Tambe,+Arjun

__** Arjun Tambe **__ Palos Verdes Peninsula ‘15 Stanford '19 Conflicts: PV Peninsula, La Canada, Dougherty Valley Co-director, San Jose Debate Intensive


 * Hard and Fast Rules **

-You must disclose or give cites to me upon request. -You must make your speech doc during prep time. -You must be willing to flash cases, have a viewing computer, or pass pages. -Card clipping or evidence ethics violations result in a loss-20. If you think your opponent has done either of these things, stop the round for an ethics challenge. -You must have proper cites for your cards (including author name, publication date if available, and source at the least). I will disregard evidence that lacks proper citations. -Please avoid adding brackets to your evidence. I would prefer if you remove them or at least restrict them to tense, punctuation, and offensive language.

-My default is an offense-defense paradigm. Skepticism is defense.
 * General Beliefs**

-I lean against voting on theory and topicality. An "I meet" definitively answers theory, even without offense, and some other responses can do the same. Voting for topicality risks over-punishment, which seems just as bad as allowing a non-topical affirmative, so if the offense on theory is small, the risk of over-punishment seems to outweigh the reasons to vote for theory.

-I will not vote on arguments I did not flow or did not understand. -Argument quality matters, not just the extent to which an argument is answered. Bad arguments are less likely to be true, and dropped arguments aren’t 100% true. Similarly, framework is impact calculus – it makes certain impacts more or less important, not the only impacts that matter.

-Presumption is almost always irrelevant.

-2AR and 2NR impact calculus is not a new argument.

-Many people oddly do not add author quals to their cards in LD, and this could be a good way to scrutinize their evidence.
 * Arguments I Do and Don't Find Persuasive **

// CP/Disad Stuff // -Try or die is fine, but not that persuasive.

// Topicality and Theory // -I lean neg in Framework vs Plan-less aff debates, but end up voting fairly evenly.

-1 conditional advocacy seems okay but I can be persuaded. 2 seems on the fence.

-Education outweighs fairness

// Philosophy // -I do not find the strategy of reading a liberty NC and dropping the aff's claim that the plan will prevent everyone on earth from dying to be persuasive. Such NCs are only persuasive to me when coupled with good case defense.

-A clear explanation of what incorrect assumption your opponent's framework relies on that yours doesn't is far more effective than saying your meta-meta-epistemology "precludes" their arguments.

// Critiques //

-Kritiks/links to the aff’s representations should be part of the debate. -Dense, obtuse evidence for a kritik needs to be interpreted and explained thoroughly enough for it to make sense as an actual argument. I often find the evidence in various postmodernist critiques to be very unpersuasive. -I often find alt solvency to be under-explained by the neg, and not answered well by the aff. -I do not find broad, sweeping "root cause" and other arguments (e.g., "the aff evidence should be distrusted because capitalism corrupts academia") to be persuasive at all, unless they are applied well to the aff. -There is almost always value to life -More critiques should be impact turned. The cap K is a good example.

__Stylistic preferences__ "You can make that argument" is a cop-out, not an answer, to a good CX question. Speaks reflect how well you use CX to make and set up good arguments. With a few exceptions, I find explanations of "how the round breaks down" to be annoying and a waste of time. You do not need to waste a ton of time "extending" your aff card by card if there wasn't case defense.