Last changed on
Sun July 21, 2024 at 6:55 PM PDT
kritiksarecheating@gmail.com
Sage 24
Not Debating '28
I'm agnostic about being on the chain. I flow without the doc.
Obligatory "I think like my coaches" - thanks Pat Fox, Brett Cryan, Bryce Sheffield, Vik Maan, and Aidan Etkin.
I. Basics
None of us had to be here at 8 am on a weekend. I will give my full attention to whatever you have to say, whether that's the death K, Baudrillard, or the rider DA. Likewise, I expect to you to treat your opponent with respect.
"That means I will not be half-flowing speeches while texting friends, I will not be checking Twitter or spacing out during CX, I will not "rep out", and I will not rush my decision to get back to my own team faster" - pat
I flow on my laptop, but will not have other tabs open.
II. Ground rules
Nothing you do or say will change these factors in my decision calculus.
A. Debate is a game that requires 1 winner and 1 loser.
B. Do not misgender people. This is non-negotiable.
C. Do not be racist, sexist, etc.
D. Ad homs will not earn you the ballot. They will earn you 25 speaks. "entirely uninterested in adjudicating the character of minors i don't know" - pat.
E. The affirmative speaks first and last and thus has the burden of positive proof. The negative speaks second and thus has the burden of rejoining the aff.
F. Speech times. 6-7-4-6-3. These do not change.
G. If an accusation of clipping or an ev ethics violation are alleged and the round is explicitly staked, I will stop the debate and decide internally whether the accusations are true or false. The winner gets a W29, the loser an L20.
III. Thoughts on specific arguments
A. Kritik/K affs
I was involved in a substantial portion of these debates in high school. I am better for K debaters that are highly technical, and make arguments that seek to rejoin the plan. I am worse for K debaters that rely on fanciful rhetoric, grandstanding, and edgy performances to win.
Link turns case and K impact turns it are arguments that are criminally underutilized in LD. I'm increasingly frustrated with the amount of time LD K debaters spend grandstanding instead of explaining their theory of power or how the link indicts the 1AC. This is probably due to the way that judging traditionally considered "good for the K" has evolved, especially on the East Coast. Nonetheless, explaining why the link interferes with 1AC solvency makes the 3 minute 2AR on plan focus and extinction outweighs far harder to give, albeit still convincing.
People should impact turn Ks more. Every K probably thinks heg and cap are bad (or they probably don't solve the link). Although the LD 1AR is too short to read some of the better heg cards, impact turns as a component of offense against Ks other than cap should definitely become a more substantive part of the meta.
I lean slightly neg on T-framework. I am persuaded by the idea that debates over a topical plan are good, but can be convinced to vote the other way. Impact turning framework is likely more convincing than a counterinterpretation that purports to solve the negative's limits offense.
B. Disads
I largely went for these negating. 2NRs on DA/case should be short on internal link explanation/overviews, heavy on turns-case analysis. Two sentences is a sufficiency. You should also weigh. Weighing is good and important. Explain why your offense comes before theirs.
Meta-weighing is also good and criminally underutilized - a lot of debaters just assert that timeframe comes before magnitude, or vice versa, without a warrant. "Intervening actors check" is not an argument.
Evidence quality matters, but sometimes analytics are better than evidence. Card quality in LD is atrocious - sometimes, instead of reading your russia D from 2012, you'd just be better off making analytic arguments about how Ukraine proves Russia's washed. It takes less time too.
Uniqueness controls the direction of the link. If there is a 50% chance that Ukraine aid passes in the world of the plan, but a 0% chance that it passes in the world of the DA, I vote aff.This isn't to say that the link CANNOT control the direction of uniqueness, but that the inverse is generally true for most disads (especially politics, dipcap, etc).
This should also highlight the importance of cutting updates to internal link ev and uniqueness. I don't want to judge the farm bill DA with uniqueness from 2020. That passed a year ago. Cmon guys.
C. Counterplans
Dense counterplan competition throwdowns were the debates I was least involved in and, by extension, the debates I am the least comfortable with judging. That said, I should be relatively okay for these rounds.
Debaters should think a lot more about the quality of evidence for a lot of process CPs. The authors of a lot of these articles are writing in the context of legal hypotheticals and often hasten to explain that anybody who tried these things in the real world would be patently insane. Letting the solicitor general, courts, or whatever make decisions about how the military works or whether UBI should be implemented would probably collapse the entire US government and it's legal, institutional, and historical legitimacy. Aff teams should say these things more.
Function > text. I'm not sure why changing "ought" to "should" means that the counterplan competes. This change in wording probably doesn't affect whether or not the counterplan could be implemented in the world of the aff. I think the most persuasive argument for textual competition is that it's most consistent with the legal process, but this seems to be fallacious. While legal interpretation certainly places an emphasis on semantics, it is generally recognized that the functional effect of the law should supersede quibbles over it's wording.
Likewise, I'm not persuaded by textual nonintrinsicness as a check on full intrinsic permutations. Functional competition makes a lot more sense to me in a purely logical sense - if the counterplan cannot occur in the world of the aff, it likely competes.
Advantage counterplans are good, but debaters should write real planks. "Substantially increase aid to the Middle East" is not a real plank. Where? Who? How? It makes no sense to me that process counterplan debaters are generally forced to delve into the minutia of the mechanics by which their arguments function, but advantage counterplans are written incredibly vaguely.
D. Topicality
Don't have much to say here. Definitions are good. You should counterdefine words in the topic as the basis of an argument for why your interpretation of the topic is predictable and do a lot of comparative analysis when giving a 2NR on limits/precision. I think there's probably little distinction between "semantics" and "pragmatics" per se. There is probably a semi-bidirectional link between the two.
I have little patience for LDers that treat T like frivolous theory. No, I will not be happy evaluating your RVIs.
E. Phil/Theory
This is the type of debate in which I am the least experienced. I'll still vote on these arguments, but I had relatively little contact with them as a debater. However, I am studying philosophy in college, so I'll hopefully have some idea about what you're talking about. Better for fully carded kant, skep, etc (in the Texas DK style) and less good for cheapshots like hidden indexicals, etc.
I'm bad for theory that isn't from policy debate. ASPEC, condo, etc are fine. Spec status is not.
IV. Closing thoughts/idiosyncrasies
"Not voting on call outs. Not my business." - brett
"not interested in voting on cheapshots" - pat
"Will evaluate after 1NC; 2AR is "after 1NC"" - sterling