Pronouns: they/he | Email: ixdebate at gmail dot com

Seven Lakes '21, University of Houston '25

Howdy! My name is Nine (pronounced like the number). Assistant coach for Seven Lakes. VP of the University of Houston policy debate team, 2x NDT qualifier.

If you're interested in debating at UH, shoot me a message!

NSDA PF UPDATE:

1) please add sevenlakespf [at] googlegroups [dot] com to the chain.

2) please make the subject of the chain: "NSDA Nats 24 PF Round [#]---[Aff team code] (AFF) vs [Neg team code] (NEG)" or something similar

example: "NSDA Nats 24 PF Round 1---Seven Lakes AR (AFF) vs Seven Lakes MJ (NEG)"

3) pre-flowing is pre-round prep. if you're pre-flowing during round start time, you should be taking prep for that.

NSDA CX UPDATE:

1) please add ixdebate [at] gmail [dot] com and sevenlakespolicy [at] googlegroups [dot] com

2) please make the subject of the chain: "NSDA Nats 24 CX Round [#]---[Aff team code] (AFF) vs [Neg team code] (Neg)" or somethign similar

example: "NSDA Nats 24 CX Round 1---Seven Lakes AR (AFF) vs Seven Lakes MJ (NEG)"

3) the tldr is you do you, i'll flow and adapt to your arguments

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Important Note!!!

If you're looking for a cost-effective speech/debate camp, come to the UH Honors Debate Workshop (HDW). We have top faculty from across the nation and an intense two-week course for CX, LD, PF, WSD, Congress, and IEs.

Check out the website for more info: https://uh.edu/hdw

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General:

- please do not refer to me as ma'am, miss, etc. my pronouns are they/he. if you have questions about this, please ask!

- i do not tolerate racism, xenophobia, homophobia, sexism, ableism, transphobia, etc. please respect people's names, pronouns, and identities. just be respectful, it's really not that hard.

- debate should be a welcoming and accessible place. if you have concerns, please let me know and i will work with you to try to resolve them.

- feel free to email me with questions! i love talking about speech/debate/interp and am more than happy to answer questions or have conversations about it. even if you have questions about college, debating in college, etc., hit me up!

- have a good debate! have a good performance! have a good attitude! and most importantly, have fun!!!

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Debate (Policy, LD, PF):

if you’re WSD, you don’t have to read this section and can scroll below for the WSD section.

five minutes before round? here’s the tl;dr:

- put me on the email chain. set up the email chain even if i'm not in the room yet. email chain >>> speech drop unless there’s an issue with school emails or wifi.

- debate is for debaters! you do you and i will adapt accordingly! i'll vote on almost any arg. specificity, comparison, and contextualizing is important. offense over defense.

- yes, spreading is okay with me. yes, i’m okay to read ks in front of. no, i don’t care how you look or if you stand or sit, etc. just feel comfortable while you’re debating!

- probably not going to vote on condo bad.

- "nine" > "judge”

- i will always try to disclose my decision and provide feedback if the tournament allows it. i will not disclose specific speaker points.

- i flow on paper, so give me pen time and slow down for analytics. you can ask to take pictures of my flows after the round! yes, you can email me with questions later too.

doing prefs? here’s what i’m good for and what args i’m most familiar with. (you should still read the rest of the paradigm though):

- i'm good for both policy and k arguments. i coach both policy and K arguments, and will be good for a policy v policy, K v policy, and K v K throwdowns.

- i’m less good for high theory, phil, and tricks/blippy theory. but, if they are read in front of me, i will evaluate them as best as i can, and i am likely looking for clarity/explanation of the argument and an impact to vote on. burden of proof comes before the burden of rejoinder. if i can’t explain your theory/shell/k/argument back to you, i won’t vote on it.

- i’m probably a better judge for policy thank you think–-i spent my first few years thinking about, going for, and getting to the NDT with topicality, DAs, CPs, and the cap K (which i went for like a DA/CP). technical policy debate still largely informs my decisions. i haven't completely removed myself from learning policy arguments (still coaching policy arguments and going for them occasionally) but i might be out of the loop of specific topic DAs or CPs, which means you might need to spend 10 seconds more explaining what the argument is.

- recently pivoted to K debate and now spend time thinking about various strands of setcol, cap, quare/trans/queer theory, black fem, and performance debate.

want more explanation? here’s the longer version (in no particular order):

i can not express this enough: debate is for debaters. i will adapt to your debating style accordingly. you do you! i will evaluate based on what’s on my flow. most importantly, have fun :-) !

- tech >>> truth. exceptions are, of course, if you are being explicitly racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, etc. everything else is fair game.

- stealing prep is bad. i will dock speaker points if i catch you stealing prep and tell you to stop multiple times. taking the time to take out analytics/to make a send doc is using prep. time your opponents' prep/speeches and hold them accountable.

- i flow on paper and flow each advantage and off case position on separate sheets of paper. give me pen time to flip pages between sheets. slow down on analytics. when you give an order, give me time to flip between my sheets.

- i flow based on what i hear. i will follow along with a doc to check for clipping BUT i will not flow off the doc, i will be listening to YOU. that means that you should be clear when spreading, you should not flow off the doc, and i will flow tags/analytics that are not on the doc as long as they are said aloud by the debater.

email chains/evidence:

- email chains >>> speech drop. add me to the email chain. please make an email chain before i’m in the room–i want to start on time. speech drop is fine if there are school email issues or if there are wifi issues, otherwise, please use an email chain.

- card docs are appreciated

- clipping cards: i will give a warning if i catch someone clipping cards. depending on how bad it is, i will either stop the round and/or dock speaker points

- ev ethics: missing paragraphs in between highlighted parts, misquoted/misattributed authors, cards starting in the middle of paragraphs, incorrect cites, etc. are reasons for teams to lose the round. if an ev ethics challenge is called, i will stop the round and evaluate the evidence unless tournament rules say otherwise (ex: UIL tournaments)

- for PF: paraphrasing is bad. actually formatted cards are good.

disclosure:

- this section is mostly for ld/pf: disclosure is good.

- personally, i think disclosure as soon as you get pairings/when you know who you’re hitting next is good. but i understand the ld/pf (?) standard of 30 minutes before the round.

- i’m very amenable to not putting things on the wiki for safety reasons.

- i will be slightly annoyed if i have to judge a disclosure debate unless the other team outright did not disclose anything. that being said, i will still flow a disclosure debate and will still default to my flow.

speed:

- yes you can spread at top speed but slow down for tags, authors, and analytics.

- clarity > speed. i will yell "clear" if i can't hear you or if you are unintelligible. if i yell it enough, i will stop flowing.

- i have minor hearing damage in both ears and it flares up once in a while, usually in my left ear. i will let you know beforehand if i'm having a flare up and if you need to be extra clear or position yourself to the right of me. i will say “loud” if you need to be louder.

cross-examination:

- i will take notes on CX on a separate sheet of paper sometimes. but, if you want the answers from CX to be applied to your speech, you need to say it in a speech!

- CX is so under-utilized. debaters need to be making more arguments during CX and aligning it with your speeches. please use CX to make arguments!

- i will boost speaker points for actually good CXs. (i.e., not spending the entire time on clarification questions, not doing flow check questions with the exception of status/reasons to reject housekeeping questions) how do you give a good CX?: matt liu's cross examination lecture

framework:

- you should have an offensive reason to prefer your model of debate or the aff.

- specificity is best, reading generic framework blocks is unpersuasive to me. you need to apply it to the aff.

- TVAs are nice to have but not necessary

- the best fw arguments implicate the aff's theory of power and/or describe why fw turns case.

- please give me judge instruction, framing points, etc.

- i really like implications to skills and iteration/testing. i like fairness if you’ve implicated it to case/the method.

case:

- yes case turns, yes impact turns, yes case debate. there isn't enough case debate in most instances.

- i am comfortable on voting on presumption if there is enough defense and/or i could not tell you what the aff does by the end of the round.

- for PF: defense is not sticky.

topicality:

- more teams should read it!

- T debate is best when the violation args are specific to the aff. but, don't miss the forest for the trees–you should still do comparison on the model/world of debate.

- i default to competing interps, can be changed in round

- will vote on reasonability if a reasonability arg is made, but this can be changed in-round.

K:

- yes, read the K if you want to.

- don't expect me to fill in gaps. don't rely on buzzwords and expect me to know them.

- if you're going for the alt, tell me what it looks like and how it applies to the aff. you can kick the alt if you don't think it's strategic, but you need to flag it and tell me how you win on everything else.

- link turns case args that are specific and contextualized to the aff are >>>>>>!!! please make more of these arguments!!!

- Ks with links to the consequences of the plan are the most intuitive links to me. but don't let that deter you from going for links to reps or similar non-consequence based arguments

DA:

- don't give me a contextless card dump, the more specific with how the DA interacts with the aff the better. i don't have opinions on specific DAs, read whatever you like.

- i will look for a clear link first then evaluate the impacts. link/DA turns case is always nice

CP:

- i don't have strong opinions about any type of CP. go ahead and read any flavor of CP you like, even if they’re “cheaty”.

- uncarded and/or multiplank advantage CPs are fine but generally require more explanation on how they solve. they should be relatively intuitive and/or based on aff warrants/cards. read as many planks as you want (read: condo thoughts in the theory section).

- i default to judge kick. but, this can be reversed in-round as long as there’s ink on my flow for it.

theory:

- condo is good. my threshold for answering condo bad is very low. i will vote on condo bad if it gets dropped.

- RVIs are silly to me, especially when they're just thrown out without a warrant.

- don't have strong thoughts on other theory issues.

- don't blitz thorugh pre-written blocks. again, i flow on paper. give me pen time to write down the analytics.

K affs:

- i like the education/real-world implications of K affs. i really like well thought out, thematically tight, content-packed, and well-structured K affs, especially if there are performance aspects to it.

- i like negs strats v. K affs that engage with K aff's theory of power (which can also include framework!), and am comfortable voting on presumption/framework

speaker points:

- (updated to match reigner's speaker point scale): i start at around 28.8 and go up or down from there. i try to adjust a bit based on the tournament. i evaluate speaker points based on strategic choices and articulations.

- debate can get heated and i don't mind mild roasts or whatever, but if you are just being flat out insulting and making people feel uncomfortable, i will lower your speaks (and stop the round in extreme instances)

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World Schools:

five minutes before round? here’s the tl;dr:

– yes, i know the format. i primarily did WSD in high school and used to primarily coach WSD.

– i flow and will vote based on what’s on my flow. i would rather vote on content, arguments, and warrants over speaking pretty.

– i value organized speeches!!! messy speeches = sad nine = sad ballot. ways to make sure your speech is organized: 1) enumerate your responses, 2) signpost your arguments, and 3) condense into clash.

– i would much rather vote on offensive over defensive arguments. worlds debaters are really really good at making defensive args, but not necessarily offensive ones. please have offense. i want to vote on your argument's impact!!!

want more explanation? here’s the longer version:

– format: follow it. that means no spreading, no “off the clock roadmaps” (i start the clock as soon as you say "as an off the clock roadmap"), taking 1-2 pois, etc. that also means no using heavy debate jargon (topicality, condo, etc.). you’re probably using those words in the wrong context anyway. “fiat” is definitely a word/arg that exists in wsd, but make sure you’re using it correctly.

– explain and characterize! the best debaters are the ones who can best explain their clash, how and why actors will act a certain way, etc.

– strategy and style are important! i value strategic debaters (ex: speech consistency, taking timed pois, not being contradictory, etc.) and if you have style on top of that, you will get some great speaker points at the end of the round. but don’t sacrifice style for content. i'll always prefer analysis > speaking pretty. the best strategic choices debaters can make in wsd is being explicit and giving me some judge direction, telling me what arguments i should prioritize in the round, and *actually* attacking the other team on their highest ground. the best replies are embedded with good judge instruction.

– issues about the debate can be resolved in-round. ex: if there is a debate about whether the team gets fiat or not, make the arguments in round and don't rely on me to default to whatever opinion i have of fiat. or, if you think the team isn't debating the heart of the motion, make those arguments in round. i expect a defense of what exactly the heart of the motion is from both sides in that instance. i'll evaluate those arguments based on what's on my flow.

– replies: the replies should be holding my hand and telling me what happened in the debate. tell me what i should be writing down in my ballot. tell me what you're winning and what they're losing. tell me how you've closed off the other team's path to ballot. please please please give me some judge instruction here.

– ideological lean: just because i do policy debate does not mean i lean towards policy style arguments. i truly and genuinely don't care what kind of arguments you run or go for as long as you give me a reason to vote for it. seriously, you do you. i'll vote on any kind of argument.

– principle debates: if it becomes a practical v. principle debate, i'm expecting a lot of weighing and why the principle outweighs practical or vice versa. i'm also in the camp that principle almost always needs some kind of impact (although it doesn't necessarily need to be utilitarian). for instance, if you're running a principle of democracy, your impact should be... democracy (surprise!). if you're running something about marginalized groups being harmed in some way, the impact could be structural violence or psychic violence to those people, which is on-face, bad and is probably overlooked. i love creative principles and creative impacts here.

– model debates: both models and countermodels need to be characterized. teams should tell me how they're mechanized, what the incentives are for key actors, and how the model might interact with core stakeholders. prop should fully articulate how they get offense from the model (this is where i usually see prop fail). opp's countermodel should articulate how it's mutually exclusive from the prop model and why it is preferable, i.e. net benefits or what the opp countermodel does better/how it avoids prop's model's harms (and this is where the opp team usually fails). i think model/countermodel debates are appropriate for a few policy leaning motions.

if the debate becomes when it is or isn't appropriate to have a model, teams need to establish 1) what in the wording of the motion grants you a model (usually the action verb and applying it to the context of the rest of the motion) and 2) why the model is goldilocks for grounds to debate (why it's not too specific/narrow of a model and why it's not too broad). regardless of what my thoughts are for what's the most strategic way to interpret the motion, i will defer to the arguments made in-round on this question.

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speech/interp:

a speech/interp paradigm feels useless sometimes just because y'all have already memorized/blocked out your pieces and there's little my paradigm will inform you about how to better adapt to me as your judge. but i guess my brief thoughts are here in the off-chance someone reads this and gets something out of it:

you do you, just follow the format and perform the best you can!

for extemp, looking for format things (i.e. having a roadmap, using on-tops, following the speaker's triangle, etc.). i prefer content over speaking pretty most of the time, but since it's a speech event, i still take presentation seriously. i don't really care if you do a three or two point speech, but the content should still be in-depth and make sense.

for oo/info, most of my ballots come down to the implications/why it matters portion. humor (even attempts at humor) is always a plus.

for interp, i'm mainly looking for clarity of plot (also, if there is a plot to begin with), embodiment and distinctions between characters, and clear blocking/binder "mojo".

Hey y'all. My name is James Allan. My email is jpa6644@gmail.com if there's anything here that's not clear. Please put me on the email chain.

Experience:

4 years at Lakeland Central School District, 4 years at Binghamton University, 2 years of grad fellowship at Baylor University, 1 year coaching Desert Vista, third year coaching for the University of Houston.

I received a first round at large bid to the NDT my senior year, the first in binghamton university history.

Previously coached at/conflicted with: Lakeland, Binghamton University, McQueen, various ADL debaters, Baylor University, Desert Vista, University of Houston.

how i make decisions

I used to flow on paper but have transitioned to flowing on my computer. it is still in your best interest to go at about 85% of what others would consider "top speed" in front of me so i can catch more warrants, examples and analysis for your argument.

i like judge instruction, i like well engaged framework debates that tell me how to view how the debate is going down, i like rebuttals that start with "vote (aff/neg) to (explanation of what the aff/neg ballot does/means/signifies) which solves these impacts. these impacts outweigh and turn my opponents' impacts because..." you catch my drift.

i determine the competing thesis-level/key/framing/whatever-you-want-to-call-it questions presented and determine which team sufficiently answered theirs/their opponents' framing questions and work backwards from there.

i generally give more weight to dropped arguments if the impact to the argument is adequately contextualized (you can say i lean towards tech over truth but it's debatable obviously).

randomly how i feel about different arguments

k aff v. framework: debate is cool because you get to actively debate about the rules

i am indifferent about framework as a strategy to negate affs that don't hypothetically defend a topical plan text. in my mind, if negatives don't successfully insulate the framework page from case offense (win a convincing "framework comes first" arg, in other words) or use standards to turn the aff method or impact, i very rarely vote negative in those debates. i like standards that defend the topic, not just topical debate in the abstract. i am pretty sympathetic to the very simple argument "don't maintain fairness, if fair debate produces X bad thing". both teams should point out that the other team is grossly misrepresenting how their model of debate actually doesn't go down the way it is described.

k aff v. k neg: debate is cool because you get to test different explanations of how power is distributed and how it operates

presumption is an underutilized neg argument in these debates and too easily dismissed by affs. how does competition function and why should i care/not care about it? what is your theory of power and how does it differ/overlap with your opponents'? explain, analyze and develop in your constructives but you should be crystallizing your big dense words for me in your rebuttals in terms of impacts and impact comparison. what is your method/theoretical approach/critical approach/alternative and how should i think about "solvency".

policy aff v. policy neg: debate is cool because even seemingly hyperbolic and contrived internal link chains teach the participants about logic processing and decision-making

show me unique, topic research that is specific and interesting. i'm slowly gaining more sympathy for cheaty counterplans. i have a low threshold for voting on presumption or inherency, with smart, warranted analytical arguments even without cards. i like politics disads. i don't like cp's that randomly first strike asian countries. i like T.

policy aff v. k neg: debate is cool because forms of rhetoric and knowledge employed by the debaters is up for debate.

neg teams usually win debates by impact turning the education/worldview/representations/justifications introduced by the affirmative (framework) or by winning that the plan emboldens/worsens/justifies the impact/social system that outweighs and turns the affirmative. i very much make sense of the world of policy aff v. k neg debates in terms of pre/post fiat debates. policy affs should be ready and willing to defend the scholarly underpinnings of their affirmative. i am very susceptible to aff tricks (util, negative state action link turns, alt solvency presses). i am very susceptible to neg tricks (floating pik, framework turns, epistemology indicts, serial policy failure). judge instruction is a necessity in these debates.

random list of great debate minds i have learned from, competed against, was judged by, worked with:

(basically who shaped the way i think about debate to give you a better insight into how i make decisions)

Amber Kelsie, Vida Chiri, Tj Buttgereit, Jeff Yan, Geoff Lundeen, Ben Hagwood, Stefan Bauschard, Carlos Astacio, Willie Johnson, Kevin Clarke, Jesse Smith, Reed Van Schenk, Brianna Thomas, Michael Harrington, Jacob Hegna.

I really like debate

this is my tenth year in the activity and i love participating and learning and teaching in every individual debate. what i am now realizing from the grad student side of things is how much the community is dependent on unrecognized and uncompensated labor from grad students, mostly feminized bodies, people of color, black people and disabled people. be nice to grad students, we are trying our best lmao

About Me: I am Afro-Latino with the pronouns him/he. I graduated from Alief Taylor High school in Houston. I've debated in LD, Policy, and Congress all four years. I am majoring in Economics and minoring in philosophy which is why I love debate so much because it encompasses both those things.

Email Chain and questions: Carbajaljilson@gmail.com

Basic Details: I don't mind spreading, just make sure you're clear and slow down on specifically important information and analytical data to make ensure it's on the flow. If you aren't clear, I probably won't remember it or put it on the flow. I'll yell clear if needed.

I don't vote for people who kiss "butt" to the judge. Don't run arguments just to satisfy me, Run arguments that satisfy you and you believe will have a good clash. All that matters is that you're confident in your case and display great arguments throughout the round.

Don't expect or assume that I know exactly what you're talking about. It will hurt you. I haven't done much research on this topic so make sure To explain your arguments well and clear.

K: I like hearing all types of Ks, especially performance Ks. However, if you run them, please know what you're talking about and how to run a K. I've seen many K debates where both teams have no idea what they are doing or talking about. Don't run Ks if you're unfamiliar with the information. It can lead to low speaking points.

K Aff: I don't mind it, just make sure not to stray away from the topic and have a clear Alt and link. Most K aff can get permutated if not run well.

Theory/T: I like theory debates however, please don't run STUPID theory arguments for the sake of winning the round or to get an advantage, I will most likely not vote on it if you do. (If you have a question on what I mean by "stupid", let me know before the round starts). For T's, I default to counter- interps. Have a good explanation of internal links and impacts.

CP: Please explain how your CP is better than the AFF's plan. Conditional CPs are fine; just don't have five CPs and only one of them as unconditional; this is abusive. It ruins clash in the debate round, and I like to see clash. Please establish if a CP is conditional or unconditional if more than one is used.

DA: Make sure to have a clear link and internal link. Be specific on the impact and include impact calculus to strengthen your argument. Utilize DA's to enact turns on the aff's case. Have a great DA structure and try not to have too many links and internal links, it can hurt you in the end.

Clash debate: I love to see clashes in the debate round. If you avoid clash or dont clash with your opponent, speaker points may be affected. Just make sure to be clear in on voters

If you have any questions, feel free to email me or let me know before the round begins. :)

Hi I'm Lee Carter. My email is bloopfourtyfour@gmail.com

I am 20 years old. My pronouns are he/him, I'm 4 years out of high school debate and I competed for Heights High School in Houston, Texas. I debated for 3 years starting out in Policy for about a year and a half and finishing with LD for the last year and a half. For reference, I was good enough to go to national tournaments and stuff but never good enough to clear. I got damn close though. When I debated I really liked theory and phil and when I couldn't run that I ran LARP. I was coached by Isaac Chao.

Pref Shortcuts:

Theory - 1

LARP - 1

T - 2

Phil - 2

K/Kaffs/Non-T stuff - 3

Tricks - 100% strike. Don't make me sit through a tricks round seriously.

I don't ever want to intervene

But I feel like so often debaters just let so much up to the judges interpretation you know? The point is to write your own ballot, so the less work I have to do the better. If you make it really obvious why you deserve the win by using substantive argument weighing, evidence comparison, etc. then me intervening should never become an issue. Just make sure you do your job 100%.

I default to comparative worlds

Of course, you can convince me otherwise. In fact, when I was a debater I was quite fond of truth testing since I ran a ton of Kant. But in general I think comparative worlds is better for debate and I will default to it if no one argues otherwise in the round.

Tech over truth 99.9% of the time

By that I mean, your argument has to contain a minimal amount of plausibility to me. For example, if you say "x is true because I say so", I'm not even going to entertain that argument nor hold your opponent to a burden of answering it. It's kind of hard to pin point exactly what I mean here, but essentially I will be receptive to anything you say unless it is totally dumb and unrealistic. No this doesn't mean I'll hack against your terminal impact, no this doesn't mean you can't run silly techy things in front of me, this just means that there's a certain brightline where I start losing receptiveness to arguments and the closest way I can identify / describe that brightline is when your argument has arbitrary / illegitimate / outlandish warrants.

Highlighting / reading / evidence rules

Always read what you highlight, never skip highlighted words without making it explicit to everyone in the room, never read anything in small print without making it explicit to everyone in the room, and lastly, do not refer to anything you didn't read as if you read it. I consider violating these rules cheating. I will usually never read the small print because the argument I'm presented as the judge is whatever words come out of the debater's mouth which is usually the highlighted words. I will typically only ever ask for evidence if I am suspicious of evidence fabrication. It makes me happy when I see good author qualifications and consistent and clean speech docs. I also fancy cyan highlighting.

Prep time

When using flash drives, prep time stops when the flash leaves your computer. When using email, prep time stops when the email is sent. Under no circumstances should you preview / look through your opponent's case or write anything down if your prep time is not being taken. I consider violating this rule cheating. I don't terribly care if your computer is messing up, it's your duty to make sure things are organized and orderly and sent where they need to be.

Signposting / roadmaps

Signpost well and effectively, tell me specifically where you are going on the flow, name arguments you're responding to, if there's a way your strategy unfolds then make it explicit rather than trying to keep it secret and holding me to the expectation of figuring it out. Roadmaps are a really good tool and you should always use them. If you can help it, try not to divert from your roadmap. If you must divert, make it explicit where you are going instead.

Speed

I'm fine with speed but keep in mind if I’m judging online, connection / quality might be scuffed. I'd say my threshold for speed is 6/10 where 10 is the fastest debater on the circuit. Slow down for important things like tags, author names, signposting, etc. If you spread through a condensed block without separating things properly by saying AND or NEXT or slowing down then I will likely miss things.

Weighing

Always weigh. Weigh preemptively if you want, certainly weigh when you have access to both impacts and always extend your weighing and impacts. Weight comparison goes a long way, and by this I mean "magnitude > timeframe" etc. I never really understood what an overview does. Your extension doesn't have to be individual cards, extending just the general thesis of your case in the overview is probably fine, but if you miss something crucial and don't explicitly extend it, I'm not gonna extend it for you.

Framework

My thoughts on framework are pretty much identical to Isaac Chao's, your impacts matter so long as they are implicated under a warranted framework. And so my decision calculus goes: I first determine which layer is the highest, then find the winning framework on that layer, and lastly adjudicate the offense to that framework.

Theory

I reeeeeeaaaaaaaalllllly love theory rounds. I default competing interpretations. Reasonability is fine but my expectations for your brightline are a bit higher than typical I think, it is not enough just to establish your brightline but you also have to tell me why your brightline is good / true. Whenever I hear "if it's link turnable, it's sufficiently reasonable", I immediately think: well, you have yet to tell me why that's true or a good brightline at all. I default no RVIs. An implication to your shell is imperative. If you don't tell me what to do about your opponent's abuse, I'm just not going to do anything. Additionally, I think weighing on the theory debate is more important that most other places, since theory usually comes first. If I have 2 instances of abuse from both debaters but no weighing between the two, I'm just going to label the flow irresolvable without intervening and move on to the next layer.

LARP

Since I was kind of a noob most of my debate career, I have the easiest time adjudicating LARP rounds because they make the most sense to me and I have the most familiarity with them. Specificity is good. Keep your cards updated, recent, and relevant. You have to tell me if you are kicking out of a conditional counterplan. I don't understand at all what judge kick is, but on a surface level to me it just sounds like asking the judge to intervene if doing so would be favorable for the debater. That being said, don't bring up judge kick.

T

T is good with me, only reason I put T at a 2 is because I'm not totally versed in the semantics vs pragmatics debate within Nebel type shells, so if your T strat involves that then either don't run it or do extra explaining to ensure that I understand.

Phil

I love a good phil debate, but at the same time about 75% of the phil debates I've experienced have been ones that have left me totally puzzled. I would love to judge your phil round, but know that the only phil I'm super knowledgeable about is util and kant. If the phil you read is not util or kant, assume that I don't know it, and let that inform your strategy.

K

If 1 off K is your strat of choice, you definitely don't want me. Here are Ks that might work out in front of me: cap, fem, security. Anything else usually requires some previous knowledge from the judge, which I just frankly don't have. Keep in mind that judges who are capable of adjudicating K heavy rounds containing stuff like Afropess, POMO, other really hard Ks probably studied them extensively within a camp or even university. I wouldn't suggest reading that kind of stuff in front of me because the likelihood that you can teach me the thesis of your K in 45 minutes (when people good enough to be considered versed and competent judges in it have probably studied it for years) is highly unlikely. Additionally, I don't understand most role of the ballot arguments, they all sound self-serving to me and are typically along the lines of "if it's not the K offense, then it doesn't matter" and it's usually warranted with "the impacts of the K are bad". Also I have yet to be convinced there's a substantive difference between role of the ballot and role of the judge. Essentially, if your strategy is "Muahahaha my opponent will surely not understand this, I'll sit back while he foolishly concedes the whole flow and ensure my win on the ballot with the judge like some kind of sick inside joke !!", you probably don't want me as your judge because I'm not going to understand your position either and I'm going to be very receptive to your opponent's (probably surface level) arguments against it. If it's not one of the 3 Ks I listed at the top, assume I don't know it.

Non-T

I think the Non-T debate can be really entertaining. When I competed I ran a case called Absurdism where I (and my partner when I had one) would essentially just try to establish change in the debate space by ignoring the rules and even sometimes settling rounds with coin flips, and spending time just educating our opponents and judges with our personal experiences with debate and creating a space where our opponents and judges could share their own. Realistically, this was an utterly awful competitive strategy. I ran it probably 25 times and won like twice. Additionally, I did not understand at all how I was supposed to defend Non T, so when people ran T on me I just kind of ignored it lmao. What I'm trying to say is, the Non T debate can make debate really fun and I like to experience it, but from a competitive standpoint I don't understand it a whole lot and if it's your strat I'm also probably not the judge for you. Like, you'll make me very happy by reading fun non T things in front of me, but I won't understand what the heck is going on, will likely not judge competently, and you’ll probably lose…

Speaks

I've never really had to give speaks in a space where it terribly mattered, what I will say is that you can generally expect over a 27. From my 3 years in debate I don't think I have once seen a round where a debater actually deserved a 30, so I will probably not give you one. Although, the easier you make my life as a judge the higher you can expect your speaks to be. I usually don't let ethos effect my speaks because I think that enables things like perceptual dominance, but at the same time make sure you are confident in what you say and make sure your voice is heard.

toss me on that email chain: aacchapman2@gmail.com

I graduated from UCLA in 2019. I coached LD for 4 years at Harker. I work in a volunteer capacity with the Heights now. That said, I have always had a lower threshold for speed. I'll yell slow twice then I stop flowing until I can comprehend the argument.

I am the most familiar with policy/framework/theory arguments. I won't vote on an RVI on T

Practices Trigger Warnings

Debaters reading positions about suicide, depression/specific mental health, sexual violence, or any similarly traumatic issue, the onus is on them to ask those in the room permission to read the position. Spectators may leave, but judges and opponents do not have that option, meaning there is an expectation that if one of them objects to the triggering subject, that the debater will not read that position. If a debater does not adjust their strategy after being asked to, they will start the round with a 25. If you do not ask before round, but someone is triggered, speaks will similarly be docked. If there is no trigger warning but no one is triggered, the round can continue as normal.

The question for what necessitates a trigger warning is difficult to objectively delineate - if you have a reasonable suspicion someone could be negatively impacted by your position, ask before you read it - explicit narratives are probably a good starting point here. Trigger warnings are contentious in debate but I've seen students negatively impacted in rounds because they were not present and have engaged in conversations with other coaches that lead me to conclude something along these lines is necessary. At the very least, debate is (or should be) a 'safe space', and I believe this is a necessary first step towards achieving that goal. Feel free to discuss this before the round if you are worried it will become an issue in round.

This (admittedly strangely) probably means I'm not the judge for "must read a trigger warning" shells - they often make debate rounds uncomfortable and i have seen them leveraged in ways that make debate spaces unsafe - if no one was triggered, don't spend your time on that shell.

https://medium.com/@erikadprice/hey-university-of-chicago-i-am-an-academic-1beda06d692e#.bqv2t7lr6

This article is very good at articulating my views on the importance of trigger warnings
It is not up for debate that if someone was triggered on account of your failure to adequately make use of trigger warnings, you'll be punished through speaks and/or the ballot

[Evidence Ethics]

1. Things I will drop a debater on whether or not their opponent brings it up: Card clipping, mis-representing the authors claims, grossly misrepresenting a cite (Use discretion here - but a completely missing site would seem to qualify here). The round stops if I notice this happen, or if the opponent brings up this claim. If the opponent brings forward this claim, I will evaluate the claim after the round has stopped.
2. Things I believe should be debated out (with the caveat here that it's an uphill battle - I think these are good norms): Other disclosure norms (not including the whole paragraph in a cut card, broken links, etc).
3. If you expect the round to be stopped (Category #1, or Category #2 but its a panel) I expect clear standards/arguments in a doc emailed out laying out the evidence claim, and specifically, why I should vote on it
4. I will not vote on evidence ethics claim that hedge on the TFA constitution. While I respect the TFA executive board and generally agree with most of the constitution, I think it sets a bad precedent in requiring debaters, especially in Texas, to be beholden to overarching academic councils.

[Things I would like written out before a speech]

1. Interps & Counterinterps
2. Perm texts

[Strategies I love]

1. A good internal link debate w/ deep evidence comparison
2. Having a true/stellar response to UQ or Inherency
3. Nuanced T
4. A unique plan aff that is extended the whole round & leveraged correctly

[Strategies I don't love]

1. Tricks
2. Dense Phil
3. Analytical args
4. Dense critical lit

Affirmative teams have to present and defend a rationale for change, and should offer a plan text (which is more than restatement of the resolution) and demonstrate solvency. If the format is need/plan or a modern rendition of same, the problem must be significant and inherent. If the format is comparative advantage or something like it, inherency tends to be about the superiority of departures from present policy over incremental adjustments. Critical affirmative presentations need to be aligned with suggested policy changes.

Negative teams can win by disputing the significance of harms, demonstrating that existing programs (status quo) are sufficient and appropriate for addressing issues (or offer advantages over the affirmative team’s approach), or showing that an affirmative team’s plan can’t solve identified problems. If there is a meaningful challenge to the affirmative team's presentation or if unique and probable and significant disadvantages flow from the adoption of an affirmative plan, that also works. (A single well articulated disadvantage can suffice, but the all-too-common species/planet extinction or end-of-the-world scenarios are unlikely to register with me unless comprehensively and credibly advanced.)

An affirmative team can dismiss most “politics disadvantages” with common sense analysis rather than reliance on “proof” to the contrary, since such argumentation is usually speculative and reflects conventional wisdom, which is as often wrong as correct. Both affirmative and negative teams strike me as more informed and more capable when they are comfortable employing analytics instead of carded evidence when it fits the moment. Given that extensive advance preparation is the order of the day, speakers departing from scripts and thinking on their feet, clashing directly with their opponents' position(s) is refreshing. I also relish seeing/hearing "authoritative" evidence picked apart and challenged instead of being countered with other "authoritative: evidence (although a combination approach is even better.)

When a negative team presents a counterplan, in my view, that is a statement that they agree with the affirmative team’s identification of a problem (or problems) but suggest that a different solution makes more sense—-as such, they concede everything else that's ordinarily debatable. A counterplan should have more than a skeleton text. since I also expect an affirmative plan to be more than just a restatement of the resolution. I frown on introducing a counterplan late into a first negative constructive speech, or introducing more than one counterplan, or abandoning it or them later in the debate. Generally speaking, if a negative team introduces fodder and claims to be just "testing" the affirmative positions, I conclude they are unwilling to take and defend a position, so I am turned off.

When negative teams argue a K position, I like to see/hear obvious links to discussions of public policy. When K positions are being refuted, I enjoy it when one philosopher’s position is undermined by another philosopher’s position. When there is a K argument and a counterplan, I expect them to line up utterly. When an affirmative K is presented, I evaluate it in terms of policy---I think it can be done well, but if it isn’t, it’s often because critical analysis of an issue doesn’t inform policy alternatives.

Humor is an important component of persuasion, so I enjoy injections of mirth in policy debate. Short and sweet and sophisticated is best.

“Speed” in speaking is usually a bore, since robotic recitations of factoids are devoid of persuasive nuance.

add to chain/speech drop:

backslash309@gmail.com

top level:

TLDR: I will vote on anything. except arguments about things that didn't happen inside the round, although disclosure is fine.

Policy and K debates are my favorite, but reading what you want and giving a good speech is much more likely to get higher speaks than trying to tailor what you read to what you think my ideological preferences are.

Tech > truth, but truth determines the extent tech matters. A blatantly false claim like "the sky is red" requires more warranting than a commonly accepted claim ie "the sky is blue". Unwarranted arguments in the constructive that receive warrants later on justify "new" responses to those warrants. This doesn't mean I won't vote on tricks or theory, but the ability to say "X is conceded" relies on "X" having a full Claim/Warrant/Impact - the absence of crucial elements of an argument such as warrants will mean that adding them in later speeches will justify new responses. If an argument is introduced in a speech where no such response is valid, it carries little weight, for example: I am not going to think fairness categorically outweighs education if fairness outweighs is introduced in the 2AR.

Not voting on call outs. Not my business.

random thoughts:

--- Qualified authors & solid warrants in your ev are important. Evidence comparison and weighing are also important. In the absence of evidence comparison and weighing, I may make a decision that upsets you. That is fundamentally your fault.

--- In the absence of paradigm issues on my flow, I'm going to evaluate theory contextually. This means I will only grant you the logical implication of the words you say, and will not automatically grant you assumptions like drop the debater. For example, if a 1AR tells me "PICs are a voter cuz they steal the aff", this logically means that PICs are a bad argument, but doesn't explain why the neg should lose for reading it. Functionally, this means I'd default drop the argument absent any explanation. This headache can be easily avoided through warranted, extended arguments.

--- Most Ks that people get away with in LD have horrible warranting in the 1NC. Blowing up blippy Ks with elaborate turns case analysis, framework arguments, thesis explanations, etc that is not present in the 1NC obviously merits 2AR responses that I will give full credence to.

--- K affs being vague and shifty hurts you more than it helps. I'm very unsympathetic to 2AR pivots that change the way the aff has been explained. Take care to have a coherent story/explanation of your K aff that starts in the 1AC and remains consistent throughout the debate.

--- I default to judgekick.

--- I have heard a concerning amount of people saying "you cannot win a perm without a deficit" lately. This is absurd. The neg has the burden of competition. In the circumstances in a counterplan debate where neither the aff nor the neg has offense due to a perm, I vote aff. For example, if the neg goes for a consult NATO counterplan and the 2AR goes for "do the plan + consult NATO on other issues", the aff wins even without a deficit insofar as the 2NR does not clearly delineate offense vs the perm. There is no risk of offense for either side, but that means the plan is the logically safest option, as it is less of a deviation from the status quo than the counterplan.

Good Morning/Afternoon/Night to whichever debater Is reading this 

Email for the chain: only4debate@gmail.com

I am currently a freshman CX debater at the University of Houston, I did three years of debate in high school though very little of it is relevant to policy. The TLDR: I am receptive to all arguments ( I do not leave my common sense at the door and will not vote on racist or harmful arguments) Besides that feel free to run any arguments you desire.I will not explain nor extend arguments for you.

As a judge, I look for clash, impact weighing and warrant comparisons above all and the debaters to do as much work for me as possible, judge instruction is heavily recommended, tell me why you are winning and make the RFD easy to write. I am best for Policy v. Policy debate but am also receptive to Policy v.K and K v.K. K debate will require greater explanation for me as I am not familiar with all the literature besides that you should be fine, showing me you are familiar with your arguments and not just a good reader is always a plus and will boost speaker points. CX is your time to shine, there is no need to be rude but making your opponent's arguments look silly is a great way to boost your points. If something you think is important comes out in CX, bring it into your speech

Clarity> Speed, If I don't catch it, it won't be flowed. My facial expressions should tell you how I feel about what you are reading.

Above all debate should be an activity you enjoy, seeing both debaters have gears turning in their heads is always great. 

For other events such as WSD a lot of the same applies, judge instruction and a good understanding of your arguments will get you far. 

Revision Date: 09/13/2017

Affiliation: University of Houston

It's been awhile since I've been involved in the activity, but there are some things that I still maintain:

Topicality: It's a prior question, especially for the early season. I normally view topicality through a framework of competing interpretations. Negatives who want to go for topicality should have be able to tell (1) under their interpretation what affirmatives actually are topical and (2) what arguments the negative couldn't read. 

Disadvantages: What's not to like? Do the evidence comparison for me. Tell me why a disad outweighs/turns case and vice versa, or else I might impose my own worldview. Relevant sidebar: Saying "our evidence postdates" isn't enough. Make it contextual, and tell me how a sequence of events interact with one another. 

Counterplans: There should probably be a solvency advocate and a well articulated net benefit.  

Critiques: I used to be comfortable with critiques, but arguably far less now because I've been removed from the activity. If you want to win, your critique should be able to articulate why the critique turns case, and an alternative that resolves the links. 

Framework/Topicality: I don't particularly care for these debates. That being said, I understand why they happen. Affirmatives should probably read a topical plan in front of me just to avoid these questions. 

Conditionality is also probably good, unless there are 4 (arbitrary number) different positions. 

Email- Aaron.Does.Debate@gmail.com - add me to an email chain. Feel free to email me any questions after the debate.

Hello to all who reads this!

My name is Aaron, I did 4 years of Highschool debate and am currently doing my second year of collegiate policy debate at the University of Houston as a sophomore! As such I am very familiar with all forms of debates and styles so don't be too scared to run something new and fun.

In general, I will vote for anything, just explain your position well. I have been delving mostly into the collegiate policy topic, so I haven't spent a lot of time researching the high school topics as such make sure you're clear about your argument.

TLDR: I will not explain nor extend arguments for you. I think theory, framework and T come first. Generally, I don't like T (I just think it’s boring to evaluate I will vote on it). Impact calc key (extinction outweighs is my default though I can be persuaded with FW and other arguments), extend warrants not taglines and compare evidence. on case args are key. I love clash of Civs :). You should make sure you signpost and control my flows if you want to win.

K- 1

Framework-2

Policy- 3

T-4

Theory-5

--Broad Topics--

Speed- Always clarity over speed. I will accept fast arguments but expect a hit to the speaks if you sacrifice clarity for speed. otherwise, if you're fast and clear expect an increase in speaks- unless you have some kind of disability which inhibits this in which case, please let me know so I take that into consideration.

Stock issues- always important if you're lacking harms, you lose.

Evidence- If you have to ask yourself about whether or not it needs ev then it needs ev. Make sure you understand your own ev. Even if I know what your ev is saying I will pretend I don't and down you if the ev is key to the round. Can't convince me if you can't explain it. Ev comparison is Key.

Weighing- my default is weighing based on key arguments and magnitude so I will weigh extinction over structural violence normally BUT if you explain to me why I shouldn't, I will happily listen and weigh differently (extinction rhetoric bad, SV prerequisite, ETC).

General notes- make sure you're extending arguments and warrants not tags. (Tell me why your evidence is true and what the evidence is saying. I hate hearing rebuttals that just repeat taglines.) Tech>Truth except in cases that are very clearly not good tech/good for education. (Even if your opponent's drop a slavery good argument even though you were technically ahead on that I will not vote on it.) Don't make Bigoted/bad arguments in front of me. Bigoted arguments will get you downed and reported to your coaches/the tournament staff.

--Specific Topics--

K- framework is key. you need to tell me why and how I should weigh the K vs The AFF or vice versa, In general I lean more towards basic Pess K's and the cap K for voting, but I'll vote on anything just make sure it makes sense. Beyond framework make sure your alt solves and that you're explaining your links. For the neg, I think most K's require robust framework debate so make sure you're doing work here - Links need to be clear and you need to explain how they lead to the impact and how the alt solves. specific stuff here - I don't like omission links that much but I try not to let that sway me, I prefer big impacts on the K page in the event you need to win impact calc (unless you won FW), ALT SOLVENCY IS KEY, also I hate immaterial alts, I will vote on immaterial alts but It takes more work on alt solvency to make sure I understand exactly how you solve.- alt solvency is key because presumption does flip Aff if the alt is net worse for the squo- performances need to link to your theory of power don't just start yelling for no reason.

K Aff's- Refer back to my opinion on K's except now you have to convince me on why I should weigh your K at all or else I will vote on T.

T- T is a procedural fairness question so I will evaluate this first but generally I don't like T debate I think it's a boring debate and more often than not the Aff is most definitely topical. That being said I will not ignore the T flow if you are a T centered debater don't be scared to read it I will evaluate it I will simply be unamused while doing so. That being said I'd recommend putting your time elsewhere. (If you're hitting a K Aff - T is strategic this is one of the only situations where I'll happily vote on a T debate that was too close for comfort.)

Disad's- Good links! I generally don't like generic links. I will accept link boosters in the 2NC if need be but try and make your link clear to begin with. + 1 Disad is almost never enough to win a round against a good aff remember to pair with something else (DA+Presumption, DA+CP, DA turns case)
CP's- You need net benefits, and you need to explain why it cannot be permed very clearly or I will not vote on it (assuming your opponent correctly calls you out on these things). - also, presumption flips Aff when the CP is net worse for the squo.

Adv CP's- same rules except only apply to specific advantages- net benefits to the advantage and why can't they perm?

Case- Case is the most important thing for the Aff. if you lose on the case flow then nothing else matters. Make sure you properly defend case. On the neg however if you have proper framing and off case positions case is less important, I still recommend covering it as much as possible as you're only more likely to lose if you don't cover case.

Theory- I will make fun of you for making silly theories on the RFD BUT a dropped/not covered argument is a true argument. That means even a silly theory could lose you a round if its properly explained and you don't cover it.

--more specific theory--

Condo bad- generally I don't like to vote on this either, but I will if the neg mishandles it or if the neg is running like 10 condo Args (yes, Conditional planks count, and I think act as an impact multiplier on condo).

Dispo bad- same as condo

Perf con- Usually this has to be super blown up and or conceded for this to even be considered a voter to me. I personally subscribe to multiple worlds. A good Aff and debater should be able to answer performative contradictions and a good neg debater should be able to explain why they can be contradictory.

General theory- judge kick bad- default is reasonability- Theory should be a rule of debate that is good not just a random reason to reject the team. - most theory probably isn't a real voter besides condo- I am VERY unlikely to pull the trigger on theory unless its condo, perfcon, or dropped.

Presumption- you have to tell me why. I will not explain to myself why the Aff or the CP or the Alt is worse than or for the squo

General biases- on the neg I like good K debate, so a good K is an easy way to the ballot, I am also partial to Disads, I dislike T, everything else is fairly neutral. - on the Aff side I like seeing new and fun advantages and am partial to strong yet new (to me) link chains that I haven't seen before. If you can make an advantage that has strong links and impacts that I haven't seen before I will love to vote on it, that isn't to say you can't win without originality, I just like it when I am judging is all.

Speaks- I Think I go by standard norms, but I'll outline anyway. (I can tend to be harsh don't take it personally.)

30- perfect (if you get a thirty out of me be proud)

29- very good

28- good/acceptable

27- ok...

anything below 27 you had to have messed up extremely bad.

0. tl;dr - read this before rounds

"takes his job seriously, but not himself." i judge an extremely large volume of debates every year. these days, it's mostly an even mix of very dense disad, case, and counterplan debates and the more technical side of K debates, but in years past i would likely have best been described as a professional clash judge. i get substantially fewer performance debates and LD "phil" rounds, so i lack comparative experience in those areas, but i am still probably better for them than an average judge, and i enjoy them when executed well. i read policy strategies in high school and the K in college, so i enjoy judging both and am loyal to voting for neither. i evaluate debates as offense/defense, but risk calculus still matters a lot to me and i am (semi-)willing to pull the trigger on zero risk. i try to be very flow-centric and value "technical" execution and direct refutation above "truth", but i don't think that means bad arguments aren't still bad. i don't flow off the doc, so you can go as fast as you want but i will be unforgiving of low clarity. while i did most of our aff writing in college, i am, at my core, a die-hard 2N. that probably tells you more useful info about my debate views than anything else in this paradigm, but you can scroll down to the specifics section regarding arguments in the round you're expecting to have - most of the meat of this paradigm is here for doing prefs. i'm very expressive, but probably overall a bit grumpy for reasons unrelated to you. Wheaton's law is axiomatic, so please be kind, and show me you're having fun. please don't call me "judge", "Mr.", or "sir" - patrick, pat, fox, or p.fox are fine. "act like you've been here."

I. operating procedure + non-negotiables

1. he/him/his - you should not misgender people.

2. pleaselearntoflow@gmail.com -

a. I strongly prefer email chains. Please have the doc sent before start time. If the round starts at 2:00, I expect the 1AC email at 1:58 so we can start at start time. Every minute the chain is late after start time is -0.1 speaks for the 1A – things are getting ridiculous. You should avoid any risk of any of this by just setting up the email chain when you do disclosure at the pairing. Format subject lines for email chains as "Tournament Round - Aff Entry vs Neg Entry" (e.g: "NDT 2019 Octos - Wake EF vs Bing AY").

b. Prep ends when the doc is sent. It is 2023, you should know how to compile and send a speech document efficiently, stop stealing prep. If you are having difficulty, I suggest Verbatim drills. No, that is not a joke.

3. I flow on my laptop. I have hearing damage in my left ear, so ideally I am positioned to the right of whoever is speaking. I sometimes get sensory overload issues, so I may close my eyes/put my head down/stare off into the distance during speeches - I promise I'm not sleeping or zoned out, and even if not looking at my screen, I will definitely still be flowing.

4. i will make minimal eye contact during any given debate, and will likely have a resting grumpy face, so don’t worry much about those specific things. That said, I'm comically expressive. It's not on purpose, and I've tried to stop it with no luck - I just have a truly terrible poker face. I shake my head and scowl at nonsense, I grin and nod when I think you're doing the right thing, I shrug when I am lukewarm on an argument, I cock my head and raise my eyebrows if I am confused, and I chuckle if you make reference to any of these reactions in the speech (which I am fine with).

5. the safety of students is my utmost concern above the content of any debate. crossing this line is the only way you can legitimately piss me off. Avoid it. Racism, transphobia, misogyny, etc. will not be tolerated under any circumstances, and I am more willing to act on this on my own accord than most judges you have had (i.e: I have submitted a ballot mid-1AR before due to egregious misconduct). You should not attempt to toe this line.

6. entirely uninterested in adjudicating the character of minors i don't know. there are channels for these issues and mechanisms to resolve them, but debates and ballots are not among them. if you have genuine concerns about safety regarding the person you are debating, i am happy to be an advocate for you and get you in touch with the appropriate tournament tab staff to resolve the issue. if you genuinely feel this way, please take me up on this offer - just let me know discreetly via email, messenger, etc. keep in mind, as an employee of a state institution, i am a mandatory reporter.

- people seem to think they're smart in saying that this means "you can't vote on disclosure" - this is false for two reasons: a. i can vote on anything i want, and b. round starts at the pairing, not just the 1AC.

II. core principles

1. debate is a competitive activity centered around research and persuasion, one winner and loser, no outside participation, nothing worse than PG13, the usual.

2. debated for Kealing, Jack C Hays, and University of Houston. if i were to describe my career with a word, it would be "unremarkable". if i get five words, i'd add "irrelevant to this paradigm". i coach HS policy at Dulles, HSLD at a few different places, and help out Houston. former coaches include J.D. Sanford, Richard Garner, Rob Glass, James Allan, and Michael Wimsatt. favorite judges included Alex McVey, DML, Devane Murphy, Scott Harris, and David Kilpatrick. colleagues (and former students) i likely align with include Eric Schwerdtfeger, David Bernstein, Ali Abdulla, Sean Wallace. of all these people, i align particularly closely with Garner, Bernstein, and Abdulla.

3. i think the ethos of judging is best distilled by Yao Yao: "I believe judging debates is a privilege, not a paycheck". 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. The most important factor in my own growth as a debater and the most helpful info as a coach has always been well-thought judge feedback, and I think – especially during and post-eDebate – the attention span and work ethic of the average judge has massively declined. I refuse to contribute to what I find to be an alarming trend in many people shirking their responsibility to the community to adjudicate even "boring" or "low-level" debates to the best of their ability. I fundamentally believe no debate is any less or more important than any other, so expect me to judge NCX R1 as if it was TOC finals. i judge a lot - in for ~100 debates a season - for three reasons: a. I think judging is a skill, and requires practice to maintain, b. judging makes me better at coaching and strategically benefits my students, and c. I love debate. some judges seem to have lost the zeal by now, but i still get excited about novel critical affs, interesting disads and turn case arguments, and dense competition debates. I am at a tournament almost every weekend, so I am reasonably aware of community norms and have decent experience with the techne of judging. Just focus on executing, and don't be afraid to take risks.

4. i get my core ideology for judging from Richard Garner: "I try to evaluate the round via the concepts the debaters in the round deploy (immanent construction) and I try to check my personal beliefs at the door (impersonality). These principles structure all other positions herein." "non-interventionist" is silly, because intervention is inevitable. everyone has a different threshold on "too new", "unpredictable cross-applications", "good evidence", because we all resolve implicit questions differently due to prior knowledge and personal affinities. if debaters instruct us to resolve those questions explicitly, it saves me the effort of doing my own evaluations, which means less work for me, which is indicative of better debating by you. I care much less about ideological alignment than a consistent threshold of quality at the level of form (clear claim, sufficient warrant, complete implication). overall, i try to be a good judge for any research-heavy strategy, and I think the best rounds are small, vertically dense debates over a stable controversy. i have voted on "killing all white people good", heg good, "Kant's humanist ethics solves all of racism", death good, the Tetlock counterplan, and even condo bad (twice, wholly dropped). each of these arguments is worse than the last, but i voted on all of them. take this as you will.

5. even with the above, probably not a true blank slate – I would consider myself a worse judge than average for theory arguments as reasons to drop the debater, "tricks", counterplans that fiat actors not used by the 1AC or lack germane net benefits, "clash" impacts, the "ballot PIK", the politics disad, condo bad, "RVIs", and “1% risk of extinction”, and much better for skills impacts and fairness, critical affirmatives that counterdefine words, “uniqueness controls the link”, counterplanning in/out of offense and general “negative terrorism”, presumption against critical affs, framework arguments that “delete the plan”, and extra-topical plans. I tend to have a high threshold for a warrant, a low threshold to punish bad-faith practices, and I value quality evidence highly. This is not exhaustive, and may indicate my inclinations to reward or penalize with speaker points. However, if any of these views kick in during my decision, the debating at play was either very lacking or absolutely perfect. Short of a few very baseline things (offense/defense, flowing, decision times, Toulmin model, etc), any of these predispositions can be reversed. if i were coaching someone to win in front of me, my principal advice would be to be as explicit about how I should piece the debate together as humanly possible, so as to minimize the risk of any of my predispositions coming into play.

III. topic thoughts

this section is under construction - you can check back after policy camp!

IV. specifics

1. disads + case

a. evidence: this applies to everything, but putting it in this section since it's first and i'm grumpy about it. generally agree with Dallas Perkins: “if you can’t find a single sentence from your author that states the thesis of your argument, you may have difficulty selling it to me.” how i conclude on the quality of evidence relates to its production (authors, methodologies), its context (specificity, recency), and it's presentation (spin, highlighting/cutting). lots of old heads are signaling concerns about the third lately, which i enthusiastically co-sign - i am unsure why debater getting faster than ever correlates to cards being highlighted to say less, not more, but i would like it to stop. also agree very much with David Bernstein: “Intuitive and well reasoned analytics are frequently better uses of your time than reading a low quality card. I would prefer to reward debaters that demonstrate full understanding of their positions and think through the logical implications of arguments rather than rewarding the team that happens to have a card on some random issue.” generally think that lots of advantages, disads, and counterplans lose to 10 seconds internal link and solvency takeouts, but teams are too scared to make arguments without cards. i think this is due to the assumption that all cards are of sufficient quality to meet the standard of "evidence" - i think many (possibly most, these days) do not. I try to restrain my natural ev hack tendencies, but will take any opportunity given to exercise them - this means that while i will reward good and punish bad evidence, the onus is on the debaters to tell me what lens i should read cards through to make that happen.

b. most of what i judge these days and read in high school lives here. “turns case/disad” usually path to victory. dense engagement with internal links and close readings of evidence usually path to “turns case/disad”. ideally, these args are carded, but maybe not necessary if straightforward. good debating is comparative here, i.e: impact calc isn't "yes/no impact" but "higher/lower risk bc..." - anything else is fundamentally inconsistent with the basis of offense/defense.

c. uq probably controls link, but care less about this in the abstract and more when debated relative to specific scenarios – large enough link might overwhelm small uq (econ disad), but maybe uq/link are just yes no (agenda politics).

d. straight turning the case likely all-time favorite thing to judge. uniqueness good, might not be necessary with sufficiently comparative evidence.

e. politics disad legitimacy negatively correlates to stupidness of arg. agenda or court capital kinda dumb but probably allowed, but rider disad = total non-starter. can conceivably vote aff on intrinsicness/theory vs agenda politics, but unsure theory is worth effort vs just beating them, they're bad args. teams should include args in 2ACs to elections about the fact that American voters are often dumber than rocks.

f. inserting rehighlighting fine for “concludes neg”, “concedes thumpers”, etc, but offensive/new arguments should probably be read aloud. debaters likely need to put ink on this for me to disregard insertions of the latter kind, but particularly egregious instances may warrant intervention on my part. i think a lot of old heads' gripes with this practice is that debaters tend to not actually debate rehighlightings as evidence and explain what they mean, they just use them as a "gotcha" and never implicate it, which encourages laziness. don't do this.

2. counterplans

a. comfortable. i think about these debates for fun the most. state of counterplan (and plan) texts + solvency advocates is an atrocity. this should implicate more debates than it does. my favorite debates to judge are likely old-school advantage counterplan debates, but i am not a priori bad for process/competition strategies.

b. most modern process counterplans have large disconnects between solvency and impact evidence for the net benefit and, if thought about for all of three seconds, are patently insane ideas that would likely collapse basic principles of government and be perceived as such by anyone watching (this is a subtweet of uncooperative federalism - all 50 states immediately ending all cooperation with the fed over a super niche issue would set the economy, our alliances, legal precedent, and basically everything else on fire). both of these issues should be the primary basis of 2AC deficits and defense.

c. competition is fully yes/no, because it's a procedural question. other than that, offense/defense - 2N/ARs should frame my ballot in terms of the impact to the risk of a deficit vs the risk of a net benefit. i care a lot about arguments like sufficiency framing, uniqueness, and try-or-die here.

d. more 2ARs should go for perm shields link/counterplan links to net benefit. most counterplans are kind of stupid and fiat more sweeping things than solvency advocates actually assume (i.e: states, concon). teams seem to be scared of having these debates absent evidence, but shouldn't be.

e. “do both” and “do counterplan” are not arguments, they are taglines. if said with no further analysis, they will be evaluated as such. permutations other than "do both" or "do counterplan" require precise texts (inserting it in the doc is fine, but function should be explained fully during the speech).

f. functional competition is good, important in real-world decisions, and i am comfortable with these debates. textual competition bad, largely irrelevant, and has never made sense to me. positional competition induces feelings in me too dark and evil to name here. "normal means" is just the most likely process by which the mandate of the plan brings about its effects. quality of evidence for both definitions and normal means determines ability to win counterplan competition/legitimacy.

g. unsure why debaters seem to think "certainty" or "immediacy" are key to neg ground/legitimate basis for competition, when zero neg literature ever assumes either because that's not how real world policy works. also unsure why the mandate of the plan being immediate/certain means the effects must also be. more aff teams should point both these things out in competition debates.

h. default no judge kick. can be compelled to do so, but have yet to judge a single debate in my many years where me kicking the counterplan has helped the negative. probably more worth it to just actually pick a 2NR and either go all in on the counterplan or case.

3. kritik

a. familiar (understatement). most of what i coach and read in college lives here. best advice for neg debaters is for the love of god, delete your overview. just start on the line by line, your speeches will be so much better. best advice for aff debaters is use the aff more, and probably read fewer cards. i care substantially less about a2 afropessimism card #9 compared to evidence or explanations about how 1AC internal links interact with/disprove the K. while i personally agree with the K's politics more of the time, in my heart and soul i think about debate like a policy 2N - the best versions of these debates play out as aggressive, detailed disagreements about the value of the aff backed by lots of cards. as such, i tend to vote neg when the K team precludes the 2AR on "case o/w" through some combination of framework, turning the case, detailed alternative debating, and having a real impact, and i vote aff when the policy team has robustly defended their aff and internal links as both a counterexample to and offense against the K through some combination of framework, impact or link turns, serious objections to the alternative, and impact comparison. the less that one side does this (i.e: the fiat K, brute forcing heg with the card dump and nothing else, etc) the more i start thinking about voting the other way.

b. framework debating often frustratingly shallow. often unsure what win conditions are under neg models of debate or how winning it actually changes how i evaluate the round. often unsure what terminal to aff offense is and how it interacts with neg args about scholarship. refuse to do the “middle ground” thing if nobody tells me to, though, and generally think you’re better off just saying “delete the plan” or “plan focus” anyways. compromise is cowardly in these debates.

c. K 2NRs tend to be too wide and not deep. extend fewer arguments, do more analysis and answer more aff args. link/impact turns case is good, but framework or alt solves case might make it unnecessary, so why do all three?

d. aff teams link turn and impact turn in the 2AC and pretend it’s coherent. Neg teams should punish this more. aff teams should defend what their aff is equipped to defend and not pretend it can or will do anything else. permutations are overrated. Case outweighs + deficit + framework usually easier and better. most perms are just do both wearing different silly hats and glasses. perm double bind stupid argument.

e. “extinction first” can be a great asset, but it’s not the end all be all, and most teams forget that even if extinction isn’t automatically first, their impact is still probably bad. similarly, care less about “extinction focus bad” than “the way the aff deploys extinction in their scenario is bad bc”. “alt can’t solve case” is usually true, but not relevant if they win turns case/K o/w. “alt can’t solve links/impacts” is much more interesting and persuasive. Root cause args are often stupid.

4. critical affirmatives/framework

ADDENDUM - February '24: i find myself voting affirmative in framework debates more often than i used to. i am not worse for framework - i still think debates are likely on-balance better when the aff is constrained by a plan (despite my reputation for thinking otherwise), so i suspect this is due to two reasons: a. neg teams are getting sloppier at actually line-by-lining or responding to aff arguments (bad), while aff teams are getting more technical and comparative (good), and b. neg teams are not answering case or extending an external impact, they're just rambling about "clash" and have no offense beyond a vague turns case arg without uniqueness. I suspect this is caused by teams being so terrified by the word "subjectivity" that they are unwilling to actually say "yes, debate changes you, and we think the way our model changes you is good and outweighs the aff's offense". this is both unstrategic and cowardly, and the 2AC is going to say that stuff anyways, even if you try to dodge the link.

So, I think there are two solutions to this problem:

1. Make neg teams read real impacts again. Big skills impacts with cards are valuable because they are always external to the case and usually much larger, and give you access to the same genre of turns case arguments as "clash", but also let you have something that outweighs the aff.
   
2. Debate case more. Neg teams need to directly answer 1AC thesis arguments about things like affect/desire/ontology/scholarship/etc to preclude the 2AR from (smartly) weaponizing conceded thesis args as uniqueness/solvency for their offense.
   

if you extended the econ disad against the econ aff, but forgot to extend a uniqueness argument or answer aff internal links, you would not be surprised when you lost. Unsure why people are surprised in this context when it's the exact same issue. tl;dr - "clash" is stupid, read a real skills impact, preferably with cards. rant end.

a. good for both sides of clash debates, but i have judged (too) many, so lots of things about them annoy me. on balance, i am inclined to think debate is a game, and like any game it's benefits and incentives are inevitably structured to reward playing for keeps, but it should probably be worth playing for more than it's own sake, and can be played in more than one way. i am not a priori bad for planless affs, but i think a model of debate that doesn't force some constraints on aff creativity and some degree of side-switching seems to lack both competitive viability and intellectual interest. full disclosure: i am likely to give lower speaks in framework debates than other debates of similar quality, due to constant déjà vu robbing any joy from the content. speaks go back up when debaters stay organized and do deep engagement instead of just dueling with blocks.

b. neg teams historically win my ballot in framework debates more because they tend to do more judge instruction and stay organized.aff pet peeves are 1ACs that say and do nothing, very amenable to presumption. aff teams also tend to grandstand too much in rebuttals and not give organized speeches - don't do that. neg pet peeves are taking begged questions as self-evident, usually makes link to aff offense better. neg teams tend to not contextualize arguments to 1AC theories and also forget to explain an impact - do that stuff. i think both 2N/ARs would be better served doing more work with the language of impact calculus, i.e: "turns case/turns framework", "outweighs", "uniqueness controls direction of offense", etc - teams are generally okay at warranting their impact but bad at implicating it.

c. debates are cleaner the earlier the neg picks one single impact and sits on it. "clash" is kind of fake and never amounts to more than a case turn, skills arguments are criminally underrated, and nobody seems to explain fairness particularly well. ssd and tva are often overprioritized over smarter defense to aff args, but also underutilized as offensive arguments in their own right - i actually think the most interesting part of debate is the way being aff or neg on a given topic force you to apply research and theories to the specifics of a topical advocacy or a link argument, and tend to think models that don't make debaters do these things end up robbing debate of most of it's intellectual rigor.

d. people forget K affs are affs. this means normal arguments about functional competition probably apply to silly PICs ("frame subtraction"), and also means solvency and impact debates are fair game. if evenly debated, i think turning the case is likely always harder to answer and more interesting to judge than framework, given that the aff has way more practice. seems weird we all agree topicality against every policy aff would be an insane neg prep regimen, even if it's occasionally strategic, but we do this for K affs. the 2N in me truly thinks there's always a best answer to every aff, and while sometimes that answer is indeed topicality, it's not nearly the answer as often as round reports would lead you to believe.

e. idk why the neg gets counterplans if the aff doesn’t read a plan. if the basis of neg fiat is that counterplans present an opportunity cost, the only non-arbitrary actor the negative gets to fiat is the aff one, which means if the aff doesn’t fiat government policy, seems weird we think the neg gets to just because. makes more sense to read “policy engagement good, k2 check populism/’cede the political’/etc” as a disad or alternative argument vs these affs.

f. i would very much like to judge more critical affs with plans. i think most neg teams are much worse at justifying utilitarianism and liberal policy-making than they should be, and would consider myself to be extremely good for teams that contest extinction first, consequentialism, and the like. a team that executed this well in front of me would get speaker points bordering on stupidly high.

g. K v K debates live and die by the quality of negative link args and net benefits for the permutation. i always went for the cap K in these debates in college because i found most 2ACs to it to be sloppy and easily answered by a robust knowledge of marxism and history, and think this also applies to most other Ks you can read in these debates, but lots of these debates suck because 2Ns explain links and alternatives badly, which lets the 2AR get away with murder. lots of these rounds collapse into who can shout "root cause" louder, but i usually care much more about impact calculus and the direction of turns case and solvency (and these args are usually much truer anyways). 2A/NC framework arguments are usually missing and missed in these debates. i definitely live on the more technical side of K debate, but i'm not anti-performance-y stuff at all, and enjoy those debates a lot when i get them.

5. topicality

a. better than average for it, most likely. evidence matters a lot – i would say inasmuch as i am an "ev hack", it's most likely to matter in these debates. in the absence of good evidence on either side (most debates these days), i will likely lean affirmative, but few things are of such beauty as sniping an aff on a well-carded T violation that has clearly been thought through. predictability and topic controversies matter much more to me than limits as an intrinsic good, which makes me worse but gettable for args about "its", "in", etc, and probably bad for args solely about grammar.

b. lots of negative evidence is abhorrent in terms of actually establishing a violation (i.e: intent to exclude), lots of aff evidence is trash at actually defining things how the aff claims (i.e: intent to include). reubttals should make this matter more, either to make we-meets/violations more compelling or magnify links to precision/limits.

c. PTIV is possibly not the greatest model, but alternatives are usually badly explained in ways that devolve into positional competition which is godless.

d. violations are yes/no, and so we meets do not require external offense or defense. other than that, offense/defense means i value impact calculus and comparative analysis (caselists, etc) highly. reasonability is a question of the aff interpretation, and not just the specific 1AC. it can be extremely powerful and very viable, but has to be framed offensively beyond just "you get politics, we promise".

6. theory

a. generally, very neg leaning, but neg teams need to answer warranted arguments. very good for “negative terrorism”. condo good most likely my strongest personal conviction, followed by RVIs being nonsense. fine for counterplanning out of straight turns, fine for lots of kickable planks, don’t care about “performative contradictions”, anything is a "PIC" or can "result in the aff", etc. “infinite prep time + only neg burden is rejoinder + arbitrary” is mostly unbeatable vs these flavor of objections.

b. counterpoint is that i'm also great for affirmative counter-terror. big fan of intrinsic perms and theory against suspect counterplans, etc. reasonability is powerful when framed offensively. if evenly debated, i will likely never conclude the states counterplan (or any counterplan that fiats a different actor) is legitimate (but also likely not a reason to reject the team). neg theory args usually amount to pure laziness and are solved by “make 2Ns work for it”.

c. restating for emphasis: condo good, RVIs bad. unless truly and wholly conceded when properly warranted at first introduction, consider these arguments unworkable with me. Most 2ACs are blips that lack warrants, which often makes it moot when conceded anyways.

d. would be very interested to see theory arguments impacted out beyond drop the arg/debater. if states counterplan fiats uniformity, might be reasonable to say aff should get to fiat out of circumvention args about sub-federal actors. if aff fiats through an enforcement question, neg might get to fiat out of related deficits, etc. nobody's done this yet, but seems very worth exploring.

7. LD things

a. better than you'd think for phil, but likely not your best pref. hand-holding is likely required for anything more complicated than kant, but i vote for these positions more often than you’d expect and am familiar with them in a non-debate context. the blippier and less cohesive the framework, the more likely you are to lose me. i am barely old enough to remember when phil and tricks debate weren't synonymous, and miss it. i actually think phil affs are insanely strategic against lots of Ks, so these interactions interest me the most.

b. lots of policy judges tend to cop out and use modesty or other things by default to avoid having to actually judge phil debates - i promise to not do this, as i think it encourages debaters to just be bad at answering phil. that being said, i'm bad for truth testing - it's never made sense to me, offense/defense is kind of just fundamental to how i was taught debate and these arguments contradict a few fundamental assumptions i have about how debate works. it is likely difficult to get me to vote solely on skep, permissibility, etc. as these just kind of seem like purely defensive arguments.

c. bad pref for tricks. consider this both a plea and a warning.

V. misc

- If I want a card doc, I'll ask, usually for the relevant cards by name. Otherwise, assume I'm good.

- COVID things: I am vaccinated and boosted, and I take COVID tests before traveling to any given tournament. Put on masks if asked. I will have extra. not negotiable conduct.

- CX is a speech, my favorite part of the debate when done well, and a lost art. i flow it (albeit not as closely), its probably binding, and it impacts evaluation of the debate and speaker points. one debater from each team should be the primary speaker in each CX - some interjections, elaborations, or clarifications are obviously fine, but while excessive tag teaming will not be disallowed, it may impact speaks and perception negatively.

- flowing is good, and "flow clarification" is not a timeslot in the debate - questions such as "did you read X card/arg in the doc" are for CX. If you ask this and you haven't started a timer for it yet, i will start one for you. if you ask "can you send a doc without all the cards you didn't read", the other team does not have to do that, because that is not what a marked doc is. if you answer arguments that were not read, but were in the doc, you are getting a 27.5.

- Ethics challenges/cheating – this one is longer because people seem to care more about this these days. I have a high bar for voting on it. I do not think power-tagging evidence, cutting an article that concludes the other way later on, etc. are voting issues - you should simply say "this card is bad/concludes neg" as an argument. If you are making the accusation that your opponent has fabricated, miscut, or improperly cited evidence, I will evaluate it with the presumption of good-faith error by the accused. I do not think skipping portions of tags or analytics counts as clipping. Those things are not evidence, so I do not know why they require being held to the standard of evidence ethics. If you are accusing the other team of clipping the highlighted text of evidence, you need a recording to prove it - I will never notice this myself because I will not have docs open during speeches, and I think that if the debate comes down to this debaters have a right to some proof. I will also apply the same standard of good-faith error. This means barring something particularly egregious as to reasonably suggest the criminal negligence if not malicious intent, I will probably err towards not punishing debaters, as I think anything else incentivizes cheap shot wins on dead links in citations, leaving out the last word of a paragraph that was OCR'd badly, or skipping two words in a card on accident. If you read any of these things as a theory argument, I will not flow it, and I will ask after the speech if you are staking the debate on it - if not, I will happily inform your opponent they do not need to answer it. I am open to being asked if I consider certain accusations to meet the threshold of ending the debate on it - my answers will not be negotiable, but they will be honest. I am also willing (I would actually encourage it) to entertain debaters negotiating proportional responses to violations outside of me ending the debate, as I think my role as educator ideally precedes my role as a referee - I'd much rather we all agree to scratch a card that can't be accessed online anymore or that was accidentally clipped than just not have a debate. Otherwise, the party found to be at fault (either the guilty or an incorrect accuser) will receive a loss and the lowest speaks allowed. The other party will get a win and a 28.5/6. All of this goes out the window if the tabroom tells me to do a different thing than what I've outlined above, as their authority obviously supersedes mine.

- speaks are largely arbitrary, but I try to start at 28.4 for a team I'd expect to go 3-3, and i try and keep it relative to the tournament pool. below 28 and I think you are in the wrong division, below 27.5 and you have likely done something bad in a moral sense. I tend to reward quality evidence and good argument choice, well-organized speeches, smart strategic choices, and debating with character. I tend to penalize unnecessary meanness, bad arguments and cowardice, and sloppy debating. i am, at my core, white trash, so i tend to enjoy some friendly trash talk more than the average judge - i stop enjoying it when it strays from the topic of debate and/or becomes overly mean spirited. Not a big believer in low-point wins - if the 2NR makes a dumb decision, but the 2AR doesn't capitalize on it, the 2AR is probably dumber for fumbling a bag. I will not "disclose speaks".

- i tend to give long RFDs because i think most decisions have a tendency to hand-wave details and i'd rather be thorough. that said, there's a point of diminishing returns and i usually overshoot it. will not be offended if you just pack up and dip while i'm yapping. i welcome post-round questions

Good luck, thanks for letting me judge, and see you in round!

- pat

Richard A. Garner | Director of Speech & Debate | University of Houston | ragarner@uh.edu

Framework: Neg: topical version is very helpful; aff: probably okay if you defend the government doing a topical thing. One should be able to defend their model of debate. I put this issue first because it’s probably what you really care about. Everything else is alphabetical.

Case debate: Turning the case is my favorite thing to judge. Uniqueness is good here, but not always necessary with comparative evidence.

CPs/Competition/Theory: Comparisons win theory debates, along with impacts. I’m not sure that states or international CPs compete, but no one has ever put this to the test in front of me so it’s hard to say. No strong feelings about consultation or conditioning either way. K affs probably shift competition questions that rely on FIAT. Won't kick the CP unless you tell me to. Non-arbitrary interpretations are ideal.

Critiques: I understand these and am fine with them (understatement). From both the aff and neg, I enjoy narrative coherence, specific application, and alternative debates. New things under the sun are wonderful to see, but so too the old, artisanal ways upon occasion.

Disadvantages: I tend to think risk probability is never 100% absent drops, and that each internal link reduces certainty. Can have zero risk (though if the CP solves 100% of the case … probably need offense). Don’t tend to think that impacts automatically/100% turn case, or vice versa; instead, comparisons are evaluating risk probability bubbles/multiple competing worlds.

Judge Space: Judges are human beings, not argument processing machines; enjoyable debates matter. Evidence comparison is the highest art. Debaters’ flowing/line-by-line is generally terrible; embedded clash is nice, but at its root it depends on an organized approach to the flow. Drops: before the burden of rejoinder attains, there must be a full argument (claim/warrant/implication). I am displeased by a) subpoints with no b) subpoints, and by "Is anyone not ready?" because it is a linguistic abomination (see: bit.ly/yea-nay). I read a lot of cards, but, paradoxically, only in proportion to the quality of evidence comparison. Highlighting: needs to make grammatical sense; don’t use debate-abbreviation highlighting (ok: United States; not: neoliberalism). If I cannot understand the highlighting, I will not read the rest of the card for context.

Logistics: Add me to the email chain. I don’t read speech docs during the debate.

*Principles: Without getting too philosophical, I try to evaluate the round via the concepts the debaters in the round deploy (immanent construction) and I try to check my personal beliefs at the door (impersonality). These principles structure all other positions herein.

Speaker Points: I approximate community norms, and adjust each year appropriately.

Topicality: I evaluate it first. I enjoy T debates, and lean more towards ‘better interpretation for debate’ than ‘we have the most evidence’.

Brief Debate CV:

South Garland (competitor): 1995-1999

NYU (competitor): 1999-2003

Emory: 2003-2004

NYU/Columbia: 2004-2005

Harvard: 2006-2015

Houston: 2013-present

*

Random Poem (updated 3/30/23):

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.

downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I’ve been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph

the rhythm the rhythm—and your memory in my head three years after—And read Adonais’ last triumphant stanzas aloud—wept, realizing how we suffer—

And how Death is that remedy all singers dream of, sing, remember, prophesy as in the Hebrew Anthem, or the Buddhist Book of Answers—and my own imagination of a withered leaf—at dawn—

Dreaming back thru life, Your time—and mine accelerating toward Apocalypse,

the final moment—the flower burning in the Day—and what comes after,

looking back on the mind itself that saw an American city

a flash away, and the great dream of Me or China, or you and a phantom Russia, or a crumpled bed that never existed—

like a poem in the dark—escaped back to Oblivion—

No more to say, and nothing to weep for but the Beings in the Dream, trapped in its disappearance,

sighing, screaming with it, buying and selling pieces of phantom, worshipping each other,

worshipping the God included in it all—longing or inevitability?—while it lasts, a Vision—anything more?

*

Previously

Dunya Mikhail, "The End of the World," The Iraqi Nights (3/30/23)

Sakutaro Hagiwara, "A Useless Book" (8/1/19)

Catullus, 101 (1/4/18)

e.e. cummings, "O sweet spontaneous" (1/4/18)

&c

Affiliation: University of Houston

I’ve been judging since 2011. As of January 2nd, 2022 I am the third most prolific college policy judge in the era of Tabroom. Ahead of me are Jackie Poapst and Armands Revelins, behind me are Kurt Fifelski and Becca Steiner. Take this how you will.

Yes, I want to be on the E-mail chain. Send docs to: robglassdebate [at] the google mail service . I don’t read the docs during the round except in unusual circumstances or when I think someone is clipping cards.

The short version of my philosophy, or “My Coach preffed this Rando, what do I need to know five minutes before the round starts?”:

1. Debate should be a welcoming and open space to all who would try to participate. If you are a debater with accessibility (or other) concerns please feel free to reach out to me ahead of the round and I will work with you to make the space as hospitable as possible.

2. Have a fundamental respect for the other team and the activity. Insulting either or both, or making a debater feel uncomfortable, is not acceptable.

3. Debate is for the debaters. My job, in total, is to watch what you do and act according to how y’all want me. So do you and I’ll follow along.

4. Respond to the other team. If you ignore the other team or try to set the bounds so that their thoughts and ideas can have no access to debate I will be very leery of endorsing you. Find an argument, be a better debater.

5. Offense over Defense. I tend to prefer substantive impacts. That said I will explicitly state here that I am more and more comfortable voting on terminal defense, especially complete solvency takeouts. If I am reasonably convinced your aff does nothing I'm not voting for it.

6. With full credit to Justin Green: When the debate is over I'm going to applaud. I love debate and I love debaters and I plan on enjoying the round.

Nukes thoughts:

The amount of time, reading, discussion, and even writing I have dedicated to American and International nuclear strategy is hard to overstate. Please treat this topic with respect.

The standard argumentative thoughts list:

Debate is for the debaters - Everything below is up for debate, and I will adapt to what the debaters want me to do in the round.

Aff relationship to the topic - I think affirmatives should have a positive relationship to the topic. The topic remains a center point of debate, and I am disinclined to think it should be completely disregarded.

"USFG" framework: Is an argument I will vote on, but I am not inclined to think it is a model that best suits all debates, and I think overly rigid visions of debate are both ahistorical and unstrategic. I tend to think these arguments are better deployed as methodological case turns. TVAs are very helpful.

Counter-plan theory: Condo is like alcohol, alright if used in moderation but excess necessitates appropriate timing. Consultation is usually suspect in my book, alternative international actors more so, alternative USFG actors much less so. Beyond that, flesh out your vision of debate. My only particularly strong feeling about this is judge kick, which is explained at the bottom of this paradigm.

Disads: I have historically been loathe to ascribe 0% risk of a link, and tended to fall very hard into the cult of offense. I am self-consciously trying to check back more against this inclination. Impact comparison is a must.

PTX DAs: For years I beat my chest about my disdain for them, but I have softened since. I still don't like them, and think intrinsicness theory and basic questions of inherency loom large over their legitimacy as argumentation, but I also recognize the role they play in debate rounds and will shelve my personal beliefs on them when making my decision. That said, I do not think "we lose politics DAs" is a compelling ground argument on framework or T.

Critiques: I find myself yearning for more methodological explanation of alternatives these days. In a related thought, I also think Neg teams have been too shy about kicking alts and going for the "link" and "impact" (if that DA based terminology ought be applied one-to-one to the K) as independent reasons to reject the Affirmative advocacy. One of the most common ways that other judges and I dissent in round is that I tend to give more credit to perm solvency in a messy perm debate.

Case debate: Please. They are some of my favorite debates to watch, and I particularly enjoy when two teams go really deep on a nerdish question of either policy analysis or critical theory. If you're going down a particularly deep esoteric rabbit hole it is useful to slow down and explain the nuance to me, especially when using chains of acronyms that I may or may not have been exposed to.

Policy T: I spend a fair chunk of my free time thinking about T and the limits of the topic. I used to be very concerned with notions of lost ground, my views now are almost the opposite. Statistical analysis of round results leads me to believe that good negative teams will usually find someway to win on substance, and I think overly dramatic concerns about lost ground somewhat fly in the face of the cut-throat ethos of Policy Debate re: research, namely that innovative teams should be competitively rewarded. While framework debates are very much about visions of the debate world if both teams accept that debate rounds should be mediated through a relationship to policy action the more important questions for me is how well does debate actually embody and then educate students (and judges) about the real world questions of policy. Put differently, my impulse is that Framework debates should be inward facing whereas T debates should be outward facing. All of that should be taken with the gigantic caveat that is "you do you," whatever my beliefs I will still evaluate warranted ground arguments and Affirmative teams cannot simply point at this paradigm to get out of answering them.

Judge Kick: Judge kick is an abomination and forces 2ARs to debate multiple worlds based on their interpretation of how the judge will understand the 2NR and then intervene in the debate. It produces a dearth of depth, and makes all of the '70s-'80s hand-wringing about Condo come true. My compromise with judge kick is this: If the 2NR advocates for judge kick the 2A at the start of 2AR prep is allowed to call for a flip. I will then flip a coin. If it comes up heads the advocacy is kicked, if it comes up tails it isn't. I will announce the result of the flip and then 2AR prep will commence. If the 2A does this I will not vote on any theoretical issues regarding judge kick. If the 2A does not call for a flip I will listen and evaluate theory arguments about judge kick as is appropriate.

Online Debate Thoughts:

1. Please slow down a little. I will have high quality headsets, but microphone compression, online compression, and then decompression on my end will almost certainly effect just how much I hear of your speeches. I do not open speech docs and will not flow off of them which means I need to be able to understand what you’re saying, so please slow down. Not much, ~80% of top speed will probably be enough. If a team tries to outspread a team that has slowed down per this paradigm I will penalize the team that tried for said advantage.

1A. If you're going too fast and/or I cannot understand you due to microphone quality I will shout 'clear'. If after multiple calls of clear you do nothing I will simply stop flowing. If you try to adapt I will do the best I can to work with you to make sure I get every argument you're trying to make.

2. I come from the era of debate when we debated paper but flowed on computers, which means when I’m judging I will have the majority of my screen dominated by an excel sheet. If you need me to see a performance please flag it for me and I’ll rearrange my screen to account for your performance.

3. This is an echo of point 1, but it's touchy and I think bears repeating. The series of audio compressions (and decompressions) that online debate imposes on us has the consequence of distorting the high and low ends of human speech. This means that clarity will be lost for people with particularly high and low pitches when they spread. There is, realistically speaking, no way around this until we're all back in rooms with each other. I will work as hard as I can to infer and fill in the gaps to make it so that loss is minimized as much as possible, but there is a limit to what I can do. If you think this could affect you please make sure you are slowing down like I asked in point 1 or try to adapt in another way.

4. E-mail chains, please. Not only does this mean we don't have to delay by futzing around with other forms of technology but it also gives us a way to contact participants if (when) connections splutter out.

5. The Fluffy Tax. If during prep or time between speeches a non-human animal should make an appearance on your webcam and I see it, time will stop, they will be introduced to the debaters and myself, and we shall marvel at their existence and cuteness together. In the world of online debate we must find and make the joy that we can. Number of times the fluffy tax has been imposed: 3.

6. Be kind. This year is unbelievably tiring, and it is so easy to both get frustrated with opponents and lose an empathetic connection towards our peers when our only point of contact is a Brady Bunch screen of faces. All I ask is that you make a conscious effort to be kind to others in the activity. We are part of an odd, cloistered, community and in it all we have is our shared love of the activity. Love is an active process, we must choose to make it happen. Try to make it happen a little when you are in front of me.

I debated policy as a 1A/2N out of Heights High School for 3 years, graduating in 2021. I am currently a student at Prairie View A&M University studying computer engineering. I started my career competing through the Houston Urban Debate League and dabbled in my local TFA and UIL circuits.

I have not judged a round since the end of last season, and am largely out of debate. I have done no topic research and am likely best at this point for a slow, relatively traditional round. Pref accordingly.

The extent of my competitive success was qualifying to UIL State, TFA State, and making it to the semifinals of the HUDL City Championships. I had limited exposure to the national circuit, outside of going to a few bid tournaments for policy and debating LD at UH my senior year because my partner was unavailable. I am a multi-year alumni of the TDC Student & Teacher's Institute and my views are heavily influenced by my coach, Isaac Chao. I am generally in agreement with his paradigm, although do feel free to ask me specific questions.

Add me to the chain: jolivettehoust@gmail.com

I am usually fine with most arguments in debate but here’s a pref cheat sheet:

• LARP: 2
• T/Theory: 3-4
• Phil: 4
• Identity Kritiks: 2-3
• Pomo Kritiks: 4-5
• Tricks: Strike

Some general thoughts:

• Again, remember that I have not judged a great deal in general, and also have not picked up a ballot since May of last year.
• I read mostly policy-style arguments with a kritik here and there, but was never deep enough in the lit to be a one-off team.
• If I were to rate my threshold for speed 1-10 (10 being the fastest debater in the circuit) I would probably be at a 6.
• I am an exceptionally rusty flow; please be clear and not too blippy. I have not judged a round since May of 2023.
• I do not have strong presuppositions about whether the affirmative needs to defend a topical plan. While I never read a non-topical k aff, I debated with teammates who did.
• I strongly believe that debaters should not read any arguments making ontological claims of violence toward a group of people they do not belong to.
• Disclose or not, it's up to you. I'm sympathetic to Black debaters who refuse to disclose, however.

For specific positions:

• LARP/ Policy - I was the 2N and I usually ran combinations of disads/counterplans along with a kritik mixed in here and there.
• Theory - Theory is fine; we read theory a lot. Frivolous theory is also fine just as long as it makes sense and you sell it to me. I wasn't super technical on this flow though, so if it gets messy or too fast then I'm not a great judge for these debates.
• Phil - is fine as long as you explain it to me well. I probably won't have read your literature though, so slow down on the spreading when you’re explaining the argument and break it down.
• Kritiks - I'm more familiar with identity kritiks (i.e Afro-Pess, Afro-Futurism, Cap) than post-modern kritiks; have read essentially no pomo literature.
• Tricks - I’d rather you not because no. If you do I can assure you that I won’t flow the round right.

Hello friends! I'm Kiran, I do policy debate at the University of Houston and help out Kinkaid in policy and PF when I can :)

Don't need to take prep for tech issues, sending cards, etc. but please don't end prep and keep talking to your partner about what you need to do in the speech.

Also, please be nice and a good human being during rounds (and outside of them!)

Yes, I want to be on the email chain: kiran.debate@gmail.com

General things:

Do whatever and do it well! I read ev during the round, but I'm not reading for meaning that isn't articulated in the speeches.

Fine with speed

Tech>truth, and use smart cross-applications to your benefit

More judge instruction and comparison = more likely wins

Idk what's happening, but recently, I've been judging so many debates where people are like "they have dropped everything, extend it across the flow," and there is just 0 argument attached. My threshold for extending arguments that are dropped or very lightly covered is pretty low, but you need to say something like "conceded x impact, that outweighs and turns the DA because..." so I have some judge instruction.

More specific thoughts:

CP/DA/Case Debate: Great, I love it!

-Prefer CPs that solve internal links, doesn't need a solvency advocate and rehighlightings of AFF ev are fantastic

-Internal link comparison>impact comparison

-There can be 0 risk of a DA

-NEG leaning on most CP theory

Topicality:

-Interps should be predictable, I default to competitng interps if ev is of equal quality

-I can be persuaded that lack of clarity in the most precise definitions is a reason to defer to reasonability.

-Most likely to vote for the team that does the best impact comparison-is limits explosion truly atrocious under a certain interp? Does topic innovation die under another one?

Policy v Ks:

-Prefer links specific to the AFF with good turns case explanations

-Don't love big overviews that try to filter the whole debate, but more and specific examples that illustrate your theory of power are much better

-Good for both education and fairness on framework, more likely to vote on the perm if you can clearly differentiate the AFF from the context of the link

K Affs v Framework:

-Pretty sure my record is 50/50 in these debates

-Good for both education than fairness, TVA and SSD helps a lot

-Framework should be combined with a presumption push, more likely to vote AFF the less your 2NR is contextualized to it

-Need to know what the AFF does before the 2AC

K v K:

-Almost never in these debates, not super familiar with the lit, if I am judging a debate where this is the strat-I need clear explanations and examples

Tricks:

-Idk why it's called tricks, this category means "desperate attempts to avoid actually debating" args to me

-Will vote on it if dropped, but threshold is so low for an answer.

-RVIs fall in this category

Speaks: I start at a 28.5, but if I’m judging at a local where everyone’s inflating speaks, I will absolutely do the same. Don’t ask me for a 30.

PF:

-I largely evaluate PF rounds the same as policy rounds

-Don't need big picture things, just explain why your thing outweighs the other team's

-Defense is not sticky, I have no idea what that even means

-I die a little every time a team paraphrases or spends 20 mins figuring out which cards to send after a speech, please do this before your speech

-Speeches are so so so short, you don't need to explain the entire story of your arg each time, just explain why it matters, what your opponents missed, and how I should evaluate it.

Feel free to send me questions, and have fun y'all! :)

Rex Kidd

Add me to the email chain - rexwkidd@outlook.com

University of Houston Debate 2025

Online Debate

Speed - I am fine with spreading through the body of cards, but if you want something flowed (taglines, authors, analytics, etc.) you need to slow down, -75%-60% of top speed allowing me pen time to keep up with the debate.

Microphone quality- if I am unable to understand you due to microphone quality, I will give multiple “clear” warnings, but if the issue isnt resolved I simply will stop flowing.

I welcome arguments in all their forms. I mean this quite literally. Denounce modernity or impact turn innovation - within the parameters of debate, I don't care. My only request: whatever form yours may take, please be considerate and take the time to outline for me the claim of the argument, the warrants to support it, and the impacts of its significance. Even better, organize these arguments so the ideas are unambiguously clear; and at the end of the debate tell me in no uncertain terms why you win and why they lose. At the end of the day, I think debate is an enjoyable game with lasting subjective consequences. What these consequences are, and the extent to which they can become desirable or malignant, is open to interpretation. I believe this responsibility to interpret ultimately resides with the debaters, not the judge. I won't superimpose. I'll try my best to simply evaluate. Have fun!

Debate should be a welcoming and open space to all who would try to participate. If you are a debater with accessibility (or other) concerns please feel free to reach out to me ahead of the round and I will work with you to make the space as hospitable as possible. Have a fundamental respect for the other team and the activity. Insulting either or both, or making a debater feel uncomfortable, is not acceptable.

Krishna Lathish

they/them

if u don't put me on the email chain i'm holding your speaks hostage and also it will definitely impact my flow quality especially if ur a super spreader or whatever so be warned - if i can't keep up i'm flagging you twice to slow down then putting down my pen: krishnalathish14@gmail.com

let me know how the round can be made accessible for you and any pronoun/name stuff

did speech - oratory and broadcasting - in high school, started policy in college

i've only been rocking with debate for about a year and also have zero experience in pf or ld so everything i write is in the context of policy

i like:

• clarity > speed
• clear interaction with the other team's arguments, especially picking apart specific warrants and responding to their fairness, clash, education impacts and giving disads to their f/w
• when you name and number arguments
• offense then defense
• good lbl debating, i kind of hate flowing rounds i'm not competing in so help me find and mark the args and ev you've responded to!
• JUDGE INSTRUCTION - omg ur 2xrs last 30 seconds should be "here's your ballot and rfd". i like spectating more than judging to be honest and i am decently lazy, so i want to be told what was and wasn't dropped and what your pathway to the W was. that being said, i'm still flowing the round so don't tell me smth was dropped if it very much wasn't lol
• interesting cx questions - its enough to just ask a question the right way sometimes to show me a gap in the other team's arg/thinking
• kritikal argumentation aff or neg especially when link specificity has depth and isn't just "your actor is the US, state bad" and you have clear impact framing; so very interesting stuff

i don't like/am not good for

• high debate theory - to be candid it's not very engaging to me and i'm just not great for it bc i'm still wading through my own understanding of stuff like condo
• kind of a subpoint but on T: i'm not a topicality-head but it is something i'd LIKE to vote on, so weigh this how u want to: i think T is cool and am not hostile towards it vs i have decent inexperience with debating it myself, never voted on it before
• f/w debates that don't interact with each other, tell me why your model is preferable and then why theirs isn't don't just reiterate ur 2ac, 2nc voters over and over
• basically just debating that just presents evidence but doesn't take time to tell me why i prefer it to the other team's stuff and makes me do debating work for the round in my head, does that make sense? yes
• being rude to be assertive, there's a difference and if you don't know what it is you should err on the side of kindness
• when you jump around on the doc and don't clearly and slowly flag it; i swear this'll kill your speaks and maybe your ballot if it messes up my flow and you don't send a marked doc
• stolen prep; its a bad habit i know sometimes you don't realize other team cut prep i'll still call you on it
• time urselves pls

tech > truth until u try to be terrible, will stop the round if u try to impact turn racism, sexism, any of the -phobias. don't be my judging horror story

have fun debating, i'm just here to write you a ballot and give feedback and be wowed. really i just love to watch this activity eeeee u guys r so smart ⸜(｡˃ ᵕ ˂ )⸝

they/them

rylee.stgl@gmail.com for evidence sharing purposes.

I participated in policy debate at both the high school and collegiate level.

Spreading is okay. Open cross-examination and flex prep are okay as long as it is consensual between the competitors. All arguments are acceptable, K and Theory included. I default to policy-making. Defending the status quo is a valid negative position.

Disadvantages: Specific/non generic links are the most important thing.

Counterplans: Would honestly rather you read five good disadvantages than four good disadvantages and a medium counterplan that is going to have seven perms read on it. Counterplans are fine, obviously, but should be specific. Default position is that PICs are bad so just know you'll have to do more work to convince me.

Theory: There should be a very clear warrant for it. If there isn't a clear warrant for the argument, RVIs are hip and cool. I value clash, fairness, and education in that order so ideally I would rather you be having a conversation about the efficacy of the AFF's plan but there is an expectation to maintain competitive integrity.

Topicality: Most topicality arguments come off as time skews and I tend to value reasonability pretty highly so unless the AFF is clearly nontopical (effectually topical or extra topical included) there is a low chance I will vote on this. If the topicality argument is unfounded, RVIs are hip and cool.

Kritiks: Critique the AFF, not just the resolution. Prefer Ks with actionable alternatives.

Framework (CX): As mentioned above, I default to policy-making framework so I want to see the AFF's plan weighed against either the status quo, counterplan(s), or alternative(s). That said, probability > magnitude, provided the impacts are suitably large. Timeframe is tricky depending on impact, mass extinction tomorrow isn't necessarily as impactful as continued systemic violence, for instance, but there are reasonable arguments on both sides and I think that is a debate worth having.

Framework (LD): Most framework debates, in my experience, just dissolve to the frameworks being the same or similar enough that the winning side can solve using either. Your frameworks should have specific value criteria to help weigh the round.

If you have any questions not covered by the above or would like elaboration, please ask.

Elise Matton, Director of Speech & Debate at Albuquerque Academy (2022–present)
EMAIL CHAIN: enmatton@gmail.com

· B.A. History, Tulane University (Ancient & Early Modern Europe)
· M.A. History, University of New Mexico (U.S. & Latin America)

Competitive Experience:
· CX debate in NM local circuit, 2010 State Champion (2005-2010)
· IPDA/NPDA debate in college, 2012 LSU Mardi Gras Classic Champion (2011-2014)

Coaching Experience:
· Team Assistant, Isidore Newman (primarily judging/trip chaperoning — 2012-2016)
· Assistant Coach, Albuquerque Academy (LD & CX emphasis — 2017–2022)

Judging Experience:
· I judge a mix of local circuit and national circuit tournaments (traditional & progressive) primarily in CX and LD, but occasionally PF or other Speech events.

Note Pre-Jack Howe:

· Jack Howe is my 1st national circuit tournament in policy this season — I haven't seen or judged many rounds at all yet this year and definitely not too many fast/technical/progressive rounds on the topic. Do not assume I know Aff topic areas, core neg ground, abstract topic-specific acronyms, etc. Adjust accordingly!

General Notes (this is catered for policy and national circuit LD. PF notes are at the bottom).

· Speed is fine generally so long as it's not used to excessively prohibit interaction with your arguments. I do think there is a way to spread and still demonstrate strong speaking ability (varying volume, pacing, tone etc) and will probably reward you for it if you're doing both well. Go slower/clearer/or otherwise give vocal emphasis on taglines and key issues such as plan text or aff advocacy, CP texts, alts, ROB/ROJ, counter-interps, etc. Don't start at your max speed but build up to it instead. If you are one of the particularly fast teams in the circuit, I recommend you slow down SLIGHTLY in front of me. I haven't been judging many fast rounds lately, so I'm slightly rusty. I'm happy to call out "clear" and/or "slow" to help you find that my upper brightline so you can adjust accordingly as needed.

· Put me on the email chain (enmatton@gmail.com) but know I don't like rounds that REQUIRE me to read the doc while you're speaking (or ideally at all). I tend to have the speech doc up, but I am annoyed by rounds where debaters ASSUME that everyone is reading along with them. I flow off what I hear, not what I read, and I believe that your delivery and performance are important aspects of this activity and you have the burden of clearly articulating your points well enough that I theoretically shouldn't need to look at the docs at all for anything other than ev checking when it's requested. If someone who wasn't looking at your speech doc would not be able to tell the difference between the end of one card/warrant and the beginning of a new tagline, you need better vocal variety and clarity (louder, intonation change, inserting "and" or "next" between cards etc, etc.

· The most impressive debaters to me are ones who can handle intense high-level technical debates, but who can make it accessible to a wide variety of audiences. This means that I look for good use of tech and strategy, but ALSO for the ability to "boil it down" in clearly worded extensions, underviews, overviews, and explanations of your paths to the ballot. I strongly value debaters who can summarize the main thesis of each piece of offense in their own words. It shows you have a strong command of the material and that you are highly involved in your own debate prep.

· I believe that Tech>truth GENERALLY, BUT- Just because an argument is dropped doesn't necessarily mean I'll give you 100% weight on it if the warrants aren't there or it is absurdly blippy. I also have and will vote for teams that may be less technically proficient but still make valid warranted claims even if they aren't done formatted in a "Technical" manner. Ex: if you run some a theory argument against a less technical team who doesn't know how to line-by-line respond to it, but they make general arguments about why this strategy is harmful to debaters and the debate community and argue that you should lose for it, I would treat that like an RVI even if they don't call it an RVI. Etc.

· Use my occasional facial expression as cues. You’ll probably notice me either nodding occasionally or looking quizzically from time to time- if something sounds confusing or I’m not following you’ll be able to tell and can and should probably spend a few more seconds re-explaining that argument in another way (don't dwell on this if it happens — if it's an important enough point that you think you need to win, use the cue to help you and try explaining it again!) Note the nodding doesn't mean I necessarily agree with a point, just following it and think you're explaining it well. If you find this distracting please say so pre-round and I’ll make an effort not to do so.

· Use Content warnings if discussing anything that could make the space less safe for anyone within it and be willing to adapt for opponents or judges in the room.

Role as a Judge

Debate is incredible because it is student-driven, but I don't think that means I abandon my role as an educator or an adult in the space when I am in the back of the room making my decision. I believe that good debaters should be able to adapt to multiple audiences. Does this mean completely altering EVERYTHING you do to adapt to a certain judge (traditional judge, K judge, anti-spreading judge, lay judge, etc etc)? No, but it does mean thinking concretely about how you can filter your strategy/argument/approach through a specific lens for that person.

HOW I MAKE MY RFD: At the end of the last negative speech I usually mark the key areas I could see myself voting and then weigh that against what happens in the 2AR to make my decision. My favorite 2NR/2AR’s are ones that directly lay out and tell me the possible places in the round I could vote for them and how/why. 2NR/2AR’s that are essentially a list of possible RFDs/paths to the ballot for me are my favorite because not only do they make my work easier, but it clearly shows me how well you understood and interpreted the round.

Topicality/Theory

Part of me really loves the meta aspect of T and theory, and part of me loathes the semantics and lack of substance it can produce. I see T and Theory as a needing to exist to help set some limits and boundaries, but I also have a fairly high threshold. Teams can and do continue to convince me of appropriate broadenings of those boundaries. Reasonability tends to ring true to me for the Aff on T, but don’t be afraid to force them to prove or meet that interpretation, especially if it is a stretch, and I can be easily persuaded into competing interps. For theory, I don’t have a problem with conditional arguments but do when a neg strat is almost entirely dependent on running an absurd amount of offcase arguments as a time skew that prevents any substantive discussion of arguments. This kind of strat also assumes I’ll vote on something simply because it was “flowed through”, when really I still have to examine the weight of that argument, which in many cases is insubstantial. At the end of the day, don’t be afraid to use theory- it’s there as a strategy if you think it makes sense for the round context, but if you’re going to run it, please spend time in the standards and voters debate so I can weigh it effectively.

Disadvantages

I love a really good disad, especially with extensive impact comparisons. Specific disads with contextualized links to the aff are some of my all-time favorite arguments, simple as they may seem in construct. The cost/benefit aspect of the case/DA debate is particularly appealing to me. I don’t think generic disads are necessarily bad but good links and/or analytics are key. Be sure your impact scenario is fully developed with terminal impacts. Multiple impact scenarios are good when you can. I'm not anti nuke war scenarios (especially when there is a really specific and good internal link chain and it is contextually related to the topic) but there are tons more systemic level impacts too many debaters neglect.

Counterplans

I used to hate PICs but have seen a few really smart ones in the past few years that are making me challenge that notion. That being said I am not a fan of process CPs, but go for it if it’s key to your strat.

Kritiks

Love them, with some caveats. Overviews/underviews, or really clearly worded taglines are key here. I want to see *your* engagement with the literature. HIGH theory K's with absurdly complicated taglines that use methods of obfuscation are not really my jam. The literature might be complex, and that's fine, but your explanations and taglines to USE those arguments should be vastly more clear and communicable if you want to run it in round! I have a high threshold for teams being able to explain their positions well rather than just card-dump. I ran some kritiks in high school (mostly very traditional cap/biopower) but had a pretty low understanding of the best way to use them and how they engaged with other layers of offense in the round. They weren’t as common in my circuit so I didn’t have a ton of exposure to them. However, they’ve really grown on me and I’ve learned a lot while judging them- they’re probably some of my favorite kind of debate to watch these days. (hint: I truly believe in education as a voter, in part because of my own biases of how much this activity has taught me both in and out of round, but this can work in aff’s favor when terrible K debates happen that take away from topic education as well). Being willing to adapt your K to those unfamiliar with it, whether opponents or judge, not only helps you in terms of potential to win the ballot, but, depending on the kind of kritik you're running or pre-fiat claims, also vastly increases likelihood for real world solvency (that is if your K is one that posits real world solvency- I'm down for more discussion-based rounds as theoretical educational exercises as well). I say this because the direction in which I decided to take my graduate school coursework was directly because of good K debaters who have been willing to go the extra step in truly explaining these positions, regardless of the fact I wasn’t perceived as a “K judge”. I think that concept is bogus and demonstrates some of the elitism still sadly present in our activity. If you love the K, run it- however you will need to remember that I myself wasn’t a K debater and am probably not as well versed in the topic/background/author. As neg you will need to spend specific time really explaining to me the alt/role of the ballot/answers to any commodification type arguments. Despite my openness to critical argumentation, I’m also open to lots of general aff answers here as well including framework arguments focused on policymaking good, state inevitable, perms, etc. Like all arguments, it ultimately boils down to how you warrant and substantiate your claims.

MISCELLANEOUS
Flash time/emailing the doc out isn’t prep time (don’t take advantage of this though). Debaters should keep track of their own time, but I also tend to time as well in case of the rare timer failure. If we are evidence sharing, know that I still think you have the burden as debaters to clearly explain your arguments, (aka don’t assume that I'll constantly use the doc or default to it- what counts is still ultimately what comes out of you mouth).

I will yell “clear” if the spread is too incoherent for me to flow, or if I need you to slow down slightly but not if otherwise. If I have to say it more than twice you should probably slow down significantly. My preference while spreading is to go significantly slower/louder/clearer on the tagline and author. Don’t spread out teams that are clearly much slower than you- you don’t have to feel like you have to completely alter your presentation and style, but you should adapt somewhat to make the round educational for everyone. I think spreading is a debate skill you should employ at your discretion, bearing in mind what that means for your opponents and the judge in that round. Be smart about it, but also be inclusive for whoever else is in that round with you.

**PUBLIC FORUM**

I don't judge PF nearly as frequently as I do CX/LD, so I'm not as up to date on norms and trends.

Mostly when judging PF I default to util/cost-benefit analysis framing and then I evaluate clash and impacts, though the burden is on you to effectively weigh that clash and the impacts.

Final Focus should really focus on the ballot story and impact calc. Explain all the possible paths to the ballot and how you access them.

Compared to LD and CX, I find that clash gets developed much later in the round because the 2nd constructive doesn't (typically?) involve any refutations (which I find bizarre from a speech structure standpoint). For this reason, I appreciate utilizing frontlining as much as possible and extending defense into summary.

Impressive speaking style = extra brownie points for PFers given the nature of the event. Ultimately I'm still going to make a decision based on the flow, but this matters more to me when evaluating PF debaters. Utilize vocal intonation, eye contact, gestures, and variance in vocal pacing.

Grand Crossfire can be fun when done right but horribly chaotic when done wrong. Make an effort to not have both partners trying to answer/ask questions simultaneously or I'll have a really hard time making out what's going on. Tag-team it. If Grand Crossfire ends early, I will not convert the time remaining into additional prep. It simply moves us into Final Focus early.

I have a much lower threshold for spreading in PF than I do for CX/LD. I can certainly follow it given my focus on LD and CX, but my philosophy is that PF is stylistically meant to be more accessible and open. I don't mind a rapid delivery, but I will be much less tolerant of teams that spread out opponents, especially given email chains/evidence sharing before the round is not as much of a norm (as far as I've seen).

I am often confused by progressive PF as the structure of the event seems to limit certain things that are otherwise facilitated by CX/LD. Trying to make some of the same nuanced Theory and K debates are incredibly difficult in a debate event structured by 2-3 mins speeches. Please don't ask me to weigh in on or use my ballot to help set a precedent about things like theory, disclosure, or other CX/LD arguments that seem to be spilling into PF. I am not an involved enough member of the PF community to feel comfortable using my ballot to such ends. If any of these things appear in round, I'm happy to evaluate them, but I guess be cautious in this area.

Please feel free to ask any further questions or clarifications before/after the round!- my email is enmatton@gmail.com if you have any specific questions or need to run something by me. Competitors: if communicating with me by email, please CC your coach or adult chaperone. Thank you!

email: saron.regassa@gmail.com

I am a college policy debater and a public policy major at the University of Houston. I am mostly a K debater, I find those debates the most interesting. I will try my best to be a “blank slate” for the purposes of the round. Don’t assume that I have advanced background knowledge in the topic. If you can convince me, in the context of the debate round, that your argument is true, I will accept it as such. Tell me how I should evaluate the round and why you should win. I am open to all kinds of arguments, as long as you explain them, but prefer when you can show me impacts to vote for.

As of 2022 I am a policy debater and Economics student at University of Houston. Back in high school I used to compete in debate and speaking events. I've done World Schools Debate, Info speaking, Extemp, and I did LD for a year. Put together I've been debating for 5 years.

I will try my best to be a “blank slate” for the purposes of the round. If you can convince me, in the context of the debate round, that your argument is true, I will accept it as such. Tell me how I should evaluate the round and why you should win. I am open to all kinds of arguments, as long as you explain them, but prefer when you can show me concrete impacts to vote for.

For policy rounds please put me on the email chain. My email address is: wajih2003@live.com

Director of Debate

Dulles High School 2022 - Present

Westside High School 2017 - 2022

Magnolia High School 2016-2017

Summer Debate Institutes

Lab Leader - Texas Debate Collective 2020 - Present

Admin - National Symposium for Debate 2022

Lab Leader - Houston Urban Debate League 2019 - 2021

Emails

All Rounds: esdebate93 at the google messaging service

Policy Rounds: dulles.policy.db8 at the google messaging service

LD Rounds: dulles.ld.db8 at the google messaging service

TL;DR

Tech > Truth. I'll reward deep content knowledge, organization, clarity and depth of explanation, judge instruction, efficient file sharing, and flowing. Other than that, do your thing and do it well. Read the full thing to get a sense of how I understand what it means to debate well. Non-Policy event specific thoughts are at the bottom.

General Thoughts

I am a full time classroom teacher who oversees a large team and judges frequently (over 100 rounds in the 22-23 season). I debated for a small rural high school and read exclusively policy style arguments; however, I have since coached students who go for the K on both sides and every other kind of argument under the sun. I am probably fine for whatever you want to do. Although most of my experience competing, judging, and coaching is in Policy and LD, I have worked with debaters across all formats. My preference is for national circuit style debate, but I have worked with a number of traditional debaters and judge traditional rounds quite frequently. I believe that debate can be one of the single most transformative activities for high schoolers who engage deeply in the processes of research, argument refinement, skill development, and content mastery that it requires to be done well. As such, I am committed to the educational integrity of the activity. This has a few different implications for you, regardless of format:

• Safety, inclusion, and access are my first priorities because students can’t get the benefits of the activity if they feel unsafe, unwelcome, or lack access to the materials they need to be successful. For you, this means to be cognizant of your words/actions and their effects on other people, especially those coming from social locations different from your own. Assume less, listen more.

Respect people’s pronoun preferences, honor requests for accommodation, and be kind to novices and those less experienced than you. Don’t bully or harass people, don’t be racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic or ableist. If something is happening and I’m not picking up on it, please bring it to my attention either verbally or via email. If I am part of the problem, please let me know so that I can do better.

Recording your speeches is fine. You must get consent from everyone in the room to record the whole round. It would also be polite to offer to send your opponents a copy of the recording if they consent. If you record others sans consent and I find out, you will be reported to the tabroom.

Content/Trigger warnings should be read if you suspect a position might be triggering to someone, and you should be ready to read something else if your opponents or I say we are not comfortable with the position being read. If an observer objects, they are free to leave, but we have to be there.

I will not be evaluating arguments about people’s character or their conduct outside of the round we are in and the prior disclosure period. Any significant issue of safety or comfort that impacts your ability to engage with someone is not something that a ballot can resolve. That needs to be taken to the tabroom.

If you debate for an under-resourced program and would like some materials to help you improve, let me know and I’ll send you some of the resources I make sure my students have access to.

• The rigor of academic debate is the main reason it has such a large and long lasting impact on people’s lives. I will reward displays of it with generous speaker points and will tend towards being punitive with regards to practices that compromise the rigor of the activity.

The two teams on the pairing are the only entities taking part in the debate. Coaches, teammates, random spectators, and AI chatbots are not to be assisting once the door closes. Chatbots shouldn’t be used before the door closes either. If I find that academic dishonesty of this variety has occurred, I will go to tab and lobby for you to be disqualified.

You should do your own research, reading, card cutting, and block writing. Using open evidence, the wiki, or published briefs is fine as a starting point, but that hardly constitutes research. Similarly, it is fine if some of your blocks are written by a coach or more veteran teammates, but overreliance on things cut/written by other people is detrimental to your learning and development. This will put a cap on your speaker points. I will bump speaker points for quality work that is obviously your own.

When cutting cards, make sure not to clip or power tag. For those who don’t know, clipping entails cutting around parts of cards that are inconvenient for your argument, not cutting at paragraph breaks, reading more or less than what is highlighted, and failing to mark cards if you decide to move on. Power tagging is simply when the tagline you have written does not represent what the body of the card says. Evidence ethics challenges are limited to claims that evidence is fabricated in whole or in part, so you should be confident that you are correct before staking the round on it. In the event of a challenge, you win if you are right and you lose if you are wrong.

Citation drives research, which is the source of argument innovation over the course of a topic. Complete citations contain the following information: The author’s complete name (you only need to read the last name), the date of publication (read month and day if the evidence is from this year, just the year if it is from a previous year), a list of author qualifications, the title of the source, the name of the publishing entity, a url to the text if applicable, and an indicator of who cut the evidence.

Generally speaking, I am pro disclosure since having time to read, think, and strategize tends to improve the quality of engagement from both sides exponentially, which in turn results in debates that are more educational for the participants and, incidentally, more enjoyable for me to judge. This is my default position; it doesn’t mean you can’t get me to vote against disclosure. I freely acknowledge the validity of objections regarding student safety and competitive equity.

Recording audio of your speeches, later transcribing and editing them, is a good habit to help you notice issues with clarity, efficiency, and explanation. It can also be a part of your block writing process. The final product might be super specific, but it does not take that much time to convert the specific speech to a generic block that you can use in future debates.

Prep time exists for a reason. You should not be typing or strategizing with your partner if there is not a timer running, be that yours or your opponents’. Stealing prep is cheating.

Take notes during feedback, preferably in a word or google doc. It’s a good habit to be in, as some judges don’t write much, memory is pretty faulty, and it helps create the impression that you care about improving and are actively listening to what judges are telling you. I would also suggest labeling and saving your flows.

Ask questions with redos and file updates in mind. I welcome all questions; however, understand that once the ballot is submitted I can do nothing to change it. Aggressive post-rounding of me or another judge on a panel is futile and immature. I would suggest that you choose to focus on growth and improvement rather than burning bridges with people.

• Debate is a skill focused activity that necessitates a degree of technical mastery. As such, I tend towards tech over truth, but I think that paradigm is overly simplistic. In reality, truth is constitutive of tech, meaning that arguments more germain to my understanding of the world will inevitably require less work to get me on board with. I do my best to check my preconceptions at the door, but the idea of a truly tabula rasa judge is a farce.

While I prefer fast debates over slow debates, I enjoy debates I can understand even more. If you are not capable of spreading clearly, then don’t do it at all. Slow down for taglines and parts of cards you wish to emphasize. Raise your volume when something is important. If you are not doing speaking drills for at least 15 minutes every day, you are not working to improve or maintain what is, realistically, the easiest skill to practice. If you spread, be ready to honor a request for accommodation.

All arguments should make a claim, support that claim with evidence and/or reasoning, and explain the implication of that argument for the debate. They should be organized in a line by line fashion, meaning “they say . . . we say . . . that matters because . . .” or an equivalent organizational schema. Compare arguments/evidence and weigh as you go down each flow sheet. If the affirmative team introduces a position, the negative team sets the order for line by line on that flow. When the negative team introduces a position, the affirmative team sets the order for line by line on that flow. Any overview that summarizes an argument should be kept short, and should include weighing and judge instruction, especially as we get deeper into the debate. Get to the line by line and do the work of debating there. Affirmative teams should start on the case page (T first is an exception), and negative teams should start with the off case positions they are extending, then go to the case (unless presumption or an impact turn is what they go for in the 2NR). Neither side should jump around and go back to a page they have already moved on from.

Most errors get made because debaters don’t flow or are not proficient at flowing. This should be one of your most practiced skills, as you can’t do line by line effectively or make intelligent decisions if you don’t have an accurate record of what happened in each speech. Flow every single speech of every single debate you are in or that you observe in order to practice. I am generally of the opinion that it is better for competitors to flow on paper rather than on your laptop, but do what works best for you.

Housekeeping tasks should be done at the beginning of CX/speeches. This means that questions about independent reasons to affirm/negate, CP/alt status, etc. go first in CX, counterplans get kicked and no link arguments get conceded at the top of speeches.

Don’t just answer the previous speech, anticipate and shut down the arguments that will be in the next speech using lots of judge directed language. The 2NR should be focused on beating their best 2AR options, and the 2AR should be focused on narrating the debate back to me and beating the 2NRs ballot story. The earlier you can start the process of judge instruction, the better off you are.

Aff and Neg Case Debating Thoughts

Affirmative teams must identify a harm or set of harms that is being caused by some aspect of the status quo. They must also propose some method of addressing those harms. If you can’t articulate how you’ve met those two burdens clearly and succinctly, you probably lose on presumption. I don’t particularly care if you prefer policy/law, philosophy, or critical theory as the part of the library you research from, nor do I care if you read a plan or poetry. I do, however, think that the topic should have some effect on the research and writing you are doing when crafting your case. If every aspect of the aff is generic and not specific to the area of controversy that we voted to have debates over, I will likely be voting neg as you have clearly not thought hard about the way that your particular literature base engages the topic and topicality/FW answers will be bad. If you are not extending the case from the 1AC to the 2AR, you will likely lose (exception for going all in on theory, for which I have a pretty high threshold).

Case is the core of the debate. The role of the negative is to disprove A.) the truth claims of the 1AC and B.) the desirability of the plan text/broader 1AC scholarship. It is way harder to do B if you have neglected A by not making offensive and defensive arguments on case targeting different aspects of the aff. Don’t just spend time at the impact level. Don’t just make cross applications of off case positions. Read cards, contest link and internal link claims, contest claims of solvency, etc. You need to think about how these case cards interact with other off case positions. I’ve written a shocking number of aff ballots in debates where someone goes for a security K in the 2NR without extending carded link, internal link, or impact defense on case, and they end up losing the debate because the 2AR gets to wax poetic about how good and true their China reps are given the conceded empirics. If it interacts with the case page, you probably need to have case cards that help the argument make sense. There are no instances where the 1NC can afford to ignore the case page. There are a few instances where you can afford to not extend case in the 2NR, but those are few and far between.

Topicality Thoughts

I default to competing interpretations, as I think choices should have to be justified. Reasonability is an argument for the counter interpretation, not the specific aff, arguing that it is sufficiently predictable, limiting, etc. to mitigate the impacts of the shell, and that losing the round would be disproportionate punishment, even if there is some marginal benefit to the negative interpretation. Interpretations and counter interpretations should be topic specific rather than generic. They should intend to define and include/exclude a given aff or set of affs. T is fundamentally a question of limits; all other standards are secondary.

Framework Thoughts

I’m of the opinion that both sides should defend a model of debate that they believe to be desirable. The social structures and dynamics that define competitive debate are fair game for criticism; however, I think the fact that you’ve voluntarily chosen to come to a tournament probably concedes that there is some benefit to doing the activity as it is currently instantiated. Tell me what your vision of the activity is and why you think it’s worth it to show up to tournaments, not just why your opponents’ model is bad. Both sides should start with a caselist of affs that would be topical under their interpretation and the various possibilities for negative testing their interpretation would permit.

For T USFG vs K affs, a limits standard with a skills impact, switch side debate net better/read it on the negative solves their offense, and an example of a topical version of the aff is most persuasive to me. If you prefer to go for fairness, that’s fine, just be aware that I understand myself as an educator first and a referee second, which does implicate how I end up thinking about close debates.

For K frameworks vs policy affs, I am unsure why we are making this section of debate more confusing and self-serving than it needs to be. They want me to look at just the plan and its consequences, you want me to look at the 1AC holistically. Other questions are either secondary to this core controversy about the evaluative terms of the debate or are irrelevant altogether. KvK debates have a tendency to be less clean cut at the framework level, so just be sure you are being clear about the model you think is good and explain how the debates your model would value relate to the debates they think matter.

Kritik Thoughts

My favorite and least favorite debates I have ever judged have involved the K in a substantial way. Do with that information what you will.

You should have done a lot of reading on the thesis of your kritik so you actually know what you are talking about and can effectively apply the theory to the aff/topic you are critiquing. Over reliance on jargon isn’t a flex. Explain big concepts simply and use lots of examples to illustrate your link and alternative arguments. Links should be specific to the aff/topic you are criticizing. Illustrate the link by quoting your opponents and/or their evidence.

Performances should relate to arguments that appear later in the debate.

Disadvantage and Counterplan Thoughts

In an ideal world, disadvantages would be intrinsic to the action of the plan. Explain the link story and do impact comparison.

Case specific counterplans are better than generics. I lean aff on multi-actor fiat, consult, and condition. I lean neg on PICs. There is strategic utility to not including a solvency advocate, but literature should probably inform the ground for both sides. Presumption flips aff if the 2NR goes for a counterplan without making an argument about judge kick.

LD Thoughts

Everything mentioned above applies to LD. I'd prefer not to be subjected to tricks or frivolous theory debates. I am old, grumpy, and have little patience for shenanigans.

A philosophy framework should have a clearly articulated relationship to the relevant impacts for the round. I would suggest slowing down to ensure I don't miss key steps in your syllogism. I'm fine for one or two substantive tricks like skep triggers and paradoxes here, provided they make sense in the context of your framework.

I'm agnostic on 1AR theory and RVIs in the context of this event.

PF Thoughts

This event exists with the explicit purpose of preserving lay debate, so pretend that this is a short policy round, and I am a lay judge who knows how to flow. If you want to do "progressive debate" things, come to policy. We would love to have you.

Cards are good. Paraphrasing is bad. If we are sending out speech docs with carded evidence before speeches, I will be a happy camper and likely bump speaks.

"Flowing through ink" is not a thing. You have to attend to responses if you want to extend something. Additionally, defense is not "sticky". You have to extend it if you want me to consider it.

I understand PF to be advantage vs disadvantage debate, with the resolution functioning in place of the plan in policy debate.

Topicality doesn't make a ton of sense in PF considering that the aff doesn't default to speaking first and the negative isn't tasked with upholding the resolution. Just do the thing traditional debaters used to do and define your terms at the top of your first constructive speech to parametrize the debate.

Counterplans are allowed at TFA sanctioned tournaments. They are banned only at NSDA sanctioned tournaments.

If you are considering reading a kritik in front of me, you don't have enough time to do the requisite amount of explanation and contextualization for me to feel like you have a shot at winning. Come to policy and read all the Ks you want.

WSD Thoughts

This event suffers from inconsistency of argument from speech to speech. Introduce your arguments in you first speech, and start answering your opponents' arguments as soon as you are able. Arguments and answers must then be extended in each successive speech in which you'd like for it to be up for consideration.

Congress Thoughts

After a few speeches of floor debate and cross examination on a given bill, you should not be reading speeches word for word. Clash with arguments presented by people on the other side of the issue and extend arguments made by representatives you agree with.

Background ---

UH '26

Conflicted against Seven Lakes HS, Barbers Hill HS, and anyone in Break Debate.

Policy debater at the University of Houston 1x NDT qualifier

Coach for Seven Lakes HS and Break Debate

Put me on the email chain --- debatesheff@gmail.com

If I am judging PF also put sevenlakespf@googlegroups.com

Overall perspective ---

Please don't call me judge---Bryce is fine

I will vote on anything. I have done extensive policy and K debate so it is naturally my preferred styles. I am open to other styles of debate and will vote on anything just might be less comfortable.

I hate deadtime in debates. It makes me increasingly frustrated when there isn't a timer running and it seems like no one is doing anything. To minimize this please have the email chain with the speech doc sent AT START TIME.

thoughts---essentially the same for policy and LD.

--- K affs being vague and shifty hurts you more than it helps. I'm very unsympathetic to 2AR pivots that change the way the aff has been explained. Take care to have a coherent story/explanation of your K aff that starts in the 1AC and remains consistent throughout the debate

--- Inserting rehighlightings is fine as long as you explain why it matters in the speech. I usually read ev while making decisions.

--- I'm more convinced by affs that commit to, and defend, an action coming out of the 1ac.

--- Ks should prove the plan is a bad idea.

--- I'm not convinced by CP theory arguments like condo or PICs bad. Private actor fiat, multi-actor fiat, or object fiat definitely have merit.

--- I default to judge kick unless 1ar and 2ar convince me otherwise.

--- I will not adjudicate anything that didn't happen in the round.

--- New affs bad is a bad argument.

--- Qualified authors & solid warrants in your ev are important. Evidence comparison and weighing are also important. In the absence of evidence comparison and weighing, I may make a decision that upsets you. That is fundamentally your fault.

Updated: 09/10/23

Debate:

Please preflow before the round starts to expedite the round especially when it's flighted

I won't disclose unless I specifically say at the beginning of the round

LD Debate:

Argumentation:

I value your ability to communicate your arguments the most out of anything else in round. Students often have interesting arguments whether progressive or traditional but if you struggle to communicate those arguments effectively, you'll lose me. It isn't my job to fill in the gaps of arguments and make links for you, if the arguments themselves aren't fleshed out and conveyed in a manner that makes sense it isn't my job to do it for you.

!!No Frivolous Theory!! - I think this makes for a bad round, if there's legitimate abuse within round that's the only time I believe theory should be run.

Speed:

If you intend on spreading, I request a speechdrop, otherwise I won't be able to keep up.

Line-by-line vs Big Picture:

I'd prefer a balance of both, I want you to go line-by-line on the most important arguments but overall crystallize and provide the big picture for me.

Speech:

What I look for:

-Speeches that flow well from point A to B, which means ensuring you transition well and organize your ideas well

-I prefer an abundance and variety of sources to be used which I want your own analysis of as well (especially in extemp)

-I value your ability to create a speech that's informative, flows well/is organized well, and has an abundance and variety of sources over your ability to speak well - but good speech should be written well and performed well, but if I have a preference then it's: well-written speech > well-performed speech, because the first shows me depth and substance that the latter doesn't

LD Quick Pref List:

K -- 1

T vs K-Affs - 1/2

K-Affs - 2

Policy Strat - 2

T - 2

Phil - 3

Theory - 4

Tricks - 4

About me:

I'm Avery, call me Avery. I use She/her. I don't like being called judge. If you "Sir" me you will not be happy with your speaks at the end of the round.

email: awilso10@trinity.edu

Put me on the email chain. The email chain should be set up before the round starts, NOT AFTER!

I debated for 4 years at Jack C Hays.

Trinity 2025

Not voting on cards written by current debaters

"techy but not super tech over truth".

My opinions about the world don't leave when I enter the round and the same applies for every other judge in existence. Certain args are obvious no go-s such as transphobia good, racism good, sexism good, etc. If your thought before an arg is "should I read this," its probably safest to assume no

I will not be friendly towards misgendering/transphobia in debate and reserve the right to vote how I want at the end of the round. Don't want me to make interventionist decisions? Don't be transphobic. This is an activity that should be safe for those involved in it. I would recommend avoiding gendering your opponent during the round, instead refer to the speech, arg, or if you must refer to the debater saying "the neg" or "the aff" will suffice.

Will I vote on death good, spark, wipeout, etc? Yes, Happily. Anything else is cowardice.

I feel as though I'm often read as a K judge - my voting record probably doesn't really reflect this to the extend one might expect. I tend to vote on extinction first a lot. I get annoyed at K args often in LD due to lack of explanation and relying on overarching claims with little to not actual debating of the aff.

Longer thoughts on things -- Updated Feb 2024

Every arg in debate is either defense or offense. At the end of the day, the team with the most winning offense wins any debate, so make your offense clear. offense, offense, offense.

K - I'm K competent, explain your thing. If you can't explain your thing I dont want to fill in the gaps for you so I'm not going to. I think LDers often don't enough framing with the K and just kind of have floating links and vague impacts, a coherent framework component to the 2nr solves a lot of this.

I've engaged and read a lot of the debate K literature, my personal interests as far as readings go should not influence what you go for. Pomo, Identity, etc (whatever arbitrary category you prefer) are all on the table. My personal interests as far as "critical" literature go are Queer Theory, Psychoanalysis, and Marxism. I am probably familiar enough with your literature to have thoughts on it and not be in the dark no matter what you read.

Very low threshold on some procedural arguments (misgendering, evidence uses racist language, etc) - If debaters did a bad thing that I notice it will likely sway how I end up viewing arguments across other flows unconsciously anyways. Don't be afraid to go for "people doing bad things is bad and its a reason to reject." I'm pretty easily convinced if there is an actual violation

K Affs -- it helps a lot if they are tied into the resolution in some way as far as answering framework goes, but I dont think there by default needs to be a need for this. If you are going for a counter model that actually maybe solves things do that, if you want to just go for impact turns do that. As far as performance goes I find myself not really every doing more than writing "poem" on my 1AC flow and it never being brought up again. Performance should probably be tied into the whole speech act and not just "look I read a thing"

I have been cutting more k-affs recently and understand their strategic appeal and value -- I like it when teams pull out the k tricks when their aff instead of relying on more pathos leaning explanation. Solve an impact.

Framework vs K Affs -- I think a lot about framework debates and have become mostly opinionless on them. I find these debates conceptually really interesting but I'm not sure how much of that can ever be drawn out in LD. Do things with framework besides "limits good!" and engage the aff more. This debate in LD I think is very skewed negative.

Policy Affs vs K -- I end up tapping out on extinction first a lot, but this is mainly due to lack of impact framing or weighing by the negative. If you are doing a framework push in the 1ar/2ar you need to implicate what winning it gets you/ why the links dont matter anymore etc on a substance level. I often find perm explanations from policy affs very lacking, I'd much rather judge an impact turn to the K than a nonsensical perm 2ar. How affs win this debate is by having offense on the the K at some substantive level (links, alt, impacts, not broad issues of "fairness"). Negs should be turning the aff in some way or interact on some level with the aff outside of "there is a link, moving on to impact." otherwise I'm left just evaluating between 2nr impact rambling versus 2ar impact weighing.

Phil - Yes. I have cut phil affs of all varieties and read a lot of them in highschool (Rawls, Contractualism, Scanlon, Virtue Ethics, Kant, even a little Schopenhauer)

I've cut and prepped induction fails, Trinity goes for no free will and we live in a simulation. I rock with a lot of these arguments. I think teams are pretty bad at answering them. do with that what you will. I don't think any of these arguments require truth testing framework to win.

Make it so I either negate or CAN'T affirm the resolution with offense of why affirming would be bad or impossible then you will probably be in a good spot -- Just make sure its CLEAR and an actually strategy and not paired with like 20 other tricks and triggers -- If it's your winning arg, make it win the 2nr and GO for it

Policy Args - Yes they are good. Functionally and Textually compete, explain things. I don't go for or extend these things very often, but I promise I will follow whatever you do. Don't be afraid to go for a CP DA. There's isnt much to say about DAs -- Have uq, a link, have an internal link, have an impact; do that and youre golden

I find a lot of cards about China to be kind of ridiculously racist at points. Policy teams please point this out more.

T - LDers please read an interp with definitions of the resolution words, I'm not a fan of people just saying "grammar" or basing the interp on vague vibes the aff maybe did something bad (Nebel). I try not to hold on to many defaults on T because I think debate about meta level questions should be largely up the debaters. Counter-interps should be extended, they should have standards, and they need reasons why they are good (I dont really care what the reason for it being good is, just make sure you answer the opponents args, otherwise T interps become two ships in the night).

WEIGH WEIGH WEIGH

RVIs on T is an arg I think is foundationally silly -- you dont get to win for following norms. However, drop or undercovered args are undercovered args, go for them if you must.

Theory - Most theory read I find pedantic and rarely a reason to DTD instead of DTA (except condo). Lean neg on condo in LD but very open to it being read. Strong tendency to not vote for AFC, ACC, Colt, TJFs, etc.

Probably not the judge if your A strat is 1AR theory restarts, but I will vote on it I just likely won't be very happy. These debates just end up becoming theory overview 2ars which become very intervention heavy to evaluate.

Disclosure is weird, I don't like voting on specific kinds of disclosure (open source, first three last three, etc). I think this is distinct from args such as "New affs bad" or "mis-disclosure." I do however think disclosure is a good norm and not very persuaded by a lot of arguments to the contrary -- going for disclosure bad is an uphill battle. I don't like voting on disclosure however, but I do feel like this is a problem easily solved by debaters disclosing so my sympathy only goes so far.

Speaker Points -

Every time I enter speaker points it is basically a number randomly generated from my head. I don't have a system for this nor plan to make one. I will give speaks on the vibes, but I tend to hover around high 28 to low 29 for doing an okay/good job.

I've found out I am not a fan of highschoolers trying to be funny in speeches and at worst has made me very very uncomfortable in the past. I like snark, I'm no stranger to it and its how I often come across, there is just often a lack of tact in how this is done.

Add me to the email chain:

Zubiazahidd@gmail.com

I'm a novice college debater at University of Houston. I'm fine with whatever argument you want to run as long as you give some judge instruction.