Ho,+Daniel


 * Experience:** 2 years national~ circuit policy, some LD. No guarantee for actually being good though.

My paradigm is excellent. English are not well.
 * General judging paradigm:**

Speed: is okay, be clear and actually make an attempt to look up from the paper every once in a while. I can flow at relatively high speed but not as fast as some people can go at the higher levels. I feel that there are some national top tier teams that go faster than anyone I've ever heard before in my life and are still very very clear and make an effort to allow people to understand every word, and some teams that go fast for the sake of sacrificing clarity for the sake of winning a round that way. Make sure tags are eminently hearable in your speech and that anything you deem to be very very important not be said at obscenely high speeds. If you start off a 2ac with a topicality block at 500wpm and no warning, there's a decently high chance of it being misinterpreted. I especially think that theory and procedural things do not need to be read at insane speeds as it's inherently harder to flow than regular carded evidence and is generally of paramount importance.
 * General Points:**

Cheating/unsavoury behaviour: Strictly no cheating. I think I've recently been partial to just stopping a round and dropping a team straight up for clipping cards or doing other forms of outright cheating if I catch them. Stealing prep is also incredibly sketchy but is a little easier to police. Flashing files does take a while and if you take an excessively long time to press like 4 buttons on your laptop, I will probably start penalising you for time, but otherwise I would not take time off for flashing. Prep stops as soon as you save the file and pull the drive out of your computer. Work as a team, there's no reason why the guy about to give the 2AC should also be the guy saving and giving the file to the other team, you can stand up and start to give the speech while your partner is handing the drive over. Speaker points will be penalised for sketchy behaviour so try not to do it :) I don't claim to know everything (and I really really don't), but please don't lie and fabricate evidence or make up wild claims. If someone catches you on this it'll be pretty bad. Getting away with lying might win you a round, but is bad in pretty much every way aside from the final result of the round. Debate is a process based educational activity, not a result based activity.

Presentation: Try to be as civil as possible while debating. It's nice to be nice! There's no reason to be mean in a round, debate should be a place where you can make relationships and develop good interpersonal skills!! For other things: you can sit anywhere you want, give a speech any way you want and largely do anything you want. I don't mind if you want to take a jacket off or take your shoes off or anything and I'm not partial to taking speaks away from dumb things like not having the right shoes on. Be comfortable! No yelling, throwing things or abusive behaviour. Don't be mean and everything will be good! Tagteam cx is okay.

I can pretend like I understand the K, but make sure you explain it on both the critical level and explain your framework. If you run it and don't explain it well, don't expect much of a saving grace. Don't expect all of your judges to have read really esoteric postmodern philosophy, and I'm kind out of touch personally with political philosophy and more advanced abstract political science, so if you think it's going to be a little confusing, make sure to explain it well. I try to keep up to date with most things though, so feel free to run whatever kind of argument you want. Running theory blocks and T at super high speed and relying on the other team to drop it it a really, really bad idea and most judges (me included) will not look kindly upon it. Tech is undoubtedly important, but saying that education is the most important thing in the round and winning on 5 minutes of incomprehensible T is such a ridiculous contradiction that I don't know how people can vote on that and feel good about themselves. There's so much good policy ground and I love a good counterplan round. Default to competing interpretations on T/theory but I think reasonability is underused as a response to random Ts in the 1nc. Not convinced that potential abuse is a voter but recently I've been more convinced by the use of T as an argument that shapes future debate rounds. Absolutely do **NOT** read dumb arguments like timecube and ashtar and stuff. It's not educational.
 * Argumentative preferences:**

I enjoy humour, wit, intelligent and incisive comments. People say I'm way too relaxed in round, which is true.