Henson,+Chad

=**C. Chad Henson - Independent**=


 * Events:** NDT/CEDA, LD, CX
 * Debates Judged:** Passed 1250 in 2007 and stopped counting.
 * Research:** [].
 * Education:** BA (Communication Studies), University of North Texas; MS (Finance), University of Illinois; JD, University of Illinois
 * Coaching Experience:** Formerly head debate coach at University of Illinois and Washington University in St. Louis, LD debate coach at Loyola Blakefield HS, and private coach for national circuit competitors.
 * Debate Experience:** High school LD at Arlington Lamar (c/o 2002), NDT/CEDA at Towson University and University of North Texas.

SHORT VERSION
I like to judge. Speed is fine. I'll tell you if you're too fast or too unclear. You can do anything you can defend. I vote exclusively on arguments presented in the round to the extent possible. I have virtually no threshold on anything. Competing interpretations is the general rule. Your advocacy is either the entire resolution or some subset thereof that you specify in your first speech, and affirmatives get substantial leeway to specify that subset (e.g., "plans" or conditional advocacies).. Fairness and education are important, with fairness being my foremost concern as a judge unless told otherwise. I used to be considered very friendly to kritiks and theory because they tend to get evaluated first and I don't hesitate to pull the trigger, though I do not myself consider them to be privileged arguments of any sort. I love big clash/throwdown debate, and my favorite debates are technical, evidence-heavy debates that boil down to "X Good/Bad" whether X is Capitalism (Ks), Hegemony (traditional), Gaming (paradigm theory), or Competing Interpretations (theory).

SHOULD YOU STRIKE ME?
I do not have any conscious regional or circuit biases and am open to all forms of debate as long as people defend it. I care very little about circuit politics, except for a strong desire to be kept out of it. I'm not the most technically skilled judge anymore, since I only judge a few tournaments a year, but I'm still better than average on the high school national circuit for LD and only a little below average for high school national circuit CX, so I'm probably not a strike on competence grounds except at very good NDT/CEDA college tournaments. But you might still want to strike me if the following describe you: 1. You engage in highly questionable practices with respect to evidence without disclosing them to your opponent. 2. You would be traumatized by your opponent vigorously disagreeing with you, and/or believe that there exists a statement in your case that you should not have to defend against another person defending its polar opposite. **I mean this.** If your entire identity centers around your project to eradicate sexism from debate and you would be disturbed, offended, and feel devalued if your opponent chooses to answer this strategy with "sexism good" rather than the typical defensive spread and half-hearted efforts at link turns, save all three of us an unpleasant encounter and use one of your strikes. Project debate is fine. Personally caring about your positions is fine. If you take this into a DEBATE ROUND and are then somehow shocked and saddened when someone disagrees with you in order to get a win, you just ruin the fun for everybody, including me. Debate arguments are just that: debate arguments, made or not made for the sake of obtaining a win in a competitive forum. If you can't handle it, your psychic trauma is your problem, not your opponent's.

=BACKGROUND= I’ll evaluate arguments like you tell me to. Don’t assume I’ve read the literature; I don't coach or construct cases, so I don't have to do as much reading. I’ll vote for any argument I understand at the end of the round, but will listen to arguments telling me not to vote for anything I didn’t understand at the end of the constructive speech. If that’s what you want, tell me so and justify it.

Debate is debate as far as I'm concerned, but debate theory is located in community norms and the structures of the competition. For that reason, I have slightly different theory norms in LD/Policy. I'll try to specify those. I have no problem with policy arguments in LD. I think the two events have a lot to learn from each other and always have. However, if you use policy debate terminology and speak at speeds associated with that event, please be aware that I’ll flow you like that event and you will be expected to do things like enumerate your arguments and not extend blippy pseudo-warrants out of the middle of cards.

Everything below assumes that there is no reason advanced in round to discard one of these propositions. That means that these are my default evaluations until someone advances a reason to use some other method to evaluate arguments. For the cutting/altering evidence section, you actually have to convince me your practice is reasonable. Everything else is competing interpretations unless otherwise specified.

**SPECIAL STANDARD REGARDING THEORY IN LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATE**
You should probably read the theory section below to avoid taking the following statement too much out of context: Negative-side bias is the most pervasive problem with the activity right now. Keep that in mind when fairness is your voter. Just sayin'...

**THEME, WHAT I LIKE, & WHAT I DON'T**
**Debate is a game**, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important, as anyone who has seen a European soccer match can attest. It’s probably good to have lots of participation, for the game to be fair, for all of us to do lots of in-depth research and be educated (either in the round or outside of it), etc. My **ideal debate round is decided on philosophical clashes** - whether debate philosophy (e.g. **paradigm theory**) or what is more commonly seen as philosophy (e.g. **moral theory**). I love to see good **technical debate, direct clash, positional cases, and interesting arguments**. Debates that involve substantial conflict over policy or philosophical issues are particularly fun to judge. Don’t be afraid to take positions that others would find offensive; I won’t think you actually believe that nuking the Middle East, FGM, racism, sexism, homophobia, or whatever else is good just because you argue that it is in a debate round. To the contrary, I consider **the successful defense of a difficult position to be something judges should reward with speaker points**. Please consider this a blank check to run arguments like Malthus, **Objectivism**, white-is-right, west-is-best, Spark, "genocide good," **Sowell**, and other similar arguments. I reward debaters with **comprehensive strategic positions**. This means T/K or CP/DA strats where the individual arguments fit into an integrated position. The earlier you indicate what you’re going for, the happier I will be. **Impact evaluation** makes my decision less arbitrary, so I feel better if there’s lots of impact analysis.

The easiest way to annoy me is to make me try to figure out which one of two virtually indistinguishable positions is farther left (best subverts capitalism, causes me to re-think race or gender relations, etc.). Multiple conditional advocacies are a pet peeve. I am convinced that they are illegitimate strategies that are not doing anything to improve the fairness of debate (especially in LD) and do a great deal of harm educationally. **Blippy theory is probably my biggest dislike.** This is closely followed by debaters reading continental philosophy at speeds that make it indecipherable, if it's not already. Psychologists abandoned Freud decades ago; I don't know why philosophers won't.

==**THE CRAZY CASE YOUR COACH SAID WOULD BE A GOOD IDEA TO RUN IN FRONT OF ME** == Your coach is right, in two senses. First, I love off-the-wall strategies that challenge basic assumptions that most of us make about the nature of debate (or life). Second, I have not yet heard of any strategy that I absolutely would not consider voting for under any circumstances, and generally think the only thing worse than a stupid debate strategy is the inability to beat a stupid debate strategy, so your ability to win is safe even if I hate what you do (though I make no promises about speaks). I have literally voted on "dressing up bad" and "running multiple offcase against an opponent with a sore throat bad" theory arguments, had debaters shed clothes in rounds, and voted for most of the positions I listed in the last section. My debaters have run Louisville-esque performance strategies, read narratives of people scheduled to be executed during the debate round, and advocated launching nuclear attacks on the moon.

The caveat to this is that they need to be strategies I am equipped to evaluate. **I am a critic of argument, not literature**. I can evaluate poetry reading or interpretive dance or storytelling, I suppose, but my standards are probably not the same as yours. If you want me to evaluate something other than the relative strength of arguments, tell me what it is and how to evaluate it. Especially you folks running narratives. I have no problem with narratives if I know how to evaluate them. In the event that I am left with no choice but to evaluate a narrative position with no instruction about how to do so, I will use some version of Fisher's Narrative Paradigm and likely interpret standard debate responses as attacks on the external consistency of the narrative.

**ORDER OF EVALUATION**
An argument that would exclude another argument is evaluated immediately prior to the argument it would exclude unless I’m told otherwise. In-round implications are evaluated prior to out-of-round implications. That means that case debate is after theory on case is after topicality is after T theory is after kritiks/performance is after K theory. I may adjust this depending on the nature of the arguments. If you don’t like that sort of ambiguity, tell me how to evaluate arguments.

**ADVOCACY & PLANS**
Your advocacy **for discourse purposes** is everything you say. You get the advantages and disadvantages of all of it.
 * In policy debate**, the "advocacy" of the affirmative for post-fiat purposes is the plan. If there is no plan text, then the "advocacy" is some specified advocacy statement. If there is no specified advocacy statement, the "advocacy" is the resolution (and I'll assume you're trying to prove the resolution true). If, given the context of the round, I believe that none of these is applicable, your advocacy will just be everything you say. Please specify some narrow advocacy to make my job easier.
 * In Lincoln-Douglas**, the “advocacy” of the affirmative is either the entire resolution or some specific topical statement specified in the 1AC. That means that the AFF doesn't need to advocate the entire resolution as long as they advocate something wholly within the resolution (e.g. a situational AC). The negative must show that I should not endorse the affirmative’s advocacy relative to theirs. If the AFF doesn’t want to defend every example of the resolution (e.g. ALL felons in ALL democratic countries for Nov/Dec 2008), they need to specify what they want to defend in the 1AC (e.g. a category of felons and/or a particular society). The NEG check on random AFF advocacies is topicality, theory (e.g. selecting Moldova is abusive), and generic positions that encompass all advocacies.

**FUNCTION OF THE BALLOT**
Please articulate how you expect my ballot to function. If I’m endorsing your project, tell me why I should do that. If you’re drawing discourse advantages off the AC, tell me that in the 1AC. **My default position in policy** is that I'm saying that your policy is net-beneficial. **In LD, my current default assumption** is that the AFF is saying that the resolution is true, and that one way to test the truth of the evaluative term is empirically. Basically, I evaluate real-world impacts unless I’m told not to or the standards preclude it.

**KRITIKS**
Kritiks consist of three parts: the link (something specific the other party did wrong), the implication (why it's bad), and the alternative. The alternative need not be a specific policy, but should demonstrate that the error the other party committed was demonstratively avoidable in some way. You should be able to point to something in the last speech that should have been different. Most permutations of kritiks aren't particularly legitimate.

**THEORY**
My threshold on theory is the same as my threshold on counterplans, disads, and kritiks: none. Competing interpretations is the rule on theory, though I am not convinced that reasonability is necessarily a bad standard for Lincoln-Douglas, given the side bias. Theory-RVI is a legit argument. It is not my default position, but "Theory is a reverse-voter for fairness and education" is just as legit as the version that omits "reverse." Arguments can be both bad and good (e.g. topicality can be educational and racist). An argument type that is generally beneficial should not be excluded on the basis of theory. Individual arguments within a general type shouldn’t be the subject of theory arguments – they should be the subject of specific Ks.

**TOPICALITY**
My threshold on topicality is the same as my threshold on counterplans, disads, and kritiks: none. Competing interpretations is the rule, except when the affirmative defines terms in the 1AC in Lincoln-Douglas, when any reasonable definition is acceptable. TRVI is a legit argument. See "Theory."