Crossan,+Ben

Ben Crossan

Debated for four years in high school in the NYUDL Debated for five years in college for SUNY Buffalo, SUNY Binghamton and finally Towson.

I used to have a long section about school (which I hope everyone still agrees is the devil) and then a lot of blah blah blah about "specific" stuff, but I think my sentiments can be less boringly summarized with this:

It would be nice if you had some sort of conception going into the round about why whatever the hell you're talking about is worthwhile or useful to talk about/learn about/debate about.

Absent that, do you and I'll enter into the same zeal of oblivious gamespersonship during my adjudication that you did in your debating.

Also, __**New Stuff**__

Stop debating like a robot. Seriously, stop it. Communication and persuasion mean obliterating the distance between you and the judge such that they are torn away from their disinterested state of quasi-contempt for how boring you are. Objectivity is a cheap trick we keep trying to convince ourselves of when almost every decision is made more or less immediately after the 2AR finishes and the next half hour is used to establish a defense of that decision as opposed to actually make one. That also probably means you should go slower for emphasis and inflection, it would be really cool if I could actually hear what the text of your cards said. Also I'm going to be honest, my flowing is like, eh. I think I have a good ear for stuff, but to listen to your debate and then be focused on condensing what you just said into nuggets of summary all while making sure to not miss the next thing you said is hard if you're going super fast in a monotone punctuated by desperate gasps for air. That doesn't mean you have to speak like you're having a normal conversation, it just means you should slow down in general, try to actually be persuasive instead of win on flow math, since math is boring, and also the devil. If you're not excited about what you have to say I think you're doing it wrong. For me that's actually more true of the 1AC and 1NC than the rebuttals. Otherwise it's kinda like [|this].

This is //especially// true in the morning. Look, debate starts too early. I think that's true whether you're an actual competitor or not, but especially for coaches and judges who don't have to wake up at 6 a.m. or earlier as part of their day jobs and who don't really have an incentive to go to sleep at a reasonable hour. So if you get me in the morning, my name is not Ben Crossan, it's Chev Chelios, except I don't have any readily available sources of high voltage electricity or adrenaline. I only have your debate that I'm about to watch. Please don't let me die.

Finally, I feel really uncomfortable with the truth v. tech situation in debate developing to the extent where dropped solitary claims = true arguments. If "explain " is a prompt on a pop quiz that has a 2 sentence minimum requirement and I would get a failing grade on that pop quiz, I feel comfortable disregarding that argument. Prime example: "They say white supremacist exclusion is bad, but they exclude our ability to talk about hegemony being good, which means they exclude //**us**//, therefore they turn themselves". Yeh, [|no].