Martin,+John

John Martin OPRF 2009-2013 Dartmouth 2013-?

I do not care what arguments you make.
 * Short version:**

I agree with everything Danielle Jennings says. I judged a handful of debates on this topic last summer. I am familiar with none of the core arguments. Work with me. I will try to put as much work into judging as you do into debating. I will try to intervene as little as possible. I try not to call for a lot of evidence. I’ll try to vote only on arguments made in the debate. I will not ignore an argument because it’s morally repulsive or because I strongly disagree with it, etc. The only exception is that I will not vote on an argument I don’t understand, even if the team running that argument appears to be technically ahead. When I do intervene, I find it's usually to ignore arguments that I do not think are sufficiently warranted. Everything written here can be changed by things said in the round. Absolute defense exists. I won’t kick positions for you unless you tell me to. Speaker points have gotten really weird but I'll try to do what other people do. References to The Room or Nicolas Cage movies can only help your speaker points.
 * Less short version:**

This is probably the only important thing I think about debate, in the sense that it could realistically make me decide a round in a way you may not have seen coming.
 * Me rambling about intervention:**

We have this norm that an argument is considered true until it is disproven. And I think people uphold this norm because it makes debates more objective, since in theory it makes it so that you don't have to overcome a judge's predispositions against whatever you're saying. What I like about this is that it gives debate to the debaters - your only obligation is to refute your opponent, without worrying about a huge backdrop of existing beliefs. Also, for better or for worse, debate becomes a more technical activity when you can force something to be true.

This is not a perfect system. Everyone eventually encounters an argument that they do not feel requires refutation; everyone breaks eventually. Ideologues break early, and make only a halfhearted attempt to listen to arguments that aren't in their worldview. For the rest of us, debate is this ongoing game of determining what's good enough, what passes the barest level of scrutiny. Can I, for example, vote on a 1ac without an internal link, even if the negative never points this out? What if there is an internal link, but it's an assertion of causality that doesn't make any sense and has no supporting evidence? What if the causal chain makes sense but is never fully explained? I could do this forever - the point is that we talk a lot about how you need to have a complete argument (claim impact warrant or something), but it's really hard to tell what passes for, say, a warrant, and everyone decides that differently.

I think I break pretty early. I think I vote negative in all those hypotheticals. I believe in something resembling a burden of proof. I have a lot of trouble with large, rhetorically powerful generalizations where it's unclear where the logical chain begins. Debates that begin with, and never question, the assumption that "ALL OF POLITICS IS //X"// feel a bit like starting a book in the middle - I can follow what goes on, but I really wish I knew why this stuff was true. And at that point, a lot of arguments feel a lot like assertions to me, and I often find reasons to vote against them for lack of explanation. If I'm told something is unethical but I'm not told how we're determining what is and isn't ethical, I'm going to be very confused, and I'm probably not going to give your argument as much weight as you expect. I don't have enough data to say this with confidence, but I think I'm a pretty bad judge for Baudrillard, Wilderson, and a lot of versions of framework (I guess it's called T or something) because of this.

If you're not sure how to react to this section, just ignore it and debate as you would. If you're worried your strategy involves getting the opponent to drop a very powerful but barely justified claim, do me a favor and reinvent the wheel a bit on your argument. Just so I can tell your opponent why they lost, not just in terms of dropped arguments, but actual content.