Menzies,+Ben

Last edited 1/17 See tabroom for a better version

Short version: I’m middle of the road, willing to listen to anything, and conscious of biases that I also try to keep at arms length. I’m a senior debating policy at Whitman College, so you know I’m into those DAs and CPs. I do/did a lot of thinking and reading about “non-policy” modes of debate though, both in my academic life and in my high school debate career. I like contextualized analysis and am much more happy with a few good cards deployed well than a mountain of single-sentence cards extended in a list at the bottom of your speech. Be competitive, be smart, but shake hands and be nice at the end of the debate. Condescension to opponents, especially inexperienced opponents, will be punished with poor speaks. Also, in case you can’t tell from the novel below, I think long thoughts and will probably have quite a bit to say at the end of the debate – feel free to cut me off if you need to go.

Standard high school things I forgot were issues: tag team CX is fine, but I think it's a problem when one partner does all the talking. Speed is fine. I flow extensively. The most important factor in my ballot is typically which team gives me a weighing mechanism in the final rebuttal that facilitates impact comparison. I think impacts are the most important aspect of debate, and think most rounds are determined by who has extended external offense and impact defense. I have now judged seven rounds on the Latin America topic at the Whitman hs tournament, with a split of 4 aff to 3 neg ballots.

Paperless things - It always irritated me when judges timed jumping the speech as prep time or generally acted like paperless wasted more time than paper. In my experience, when done correctly, paperless is significantly more efficient than paper debating. Therefore, my default is to stop prep when you announce to me that you are jumping the speech or whatever. That said, if you are taking forever, I might institute more stringent requirements or dock you a little prep - after all, ballots have deadlines and time wasted during the round is time that I can't spend rendering a careful decision or discussing the round with you. **__I also have a huge problem with stealing prep - it irritates the living shit out of me.__** I've struggled with how to communicate my displeasure about this, and I think I have found a system. If you are talking or writing while a timer isn't running (speech, prep, or CX), I will ask you if you need prep as a warning. You get 2 of these warnings. **After your warnings are used up, I start a timer when I see prep stealing occurring and every second stolen equals a tenth of a speaker point reduction.** I will probably also look extra-super grumpy and make irritated sounds while this happens. I think this is a slightly draconian measure, but prep stealing is one of the only methods of cheating in debate, and it is HUGELY disrespectful to your opponents and me.


 * Speaks** Typically I operate on a scale of 26-29, with 29+ points awarded for people I think should be locks for top 15 speakers at a major tournament (Cal, Harvard, USC, etc) and below 27 reserved for younger debaters with substantial progress to be made on both technical and stylistic fronts. I would guess that my average is something like 27.9. This scale will be different for JV/Novice divisions - I would probably use 28+ for debaters I think display significant promise already and could probably hang in an open division round without being blown out. I am willing to discuss your points with you in the postround if you want, although most people have not taken me up on this.

Contact me at menziebr@whitman.edu if you want help on going to Whitman, debating in college (anywhere) or just generally want to talk about debate or making it to college.

Debates I am most qualified/happy to be judging based on 2NR strat: Case/DA CP/DA Case/K T K alone (...) Bataille

Couple quotes that illustrate my perspective –
 * “I believe I have an obligation to work as hard at judging as the debaters do preparing for the debates.” – Scott Harris** – in other words, I’m gonna read a lot of cards and I’m going to think a lot of thoughts


 * “When you go for everything, you get nothing.” – Stephen Goldberg** – debate is a game of strategic choices – the best way to play it is to make conscious, intelligent choices that put you in a better position to win the debate. I give speaker points that reflect whether I think you did that or not.

Also if you aren't treating CX like a speech you're doing it wrong. CX time is the most precious resource in a debate round, yet it frequently goes underused. Prepare for it, use it to set up your speech's arguments, use all of it (duh), and have a damn point to your questions. I think CX is probably the biggest factor in how I award points and it exercises a huge influence over how I evaluate evidence or arguments.

__**Long version:**__ Debate, for me, has been a space for extraordinary diversity of thought, and has allowed me tremendous space to bounce all over the place in the past seven years. I think my primary responsibility as a critic (not a judge) to help you in whatever way I can regardless of where you are locating yourself within that space. My vision for debate is a space in which hard work necessarily results in success, despite natural ability and material inequalities. As such, I tend to reward teams with specific, contextualized arguments backed by rigorous research and deployed responsively against opposing arguments. I think judges who say they are “tab” are lying to themselves and to you, so I will not claim to be that – see below for specific argumentative proclivities – but I also think that it is my obligation to work as hard as possible to hear your arguments fairly. That means I’ll listen to any strategy – K, policy, something irreducible to such labels – and will work very hard to give you a constructive critique. I sympathize with one iteration of James Stevenson’s philosophy: “I aim to be the most middle-of-the-road judge ever”; however, I also am limited simply by what I find persuasive.


 * Members of the community who I particularly admired** and thus have exercised significant influence over the development of my perspective(s) on debate (in no particular order): Lindsay VanLuvanee, Alex Zendeh, Allison Humble, James Stevenson, Ryan Wash, Sam Allen, Meghan Hughes, Matt Schissler, Nate Cohn, Ben Meiches, Stephen Goldberg, Jimi Durkee, Aaron Hardy, Tom Meagher. I hope to add many more to this list. Inclusion on this list does not mean that I agree with everything this person things - in fact I have some very serious disagreements with a number of these people on philosophical grounds, but each person there has contributed significantly to my understanding of debate. Note that the above list would produce a very interesting squad…


 * My background**: I debated for three years in high school on the California circuit (Long Beach, USC, Cal, Stanford, Berkeley, usually a few more in there) at Nevada Union HS. We were a rural, public high school and as such encountered a LOT of difficulties in terms of resource disparities. We were lucky enough to be somewhat proximate to a lot of good debate (only an eight hour drive to LA!). The team also basically fell apart shortly before I joined. As a result, the vast majority of my time in high school was spent doing team-building things (teaching, fundraising, recruiting etc) as opposed to “debate” things. Most of this time was spent moving further towards the “critical” side of the policy/critical divide – my senior year, I read narratives about Hmong veterans on the aff and talked about Chaloupka and decoloniality (word to Tom Meagher) a lot on the neg. Then I got a massive need-based scholarship to go to Whitman and got shafted by a lot of state schools, which sort of changed my argumentative toolbox. I spent a lot of time early in college learning how to do “traditional” debate with Aaron Hardy and had a somewhat radical pendulum swing towards the “policy” stuff. At Whitman, I’ve also studied a lot of humanities – I’m a Religion major in a department headed by a brilliant Gender Studies scholar who specializes in Queer Studies, if that gives you a picture for the kind of work we do. As a result, I’m very comfortable with the general theoretical framework of “critical” arguments (even if I am a bit of a materialist at heart). I’ll also take this moment to note that while I do still have some of that “rural, poor, small, public school kid” chip on my shoulder, there’s a lot of privilege embedded in the above background, and personally, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to acknowledge that privilege without letting it entirely determine my thought and practice.


 * In the last couple years, I’ve settled somewhat in the middle** if I had to peg my ideology: I have a lot of respect for what some “critical” teams do (Emporia SW was obviously one of the best teams ever, for instance), and think the K is a strategic tool much like anything else, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I found the incommensurability of impacts in these debates somewhat difficult to evaluate, leaving me in an awkward position as a critic. I’ll confess: I like extinction impacts because I think they create a somewhat stable locus of impact comparison, but I’m also pretty soundly persuaded that they tend to obviate other forms of violence that have “probability” and “timeframe” metrics through the roof.


 * “Framework” (whatever this is)**. I think the framework debate is becoming kind of a vestigial component of K debates, which is unfortunate. While I am almost entirely unpersuaded by the 2AC framework that says Ks are cheating, I also think some discussion of “framework” is necessary to determine how I, the critic, should evaluate new, different frames of analysis. IE – if the 1NC says your ontology is bad, you definitely need some reason why the 1AC should matter at all as a matter of ontology. At the same time, if your K is about ontology, you really should defend why an ontological focus is necessary. The basic utility of this argument, then, for the K on the neg is to “frame out” aff impacts, and for the aff, to develop a reason why I should evaluate the 1AC.
 * My perspective on this changes significantly when there is a K aff**. K affs are cool. However, a necessary cost is defending your relationship to the topic, whatever that is. I honestly don’t understand the snide dismissal of framework/T in these debates these days – it seems like a central question of the affirmative’s “mechanism” much like a plan in a more traditional debate, and thus seems an important argument to forward by the negative. I think “T version of your aff” is often devastating, and affs should be very diligent about answering it. I also think that negatives are best served by establishing an interpretation of debate that grants some space for “non-traditional” argumentation while preserving some locus of negative debates. I am also somewhat alarmed by a growth in affs that I find fundamentally un-negatable – I am deeply troubled by the prospect of compelling a negative to make arguments against a person’s identity, for instance, or forcing that same negative to discuss their identity if they do not wish to. But of course, like all things, that perspective is wrapped up in some privilege. K affs – if you don’t derive any advantage from the plan action, why read a plan text? If you’re only garnering solvency from your critical genealogy (or whatever), having a text probably only hurts you by creating space for the neg to out-radical you.


 * Affirmative thoughts:** I’ve spent most of my time in debate writing affirmatives. As such, I appreciate well-constructed affs. A good aff is much like a good article – there is a coherent purpose to each part of the aff. Furthermore, the best affs begin as responses to the best negative arguments on the topic. Thus, on the college topic, the best 1ACs contain embedded DAs to the XO counterplan. The worst affs are a bunch of random impacts strung together loosely, and these are usually defeated by intelligent counterplans. Most affs depend on fairly tenuous internal links – I reward negatives that are able to pull those apart. You don’t need cards to make case args – nothing is more devastating for a 2A than a 1NC that contains significant quantities of smart analytics against the case. Cards against the case are good though. I think a neg that doesn’t answer the aff will lose 95% of its rounds – that can mean either adequately extending defense to the case directly or a well-argued counterplan that negates the strategic benefit of the 1AC, but one way or another, that case is likely big and scary and quite persuasive to me if you aren’t challenging it.


 * Theory** – here are my biases. First, as noted above, my least favorite kinds of debates are debates between blocks written by somebody else. Theory tends to be the epitome of that. I tend to think theoretical challenges are no-cost, small reward options, and therefore will not punish you for them, but I am probably zoning out while you read your crappy shell. You probably don’t need ten standards on your conditionality violation. Interpretations are useful and make debates easier to adjudicate. I am a 2A and therefore probably somewhat aff-biased on question of cheating counterplans (I am usually not fond of CPs that just steal the whole aff, although they are also often strategic necessities), but I am also a 1N which means I am also friendly to neg claims making fun of “abuse.” The best way to get my ballot on this is to set up an intelligent, coherent, and short violation early in the debate, have offense for your interpretation, and spend a lot of time in the final rebuttals doing impact calc. I recommend you only do this if they have made a serious, round-losing error, like dropping the argument. I’ll close with a thought from James Stevenson that largely sums up my feelings: “I no longer flow answers to theory arguments, I just write "hard debate is good debate" and move on.”


 * “The K”: __If all you are looking for is whether I will listen – yes.__** That said, I’ve had a long and complex relationship with the K. I’ve used it to effectively demolish some teams by being crafty and working hard. I’ve also had it used against me in ways that I think sidestepped the importance of hard work in favor of obscure philosophical terms. I think the K is at its best when it is paired with a heavy case press to disprove the truth claims of the 1AC. It is at its second-best when effectively deployed to criticize a critical aff’s methodology. It is at its worst when it is the McWhorter card and the Zimmerman card in the 1NC, and the block fails to mention the aff. The K is powerful because it offers alternative theoretical understandings of the 1AC – those NECESSITATE contextualization. Your overview written in August is likely not directly applicable to the round at hand – so don’t read it verbatim. The best K debaters are those who are most flexible against the affirmative – applying their genero Burke evidence to the ways the 1AC constructs a violent ontology SPECIFICALLY (as opposed to “They said states do stuff = genocide”). I confess, my “Ivory Tower Bullshit” alarm starts going off the more cards read by abstract European intellectuals – Heidegger, Baudrillard, Derrida, Lacan, and Bataille, are all individuals I find entirely boring (but occasionally useful). I’ve rolled with many a standard cap K in my day and am very comfortable with that literature. In the right context, I think Nietzsche is slayer and I have read a lot of Nietzsche in my day. I am generally on board and quite familiar with critiques of oppressive systems – I have a ton of background in gender studies, and quite a lot of background in various strains of critical race theory (and its more contemporary iterations). The #1 problem with critiques is the alternative – the more the aff indicts it and impacts their indictments of it, the more likely the aff is to win. I am generally uncompelled by “the K is cheating” but some component of framework is necessary – see above. Analytics > cards 99% of the time in these debates – in fact, I am generally inclined that cards are not necessary for critique debates (although you should probably still read some).


 * DAs** – these exist and I frequently vote on them. Topic DAs are always better than politics DAs. The politics DA is basically on dialysis given the political dynamics of the Obama Administration, but I have seen it occasionally revived. Smart analytics are sometimes (often?) better than cards. I’m generally a “low risk = some risk” kind of guy, but can be persuaded otherwise.


 * Counterplans** – they’re important. I’m an aff guy and am therefore sympathetic to the aff’s case when you read a stupid/cheating cp that is generic to the topic. I am particularly hostile to cps that result in the entirety of the aff by some currently-nonexistent system – for instance, a counterplan creating a commission that will recommend the plan be done whose recommendation enters into law after a certain amount of time. The dumber your cp evidence, the more weight I will grant to aff analytics indicting the cp. I’m persuaded that the SQ is always a logical option, but I sure would feel uncomfortable kicking the CP and voting neg after a 2NR/2AR where these words were never uttered. Don’t interpret the above as meaning I’m anti-CP – you gotta do what you gotta do, and I anticipate what you do will probably be fine. Textual competition is a gold standard probably, but again, you should debate it.


 * T** – eh. See theory above. Debate it like a disad – don’t forget that even T debates are about impacts, NOT links – ie – if you just repeat your violation a million times without telling me the impact, I will likely not be that compelled. This seems like a pretty easy topic to be topical under. Probably should not be your A strat. Then again, if they aren’t topic, probably no excuse. T version of your aff is highly compelling.

And, as we all-too-often forget in this activity of stress and anger - have fun doing whatever it is you do. If it isn't fulfilling you, find a way to make it fulfilling. This community should be a welcoming place where people come to think and talk about important things in a setting that allows them freedom to develop their own perspectives while engaging in friendly competition.