| Judge Philosophy: |
As my About Me section suggests, I am familiar with both Policy and public debate. I'd like to evaluate rounds here as closely to how I would for a policy round, but a different format requires some adjustments. Hopefully, I can outline a standard such that this form of debate retains all of the educational value of policy debate while increasing its accessibility.
Firstly, I recommend that you avoid speed reading (Spreading). This site's goal is to bring debate to new audiences by allowing ordinary people to understand them. If you are a good debater, you will be able to have a deep debate within these time and speed constraints. Use it as a last resort, or when your opponent is spreading, and your speaker points will go up.
Similarly, you must avoid debate jargon such as link, perm, etc. This should do nothing but make you think more about what these terms actually mean. Again, there's no brightline to this, but for the sake of this site's success, please explain your arguments as you would to someone who has never done debate. This will make you more successful with the lay judges you might run into anyway.
This format in no way excludes the kritik. Please run Ks. Of course, you need to go into more depth with them to convince the average person. Speeches that sound like they were created by the The Postmodernism Generator are not appealing to me; ones that challenge the foundations upon which the proposition rests and outweighs or even turns case are. The alternative debate is a bit trickier here. It's too early for me to say that alts should be disallowed, but if you run them, you certainly should explain the real world implications of your alternative and defend some level of spill-over. Discourse Ks are probably better here because they link directly to the offender's speech act and can easily supersede the debate itself. You will have to debate out whether or not discourse shapes reality and whether it is a voter. I am not deep into philosophical literature, but I have a shallow understanding of many authors (Ex. Foucault writes about invisible power structures), and that should be enough of a base for you to build on if you explain your K properly.
Topicality-type arguments function differently here than in policy. The role of the proposition is to affirm the resolution. You can propose a plan to prove the resolution. If your opponent wins that you are not topical, that can be enough for you to lose regardless of the fairness and education lost, though these arguments are still important. As such, an abuse story is not necessarily required. I do not believe this format precludes the reasonability vs. competing interpretations debate, to which I default to competing interpretations.
Framework is a slightly different story. Although I have a much lower threshold to vote for framework in this format, if you are impact turning being topical, my above specification doesn't apply. At that point, framework debaters will have to prove that the proposition's method doesn't solve or turns the criticism, that important information was lost, or that the debate was so unfair that it was impossible for you to engage with them (Unpredictability is almost definitely not enough). I believe that kritikal affirmatives need to defend that the resolution is good in the abstract, but how resolving something else is a necessary prerequisite.
Evidence should be used often. If you do great evidence comparison and analysis, I won't have to read your evidence to determine the truth value for myself. In case this doesn't happen, please use the citations box to include all of evidence you read.
Most rounds end up coming down to impact calculus. Give me a sequencing of impacts. Tell me which have a higher magnitude, probability, timeframe, and chance of solvency.
I will not respect you for pandering to my personal beliefs, but in case you'd like to know, I'm an Anarcho-Fascist. |
