Pilcher,+Max

Max Pilcher Varsity Policy Coach at West Des Moines Valley High School

Debated at Des Moines Roosevelt High School, then did a year of college debate at the University of Iowa. I am now a 3rd year Philosophy and Gender Studies major at Grinnell College and in my second year coaching the Valley debate team.

My email is **maxtp26@gmail.com **. Feel free to contact me at any time for any reason. Talking about debate is one of my favorite things in the world. I **would **please like to be in on email chains, if only for reasons of personal bemusement/curiosity after rounds.

**Things you should know about me/how I judge:**


 * I go by Max, "Pilcher," or "the Pilch."
 * I edit this paradigm a lot. This is mostly because I think about debate a lot. While I'm not currently debating myself, I've judged a high school tournament what feels like every weekend this year, and I like to think of myself as a reasonably actively involved coach and judge in the high school debate community. The consequence of this frequent editing, however, is that the paradigm often becomes bloated, filled with random thoughts on random arguments, and random quotes from random philosophers/rappers. This means that every once and awhile I completely redo the paradigm to get across what I currently find most important.
 * I don't come into the round with the illusion that any particular action in the round will change the world, or debate, or anything. Rather, I think claims about debate's potential are claims about what sort of pedagogy is best for debate.
 * I think debaters are responsible for all of their words, actions, etc. in the round, and that each speech is an example of that team's pedagogy and a part of their overall performance in the debate.
 * While I do try to be //tabula rasa// to a certain extent, like all judges I have my biases, both implicit and explicit. The biggest example of this in framework debates, I rarely (never?) vote for "gotta have a plan." I have gotten quite close at times, so I'm not saying it's impossible, and I try my best to judge these debates objectively, but you should know that I believe that debate should be a space for more pedagogies than just one which is centered around "policy," and that makes this argument fairly unconvincing to me overall. However, I like to think that me voting on FW is still a possibility, but empirically I'm not a very good judge for it.
 * Other presumptions which I have are that racism, sexism, homophobia/transphobia, ableism, and other such violent behavior are not acceptable in debate rounds. This is not something which can be negotiated. I am willing to call you out, and I am willing to drop you. Don't do these things. This also applies to misgendering your opponents. I used to give a speaker point boost to people who asked for pronouns pre-round, but for various reasons I'm removing that. However, I would still appreciate it, and expect debaters to respect their opponent's gender identity.
 * I'm also pretty committed to anti-capitalism, but I guess I can't drop debaters for saying "cap good." However, I do still have a very large soft spot in my heart for the Cap K.
 * <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 1.5;">However, contrary to popular belief, I don't hate "policy" debate. I actually really enjoy the super fast, techy, 7-off-and-case-turns stuff, and wish I judged more of these debates. In high school I won just as many rounds on DA/case as I did the kritik, and I read mostly tricky small policy affs with tons of extinction impacts.
 * <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 1.5;">Going along with the last point, I have a bizarre soft spot for the politics DA. I recognize that it represents debate's flaws taken to their logical extreme, but the accelerationist in me is a fan of that. I love the excess of it and I really do appreciate a good politics debate.
 * <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 1.5;">I will vote on presumption, and, logically, impacts can have zero risk, or at least risk so close to zero it is functionally the same as random noise.
 * <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">The rounds I enjoy the most are the ones where debaters are engaged in their own literature base and are clever enough to make the cross-applications to their opponent's literature base. To give an out-of-left-field example of this (for me), I really enjoyed judging GBS RS last year when they specifically framed their (big stick policy) aff as link turning the security K.
 * <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">I find it highly irritating when debaters lie about or conceal their arguments for pure strategic gain. This mostly applies to K teams who decide that they'd rather win off being slippery and confusing their opponents, instead of, you know, actually debating them. However, this also means, for example, if you read an extinction impact in the 1AC, and your response to the question "what is death?" is "we don't take a stance on that," I will be very amenable to voting negative on presumption. I repeat again, you should be responsible for (almost) everything you do, say, etc. within a round.
 * <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">I think all "roles of the ballot" (including ROB is best policy option) are arbitrary and self-serving, and tell me absolutely nothing. It's cliche, but the role of the ballot is to vote for the team who did the better debating. Past that, I think most claims which people label roles of the ballot are actually just claims about how I should evaluate the debate, and I will default to that interpretation. One implication of this, however, is that saying "role of the ballot is who does the better debating" in response to a "role of the ballot" claim is non-competitive, because when I hear people say RoB I take them to mean "the framework with which you should evaluate the debate." That the actual role of the ballot is to determine the better debater is a given in any debate round (although perhaps arguable) and as such you need an alternative claim as to how I should evaluate the round (preferably supported by argument) that functions on the same level as your opponents "RoB" claim. Similarly, I find many (although not all) iterations of what could be called the "ballot K" utterly nonsensical.
 * <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">Above all, I believe that debate, while incredibly flawed at times, is fun, and is one of the best spaces for the intellectual growth of high schoolers. The more committed you are to your argumentation, and the more you make the debate space enjoyable for all participants, the more you will be rewarded with ballots and speaker points.