Durkee,+James+Donald

James Donald Durkee

Since most of you will stop reading this after I speak to the question of critiques, I guess I’ll start there. This probably isn’t a very good idea if you aren’t very good at debate. Be honest with yourself about this. If you wonder if you fall into this category, feel free to ask me and I’ll tell you. If you know how debate works, like understand that you need offense and that the alternative has to both compete and probably solve at least some of the case, then you might be ok. I actually am pretty familiar with most of the various academic currents that show up in K debates, and I used to only go for the K, but then I stopped being a lazy sack of shit that just throws around buzzwords. You have to make full arguments – claim, warrant, and impact. What this really means is you can probably pref me if you debate the K like a disad/cp and you are good at it, and you probably shouldn’t if you are doing performance/being intentionally vague in the hopes that I’ll turn your 1nc fisting performance into a totally slayer impact turn to the aff in the post round. I assure you I won’t. More likely I’ll tell you that you can save a lot of money on airline tickets if you just stay home and fist yourself.

Outside of that, I will do my best to judge debates based on the arguments presented to me by the debaters in the debate, and will work as much as possible to shelve my ideological positions. In this vein, I think that a full arg consists of a claim, warrant, and impact, and that a dropped argument is probably true. However, if you said “no spillover” in the 2ac, and the block dropped it, you can’t just say “extend no spillover, they dropped it” and think I will give them zero risk of the disad. You have to explain why the impact of your no spillover argument is zero risk. The flipside is that if no spillover wasn’t fully developed in the 2ac, the 2nr gets to answer the 1ar impact calc. I will try to be as consistent with this approach as possible. I won’t vote on stupid cheap shots, and I find that to be entirely consistent with an argument-theory based approach to judging.

However, that is only partially possible for anyone, and so I will now list the tendencies that I have when thinking about debate, with the caveat that my perspective could change on some of these after judging debates –

1.	CP Theory – Probably not the best 2ar choice as long as the neg executes. I think almost all theory arguments are reasons to reject the counterplan not the team, and that the neg doesn’t need an explicit counter-interpretation, just a reasonable standard for why their counterplan is sweet. I personally find most arguments against multi-actors/prongs/international actors/etc. to ultimately buckle to “the counterplan isn’t fair because it solves the case” – in order to win any theory argument the Aff needs to explain why this is not the case.

2.	Topicality – my hunch is that I kinda lean Aff on topicality in most situations. I am not really a fan of stupid contrived topicality arguments. Brett Wallace would win exactly zero debates if I judged him on the neg 100 times. That said, this topic is fucking massive and I could easily be convinced that many of the Affs on the Gonzaga/UNI caselist are untopical.

3.	Counterplan competition – I’m not really sure where I fall on this, and I feel like I could be persuaded about most reasonable things (functional, textual, both?) and not by stupid shit like planplan. I think that this means you should assume that I don’t really understand very well why the consult counterplan does/does not compete, and should budget a little extra speech time if you are running one of these counterplans or if you forgot to cut say no cards and have to go for a permutation.