparent to me. A dropped argument is true, but non-dropped arguments can also be true, and I need you to contextualize how to evaluate and compare those truths.

I appreciate well-thought-out perms with a brief summary of its function/net beneficiality in the 2AC. I get frustrated by teams who shotgun the same four perms on every page, especially when those perms are essentially the same argument (e.g. “perm do both” and “perm do the plan and non-mutually exclusive parts of the alt”) or when the perm is obviously nonsensical (e.g. “perm do the counterplan” against an advantage counterplan that doesn’t try to fiat the aff or against a uniqueness counterplan that bans the plan).

I appreciate when teams read rehighlightings and not insert them, unless you’re rehighlighting a couple words. You will lose speaker points for inserting a bunch of rehighlightings, and I’ll happily ignore them if instructed to by the other team.

I prefer to judge engagement over avoidance. I would rather you beat your opponent at their best than trick them into dropping something. If your plan for victory involves hiding ASPEC in a T shell, or deleting your conditionality block from the 2AC in hopes that they miss it, or using a bunch of buzzwords that you think the other team won't understand but I will, I will not be happy.

I generally assume good faith on the part of debaters and I'm very reticent to ignore the rest of the debate/arguments being made (especially when not explicitly and extensively instructed to) in order to punish a team for what's often an honest mistake. I am much more willing to vote on these arguments as links/examples of links. Obviously, there are exceptions to this for egregious and/or intentionally problematic behavior, but if your strategy revolves around asking me to vote against a team based on unhighlighted/un-underlined parts of cards, or "gotcha" moments in cross-x, you may want to change your strategy for me.

K affs:

1. Debate is indisputably a game to some degree or another, and it can be other things besides that. It indisputably influences debaters' thought processes and subjectivities to some extent; it is also indisputably not the only influence on those things. I like when teams split the difference and account for debate’s inevitably competitive features rather than asserting it is only one thing or another.

2. I think I am better for K affs than I have been in the past. I am not worse for framework, but I am worse for the amount of work that people seem to do when preparing to go for framework. I am getting really bored by neg teams who recycle blocks without updating them in the context of the round and don’t make an effort to talk about the aff. I think the neg needs to say more than just “the aff’s method is better with a well-prepared opponent” or “non-competitive venues solve the aff’s offense” to meaningfully mitigate the aff's offense. If you are going for framework in front of me, you may want to replace those kinds of quotes in your blocks with specific explanations that reference what the aff says in speeches and cards.

3. I prefer clash impacts to fairness impacts. I vote negative often when aff teams lack explanation for why someone should say "no" to the aff. I find that fairness strategies suffer when the aff pushes on the ballot’s ability to “solve” them; I would rather use my ballot to encourage the aff to argue differently rather than to punish them retroactively. I think fairness-centric framework strategies are vulnerable to aff teams impact turning the neg’s interpretation (conversely, I think counter-interpretation strategies are weak against fairness impacts).

4. I don't think I've ever voted on "if the 1AC couldn't be tested you should presume everything they've said is false"/"don't weigh the aff because we couldn't answer it," and I don't think I ever will.

5. I think non-framework strategies live and die at the level of competition and solvency. When aff teams invest time in unpacking permutations and solvency deficits, and the neg doesn’t advance a theory of competition beyond “no perms in a method debate” (whatever that means), I usually vote aff. When the aff undercovers the perm and/or the alt, I have a high threshold for new explanation and usually think that the 2NR should be the non-framework strategy.

6. I do not care whether or not fiat has a resolutional basis.

Ks on the neg/being aff vs the K:

I am getting really bored by "stat check" affs that respond to every K by brute-forcing a heg or econ impact and reading the same "extinction outweighs, util, consequentialism, nuke war hurts marginalized people too" blocks/cards every debate. That's not to say that these affs are non-viable in front of me, but it is to say that I've often seen teams reading these big-stick affs in ways that seem designed to avoid engaging the substance of the K. If this is your strategy, you should talk about the alternative more, and have a defense of fiat that is not just theoretical.

I care most about link uniqueness and alt solvency. When I vote aff, it's because a) the aff gets access to their impacts, b) those impacts outweigh/turn the K, c) the K links are largely non-unique, and/or d) the neg doesn't have a well-developed alt push. Neg teams that push back on these issues--by a) having well-developed and unique links and impacts with substantive impact calculus in the block and 2NR, including unique turns case args (not just that the plan doesn't solve, but that it actually makes the aff's own impacts more likely), b) having a vision for what the world of the alt looks like that's defensible and ostensibly solves their impacts even if the aff wins a risk of theirs (case defense that's congruent with the K helps), and/or c) has a heavy push on framework that tells me what the alt does/doesn't need to solve--have a higher chance of getting my ballot. Some more specific notes:

1. Upfront, I'm not a huge fan of "post-/non-/more-than/humanism"-style Ks. I find myself more persuaded by most defenses/critical rehabilitations of humanism than I do by critiques of humanism that attempt to reject the category altogether. You can try your best to change my mind, but it may be an uphill battle; this applies far more to high theory/postmodern Ks of humanism (which, full disclosure, I would really rather not hear) than it does to structuralist/identity-based Ks of humanism, though I find myself more persuaded by "new humanist" style arguments a la Fanon, Wynter, etc than full-on rejections of humanism.

2. There's a new trend of Ks about debt, debt imperialism, etc. I may not be the best judge for these arguments, simply because of my difficulty with understanding economics on its own terms, let alone in the context of a K. It's not for lack of trying to understand or familiarize myself, I just have tremendous difficulty understanding even basic economic concepts at a fundamental level, and this is seriously amplified when those concepts are being analyzed by relatively complex critical theory. This isn't to say these arguments are unwinnable in front of me (I've voted for them this year and in past years), but you may want to consider something else and/or investing a really large amount of time in explaining the fundamentals of your arguments to me.

3. I also don't really get all these new Ks about quantum physics in IR and stuff. Again, it's me, not you. I was an English major; every time I try to read these articles I get a headache. I'm interested, I promise, and if you can explain it to me I'll be very appreciative! But for transparency's sake, I think it's highly unlikely that you'll be able to both explain the argument to me in a way that I can comprehend AND invest the time necessary to win the debate in your 36 collective minutes of speaking time.

4. I'm quite interested in emerging genres of critical legal theory. I think I would be a good judge for Ks that defend concrete changes to jurisprudence and are willing to debate out the implications of that.

5. I think that others should not suffer, that biological death is bad, and that meaning-making and contingent agreement on contextual truths are possible, inevitable, and desirable. If your K disagrees with any of these fundamental premises, I am a bad judge for it.

6. I don't get Ks of linear time. I get Ks of whitewashing, progress narratives, etc. I get the argument that historical events influence the present, and that events in the present can reshape our understanding of the past. I get that some causes have complex effects that aren't immediately recognizable to us and may not be recognizable on any human scale. I just don't get how any of those things are mutually exclusive with, and indeed how they don't also rely on, some understanding of linear time/causality. I think this is because I have a very particular understanding of what "linear time" means/refers to, which is to say that it's hard for me to disassociate that phrase with the basic concept of cause/effect and the progression of time in a measurable, linear fashion. This isn't as firm of a belief as #5; I can certainly imagine one of these args clicking with me eventually. This is just to say that the burden of explanation is much higher and you would likely be better served going for more plan-specific link arguments or maybe just using different terminology/including a brief explanation as to why you're not disagreeing with the basic premise that causes have effects, even if those effects aren't immediately apparent. If you are disagreeing with that premise, you should probably strike me, as it will require far longer than two hours for me to comprehend your argument, let alone agree with it.

7. "Philosophical competition" is not a winning interpretation in front of me. I don't know what it means and no one has ever explained it to me in a coherent and non-arbitrary way.

8. There's a difference between utilitarianism and consequentialism. I'm open to critiques of the former; I have an extremely high burden for critiques of the latter. I'm not sure I can think of a K of consequentialism that I've judged that didn't seem to link to itself to some degree or another.

Policy debates:

1. 95% of my work in college is K-focused, and the other 5% is mostly spot updates. I have done very little policy-focused research in the preseason.

For high school, I led a lab this summer, but didn't retain a ton of topic info and have done exclusively K-focused work since the camp ended. I probably know less than you do about economics.

2. “Link controls uniqueness”/“uniqueness controls the link” arguments will get you far with me. I often find myself wishing that one side or the other had made that argument, because my RFDs often include some variant of it regardless.

3. Apparently T against policy affs is no longer in style. Fortunately, I have a terrible sense of style. In general, I think I'm better for the neg for T than (I guess) a lot of judges; reading through some judge philosophies I find a lot of people who say they don't like judging T or don't think T debates are good, and I strongly disagree with that claim. I'm a 2N at heart, so when it comes down to brass tacks I really don't care about many T impacts/standards except for neg ground (though I can obviously be persuaded otherwise). I care far more about the debates that an interpretation facilitates than I do about the interpretation's source in the abstract--do explanation as to why source quality/predictability influences the quality of debates under the relevant interpretation.

4. I think judge kick makes intuitive sense, but I won't do it unless I'm told to. That said, I also think I have a lower threshold for what constitutes the neg "telling me to" than most. There are some phrases that signify to me that I can default to the status quo by my own choosing; these include, but aren't necessarily limited to, "the status quo is always a logical policy option" and/or "counter-interp: the neg gets X conditional options and the status quo."

5. I enjoy counterplans that compete on resolutional terms quite a bit; I'd rather judge those than counterplans that compete on "should," "substantial," etc.

6. Here are some aff theory arguments that I could be persuaded on pretty easily given a substantive time investment:

--Counterplans should have a solvency advocate ideally matching the specificity of the aff's, but at least with a normative claim about what should happen.

--Multi-actor fiat bad--you can fiat different parts of the USFG do things, and international fiat is defensible, but fiating the federal government and the states, or the US and other countries, is a no-no. (Fiating all fifty states is debatably acceptable, but fiating some permutation of states seems iffy to me.)

--No negative fiat, but not the meme--counterplans should take a positive action, and shouldn't fiat a negative action. It's the distinction between "the USFG should not start a war against Russia" and "the USFG should ban initiation of war against Russia."

--Test case fiat? Having osmosed a rudimentary bit of constitutional law via friends and family in law school, it seems like debate's conception of how the Supreme Court works is... suspect. Not really sure what the implications of that are for the aff or the neg, but I'm pretty sure that most court CPs/mechanisms would get actual lawyers disbarred.

--“…large advantage counterplans with multiple planks, all of which can be kicked, are fairly difficult to defend. Negative teams can fiat as many policies as it takes to solve whatever problems the aff has sought to tackle. It is unreasonable to the point of stupidity to expect the aff to contrive solvency deficits: the plan would literally have to be the only idea in the history of thought capable of solving a given problem. Every additional proposal introduced in the 1nc (in order to increase the chance of solving) can only be discouraged through the potential cost of a disad being read against it. In the old days, this is why counterplan files were hundreds of pages long and had answers to a wide variety of disads. But if you can kick the plank, what incentive does the aff have to even bother researching if the CP is a good idea? If they read a 2AC add-on, the neg gets as many no-risk 2NC counterplans to add to the fray as well (of course, they can also add unrelated 2nc counterplans for fun and profit). If you think you can defend the merit of that strategy vs. a "1 condo cp / 1 condo k" interp, your creative acumen may be too advanced for interscholastic debate; consider more challenging puzzles in emerging fields, as they urgently need your input.” -Kevin "Kevin 'Paul Blart Mall Cop' James" James Hirn

James Mollison Purdue University 3 rounds

Last changed on Sat April 23, 2022 at 7:50 PM UTC

The Short:

I have a PhD in Philosophy. I was 3rd speaker and a semifinalist at the NDT (in 2012?). I read: Baudrillard, Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari, Nietzsche. I didn't read: topical plans. I will vote on T, though I don't think fairness is an especially compelling impact. I defer to an offense/defense paradigm unless told to do otherwise.

Speaker points start at 27.5. 28.2-28.4 marks an average speaker.

Don't adapt. Be bold.

Mollison.JamesA@gmail.com for the chain. (Sigh.)

Butin scale is:

Helpful-----------------------x----Lazy

The Medium:

Judge adaptation, by my lights, is better saved for “smaller” or “more technical” aspects of debates, as opposed to being something that should inform your overarching strategy. Besides, it pains me to watch a poorly executed version of an argument that I agree with, whereas a poorly executed version of an argument that I disagree with strikes me as a matter of indifference. So, your best bet is probably to argue whatever you like to argue if I’m your judge.

I incline, as much as I can, against intervening in debates that I judge – though I oscillate as to whether I take this to express some vague pretension to intellectual integrity or mere laziness. This isn’t to say I don’t intervene. (For example, I have yet to develop a criterion for new arguments that amounts to anything more than thinking “I saw it coming, so you should have too.”) Nevertheless, it is to say that I try not to intervene more than I must to make a decision. If your argument is valid or strong, I’m willing to vote for it. (Soundness and cogency are far too high a bar for most arguments to pass, and I can’t make claims about the soundness or cogency of your arguments without portending to know things about the world, which gets us all in hot water.) So, again: read what you’d like.

If no one in the debate tells me how to judge it, as is the case more often than not, I default to some sort of opportunity-cost calculation thingy, maybe with some offense-defense jargon thrown in so that I sound like I know what I’m talking about. To be clear, I consider such methods inadequate to the task of doing justice to the messy value oriented questions that debates typically devolve into. Nevertheless, I resort to such crude methods because I think it’s fair to presume that most policy debaters take some such paradigm for granted – and it’s not my place to ruin your fun. (For my part, when I read the room, I often think something like: “Are these calculators trying to make heads or tails of ethical questions? Fascinating.”) If someone in the debate tells me I shouldn’t do the cost-benefit-analysis thingy, great. But you’ve been warned about what I’ll do if left to my own devices. Chalk it up to the aforementioned inability to distinguish intellectual integrity from laziness.

In descending order of preference, I suspect that these are the kinds of rounds you want me to judge for you:

1. “Clash” of “Civilizations” Debates

2. Critique v. Critique Debates

3. Policy v. Policy Debates

Here’s some explanation for this ranking.

1. “Clash” of “Civilizations” Debates – On the one hand, I didn’t read plans, topical or otherwise. I was what some call “a critique debater.” On the other hand, my familiarity with the standard policy-debate replies to critical arguments is developed enough that I don’t hesitate to vote for policy teams against critical arguments. Indeed, I often find myself voting on arguments that, in my bones, I believe are false. To cite a sadly common example, I don’t think fairness is an impact; if a game is shown to be unethical, bellyaching about equal due within the game seems to me to be beside the point. Similarly, the argument that “clash is unique to debate, so it must be its purpose” is worse than Aristotle’s argument from function, which I bet you don’t believe either. Yet, I vote on fairness and clash as impacts regularly. “Topical versions of the affirmative” and “switch side debate solves” arguments are counterplans in disguise – and I expect critique debaters worth their salt to be wise to such tricks by now.

2. Critique v. Critique Debates – I list these debates second because they tend to be messy, with teams struggling to generate clear competition claims. The struggle is often bad enough that judge intervention is required at a more fundamental level of the debate than usual. So, if you have me in these debates, try to hold my hand when it comes to explaining how the arguments in the debate ought to be compared. Otherwise, I’ll intervene in an unexpected place based on what I consider to the philosophical ground-floor of the debate – and to wit, I’ll blame you for my doing so. Another reason I put these second is that there are many different kinds of critique arguments and you likely don’t want me to judge all of them. I mostly read Baudrillard, Bataille, and other bastard children of Nietzsche born in France. As a result of these research interests, which I still champion, I dislike critical strategies that shrilly moralize or rely heavily on some taken-for-granted notion of identity. Don’t worry, though. Should you choose to moralize your opponents and should they choose to grovel apologetically, I’ll vote for you – quickly, too.

3. Policy v. Policy Debates – I like to think I can judge debates about counterplans, disadvantages, and case. Nevertheless, and regardless of what year it is, I probably haven’t done any research on the topic. There are too many things that I want to read for me to whittle away my eyesight reading about process counterplans. Technical terms from topic literature, acronyms, tricky procedural distinctions – you will have to explain these things to me patiently. Otherwise, I approach these debates like a toddler in a knife store. Let me be explicit: I enjoy a case beatdown as much as the next judge, but you may need to catch me up to speed before I know what, exactly, is going on.

Many of the debates that I judge are what I call “a double loss.” A double loss occurs when neither team has effectively precluded the possibility of me voting for their opponents (without intervening for them, that is). If I judge you and the debate is a double loss, I will likely tell you as much. This isn’t intended to hurt your feelings. But it is intended to remind you: you left enough doors open that you’re letting me decide the debate haphazardly. My RFD is bad, you say? You should have written a better one for me.

After a debate is over, I tend to ask myself: (i) “what is the central question of this debate?” and (ii) “which team requires me to do less work in order to write a ballot for their side?”

If the debaters themselves have not told me the answer to the first of these questions, and in keeping with my feeble attempt to fall back on some ill-defined policy-debate-norm that I assume policy debaters take for granted, then I answer the first question with something like: “the central question of the debate is how effectively avoid bad stuff, like a big boom-boom with horror-show theatrics.” Don’t like that? Nor do I. But if you don’t tell me not to do the cost-benefit analysis calculation-thingy, that’s what I’ll fall back on. You’ve been warned twice now.

Unfortunately, debaters often require that I do a great deal of work to rationalize voting for them. I’m frequently left doing impact comparisons, having to think through the priority among arguments, asking what arguments undercut others… These are all signs that I’m judging “a double loss.” Woof. So, like I say, I ask myself (ii) “which team requires me to do less work in order to vote for them?” I then incline toward thinking whatever team that is has likely won the debate. Just to be sure, though, I go back through my notes and see whether there are adequate answers to all of the bits and pieces the other team may whine about in an attempt to convince me, after the fact, that they won the debate. If the answers are adequate, I vote for the team who lost less, that is, for the team who requires that I do less work for them. If the answers aren’t adequate, then I ask myself why it took so much effort to discover this team’s winning argument... and, very likely, still vote for the other team because they didn't need me to do so much work for them.

I’ve made at least three wrong decisions when judging debates. If I do this to you, I will let you know once I realize as much.

The Long:

Good on you for reading more than the bare minimum.

My name is James. I was a critique debater who called everything an impact turn.

Don’t lose the forest for the trees.

Try to enjoy - well, everything you do, but also - your debates.

Here's my old judging paradigm, which is now a simulacra of sorts.

I don't have much time...

I agree with Calum Matheson's debate paradigm, for now, with a certain degree of deviation which needn't really concern anyone. It reads:

Calum Matheson--Harvard

Do as thou will shall be the whole of the law. All styles of debate can be done well or done poorly. Very little offends me. If you can’t beat the argument that genocide is good or that rocks are people, or that rock genocide is good even though they’re people, then you are a bad advocate of your cause and you should lose. If it’s so wrong and you’re so right, then it should be easy for you to win. Is that really too high a bar? If so, then I have a 26.5 here for you. Do you like it? I made it myself. Just for you.

Debates are almost always decided in part by preconceived ideas which we presume to be shared. The same holds true for debate-theoretical issues. Due to time pressure, size, or whatever, many debates leave some element that a judge must decide for themselves, like “What is the standard for a new argument?” or “What does it mean for something to be conceded?” As a result, I have rewritten this to focus on those factors. All of these are defaults. Contrary arguments by a team in a debate always override them. I would like to intervene as little as possible, but am unwilling to pretend that anyone's objective.

1. An argument contains at least a claim and a reason. It constitutes intervention for a judge to ignore a dropped argument on the basis of its soundness, rather than its validity. If you don't know what that means, you should look it up--it might be helpful more generally.

2. One makes an argument, and then reads evidence to support it. The evidence is not the argument. Many judges read too much evidence, which invites them to intervene. In thebest case, reading fifty cards and taking forever to make a decision means you’re reading too much into cards, forgetting the debate, and thus taking the debate away from the competitors. You should use your evidence carefully and sparingly with me. I’d rather you read a few high-quality cards than a big pile of crap. The quality of arguments matters, not the quantity of evidence.

3. “Any risk” is inane. Below some level of probability, signal should be overwhelmed by noise, or perhaps the opposite effect might occur. Pretending that one can calculate risk precisely is stupid. Are you really sure that the risk of a disad is fifteen percent? Are you sure it’s not, say, twenty? Or maybe ten? Or, God forbid, twenty-five? If you are able to calculate risk with such precision, please quit debate and join the DIA. Your country needs you, citizen. If not, recognize that risks can be roughly calculated in a relative way, but that the application of mathematical models to debate is a (sometimes) useful heuristic, not an independently viable tool for evaluation.

4. Uniqueness cannot determine the direction of a link. This is not an opinion, just a statement of fact. Some outcome is more or less likely to happen in the future, but because it’s a prediction, the probability is almost never 100%. The link is a net assessment of how the plan changes this—it’s a yes/no, up/down thing. So if one team wins the direction of the link, they should win the argument (although winning the sign of the change doesn’t mean that its magnitude is necessarily enough to result in a particular outcome).
Here’s an example: the Aff has three advantages. The Neg has a counterplan that definitely solves two of them, and definitely does not solve the third. The Neg only has inherency arguments on that advantage, which is the only net benefit to the counterplan. Does the Neg win? No. They have no offense so the counterplan can’t possibly be better than the Aff alone. This situation is identical to the case when a counterplan solves all of the case, the Neg wins uniqueness to the net benefit, but the Aff wins (non-unique) link turns.

5. An argument that is conceded is “true” for the purpose of the debate and joins the set of other usually unspoken presuppositions, like “things can cause things,” “death is bad,” “the Obama mentioned in the cards is the president of the United States,” and so forth. This means that if something is conceded by the negative bloc (for example) and then becomes relevant again as a reaction to the 2nr, the Aff’s extension of it is not new.

6. My criteria for “new” applications of an argument: if I could see it coming when the team made the argument originally then their use of it later on is not new. I know this isn’t a perfect standard, but I can’t think of a better one. If a claim or reason is not made until the rebuttals then that component of the argument is new, but not necessarily the whole argument. It’s not enough to say “this is new.” You must say that that’s bad for some reason.

7. Offense/defense isn’t always appropriate for theory arguments. The team that makes the argument has the burden to show that it’s okay to do that, but they don’t need to prove that something is particularly good—just okay. Theory arguments should be rooted in something fundamental. There are hypothetical benefits of debate, then practices that further them, then specific arguments that are examples of those practices. These principles rarely result in a counterinterpretation that isn’t an arbitrary, self-serving turd shat gracelessly into a shallow theory debate.

8. The idea that the Aff determines the meaning of words in the plan is wrong. If so, then nothing would stop them from saying “by Iraq we meant Iran,” “decrease means make more,” or whatever. Topicality arguments would be impossible. Competition and disad links even worse. Cleverly written Affs could have some ambiguity in their advantages so that words in the plan could be suddenly and arbitrarily redefined in ways that still allow the plan to have advantages. The meaning of the plan wouldn’t be predictable. Here’s the plan you hand the Negative before the debate: “The USFG should set fire to children. Survivors will be eaten by cobras.” The Neg spends half an hour prepping (some “cobras aren’t big enough to eat kids” cards, maybe a PIC out of children who agree to join the Marine Corps, a "Russia likes cobras/hates children" card, etc) and then the debate starts and the 1AC is about why the war in Iraq is immoral and we should ban depleted uranium shells. Seems to me that a better interpretation is that both sides should debate over the meaning of the words in the plan text—which the Aff should be ahead on since they chose the words.

9. Unless the Negative makes an argument to the contrary, going for a counterplan in the 2NR means that the only relevant comparison is the counterplan versus the plan. If the plan is better than the counterplan, the Aff does not need to be compared to the status quo. It is “logical” for the judge to compare the plan to the status quo if the counterplan is a bad idea, but it’s similarly logical for the judge to vote for only part of the plan, or the plan plus some undiscussed-but-implied alternative, delay the plan for a couple of months, or to unilaterally decide that a disad isn’t intrinsic. Saying “status quo is always an option” doesn’t resolve this—an option for who? The 2NR or the judge? If you want the status quo to be considered along with the counterplan, you should say so clearly.

10. Debates should be about opportunity cost. Disadvantages should be intrinsic to the plan. Many people seem not to understand what this means. If the impact to a disad is that the same actor doing the plan would then do something bad, this disad is not intrinsic—i.e., nothing about the plan means that the disadvantage necessarily results. Example: the plan has the US Congress withdraw US troops from Iraq. The Neg says “Congress would then choose not to repeal the Jackson-Vanik amendment and that would hurt US-Russian relations.” This disadvantage is not intrinsic, because the same actor—Congress—could do the plan and still repeal Jackson-Vanik. A legitimate Aff response is “Congress could do the plan and still repeal Jackson-Vanik.” Here’s where some people seem to get stuck: the Aff argument “we could do the plan and Congress could give Alaska back to Russia” is not a legitimate argument. Intrinsicness arguments are like permutations of the status quo—they test to see if the Aff could do the plan and still maintain the decision that the negative says the plan trades off with (Jackson-Vanik). They can’t introduce new options to solve the same impact because that tests the necessary magnitude of the cost, not whether or not two courses of action are actually exclusive of one another. The “plan plus return Alaska” argument tests competition with a hypothetical world where we’re giving back Alaska, which is not the world that the Negative defends. There are many, many ways around this intrinsicness requirement for the Negative, and I have very rarely voted Aff on this argument.

11. In critical debates, the role of the judge is very important (“critique” is not spelled with a “k” in English, and we didn’t fight the Boche on and off for thirty years just to revert to their barbarian customs). If the alternative uses an agent other than that proposed by the Aff, it is necessary to make this clear and justify the change. I don’t think the default position for the judge is as a government policy maker—without further instruction, I will suppose that the judge should just select the best option regardless of the agent, but this presents a number of serious problems that are worthy of attention by both teams, as whoever wins the “role of the judge” generally wins the debate.

12. All debates are impact debates. If team one wins that (impact x risk) of their arguments is larger than (impact x risk) of team two's arguments, team one wins. Although the standards for evaluating impacts is different in different debates (e.g., "liberty outweighs life," "moral action outweighs consequences"), this is true in theory debates, policy debates, and critical debates because the "impact" is just the reason to care about whatever you said. Impact calculus is thus very, very important, probably more important than any other aspect of a debate. Oddly enough, I think this is also the least-developed part of most debates. Bear in mind how conceded arguments influence impact uniqueness--in many debates, someone kicks a disad with a nuclear war impact by conceding that it's not unique and doesn't link. This means that the judge is making a decision about two opposing contingent worlds, both of which contain a nuclear war, usually in the next few years. Shouldn't timeframe matter more then since we'll all be fighting Super Mutants and learning to make our own bullets in a couple of years? In a related note, it's strange to me how little people exploit the impacts that they do win since the scale of impacts people discuss would clearly effect one another not just at the internal link level (e.g. "econ collapse hurts heg") but at the level of terminal impacts vs. internal links (a nuclear war might cause pandemics, or collapse the economy, or whatever--at the very least, we'd probably quit enforcing the plan once the time came to discuss the finer points of radioactive cannibalism).

13. Nearly always, what Aff teams call "not unique" arguments are actually brinks. Because most disads are cartoonishly stupid, they are also unique, because the magnitude of change that they're talking about is extreme. Example: "the plan spends money; hurts the economy; econ collapse = nuke war." If the Aff says "economy low now," that's probably good for the Neg, because their impact ev is talking about a situation where the economy has completely collapsed, so the Aff claim arguably adds plausibility to their argument. Link uniqueness is different of course.

14. Debate is ultimately about communicating your ideas to a judge to persuade them to vote for you. If I cannot understand you, I will not be persuaded to vote for you. It is the burden of debaters to communicate clearly. I will not say “clear.” I will just ignore you without remorse, since the most basic goal of a debater is to be understood by the judge. This doesn't apply if it's not your fault, e.g., you're too far away and I can't hear you.

15. A few notes on language: Speaker points are entirely subjective. They reflect how much I like a set of speeches as a performance; feel free to fight with me about them but be aware that I have never cared. If you have an accent, speak a dialect, or whatever, I would not penalize you. That said, if you think that the first syllables of "tyrant" and "tyranny" are pronounced the same way, I wish you ill. Similarly, the aff does not "cause the Holocaust," unless this is an unusually bizarre counterfactual debate. "Knight Ridder" is a news agency; "Night Rider" was an 80's television series. "G.A.O." is an acronym, not a name. "Genocide" is a noun. The adjectival form is "genocidal." "Genocide" is not a verb. "Critique," as previously mentioned, is spelled with a "C," and as a rule, unnecessary use of German never made an argument sound less insidious. "Spec" is an annoying abbreviation; "tix" is one whose users should be condemned to a short life of hard labor in a Siberian uranium mine.

Again, all of these are defaults, and I ignore them when teams I judge make contrary arguments. Please do feel free to contact me with questions about how I judge or ideas for change. I will update this periodically.

Bruce Najor Michigan State University 4 rounds

Last changed on Mon April 15, 2024 at 9:26 AM EDT

he/him

Coach at Michigan State University 2019-

Coach at Wayne State University 2010-2019

Debater at Wayne State University 2006-2009

Debater at Brother Rice HS 2000-2004

BruceNajor@gmail.com

Below is a compilation of thoughts. Some are argument related, some are decision-making related. I update it periodically to keep it fresh, but nothing important has changed since you last read this.

-General-

- I used to judge 80+ debates a year, and now I probably judge less than 20. As with anything, skills atrophy, and I find that I'm a bit slower in terms of argument processing, both in real time and in decision time. It would behoove you to narrow the debate and explain the winning arguments as early as the negative block, treat the 1AR like a rebuttal, not a 3AC, and make connections on the line x line, instead of emailing me a plethora of cards and expecting me to sort it out.

- I flow. I don't follow the speech doc while you're talking. If you are unclear I won't be able to get what you say down and I won't vote on it.

- Slightly more truth > tech than the median judge. Once indicts are made your rejoinder burden grows depending on the strength/weakness of the original argument. Bad arguments can lose to bad arguments. Your argument got what it deserves.

- I value my decision time, and I'd hope you do too. Judges normally get around 30 minutes assuming everything in the round ran promptly. This is not an unreasonable amount of time, but ask yourself if the minute(s) it takes to get that marked copy before CX, or the "econ decline doesn't cause war" card before starting prep > subtracting those minutes from decision time. Please be prompt in making and sending a post-round doc.

- I carry the try-or-die flag higher than anyone else in the judge pool. I find I get sat on this argument more than any other. This probably won't bother you on a panel, but may be a tad more frustrating in a prelim debate. Ensuring that the world you're advocating for has a chance at sustainability is important. This isn't applicable to how I think about impacts generally (see below), rather, I think of it as a win condition of the game. If voting for you means there's a 100% chance of everyone dying, but voting for the other team means there's a 1% chance of everyone staying alive you lose, regardless of solving an impact. I'm open to teams who find themselves in a try-or-die trap arguing for rejecting this as a win condition, but debated out equally, or not debated out at all, well, you can't say you weren't warned.

- A bit inconsistent with the above, but once the conditions for try-or-die are not met, I find that I put greater emphasis on the link than many of my colleagues. When I get sat for non try-or-die reasons, it is often because I thought the link was small despite the impact being large.

- I don't flow "stream of consciousness" well. I encounter this a lot in 2NRs where the 1N typed up a thing for the 2NR to blitz through. I don't have an issue with speedy delivery communicated in a way that allows for the listener to digest the content, but if you're just speed reading through a long chunk of text I'm probably missing 50+% of it.

- We don't "debate out" accusations of unethical behavior/practices. If you want to stop the debate and have me adjudicate whether a debater/team was unethical, the debate ends. We cannot restart the debate from the alleged unethical practice, and the winner of the debate cannot be decided on "who did the better debating." I think a fundamental standard for "unethical" must be obfuscation for the purpose of gaining a competitive advantage. This doesn't mean the team in question had to know they were gaining a competitive advantage (i.e. they didn't have to have cut the card), but that the way the evidence was presented gained the team a competitive advantage they wouldn't otherwise have had if the evidence was presented properly.

-Critical / Critique-

- I generally understand impact turns to topicality as "counter-standards" that support a counter-interpretation, so I struggle as a judge to get to an aff ballot when the "critical aff" (broad interpretation) fails to provide a counter-interpretation to the resolution. I equally struggle when that counter-interp is self-serving and not grounded in defining resolutional terms (i.e. "affs can affirm or negate the resolution").

- Most critical debate is too fast for me. If these arguments are your thing, you will benefit from slowing down over-explaining.

- I struggle to understand critiques of "fiat." I find that most of them rely on an interpretation that is divorced from what I understand "fiat" to mean. Absent a tech disaster from one team, I have consistently been persuaded that the aff gets to weigh the benefits of implementation versus the impacts of the K.

- A critique argument still needs to engage the case. Trying to simply outweigh the case or framework it away has empirically been unlikely to persuade me to vote neg.

- Critiques of "impact magnitude" are generally unpersuasive to me. "Critical affs" are much more successful in front of me when they focus on challenging the link.

-Evidence-

- My decision will probably reflect evidence quality / evidence specificity more than the median judge.

- I value good evidence with coherent highlighting. Nonsense highlighting makes me want to read for flaws in your evidence and have it reflect in my decision making even if not brought up in round.

- I don't have an issue with "insert re-highlighting" as long as its accompanied by an actual argument, and the insert has merit. If your "inserting" is actually just mis-readings on your end, I won't care if it's "dropped". Likewise, if you're inserting stuff but haven't introduced context for an actual argument, the other teams burden of rejoinder is low to nil.

-Theory / Competition-

- More neg than the median judge on conditionality.

- 50/50 on judge-kick but presumption is 2NR = one-world. This means if neither team addresses the judge-kick contingency, I will not do it and vote aff if the neg fails to prove a NB and/or competition, even if I think the NB links to and outweighs the case.

- Slightly more neg than the median judge on neg fiat (states, international, multi-actor). I can't see myself ever rejecting the team for non-conditionality theory arguments, even if dropped in every speech.

- "Perm do CP" means the plan and the CP can be the same thing. "Perm do both" means doing the plan and CP at the same time resolves all the NB, or enough of the NB that the solvency deficit outweighs. If you are making a different perm than either of these, you need to say more in the 2AC than "do both" or "do CP"

- I'm not going to vote on disclosure args (not disclosing the 1AC is a voter, you disclosed to us wrong, you're not on the wiki, you only gave us a paper copy, you only read this in X spot, etc.). Disclosure is a privilege, not a right, and I'm here to judge a debate, not be the disclosure police. That said, poor aff disclosure can be persuasively used to justify leniency for the neg on theory args, like conditionality or judge kick.

-Speaker Points-

- I don't really have a model. I suppose my scale goes from 28-30, but realistically my range is probably 28.5-29.5. That doesn't mean if you get a 28.5 you're the worst debater I've seen, it means you did an adequate job and I expected debaters I judged at this tournament to fall in that range. #BringBackTies

Theo Noparstak Hire 4 rounds

Last changed on Fri January 5, 2024 at 4:09 AM CDT

Niles West High School '14

University of Kentucky '18

Chicago-Kent Law School '24

Northwestern University Coach '18-21

University of Kentucky Coach '22-23

Put me on the chain theonoparstak22@gmail.com

GENERAL THOUGHTS

I decide debates by re-organizing my flow around the issues prioritized in the 2nr and 2ar, going back on my flow to chart the progression of the argument, reading the relevant evidence, then resolving that mini-debate. Tell me what I should care about in the final speeches. Use the earlier speeches to set up your final rebuttals.

I try not to consider personal biases when judging policy or k debates. Debates hinge on link, impact, and solvency questions that have to be argued whether its plan/cp, perm/alt, fw/advocacy.

I believe the most important skill a debater should have is the ability to do good comparative analysis.

I'll read evidence during and after the debate. Evidence quality influences my perception of the argument's strength. Bad evidence means there's a lower bar for answering the argument and vice versa.

When trying to resolve questions about how the world works, I defer to expert evidence introduced in the debate. When trying to resolve questions about how the debate in front of me should work, I defer to the arguments of the debaters.

The debates I enjoy the most are the ones where students demonstrate that they are active participants in the thinking through and construction of their arguments. Don't be on auto-pilot. Show me you know what's going on.

Have an appropriate level of respect for opponents and arguments.

SPECIFIC THOUGHTS

I would strongly prefer not to judge debates about why death is good that may force an ethical debate about whether life is worth living.

K Affs: There is a place in debate for affirmatives that don't affirm the resolution. I will not vote for or against framework in these situations based on ideological preferences alone. I wish the activity had clearer rules for what we consider fair game in terms of links to negative offense/competitive advocacies against affs that don't affirm the resolution/read a plan text because I enjoy debates over specifics more than rehashed abstractions. But I am sympathetic to neg arguments about how the aff precluded those good debates from occurring, depending on what the aff defends in the 1AC.

T: I would prefer neg teams only go for topicality when the aff is very clearly attempting to skirt the core premises of the resolution. Going for silly T arguments against super core affirmatives is a waste of everyone's time. Having said that, T debates have the potential to be the most interesting and specific arguments in debate, so if you feel really good about the work you've put into developing your position I encourage you to go for it.

Theory: I feel similarly about theory. It's hard for me to take theory arguments seriously when they're not made in specific response to some seriously problematic practice that has occured in the debate at hand. Debate is supposed to be hard. People are way too quick to claim something made debate 'impossible'.

K: When the neg is going for a kritik, I find the framework debating from both sides largely unnecessary. The easiest and most common way I end up resolving framework debates is to allow the aff to weigh their advantages and the neg to weigh their kritik. You'd be better served spending time on the link/impact/alt.

CP: When judging process counterplans, I'm most interested in whether there are cards a) tying the counterplan to the resolution b) tying the net benefit to the plan. This is what usually pushes me aff or neg on theory and perm arguments.

DA: I usually think the link is the most important part of an argument

Sydney Pasquinelli Wayne State University 4 rounds

Last changed on Thu January 4, 2024 at 8:50 AM EDT

DR. SYDNEY PASQUINELLI

Director of Debate @ Wayne State University
Program Director of the Detroit Urban Debate League
BA- Wayne State University
MA - Wake Forest University
PHD - University of Pittsburgh
she/her
email chains: wayneCXdocs@gmail.com

Stylistics:

- I like debates with a lot of direct clash and impact calculus.

- I am very flow-oriented, and I often vote on based on "tech over truth." In other words, I like debates where teams debate LBL, and exploit the other team's errors and use technical concessions to get ahead strategically.

- I really dislike tag-teaming in CX, especially when the result is that one person dominates all the CXs.

- I don't usually read along in the speech docs during your speeches, because I like to stay true to the flow.

- I would appreciate if you sent me compiled card docs at the end of the round.

Default Voting Paradigm:

- If the aff is net beneficial to the status quo, I default to voting aff unless the negative wins another framework.

- If the neg wins a substantial risk of a DA, which has an external impact that outweighs and turns the case, the affirmative is probably going to lose my ballot. The 1AR can't drop "turns the case" arguments and expect the 2AR to get new answers.

- If the neg wins a substantial risk of the K, which has an external impact and turns the case, the negative still has to win an alternative or a framework argument (to take care of uniqueness), and beat back the perm.

- The perm which includes all the aff and all or part of the CP/Alt is a legitimate test of competition. If the neg proposes a framework to exclude perms, it has to be very well-justified, because I see the role of the neg is to win a DA to the aff as it was presented.

- Severance perms are not a reason to vote aff - if the aff is abandoning ship, this signals to me a neg ballot.

Topicality / Theory:

- I do not default to competing interpretations on framework or topicality. Winning that AFF could've started the round debating within a net-better "competing model" does not fulfill the role of the negative, which is to disprove the desirability of the aff.

- I think topicality is a question of in-round debatability. If you win that the aff was so unpredictable, vast, conditional and/or a moving target, and thus made it implausible for you to win the debate, then I will vote for T as a procedural issue. (A TVA or a net beneficial model is not a substitute for doing the work to prove their model is undebatable).

- Theory is also a question of in-round debatability. If you win that your opponent did something theoretically objectionable, that made it impossible for you to win this debate, I can see myself voting against your opponent. This includes excessive conditional worlds. I want to reiterate here that competing interpretations don't help in theory debates - procedurals are a yes/no question of in-round abuse.

Stephen Pipkin Michigan State University 6 rounds

Hope Reamer Indiana University 6 rounds

Last changed on Sun February 3, 2019 at 10:56 AM EDT

I would like to be included in the email chains (hope.lana22@gmail.com). Feel free to email me with any questions post round as well.

I am a graduate student at Indiana University studying environmental management. I debated at Samford Univerisity during my undergrad.

Aff:

I am ok with critical affs but prefer that they are germane to the resolution. Frame my ballot as why I should prefer critical impacts over policy impacts or framework impacts that the neg is making.

Policy affs: If you’re not topical make sure you’re really good at debating topicality.

Neg:

Das:

Totally down with DAs just make sure you explain your link. Impact calculus is your best friend.

CP:

I prefer CPs that are functionally competitive with the affirmative. I think theory should always be a response but I’m unlikely to vote on it unless it’s been dropped or you’re going all in on it. I will not kick the CP for you unless you tell me to.

Ks:

Again, fine with them just explain them well. Explain what your alt does and why I should prefer your impacts over policy impacts. Don't assume that I know/have read all the lit on your K, I probably haven't. Therefore, make sure you're explaining the warrants of the args well. I need good articulation of what the alternative actually does either within the debate or spillover claims and why is mutually exclusive with the aff.

Make sure you’re engaging in the actual line by line and not just reading blocks. I need competitive arguments between the t interpretation and the affs counter interpretation. Listing what affs their interpretation excludes/allows and what ground is lost in round is good.

FW:

Make sure you’re doing good impact work and why I should prefer that in the realm of the debate space.

General:

1. Don’t be rude.

2. I’m fine with speed just make sure you’re clear. If I can’t understand you I can’t flow.

3. Respect people’s preferred pronouns.

4. I don't have time to sit through and read ever card you tell me is awesome. If a card is important to a round I'll read it after but clear articulation of the warrants of the card are important and how it functions as an argument in the debate.

William Repko Michigan State University 2 rounds

Last changed on Wed January 3, 2024 at 10:14 AM EDT

Updated - Pre-NU - 09.12.23.

On balance, J Philosophies should prob cut to the chase - but I'm gonna violate my own rule this time:

We exist in an era where being unfiltered gets glorified.. where the smartest person in the room is also encouraged to be the loudest.

Every now and again, someone arrives in our small pond - and they have all the characteristics of a great judge. They are quietly brilliant. They are thoughtful. They hold the community's respect for the simplest reason of all: they are undeniably good at what they do. It doesn't need to be broadcasted - it finds itself on display in each oral critique.

I won't be the guy that pretended to know Brian McBride on a deeply personal level. Our interactions were often limited to those panels that finish their task at 2am.

... but I know enough to say this with confidence. I learned a great deal by letting that guy go first in the post-round. He rarely called attention to himself. I am hopeful that our community finds ways to honor his contribution - even if he would've bashfully declined such praise.

I had a great deal of respect for who he was in this community.

Customary biz:

Yes - speech Doc.

Repko.Debate@gmail.com

Side note - I often miss non-speech doc correspondence sent to that address bc I only use it for judging.

** New - Topic Specific - Nuclear weapons, 2023-4

With all the asterisks that often accompany this, I'll say I'm not going to deeply break-down my thoughts on hyper-generics and the kind of K's that tend to get run on every Res. I do have thoughts on these matters - but I am much more apt to be placed in a Policy-Policy round... this is bc clash/K teams have (correctly) concluded that there are many judges in the pool where their win% would be higher.

I have sneaking suspicions that Topicality will arise more in Policy-Policy rds - what follows is designed to be helpful:

- As a general proposition, I am more Aff than most on T - but I do think the Framer's worded things in a manner that gives the Neg something to argue here. Enough will come down to execution that some of what follows could be overread.

- I do not enter into the T Debate presumptively assuming Negs are structurally hosed on *this* Res. This ain't the water or CJR Res - there's at least room to argue that this Res= atypically good for Negs. I often judge on panels where the lone conception of "ground" is Neg. Absolute kudos to the Neg if they can pull of that framing - you should (as ever) run with the premises your opponents concede. But - in an evenly matched debate - I do think there's space for the Aff to push back on the some of the classic Neg ground claims.

- While I can certainly imagine hypotheticals where one side's interp is noticeably imprecise (i.e. old school "substantial" defs about a Court case involving a kitchen measurement), I tend to think most prepared teams read a reasonably precise interp. Once the opponent's interp has exited the theater of the absurd, I am open to threads that argue that we should consider defaulting to other RTP various interps. Better put - if you're trying to win that an inch of precision >>> a mile of balanced ground/limits, I would recommend you have technical execution on your side.. bc I am going to need to read the opponent's interp and chuckle at how non-applicable it is. If your lead on precision is NOT an inch - I am very good for your side.

Deterrence and Assurance are a thing. If/when the Neg blends them together, they create Aff openings where "thumping one" can "thump both".

Revisionism has become the Policy equiv of ontology. The 2N uses the fact that "Russia has revisionist tendencies" to lower the threshold for the link, the impact, the "turns case" thread, etc.... OK - I suppose it's somewhat helpful to the cause - but let's not overdo this. No one would pretend that reading a card that "X nation is revisionist" is - by its lonesome - a link to the NFU Aff... The best K research takes the ontology claim and contextualizes it to the Aff in question. The best disad research takes the revisionism premise and applies it to the NFU Aff. I find no dissonance here - it feels logical (to me) to demand scholarly contextualization from both revisionism claims and ontology claims. And - to be candid - I suspect I have a higher bar for Neg contextualization than most.

*Older stuff starts here - I'd only read through it if you needed more than the basics

I'm somewhat correctly stereotyped as a "good judge to break a new aff in front of". And, certain broad strokes will not change between now and Monday:

- I am bad for some Neg generics that get run in these spots (process CP, many K's)

- I will do enough "reading" in the post-round to at least try and comprehend a novel Aff or Neg arg - and, as these things go, that can open room for a prepared new Aff to win on various appeals to specificity

- I get that Neg's adore the Cap K... but the way this is getting deployed in the modern era is just so far from what I feel is a complete reason to Negate. I could break down my creative Cap K 2.0 blueprint ..or go on some rant - but, unless your Cap K has some very unique twists, I'd say that I am the second worst judge in the pool for your Cap K (behind Katsulas). This is meant to be helpfully honest as you make pref decisions;

- I am one of the better judges in the pool for "the impact turn doesn't link". Let me unpack - as this might read as illogical. Just bc the Aff said "heg" doesn't mean that *the way* the Aff enhances Heg auto-links to your backfile... similarly, just bc the Neg read an impact module that loosely referenced "ag" or "econ" doesn't mean the camp backfile is simply greenlit. Often times the OG impact is about "preventing a future decline in Heg"... or helping a sector of the econ that may solely be a piece in the dedev puzzle. I'll obviously "play ball" if both teams opt to ignore this int link minutiae. But I do sometimes find myself on the bottom of a 4-1 bc I strongly consider analytic threads appealing to whether the impact turns applied in the first place. This is not intended to full-on dissuade. Teams seeking to impact turn should invest some time connecting the "top-level" dots between the opponent's impact claim and their impact turn. Impact turn strat can also wind-up defending a squo that's very messy (transitions, other Aff impacts). Think about more than the narrow impact turn itself - and the broader system being defended.

- I differ from many judges on "disad turns case". I was recently asked to recount an NDT elim I judged a few years back. In it, Aff slams on Adv... Neg slams on Disad... Aff is bad on "disad turns case"... neg is silent on "Aff solves case"... 8 out of 10 judge vote neg here: after all, Neg turns Aff. I regularly vote Aff on "aff solvency claim is every bit as dropped as the neg's claim to turn solvency". There are some exceptions where I would vote Neg - suppose the neg's "turns case" arg is couched as comparative to the 1AC solvency... OR maybe the neg claim simply makes more sense than the OG Aff solvency.. etc... but I tend to not punish the Aff for lacking large re-explanations of (dropped) swaths of their case. Negs would do well to make comparisons that bake-in the particulars of the Aff.

- there is a risk of overcorrection to all of this. I have voted on "PIKs bad" at the NDT - and it was the correct 2AR choice.. I voted on a "meh" human innovation disad earlier this season bc the Neg tailored it so well to the opponent's solvency claims. There have been other decisions that might surprise a third party coach - unless they watched the debate itself. I do understand that debate is a game. All of this advice assumes situations where both sides have the time to evenly execute on a position - but sometimes that hasn't taken place. Capitalize accordingly.

--- Everything below this is older stuff... all of it still applies - but may be more than you need ------

TLDR - general

More apt to be placed in Policy v. Policy rounds. A great deal of the research that I do is on critical/culture theory. And, a lot of outcomes are possible in a world of imbalanced coverage/attention to detail.

That said, I have a poor track record for planless Affs. I have enough "argumentation teacher" in me to give a range of oral critiques. But, I do think K of this Res/Topicality struggles vs. standard (policy) boilerplate responses.

If your pref decisions hinge on post-round academic convos, I will be an engaged critic. But if a big component of your pref decisions are about the grizzled bottom line of winning (which is 1000% understandable, IMO), I think much of the pool has a better track record on behalf of the K.

Seems like there's two sets of Policy judges on this particular Res:

Camp 1.0 - summer pleasure reading was about Bostrom, gray goo bloggers, and meta-physical q's posed by British scholars.

Camp 2.0 - not that.

I'm more in camp 2.0. I have cut policy cards on the topic. I am not dismissive existential risk. I think the Sci Fi impacts are fine - strategic even....

And, I am (quite fairly) accused of letting your ev do some work for you. But there's a wave of oral critique out there that's akin to: "the sub-text of the Aff entropy claim rests on Toby Ord's The Precipice - which is hardly viable without a deeper defense of hypercomputation".

... huh ?..

I can get there - but you'll need to at least start me down that journey.

TLDR - process CP, compete on "should"

Anything is poss in the land of wildly disparate in-rd execution/coverage - but I am quite Aff here

Where are you good for the neg ?

Disad, CP of non-process flavor... the 1AC itself = often pretty silly.

'Rona

For me, I am judging INP for the first time in a minute - mostly bc it would not be great if I brought COVID back to my household.

I am appreciative of the efforts the tournament and the participants are making to reduce the risk of COVID. I mean that quite genuinely

... this simple statement could be over-read or cause students to overreact when I am judging. I understand that sure-fire solutions are rare... and I do not need to 2A to debate outdoors or something. Just a friendly - not judgmental - reminder that I will be on the cautious side of this one.

--wrote this pre '21 NDT - I'll leave it up a bit longer, but it has little to do w. arg preferences ----

This strikes me as an audience where one can make a bold claim... and be granted an opportunity to back it up.

Here goes:

One of the strongest people I know is only 3 yrs old.

... I've watched her figure it out.

When the six yr old points and stares.

When the family switches lanes in swim class.

When they ask why her mask is the kind that ties in the back.

...and I've watched in amazement. Somehow, she channels her exasperation into thoughtfulness. Somehow, these aftermaths are productive.

A few years ago, I heard rumor that a student was thinking of foregoing her final NDT - ending her career after her Junior season. This student had challenged MSU Debate ...in the best ways possible. Judging policy rds as I do, I knew this debater. I decided to drop her a note. I thanked her for the hard work she'd put in.... for the indirect ways in which she'd made our program grow. One never knows what to expect once the send key is hit. I do think she was a little surprised to receive it. But I came to learn it made a small difference... that it landed with the right timing.

Later that season, I wrote a similar note - this time to a non-traditional debater. The same premises held. This student pushed our program and drove us to be more prepared. I extended an overdue "thanks". I imagine they were more than a little surprised to receive it. Judging policy rds as I do, I had even less of an idea how it may land. I was glad to learn it landed well.

The days leading up to the NDT are an especially good time to keep one's head down.

...But when the dust settles... when the inevitable frustrations grow distant... consider crafting a simple note. Consider sending it to a judge... a rival... a teammate.

Above all, consider sending to someone that may not expect it.

In doing so some will accuse you of being weak. Why extend energy to your rivals ?.. Why breathe life into the foe ?

But - in doing so - you will be anything but weak.

You will exit a challenging season... perched atop a most-challenging 12 months... and you will have done something genuine.. something unexpectedly thoughtful.

And - in doing so - you will show strength.

Strength similar to the strongest girl I know.

A girl who is Earless... and Fearless.

A girl named Robin Jane Repko.

#E&F

Thanks - and best of luck to each of you this weekend.

NDT 2021

---------old stuff here-------------------------

True non-starters:

A - Teams that joke-y or playful about death or trauma - esp as part of some high-theory attempt to illustrate a point. I was early to this train - but I think a lot of people in the community are ready to close this chapter.

B - Consult Cplan in almost any variety - it's quasi comeback is surprising.

Topicality:

I'm overwhelmingly Aff on "contrived" interps bad. In general, I think I am more Aff than most on T in policy rounds. If it helps, I did not happen to judge the elim between UGA AR + KU HM on the Exec Authority. Here - by all accounts - the neg did a dazzling job on a T thread that amounted to "you gotta be a big Aff".

I cannot know - but I suspect I would have been an above-average judge for UGA in that spot. It has nothing to do with the debaters - all four were/are magnificent. It's more that I find T interps of that ilk tend to break-down under strict scrutiny.

I don't mention this example out of nowhere. I am writing in 2021 bc I suspect it could be instructive for this yrs college topic. I would not be shocked if I voted Neg on T - hard work has dividends. By this is a game of inches - and this is me being transparent about an inch.

Just be honest, please:

In an evenly matched-debate where all the best args are on the table (two important caveats), rate yourself on the following items relative to the field of possible policy judges:

A - CPlan competition theory.... Aff (esp vs. "resolved", "should", etc).

B - Kritik - even the flex variety - Aff by a considerable margin.

C - Truth or tech.... truth by a decent amount..

D - Are you lying - lots of judges just lie in these philosophies ?..

Not really... I'm pretty ardent - but I will say that anything is possible in the land of wildly-disparate in-round execution. I did vote on PICs bad (dropped) last season.

-------------- old philosophies start here -------------

I wrote this a few years ago - it still holds:

Often, the K struggles on the alt... and can be a little over-reliant on the checklist for someone (like me) that's a bit of a truth-seeker and post-round ev reader.

To give a concrete example:

Suppose a (policy) Aff said "a Small Modular Rector will *solve* for a nuclear accident". Further suppose that the Neg did not engage this claim in any way.

Then suppose the Neg said "interrogate our relationship to neolib -- as it may *solve* neolib". Suppose the Aff was comparably inattentive to that alt.

I would start the post-round evaluating competing solvency claims. Both teams 100% won their original statement -- but the word *"solves"* in both sentences does not get at questions of magnitude/likelihood. "Solve" was not posited as a 100% affair in either the ev, the tag, or under any standard of logic.

So, yes, both teams "solve", but the degree to which an SMR could prevent an accident is miles ahead of the degree that individual interrogation might solve neolib. I acknowledge that not everyone judges these args in this manner -- in part because they fear being labelled "interventionist". I happen to feel it "intervenes" to impose magnitude onto either team's claim (as stated).

I can imagine a future time where the K more assertively attempts to have Alts that inform policy praxis or generates non-institutional collectives... And if you think your arg is novel in that regard, then I might be a better judge for you... But, the odds are that you've learned to run the K based on the prevalent community norms that have developed over the previous 15 years... Over that time, your predecessors did an exceptionally mediocre job of helping the K inform praxis and be PART (not all) of negating an Affirmative.

-------------------------------------------

Rando:

- I rarely think "literature" alone makes a cplan competitive. I consider the two as wholly unrelated and I struggle to grasp this line of thinking. Some are aghast if the two options that are compared by a think tank article are somehow not auto-competitive. This borders on laughable - as there's lit that defends plan-plus cplans....Sometimes I have judged literature that demonstrated that the perm severs - that might be germane.

- I think "judge kick" needs to be flagged early and often - not merely implicitly as part of a conditionality answer in cx - for it to be a presumptively strong arg for the Neg. I consider "conditionality" to be a question of whether multiple strategies can/should be carried through the middle of the debate - and *not* whether the Neg should ultimately be afforded multiple choices at the end of the debate. I will assume that you went for the one damn strategy that you did extend in the 2NR unless you play your "multiple options" card earlier in the debate.

If you have specific questions about how I'd evaluate an item, feel free to ask. I'll strive to respond with candor.

Best,

Will

Jacinda Rivas Hire 12 rounds

Last changed on Sat February 3, 2024 at 8:10 AM CDT

Whitney Young ‘15

University of Kentucky ‘19

Cornell Law '23

Former WY and UK coach; Officially not coaching anymore. This means that I have less topic knowledge than normal and you should not assume I know what your aff is or will know what those acronyms you just threw out stand for. When in doubt, invest more time in explaining your argument.

Top Level

Add me to the email chain- Jacindarivas@gmail.com

My name is Jacinda (Juh-sin-duh) so call me that instead of judge.

I will reward smart teams that can effectively and efficiently communicate their arguments to me. Engaging with your opponent, having a well-thought out strategy, and demonstrating that you’re doing consistent, hard work is what this activity is about.

Please be nice. I am not very responsive to raising voices/yelling.

Clash debates

No one ENJOYS clash debates but I end up judging quite a few. I really do believe that affs should have a tie to the topic and should be in the direction of the topic. I am not the judge for an aff that has a couple cards that say a theory and then pretend to say something about the topic. I also believe that debate is an inherently good activity so indicting the entirety of the activity we participate in is not great for me. I think this matters a lot for the way some teams answer framework so be cognizant of this. The only thing that my ballot decides is the winner.

Links should be causal, specific and about the plan. They NEED to be contextualized to what the aff actually did. I have too often judged debates where a team presents a theory of the world but have not explained what the aff has done to implicate that. Explanation is key. That applies to all Ks cause if you are just spitting jargon at me and the other team, you aren’t gonna have a good time. I am not persuaded by arguments that the aff just doesn’t get fiat.

CPs/DAs

Love them. Obviously better the more specific to the aff they are. I default to judge kick unless expressly informed not to.

There can be zero risk of a DA

Theory

Conditionality is good.

Random Things

You can insert a re-highlighting of a card- you shouldn’t have to waste time re-reading a card if they suck at research

Ethics violations (ex. Clipping, a card being cut in the middle of the paragraph, etc.) should just have the debate staked on it. It is a bad form of education and should be rejected. No point in drawing it out.

Further questions- email me at jacindarivas@gmail.com

Matthew Rosenblum Wayne State University 3 rounds

Ron Stevenson Wayne State University 5 rounds

I have the following preferences, but I will vote counter to these biases if a team wins
their arguments in the debate.
1. I view debates from a policy perspective as clash of competing advocacies. For me
this means that minus a counterplan, the affirmative must prove that their plan is better
than the current system. Fiat operates only to bypass the question of whether something
could pass to focus the debate about whether something should pass. I do believe that
fiat is binding so rollback arguments can be difficult to win.
2. I will vote on topicality if the negative can clearly articulate how the affirmative is
non-topical and why their interpretation is superior for debate. In this regard I see
topicality debates as a synthesis between a good definition and a clear explanation of the
standards. Critical affirmatives must be topical if the negative is to be prepared to debate
them. I won’t vote on topicality as a reverse voting issue under any circumstance.
3. I don’t find most theory debates to be very compelling, but I have voted for these
arguments. These debates are often filled with jargon at the
expense of explanation. If you do want me vote on these arguments then don’t spew your
theory blocks at me (I’ve tried – but I just can’t flow them). Have just a couple of
reasons to justify your theoretical objection and develop them. Pointing out in-round
abuse is helpful, but if their position justifies a practice that is harmful for debate that is
just as good. Identifying the impact to your theory arguments in the constructive is a
must.
4. I am a big fan of all types of counterplans (pics, agent, consult etc.). The only
prerequisite is that they be competitive. I am not a big fan of textual competition and tend
to view competition from a functional perspective. When evaluating counterplans I believe that the negative has the burden to prove that it is a reason to reject the plan. This
means that the counterplan must be net beneficial compared to the plan or the
permutation. Affirmatives can prove that some of these counterplans are theoretically
illegitimate, but be aware of my theory bias (see above).
5. Kritiks are fine as long as it is clear what the argument is and that there is a clearly
defined impact. Statements that the kritik takes out the solvency and turns the case need
a clear justification. Hypothetical examples are extremely useful in this regard, and the more specific the example the better. I prefer frameworks discussions occur on a separate page from the K – from a judging perspective I’ve noticed that when it’s all done on one piece of paper things tend to get convoluted and debate gets extremely messy. Having an alternative is helpful, but I can be persuaded that you don’t need to have one.
7. The most important thing for you to know to get my ballot is that my decision is highly
influenced on how arguments are explained and justified during the course of the debate
rather than thru evidence. While I do think that at certain levels you must have evidence
to substantiate your claims, good cross-examinations and well developed explanations and comparisons are often the key to persuading me to vote for one side over the other. Other than that just be polite but competitive, intelligent, and enjoy the debate.

Marge Strong Michigan State University 4 rounds

Last changed on Sun January 28, 2024 at 5:59 AM EDT

Updated 1/28/2024

Quick Q&A:

1. Yes, include me on the doc chain – mrgrtstrong685@gmail.com

2. No, I am not ok with you just putting the card in the text of the email. Even if it’s just one card

3. Idk if the aff has to read a plan. I went for framework and read a plan, so I'm definitely more versed in that side of the debate, but I'm frequently in support of identity-based challenges to framework. I went for framework because it was the best thing I knew how to go for, not because it was objectively the best

4. No, you should not try to read Baudrillard or other post-modern theories against me. (Yes. Against me.) This is not a challenge. It's not a threat, it's a warning, be careful with me. I am admitting insurmountable bias.

5. Yes, you should (please) slow down while debating if you are online. There are glitches in streaming and it’s hard enough to understand you. For a while, I tried following along with the docs when I missed something, but we all know that just leads to more errors. This is your warning: if you are not clear enough to flow I will not try to flow it. I will give two warnings to be clear (and one after your speech in case you didn’t hear me). If you choose to keep doing you, don’t expect to win or for me to know what you said. On the flip side, if you are actively slowing down to make the debate comprehensible, you will be rewarded with a speaker point bump.

6. JESUS CHRIST PLEASE stop trying to debate how you think I want you to. It's never a good look to over-adapt. The only exception is if you want to go for Baudrillard and somehow ended up with me as a judge. Then please over-adapt. I cannot stress enough the importance of adaptation if you are trying to tell me post-modern theory or that death is cool.

7. I don't like to read cards as a default because decision time is 20 minutes assuming there were no delays in the round. If a card is called into question or my BS meter is going off, I will read the card. Absent that, I'm mostly about the flow and ethos. Tell me what warrants in your card you want me to know about. Point out the parts in the other team's evidence that are bad for them. That makes my judging job easier, causes me to read the card, AND gives you a sick speaker point boost.

WARNINGS:

I am chronically ill. If you pref me, there is a chance I have a flare up while judging you. This means I will finish the debate with my camera off but am still there. I just want some privacy while sick/you really don't want to see my face if I turn my camera off. If we are in person this may mean a slight delay in the debate. One time and one time only I have gotten so sick in a debate that a bye was given to both teams. So pref me if you want the chance of a free win!
I am a blunt judge. When I say that I mean I am autistic and frequently do not know how to convey or perceive tone in the way that other do. If you post-round me, I wont call you out of your name, but I will be very clear about your skills (or lack thereof) in the debate.
I also might cry...I'm clinically hypersensitive from CPTSD. Sometimes people assume I have a tone and "match" or "reraise" what they think I'm doing. If I cry and you weren't being a total jerk, don't over-apologize and make the RFD about me, lets just plan on a written RFD in that case.
I appreciate trigger warnings about sexual abuse. I will not vote on trigger warning voters because it's impossible to know everyone's trigger and ultimately we are responsible for our own triggers. All debaters who wish to avoid triggers should inform opponents before the round, not center the debate on it. I'd rather use "tech time" for the triggered debater to try to get back to their usual emotional state and try to finish the round if desired.
If the behavior of one of the teams crosses the line into what I deem to be inappropriate or highly objectionable behavior I will stop the debate and award a loss to the offending team. Examples of this behavior include but are not limited to sexual harassment/abuse, abusive behavior or threats of violence or instances of overt racism, sexism or oppression based on identity generally.

This does not include self-expression. I would prefer not to see an erotic performance from high schoolers as an adult, but I am able to do so without sexualizing said debaters. There are limits to this, as you are minors and this is a school activity. Please do not make me have to stop the round because you exposed yourself to the other team, or something similar. If you are in college I still feel like you are a student, but I will honor that you have the right to express yourself without sexualizing you. Please no "flashing" without consent - that is sexual harassment/assault.
This also does not include a Black debater using the N-word, unless used intentionally to put down another Black debater to the point of distress in the other Black debater.
When in doubt, don’t make it your goal to traumatize the other team and we will all be fine.
If you ask a team to say a slur in CX I will interrupt the debate to change course, though I will not auto-vote against you. I don’t think we should encourage people to say slurs to try to prove a point. Find another way, or don’t pref me.

The longer version:

Speaker points:

I've been told you need to average a 29.2 to clear nowadays. Because of that:

-a learning speech will be 28.4-28.7,

-an average speech will be 28.8-29.1,

-a clearing level speech will be 29.2-29.5,

-a top ten speaker will be 29.6-29.9.

I'm not giving 30s. Ya gotta be perfect to get a 30, and Hannah Montana taught me that nobody's perfect.

If you get below a 28.4 you probably severely annoyed me.

If you get below a 28, you were probably a problem in the debate, ethically.

I have yet to give a low point win, to my memory. I generally think winning is a part of speaking well. If you cause your team to lose the debate, you’re likely to get lower points.

Speaker-point factors:

- Did you debate well?

- Were you clear?

- Did you maintain my attention?

- Did you make me laugh, critically think, or gasp?

- Did your arguments or behavior in the debate make me cringe?

- Were you going way to hard in a debate against less experienced debaters and made them feel bad for no reason?

K STUFF:

Planless Clash debates:

-I’ve rarely judged a planless debate where the neg has not gone for framework. In instances where I have, the neg was policy style impact turning a concept of the aff, not going for a K based on a different theory of the world.

-I generally went for framework against planless affirmatives when I debated, and therefore am a bit deeper on the neg side of things. That being said, I also have a standard for what the neg needs to do to make a complete argument.

-I don’t think topicality, or adhering to a resolution, is analogous to rape, slavery, or other atrocities. That doesn't mean arguments about misogynoir, pornotroping, or other arguments of that nature don't work with me. I understand the logic of something being problematic. It's just the oversimplification of theory into false comparisons I take issue with.

-I don’t think that not being topical will cause everyone to quit, lose all ability to navigate existential crises, or other tedious internal link chains. That being said, I love an external impact to framework that defends the politics of government action.

-I would really prefer if people had reasonable arguments on topicality for why or why they don’t need to read a plan, rather than explaining to me their existential impact to voting aff or neg. In the same way that I'm not persuaded the neg will quit or extinction will happen if you don't read a plan, I also don't think extinction will happen if you lose to topicality. Focus instead on the real debate impacts at hand. Though, as said above, I love a good defense of your politics, and if that has a silly extinction impact that's fine.

-I find myself persuaded that the case can not outweigh topicality. Arguments from the case can be used to impact turn topicality, but that is distinct from “case outweighs limits” in my mind. T is a gateway issue. If the neg goes for T, that's what the debate is about. This is why I think many planless 1ACs are best when they have a built-in angle against framework.

-indicts to procedural fairness impacts are persuasive to me.

-modern concrete examples of incrementalism failing or working help a lot

-aff teams need to explain how their counter interpretation solves the neg impacts as well as their impact turns.

-neg teams need to turn the aff impacts and have external offense of their own. Teams frequently do one or the other

Neg K v plans:

-Generally, the alt won’t solve when the aff does a serious push, but the aff will let the neg get away with murder on alt solvency.

-Generally, the alt doing the plan is a reason to reject the alt/team absent a framework debate, which is fine.

-Generally, contradictions justify severance

-Always, the neg is allowed to read Ks

-I'm getting more and more persuaded the neg needs a big push on framework to beat the perm. If the alt is fiated and not mutually exclusive with the plan, there is almost no way to convince me that the perm won't solve. This is not true on topics where the alt impact turns the resolution. You truly can't do both sometimes.

-Framework debates are won by engaging the theory aspect and is pragmatism/action desirable, not just one. Typically the neg spends a bunch of time winning the aff is an unethical method, while the aff is talking about fairness and limits.

-please slow down on framework blocks!

K v K debate:

I tend to find myself thinking of things in terms of causality, so if that’s not your jam you gotta tell me not to think in that way. I have *technically* judged a K v K debate, but I'm pretty sure it was a cap debate that was more impact turn-y than theory of power-y.

I'm interested in seeing debates like this despite my lack of experience.

K stuff in general:

-My degree is in math. While y’all were reading a lot of background lit, I was doing abstract algebra. You might have to break it down a bit. I'm reading a bit more of the stuff y'all debate from in grad school, but it's still safe to eli5. My masters work is mostly on pop culture, hip-hop, and Black Feminist literature. If you want to debate about Megan Thee Stallion, I should be your ordinal one because it is the topic of my thesis.

-I am more persuaded by identity or constructivism than post-modernism. I am the opposite of persuaded by post-modernism.

-I DO NOT recommend reading Baudrillard, Bataille, etc. You might think "but I'm the one that will change her mind;" you aren't. I will be annoyed for having to judge the debate tbh. You have free will to read it if you want, but I have free will to tank your points with ZERO remorse. If this third warning doesn't do it for you, you are responsible for your speaker points. If I was swapped in to judge your debate last minute, I won't tank your speaks. I only clarify because this happened to a team once.

POLICY STUFF:

CPs:

-Tell me if I can (or can’t!) kick it for you. I may or may not remember to if you don’t. I may or may not feel like you are allowed to if you don’t.

-Reading definitions of should means the perm or theory is in tough shape. It's not unwinnable, but I was a 2A… Tricky process counterplans that argue to result in the aff by means of solvency, but are *actually* competitive (more than just should and resolved definitions), game on. If that means you have to define some topic words in an interesting way, I'm fine with that. Also, despite being a classic 2A, I find myself holding the aff to a higher standard sometimes. Maybe it's because I went to MSU, but a lot of times I find myself thinking "this CP obviously doesn't solve. why doesn't the aff just say that or try to cut a card about it???"

-Make the intrinsic perm great again!

-Links to the net benefit is usually a sliding scale. But sometimes links have a certain threshold where it doesn’t matter which links less. Please consider this nuance when debating.

Theory:

-TBH – y’all blaze through theory blocks with no clarity and then get confused when I have no standards written down. These debates are bad. Be more clear. Speak at a flowable pace. Maybe make your own arguments. Idk.

-It is debatable whether an argument is a reason to reject the argument or team.

-2ACs that spend 15-plus seconds on the theory shell will see a lot more mileage and viability for the 2AR. One-sentence blips with no warrants and flow checks will be treated as such.

-impact comparison and turns case are lost arts in theory debates.

DAs:

-Yes, there can be zero DA. No, it’s not as common as you think.

-answer turns case!!!

PF/LD:

I have coached LD and PF for years, but it is hard for me to separate my years of policy debate experience from the way I judge all debates. I was trained for 8 years as a policy debater and continue to coach that format. I have participated in both LD and PF debates a few times in high school, so I’m not a full outsider

I’m not a trickster and I refuse to learn how Kant relates to the topic. Similarly, theory arguments like “abbreviating USFG is too vague” or “You misspelled enforcement and that’s a VI” are silly to me. Plan flaws are better when the aff results in something meaningfully different from what they intend to, not something that an editor would fix. I’m not voting/evaluating until the final speech ends. Period.

Dense phil debates are very hard for me to adjudicate having very little background in them. I default to utilitarianism and am most comfortable judging those debates. Any framework that involves skep triggers is very unlikely to find favor with me.

PF:

Do not pref me if you paraphrase evidence.

Do not pref me if you do not have a copy of your evidence/relevant part of the article AND full-text article for your opponent upon request.

Please stop with the post-speech evidence swap, make an email chain before the debate, and send your evidence ahead of time. If your case includes analytics you don’t want to send, that’s fine, though I think it’s kinda weaksauce to not disclose your arguments. If the argument is good, it should withstand an answer from the opponent.

Second, there is far too much untimed evidence exchange happening in debates. I will want all teams to set up an email chain to exchange cases in their entirety to forego the lost time of asking for specific pieces of evidence. You can add me to the email chain as well and that way after the debate I will not need to ask for evidence. This is not negotiable if I'm your judge - you should not fear your opponents having your evidence. Under no circumstances will there be an untimed exchange of evidence during the debate. Any exchange of evidence that is not part of the email chain will come out of the prep time of the team asking for the evidence. The only exception to this is if one team chooses not to participate in the email thread and the other team does then all time used for evidence exchanges will be taken from the prep time of the team who does NOT email their cases.

Ayoka Wicks Indiana University 6 rounds

Carly Wunderlich Michigan State University 4 rounds

Last changed on Wed January 3, 2024 at 6:49 PM UTC

Background: Debated 2006-2010 at Michigan State University, Assistant Coach at Gonzaga 2010-2011, Coach at MSU 2011-present

carly.wunderlich@gmail.com

---Updates Based on Getting Old---

1. What happened to 1NC DA shells that were complete arguments? Card 1 – Dems will win now – health care is a thing that matters. Card 2 – Dem win stops impeachment. Card 3 – Trump causes nuclear war. Um, no. You don’t have an argument here. The aff gets a wreck of leeway to answer stuff in the 1AR because this isn’t even starting to establish a causal link chain in the 1NC.

3. What happened to 1NC solvency cards for CPs? If your 2NC starts “they dropped the announcements plank in the 2AC it’s GAME OVER” but you haven’t read solvency for that plank that’s a no as well.

They all have huge strategic benefits, I get it – you can just spread them out and then piece it together once the aff drops everything. It’s gross to watch, your speaker points will reflect it and I won't forget who's fault it is that the debate is a wreck to try to decide because the debating didn't start until the block. This is also all true of ludicrous aff moves in the same vein

---Old Philosophy + Minor Revisions---

Things I like about debate

1. Working hard/preparation--- I think quality research should be a guiding factor when making decisions. Specific strategies rewarded, poo-nuggets punished

2. Critical thinking--- nothing gets you thinking you your feet like debate. I like interesting pivots and fast-moving debates

3. Argument testing---looking at both sides of an issue to parse out the most compelling arguments on both sides without confirmation bias – more important than ever, in my opinion

Topicality

As an old 2A I think reasonability works out well for the aff in a lot of spots. I'm very close to living in a post-T world if I'm being honest. The link to the limits DA should be well explained and evidenced (either by analysis or with actual evidence). Need clear case lists with explanation why you do/don’t include a specific case. T-substantial/significant is no for me.

CPs

I find myself leaning neg on a lot of CP theory questions (agent, pics, states) as reasons to reject the team. I do not think that CPs that compete on the certainty of plan (consult, condition) are competitive but that this is a reason the aff should get permutation and not a reason to reject the CP in most instances. I also do not think that distinct is competitive and I think the neg should compete off a mandate of the plan.

Conditionality- for the last decade my philosophy has read “this is an area where I've started to move farther into the aff camp. My predisposition is that the neg should get one conditional counterplan. I've not heard many good reasons that the neg should get multiple counterplans. It think that 1 is a logical limit and that to say that 2 or more is OK becomes a slippery slope. I think we all need to do a better job of protecting the aff in this department.” Unfortunately, I have failed the aff and voted neg in a LOT of spots. I still wish in my heart that we could limit the number of CPs read in a debate but unfortunately my voting record has not reflected that.

Unless the neg explicitly says it I will not "reject the CP and default to the status quo because it's always a logical option."

DAs

I think there are many logical inconsistencies with DAs that often go unremarked on by the aff in favor of impact defense. I think the aff would generally do better on engaging at the link/internal link level of dubious DAs. Picking one argument to deal a death blow to the DA works better than death by a thousand cuts.

Topic specific Ks that turn and/or solve the aff are better. Links to the plan action are best. Affs get far on “K doesn’t remedy “x” advantage and that outweighs” if the neg is not good and explicit about it. Almost all frameworks are a race to the middle. Neg gets to question assumptions of the aff, aff gets to weigh advantages- that’s a warning to the aff and the neg.

The Aff

I feel that there are lots of instances where crummy affs get away with it because the neg only focuses on impact calc. I think this is another instance, like DAs, where focusing on solvency/internal link args can pay bigger dividends than impact calc.

Speaker points

Things I like in speeches

1. Connections on central questions- slowing down and effectively communicating about guiding issues

2. Technical proficiency- answering clearly all necessary arguments

3. Clarity- I’m doing my best to be mindful of this but I honestly sometimes just forget- I’ll call clear once if you’re incomprehensible but at a certain point it will affect whether or not I vote on arguments

4. Strategic cross-exs- I’d prefer not to spend another 12 mins listening to “where does your card say that?”

Things that will result in reduced speaker points

1. Cross-reading, clipping- if there is an ethics challenge made I will stop the debate and evaluate it. If the person in question is found to be doing it they will lose the debate and receive zero speaker points.

2. Tech fails- please be prompt and quick with tech things. In a world of decision times this is increasingly getting to me.

3. Creating an environment that is hostile or unsafe for me or the other team – It's important for productive conversations and it's not healthy for all of us to leave tournaments hating each other.

4. Talking over everyone in c-x – I get it, you think you’re cool but I’m pretty bored with watching people get themselves all worked up and then just yell over the other team

My Speaker Point Scale (unless otherwise published by the tournament)

29.6 -30: You should receive a Top 10 speaker award

29.3 – 29.5: In this debate, you were an quarters level debater

28.8 – 29.2: In this debate, you were a 5-3, octos or double octos debater

28.4 – 28.7: In this debate, you were a 4-4 debater on the verge or bubble of clearing

28 – 28.3: You are improving but not quite there on big picture issues

27.5 – 28: You need some improvement on technical items as well as big picture things

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D5 NDT Qualifying Tournament at Northwestern

2020 — Evanston, IL/US

Policy Paradigm List

Judges