Buntin,+Jeff

Jeff Buntin

Northwestern University

Seventh year of judging GSU 2012: updated to reinforce grumpiness about some K things. Should you strike me? If you saw the topic this summer and thought "sweet, time for the Bataille aff," you should strike me. If your 1AC begins with "chapter 1" instead of "advantage 1," you should strike me. If your neg wiki page says "see aff page," or vice-versa, you should strike me. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman',times;">I judged four prelims at UNI - three were about Heidegger and one was about God. If that sounds like the basic distribution of your 2NRs across a tournament, you should strike me. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman',times;">I don't harbor some deep hatred of all things K. I just find that as I get older, I enjoy judging teams who *solely* go for the K less and less. Strike me for your sake as well as mine. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman',times;">I do enjoy watching debates about the K when some baseline conditions are in place. Number one, I find that most of the time, the K is a way to avoid clash and minimize commitment to things that must be defended. If instead, you go for the K because it clashes with the aff, and you're not spending half your speech saying "that's not our Heidegger," then I'm not a bad judge for you. Number two, I enjoy debates that treat the K like a CP/disad debate - the K cannot be an excuse not to be technical, nor an excuse to evade concepts like uniqueness, comparative impact calc, etc. "No value to life" is borderline-completely meaningless to me the vast majority of times it's referenced. Debate the K like a disad - impacts need a unique link to the aff, and then need to actually <span style="font-family: 'times new roman',times;">__be__ <span style="font-family: 'times new roman',times;"> impacts - "epistemology first means vote neg on presumption" is not an impact. Value to life presumptively does not outweigh extinction.

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman',times;">Other than that, old philosophy still applies. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman',times; font-size: small;">Clay 2011 (major revisions)

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman',times; font-size: small;">Cliff notes/most important changes: I’m changing my judging philosophy to make explicitly clear a preference in what debates I like to see that has been increasingly pronounced for me, but that was not clear in my judging philosophy for a while.

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman',times; font-size: small;">I overwhelmingly prefer to judge debates about the policy-related substance of the topic. If your 1AC does not argue that democracy assistance is good/should be expanded, you should strike me. If your 1AC skirts this line, or has a slightly expanded notion of what your plan means, but still goes in the *direction* of the topic, I’m a decent judge for you. If your 1AC explicitly refuses to defend an expansion in democracy assistance, I will certainly give you as fair a hearing as I can – but you should know that from the outset your arguments will be less persuasive to me than those that support a model of debate where the aff defends a topical plan, and the neg responds to that plan.

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman',times; font-size: small;">Spanos knows nothing about debate. Do not expect cards from him about debate to receive a sympathetic ear from me.

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman',times; font-size: small;">K on the neg – interact with the aff well or be overwhelmingly good at not interacting with the aff. Otherwise I’m likely to be pretty lukewarm toward your arg.

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman',times; font-size: small;">Note for RRs - in the unlikely event I replace Fitz as NU's go-to RR judge, I will attempt to judge with as little of my normal K/framework preference in mind as possible (I suppose this would apply in any situation without MPJ).

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman',times; font-size: small;">Theory – I have a high threshold for most aff theory arguments. I think conditionality is generally good, but that it should be guided by germaneness – i.e. I’m fine with the neg reading two CPs that clash with the plan, but would be aff-leaning if the CPs were courts and consult NATO. I’m suspicious of international fiat, but not overwhelmingly.

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman',times; font-size: small;">In the instance of a dropped theory argument – I will vote on it, grudgingly, if the argument contains a warrant that overcomes the presumption of “arg not team”. If the 2AC says “agent CPs are a voting issue because they steal the aff,” the block drops it, the 1AR/2AR say “extend that agent CPs are a voter, they dropped it,” without developing the argument in a way that overcomes arg-not-team, I am unlikely to vote aff.

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman',times; font-size: small;">I am virtually never likely to vote on a cheap shot given minimally competent refutation.

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman',times; font-size: small;">Topicality – it would be very easy to convince me that a large percentage of the affs read at Gonaga/UNI/GSU are not topical. I’m not persuaded by the seemingly wide-held belief that judges should be more lenient on the aff because many people feel there’s not enough quality solvency evidence on this topic.

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman',times; font-size: small;">CP competition – like conditionality, my feelings are guided by germaneness. If the neg has a condition CP that contains an evidenced argument for being functionally competitive and a net-benefit that interacts substantively with the aff, I have a hard time seeing how debate is served by excluding that CP. Any coherent model of opportunity cost seems to require evaluating the benefits of using the plan as leverage vs doing the plan – but it’s up to the neg to establish conclusively that the plan specifically provides that leverage. Conversely, it’s easy for me to see the benefits in excluding the CP that conditions the whole plan on some random actor unimportant to the plan doing something unrelated to the aff.

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman',times; font-size: small;">Reverting to the squo – I won’t do it unless the neg explicitly lays out the conditions in which I should.

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman',times; font-size: small;">Things from the old philosophy that still apply:

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman',times; font-size: small;">-- General decisionmaking process: the first thing I usually think about is which side has advanced a more coherent or compelling framework for deciding: a) which impacts matter, and b) how to assess (i.e., what are the metrics of) who is ahead on those impacts. I feel like way too many final rebuttals are interested more in refuting the exact substance of each single argument made by the other side, and less invested in creating this sort of impact framework. The most dependable way to get me to vote for you is to explicitly introduce a criteria for evaluation and then be clear about why you win within it. This is true in disad & squo vs. case debates, clashes of civilizations, T debates, etc.

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman',times; font-size: small;">-- I'm on the "card-oriented" side of the spectrum. I will read any/all evidence that the final rebuttals deem important in resolving the nexus question of the debate. When I don't call for something that seems important, it's usually because one team did a substantially better job of controlling my interpretation of that card, and I'm trying explicitly to let that debating guide my assessment of the issue in question, rather than something I might subconsciously read into a card. I do not read un-underlined or un-highlighted portions of cards unless explicitly instructed to do so by the other team.

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman',times; font-size: small;">-- Not a member of the cult of uniqueness or of the belief that you always have to have offense to win a position. "Uniqueness determines the direction of the link" makes little sense to me - the link determines the direction of the link. I have no problem, however, abandoning this presumption if you successfully defend an alternate frame.

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman',times; font-size: small;">-- Alternate use time - I love it. Nobody ever asks for it. Shame. I'm all for it if it's unanimous among both teams.

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman',times; font-size: small;">-- Card-cutting ethics - recently when tracking various people's cites I've noticed an increase in the instances where people's cards start/stop in the middle of paragraphs. I think when done intentionally this is an ethical violation near card-clipping in its seriousness. I think that if a team in a debate I were judging could prove that the other team had cut cards that start/end in the middle of paragraphs for the purpose of excluding stuff that changes the author's intent, I would vote against the offending team and probably give them zero points. A murkier instance is where the excluded text is innocuous or irrelevant to the author's argument - I think that's shady, but not necessarily a reason to lose a debate. Ultimately, this relies on a "know it when I see it" test - be aware.

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: 'times new roman',times; font-size: small;">-- Prep time - lots of people seem to be starting to think that dead time is getting out of control. I agree. If you're paperless, your prep time runs until the speech is saved on your jump drive and ready to be transferred. I feel like this is a fair compromise, but if you vehemently disagree you should make your case before the debate, rather than once I've started your prep. Please please be cognizant of dead time in your debates. I would like to both have the maximum time available to render a decision, and to get out of tournament days at a somewhat humane hour. When the 2AR ends 2 hours after the posted start time (which happens way more than it should), that means there was 28 minutes of dead time in that debate. Over an eight-round tournament, that's close to four hours of dead time.