Harris,+Rachelle

Rachelle Harris – Puget Sound Judging Philosophy Background – 2 years high school LD/PF, Student Director and 4 years college NPTE/NPDA parli at CU Boulder, currently coaching at Puget Sound. In general, I view debate as a game that, much like other games, rewards the deployment of the skills you possess in a strategic manner to overcome your opponent. Translation – I think you should do whatever you are best at/want to do in a debate round, whether it’s a CP/politics strat, nothing but case turns, or a K. I don’t have any particular preference on what type of round I want to see. I admit a serious bias toward evaluating things in terms of net-benefits and in a policy-maker framework, but I am certainly willing to hear other things, just explain your shit. I am more than willing to vote on theory/procedural arguments, and in fact like them a lot. I have even been called a T-hack. I especially enjoy well developed theory applied specifically to parli and nuanced T/Spec arguments (that said, I hate hate hate stupid procedural debates, and those that are purely generic). I am willing to vote even on theory arguments that I don’t necessarily agree with, or for positions I may think warrant a theoretical objection. I will default to a competing interpretations framework when evaluating these things, so tell me otherwise if you don’t want me to do so. Please have internal links for your impact stories. Just because I know why most people in debate //say// that X leads to Y does not mean I will do the work to grant you that scenario. You gots to tell me how it happens, b. I appreciate rebuttals that do an effective job of weighing and prioritizing impacts in the round, and that direct me to where I should be voting. It’s been said before, but it’s true that if you leave it up to me to decide where to vote, you might not like the outcome. I also appreciate strategic position selection; you do NOT need to go for every argument every time. Really. I promise. No seriously though, collapse. I’ve found that in close rounds I will pretty reliably vote for whoever makes the debate smallest in their rebuttal. I want to do as little work as possible. Regarding speed of delivery, you’re unlikely to loose me but I suppose I’ll try to make it clear if you are. What I definitely don’t like with regard to speed, however, is “dumping” of line-by-line argumentation without any real analysis behind the arguments. There are some arguments that will take some extra work to get me to vote on, including RVIs on T and “speed bad.” I will also note that I detest the impact calculus of “rape is the worst form of dehum because you can’t be rehumanized afterwards.” I will not be evaluating it if you make that argument in front of me. I also find the argument that running an unconditional counterplan means you can’t go for theory to be patently absurd, and will need a whole lot of justification to vote on it. Please don’t assume I’ve read the author your arguments are based on. I am seriously under-read in most things, especially critical theory, so don’t say “Zizek” and expect me to know what the hell that means. I will try to protect from new args in rebuttals, but you should probably call necessary points of order anyway. Your ability to do this is unique to parli, so take advantage of it. That said, don’t call a billion. Just because you didn’t flow an argument doesn’t mean it’s new. I think there has been a general increase in community awareness concerning the lack of judge access to plan/counterplan/perm texts, and it is something that bothers me as well, so I’ll repeat here what others have said: If you’re going to blow through your texts and give copies to your opponents, give me a copy as well, or at the very least repeat it slowly and make sure I seem to have it. Otherwise don’t be pissed when I don’t have it perfect. Other random things that are true – uniqueness wins debates. You may know that I ran dedev and politics a lot as a debater, but please don’t think that means you must run them (especially poorly) in front of me. My speaker points for most rounds assume a base of 27 and go up from there based largely on strategy and intelligence of arguments. Please feel free to ask me if you have any specific questions. Have fun!!!