Thai,+Sean

If you are in a rush and want to know the most important things about me then here is an overview- My favorite debates are ones in which the affirmative defends a fiatted plan text defending the resolution and the negative defends the status quo or a competitive policy option.

I am open to all arguements, so Kritikal debates are fine, but most K debates I have seen are lacking warrants, evidence, and or historical examples. I am fine if there is a clear delineated story for the most part. I mostly evaluate

I will not reject any argument on face so I will listen to kritik debates but most of the high school kritiks debates I have watched have been shallow and lacking warrants so if you wanna do it then do it well just keep in mind my proclivities.

I mostly evaluate through an offense/defense paradigm.

I do believe in terminal defense but I am more likely to vote one way or another if I have some risk of offensive. Please terminalize your impacts and do impact framing in the PMR, and when I say that I don't just mean "we are winning on magnitude probability and timeframe" cause let's be serious, most often you won't be winning all three. I am all about inclusivity within debate so please avoid racist/sexist/discriminatory language in front on me, I won’t immediately drop you over it but I will take out my frustration on your speaker points. I have a similar viewpoint on speed, I am fine with it as long as it is not used as a tool of exclusion, so if you are a higher level team hitting a newbie team, go easy on the speed, you don’t need to spread them out to win the debate.

Overall, just be polite and nice, there is no reason to be rude. As for specific questions Speed- You read my viewpoint on speed above, overall, I am probably an 8-9 on speed as long as you are clear but I request you slow down down a bit on taglines to make my flow a bit easier.

Topicality/Procedurals I view topicality as a search for the best interpretation, determined through the standards debate and I believe that T is a voter unless otherwise convinced. I have a pretty low threshold for topicality and I do not need abuse to vote on topicality or a procedural but I view it as impact magnifier. In general I will default to competing interpretation and however I have recently been more receptive to reasonability when the affirmative is just topical but I absolutely will vote for T if it is mishandled in the 2ac. I personally think you that any good 2ac will have blocked answers to any topicality they hear but in general I think for the aff to effectively respond to T there needs to be a we meet, a counter interpretation, counter standards, responses to the neg's standards and reasons why I should prefer reasonability. Absent these things I think the neg would be well served collapsing to T in the 2nr which is a strategy I whole-heatedly endorse. I am fine with the neg reading T as a strategic time trade-off however I think if you are going to be asking me to vote on T in the 2nr it should be the only thing you are going for, I believe that it is both the most strategic way to bury the 2ar but additionally I think if you are asking me to vote against the affirmative because they have denied you access to the round then asking me to vote on other arguments really seems to indict your credibility. I am not particularly inclined to vote on plan vagueness or specs unless the violation is deliberate and excessive, I think normal means should resolve most of these issues and most specification positions are infinetly regressive.. Theory- I evaluate theory the same as any other procedurals. I think conditionality is generally a good thing but I am willing to vote on condo bad or any other theory position. One area of theory that I have strong feelings on is multiple conditional advocacies, I think these are bad for debate and I am more inclined to vote on this above others but as with anything you have to win that debate.

Kritiks- As a debater, I tend to default more towards traditional style CP/DA strats but I am open to kritiks, just don’t expect me to be familiar with the literature you are citing. I am familiar with most of common kritiks and literature bases but if you start getting into post-modern metaphysical stuff I think you should explain it more than just in tag lines. In evaluating kritiks it will help me immensely if you tell me 1. The framework through which you want me to evaluate it, absent this I will default to a policymaker lens, 2. A specific role of the ballot argument, tell me what my ballot does and how it can change the world. 3. Give me real world examples, don’t just tell me about the hyper real, give me examples in my life and in the real world of how these underlying assumptions affect people. Permutations I view permutations as a test of competition and I think most permutations should have a text if it is anything more than Do Both. When I was in high school I often made the mistake of just reading the perm text then moving on to the next argument, I want you to describe how the permutation works and how it proves the counterplan in not mutually exclusive and resolves the net-benefit to the counterplan. It is especially crucial in kritik debates that you explain to me how the permutation works. I want to be very clear on this for kritik debates, in the 2ac if you just say "Perm Do both" or "Perm do the plan and the alt in all other instances," I don't know what that means or what it looks like in the context of that particular advocacy and I would be very hesitant to allow a lot of new explanation in the 1ar or 2ar. Take the little bit of extra time to explain the argument in context.

Misc- These things may make me seem old school but my views on debate are largely influenced by my experiences on the circuit and in my own competition. If you have problems or questions about any of these viewpoints then feel free to talk to me about them. I debated policy right before the paperless trend really hit so I often find myself annoyed with teams that take excessively long to flash speeches. I’ll allow a few seconds of grace period but I prefer you end prep, hand them the flash drive and start your order. If they have problems accessing the document then your partner can deal with it. I’m fine with partner communication as long as it isn't excessive, so you can give them an argument or stop them from screwing up but I certainly believe that you shouldn't be parroting your partner, I don’t want to spend the whole round sitting in an echo chamber. I currently do parliamentary debate where there is no evidence so when I judge policy I often see people read cards on cards when they could just make a quick logical argument and save a lot of time. I will usually be more persuaded by an explanation of the internal warrants of a card you already read and how it deals with a given argument than just reading more cards and asking me to figure it out. To use a common analogy, a double tap with a sniper rifle worker better than taking the shotgun approach. This is also leads into my opinion that cards don't necessarily win debates, you can have all the cards in the world but if the argument doesn't make sense, you haven't explained a warrant and the other team is making smart analytic arguments as to why it isn't true I am inclined to defer to the smart analytic warrants over blippy cards. Additionally this goes into my opinion that while policy is an evidence based debate I think you need to do the work to in explaining the warrants thus I am not particularly inclined to call for evidence unless there is a question of legitimacy or there is just no other way to rectify the debate. You have over 26 minutes of speaking time, if at the end of the debate I still can't figure out the warrants behind your arguments then I'm not likely to vote for you otherwise both teams might as well have given me their shells and just asked me to determine which I believe is true and we could have saved 2 hours where we could go to Crepe's a gogo. This is not to say I won't still understand and evaluate the arguments as you have presented them; I've both run and heard almost every argument in the playbook at this point and you probably won't surprise me but I would much rather hear a substantive debate rather than a debate full of technical jargon. If you have any questions feel free to ask before the round starts

Things for public forum/LD - I tend to judge policy debates so I public forum can be very frustrating for me when I am trying to evaluate essentially a lot of varying arguments with no impacts. I am also a very firm believer of the trichotomy, and that the types of debate are well-seperated.