GBN Congress 3
2022 — NSDA Campus, IL/US
Congress Paradigm List
All Paradigms: Show Hide42fryguy@gmail.com
I debated at KU and Blue Valley Southwest, I am currently coaching at Glenbrook North
FW
I am heavily persuaded by arguments about why the affirmative should read a topical plan. One of the main reasons for this is that I am persuaded by a lot of framing arguments which nullify aff offense. The best way to deal with these things is to more directly impact turn common impacts like procedural fairness. Counter interpretations can be useful, but the goal of establishing a new model sometimes exacerbates core neg offense (limits).
K
I'm not great for the K. In most instances this is because I believe the alternative solves the links to the aff or can't solve it's own impacts. This can be resolved by narrowing the scope of the K or strengthening the link explanation (too often negative teams do not explain the links in the context of the permutation). The simpler solution to this is a robust framework press.
T
I really enjoy good T debates. Fairness is the best (and maybe the only) impact. Education is very easily turned by fairness. Evidence quality is important, but only in so far as it improves the predictability/reduces the arbitrariness of the interpretation.
CP
CPs are fun. I generally think that the negative doing non-plan action with the USfg is justified. Everything else is up for debate, but well developed aff arguments are dangerous on other questions.
I generally think conditionality is good. I think the best example of my hesitation with conditionality is multi-plank counter plans which combine later in the debate to become something else entirely.
If in cross x you say the status quo is always an option I will kick the counter plan if no further argumentation is made (you can also obviously just say conditional and clarify that judge kick is an option). If you say conditional and then tell me to kick in the 2NR and there is a 2AR press on the question I will be very uncomfortable and try to resolve the debate some other way. To resolve this, the 2AC should make an argument about judge kick.
Updated 2023 Pre-Northwestern College Season Opener
Assistant Policy Debate Coach at UT-Dallas and Greenhill
Debated at C.E. Byrd HS in Shreveport, Louisiana (class of ’14). Debated in college policy for Baylor University (2014-2016) and the University of Iowa (2017-2019)
Have also coached: Caddo Magnet HS, Hendrickson HS, Little Rock Central HS, Glenbrook South HS, University of Iowa, James Madison University
Email chain should be set up/sent before start time. sam.gustavson@gmail.com
Top level
Please be respectful of one another. We are all sacrificing our weekends to be here and learn, you can be passionate about your arguments without being mean, rude, condescending, hostile, etc. I’d almost always prefer you convince me that your opponent’s arguments are bad, not that they’re bad people. Chances are, none of us know each other well enough to make that determination.
Please prioritize clarity over speed.Everything else you can take with a grain of salt and ultimately do what you are best at, but me being able to understand you comes before anything else.
Debate is hard. People make it harder by making it more complicated than it needs to be. I like debaters who take complex ideas and bring them down to the level of simplicity and common sense.
Judge instruction, impact framing, comparison of evidence, authors, warrants, etc. or “the art of spin” is the most important thing for telling me how I should decide a debate. Making strategic decisions is important.
One of the things that makes debate truly unique is the research that is required, and so I think it makes sense to reward teams who are clearly going above and beyond in the research they’re producing. Good cards won’t auto win you the debate, but they certainly help “break ties” on the flow and give off the perception that a team is deep in the literature on their argument. But good evidence is always secondary to what a debater does with it.
I care about cross-x A LOT. USE ALL OF YOUR CX TIME PLZ
Organization is also really important to me. Debaters that do effective line by line, clearly label arguments and use things like subpoints are more likely to win in front of me and get better speaks.
High School Specific Thoughts
I did a lot of work in the summer on IPR but I will be doing mainly college debate during the regular season. If I am judging you in high school, don't assume I know everything about the topic, especially how things have evolved since camp in terms of argument norms and things like that.
If you’re interested in doing policy debate in college, feel free to talk to me about debating at UT-Dallas! I am a full-time assistant coach there. We have scholarships, multiple coaches, and a really fun team culture.
CLARITY OVER SPEED APPLIES DOUBLE TO HIGH SCHOOL
Set up the email chain as soon as you get to the room and do disclosure. If you’re aff, ask for the neg team’s emails and copy and paste mine from the top of my paradigm. Let’s get started on time!
Please keep track of your own prep, cx, and speech time.
Don’t flow off the speech doc, it’s the easiest way to miss something and it’s super obvious. Don’t waste cross-x time asking what the did and didn’t read! Flowing is so important.
Aff thoughts
I don’t care what “style” of aff you read, I just care that it is consistently explained and executed throughout the debate.
I like most judges enjoy 2ACs that make strategic choices, smart groupings and cross applications, and effectively and efficiently use the 1AC to beat neg positions in addition to reading new cards.
2ACs and ESPECIALLY 1ARs are getting away with murder in terms of not actually extending the aff.
Pretty aff leaning on a lot of CP theory questions (Process especially, 50 states, agent CPs. With the exception of PICs), but usually think they’re a reason to reject the argument. You can win it’s a reason to reject the team, but my bar for winning the 2ac was irrevocably skewed by the existence of a single 1NC position is pretty high. I don’t really lean one way or the other on condo (ideologically at least, I have no clue what my judge record is in condo debates).
Neg Thoughts - General
I like negative strategies that are well-researched specific responses to the aff. I think case debating is super important and underutilized. Nothing is more persuasive than a negative team who seems to know more about the 1AC than the Aff team does.
The 1NR should be the best speech in the debate, you have so much prep.
The 2NR should make strategic decisions, collapse down, and anticipate 2ar framing and pivots. The block is about proliferating options, the 2NR is about making decisions and closing doors.
Counterplans
Like I said above, prefer aff-specific CPs to generics. Counterplans that only compete on immediacy and certainty and net benefits that don’t say the aff is bad are not my favorite. I definitely prefer Process CP + Politics to Process CP + internal net benefit, because the politics DA disproves the desirability of the plan.
Because of the above thoughts, I am more aff leaning on CP theory in a lot of instances, with the exception of PICs. I think PICs that disprove/reject part of the aff are probably good.
People say sufficiency framing without doing the work to explain why the risk of the net benefit actually outweighs the risk of the solvency deficit. You have to do some type of risk calculus to set up what is sufficient and how I should evaluate it.
I have no feelings one way or another about judge kick. Win that it’s good or win that it’s bad.
Counterplans vs K affs are underutilized.
Disads
Comparison is important and not just at the impact level. Telling me what warrants to prioritize on the uniqueness and link debate, rehighlighting evidence, doing organized labeling and line by line, etc. Don’t just extend the different parts of the DA, do comparative work and framing on each part to tell me to tell me why you’re winning it and what matters most in terms of what I evaluate.
Like I said in the neg general section, I usually prefer an aff/topic specific DA to politics, but those concerns can be easily alleviated with good link debating on the politics DA. Your link being specific to the aff/resolution is usually important especially for link uniqueness reasons. I typically like elections more than agenda politics just as a research preference.
Impact Turns
Get in the weeds early in these debates and read a lot of cards. Don’t be afraid to read cards late in the debate either. Teams that get out-carded in these debates early have a tough time getting back in the game.
Recency, specificity, and evidence quality really matter for most every argument, but these debates especially. It’s pretty obvious when one team has updates and the other is reading a backfile
These debates get unorganized in a hurry. Labeling, line by line, using subpoints/numbers, and making clear cross applications are super important
Topicality
I really like T debates vs policy affs. I think creative arguments like extra T and effects T are underutilized or at least often underexplained and that there are affs getting away with fiating a lot of extra-resolutional/non-resolutional things.
Typically default to competing interps, and I’ll be totally transparent here: reasonability is kind of an uphill battle for me. When people go for reasonability with an interp, I almost always understand reasonability as a standard for why the aff’s interp is good. If you’re arguing your interpretation is better because it’s more reasonable, how is that not also an appeal to competing interpretations? And in the other scenario, if you’re going for reasonability with a we meet argument, I feel like a lot of the time it just begs the question of the violation and it’s easy for the neg to frame it as a yes/no question, not something that you can kind of/reasonably meet. Ultimately superior debating supersedes everything. If you win reasonability, you win reasonability. But you are probably better off just winning the we meet or going for a counter-interp
Impact comparison on standards is super important. I don’t have any strong preferences in terms of how I evaluate limits vs precision, aff ground vs neg ground, etc. Those are things you have to win and do the work of framing for me.
For the neg: Case lists, examples of ground lost under the aff’s interp, examples of why the debates under your model over the course of the year, topical versions of the aff, etc. will all help me understand in practice why your interp is better for the year of debate on the topic rather than just in theory.
For the aff: A well-explained we meet and/or counter interpretation, a case list of things you allow and things you don’t, and explanation of what ground the neg gets access to under your interp beyond quickly listing arguments and saying functional limits check, explain the warrant for why your interp preserves that ground and why those debates are good to have. N
Not super persuaded by “we meet – plan text in a vacuum” without much additional explanation. If the aff reads a plan text but then reframes/clarifies what that means in cross-x, in 1ac solvency evidence, or in the 2ac responding to neg positions, I think it’s easy for the neg to win those things outweigh plan text in a vacuum.
Framework
I judge a lot of these debates, and I’m fine with that. I think debating about debate is useful.
Fairness can be and impact or an internal link, just depends on how it’s debated. For it to be an external impact, it needs to not be circular/self-referential, which I think it often is in terms of how teams execute it. “Debate is a game, so it needs to be fair, because games need to be fair, and without fairness we can’t debate” is a circular argument that lacks an impact. To me, the argument becomes more offensive the more teams emphasize the time commitment we all put into debate and why maintaining fairness is important for honoring that time commitment, or explaining why it’s important for participation.
If either side is claiming participation as an impact, you have gotta explain how voting for you/your model would solve it. I think that’s hard to do but I’ve seen it done effectively both with fairness and with K affs doing for access/participation outweighs. The impact is obviously very big, but the internal link is often sketchy and not flushed out, in addition to largely being untrue because things like budget cuts have a lot more to do with who can participate than any particular team reading any particular argument.
I prefer clash as an impact more because I feel like it gets to a bigger impact that is more at the heart of why debate is good and that it often causes the neg to interact with the aff more. Your warrants for why clash turns the aff should be aff specific – same with TVAs. Nothing hurts me worse than ultra-generic framework debating where the argument could apply to literally any K aff. The best way to win your model can account for the aff’s impacts is to use the language of the aff in your explanation of things like clash, Switch-Side, and the TVA.
Affs that have something to do with the topic and can link turn things like topic education and clash are more persuasive to me than affs that try to impact turn every single part of framework. You probably will need to win some defense, because so much of the neg side of framework is defense to the stuff you want to go for.
Having a counter-interpretation really helps me understand how to evaluate offense and defense in these debates. This does not necessarily require the 2AC to redefine words in the resolution, but rather to tell me what the aff’s vision of debate is, what the role is for the aff and neg, and why those debates are good. Even if you are going to impact turn everything, having a counter-interpretation or a model of debate helps me understand what the role of the aff, neg, and the overall role of debate are.
Kritiks
The more aff-specific the better. Links do not necessarily have to be to the plan (it would be nice if they were), but they should implicate the 1ac in specific ways whether it’s their rhetoric, impact scenarios, etc. 2NCs that quote and rehighlight aff evidence, read new cards, proliferate links, and give the 2nr options are good. If you are criticizing/kritiking the aff, you should quote as much of their evidence, indict as many of their authors, and apply your criticism to the aff as much as possible. The most common advice I give 2Ns going for the K is to quote the aff more
Making decisions in the 2NR is still important even when reading the K one-off. You cannot go for every link, framing argument, perm answer, etc. in the 2NR.
The best K 2NRs I’ve ever seen effectively use case to mitigate parts of the aff’s offense. If you give them 100% risk of the aff vs the K, it’s harder to win!
Kicking the alt/going just for links or case turns is not the move in front of me. There are almost always uniqueness problems and I end up usually just voting aff on a risk of case. Whether it’s an alternative or a framework argument, you gotta explain to me how voting neg solves your offense.
I have noticed that in a lot of K debates I find that both the aff and the neg over-invest in framework. I honestly don’t see a scenario where I don’t let the aff weigh the 1AC if they win that fiat is good. I also don’t see a scenario where I vote aff because Kritiks on the neg are unfair. If the neg is making links to the aff, the aff obviously gets to weigh their offense against those link arguments. I really think both sides in most cases would be better served spending time on the link/impact/alt rather than overinvesting time on the framework debate.
I don’t really understand a lot of the form/content distinction stuff people go for because I think that the way arguments about “form” are deployed in debate are usually not actually about the form of anything and almost exclusively refer to disagreements in content
Ethics challenges/Clipping/Out of Round Stuff:
In the case that anyone calls an ethics violation for any reason I reserve the right to defer/go to tab, and then beyond that I can only vote based on my interpretation of events. This used to really only apply to clipping, but I’ve been a part of a bunch of different types of ethics challenges over the years so I’ve decided to update this.
Clipping: Hot take, it’s obviously bad. If I have proof you clipped the round will end and you’ll lose. I don’t follow along in speech docs unless someone starts being unclear, so if your opponent is clipping it’s up to you to notice and get proof. I need a recording if I don’t catch it live, even if we are on a panel and another judge catches it. Without a recording or proof, I’m not pulling the trigger.
Be careful about recording people without their consent, especially minors. Multiple states require two-party consent to record, don’t get yourself in legal trouble over a debate round.
I don’t vote on out of round stuff, especially stuff I wasn’t there for. For clarification, I suppose there could be exceptions to this and my opinions on it have gone back and forth. If you feel that someone in the round has jeopardized your safety, made you uncomfortable, or anything remotely similar, I will do everything in to advocate for you if I witness any of the following. If I am not a witness, I will make sure that the proper channels are used to address the complaint.
This is obviously distinct from criticizing something that someone has said or calling people out for being problematic. I’m saying if something so bad has happened that we have to stop the round, I have to go to the tournament and my bosses and look at my options. For your safety and mine I am required to think about how I’m protected, and my role and qualifications as a coach and educator as it relates to resolving officially lodged complaints of discrimination or harassment.
LD Paradigm:
Tech over truth but asserting that an argument is dropped/conceded is not the same thing as extending a full argument
My debate background is in policy, so I have much more familiarity with policy/LARP and Kritikal debates than I do with phil. I like phil debate, but you need to treat me like more of a beginner for the more advanced stuff.
Not the best for tricks but I won't outright reject them. Theory is fine, the more frivolous it is the more annoyed I'll be, but I'll flow it.
Clarity is more important than speed. Slow down a bit on counterplan texts, interps, etc. Spreading as fast as you can through theory shells or a million a priori's means there's probably a good chance that I am not going to get everything.
My policy paradigm has a lot of my K/policy specific thoughts as well.
JUN is pronounced like FUN (she/her)
I enjoy authentic debate. I will rank higher for speakers who genuinely advance the debate by bringing in fresh and nuanced perspectives.
Debate is meant to be informative and challenging. Avoid intellectual bullying and remember that we are in a space that is an extension of the classroom.
Sources should be credible, recent, and varied.
Respect, inclusivity, and kindness go a long way, especially considering the range of experience and exposure that each debater brings to the chamber.
The chamber is as fun as you make it! If it’s starting to get stale and boring for you, it is for me as well. Speakers and PO are encouraged to set the mood, tone, and pacing of the chamber to one that reflects decorum, vigor, and efficiency.
Make every effort to learn correct name pronunciations and pronouns for all individuals.
Top shelf:
Pronouns are she/her
Just call me Alyssa or ALB - do not call me judge and dear debate Lord do not call me ma'am.
Email chains: SonomaCardsCardsCards@gmail.com AND alyssa.lucas-bolin@sonomaacademy.org
I deleted most of my paradigm
...Because I have run into way way way too many situations where people wildly misinterpret my paradigm and it leads to a rather miserable situation (mostly for myself.)
Debate well and we'll figure it out.
I'd prefer you talk about the topic and that your affirmative be in the direction of the topic. I could not possibly care less if that is via policy debate or K debate. False divide yada yada. Both policy teams and K teams are guilty of not actually talking about the topic and I am judging ALL of you.
Speed is fine but I need clear distinction between arguments and I need you to build up your speed for the first 10 seconds.
Tag team is fine but I'd prefer that the designated partner handle most of the cross ex - only intervene if it is absolutely necessary. I am an educator and would prefer to see each student develop their skill set.
You must read your re-highlightings out loud.
Stop stealing prep.
Please make as many T Swift references as possible.
Have solvency advocates - plz plz plz don't read a cardless CP :(
Heavy stuff:
*No touching. Handshakes after the debate = fine but that is it.
*I am not the right judge for call outs of specific debate community members
*I am a mandatory reporter. Keep that in mind if you are reading any type of personal narrative etc in a debate. A mandatory reporter just means that if you tell me something about experiencing violence etc that I have to tell the authorities.
*I care about you and your debate but I am not your debate mommy. I am going to give you direct feedback after the debate. I won't be cruel but I'm also not a sugar coater. It takes some people off guard because they may be expecting me to coddle them. It's just not my personality - I deeply care about your debate career and want you to do your best. I also am just very passionate about arguments. If you're feeling like I'm being a little intense just Shake It Off (Lauren Ivey.)
*Clipping = zero points and a hot L. Clarity to the point of non-comprehension that causes a clipping challenge constitutes clipping.
*I am more than fine with you post rounding as long as you keep it respectful. I would genuinely prefer you understand my decision than walk out frustrated because that doesn't help you win the next time. Bring it on (within reason). I'm back in the ring baby.
Let's have a throwdown!!! If you're reading this before a round I am excited to see what you have to offer.