Coleman,+Chris

Debated at Glenbrook South for 4 years, going to be a freshman at Northwestern University.

Debate is foundationally a dialectical game. There are no fundamental truths and we are always forming new concepts and discarding old ones. This means that everything is up for debate (whether it be the words in the plan text, who gets to define them, whether over-limiting is good or bad, whether hegemony is good or bad, whether death is good or bad, blah blah blah).

That being said, as a debater, it’s an impossible burden to make you justify every single thing you say. However, certain warrants are usually more important in different debates. I try to evaluate debates with a focus on why your warrants matter - there are two parts to this. The first part is “actually having a warrant to support up your claim” part. The second is “impacting” your warrants: why does democrat backlash matter more than the plan appeasing republicans? This is essentially impact calculus and shouldn’t just be limited to the impact debate – you should weigh the importance of your arguments versus theirs. Tell me why your argument is more logical. Tell me why your specific evidence indict matters.

This tends to be important for me in critical debates for both the affirmative and the negative. Why does the plan’s security discourse lead to the complete failure of the aff? Why does the permutation resolve the link arguments? Both sides of K debates have a tendency to drift towards spewing claims without warrants. This is a shame because impacting your claims is crucial here. Alternative solvency should be articulated – if it’s not, why does the alternative not matter?

Of course, there are some fundamental predispositions that all judges have. I try my best to judge from this objective lens but this objectivity is impossible. In high school, I debated both critical and policy arguments. For critiques, I researched and debated everything including but not limited to neoliberalism and capitalism, feminism and security, Chernus, Heidegger and Introna, Deleuze and Guattari, Wilderson, and Baudrillard. I might have some knowledge of things not on this list, but you should debate acting like I do not. The policy list is probably less important to go into detail over - everything from politics to advantage counterplans to PICs is fine.

I don’t really “err” anything for framework debates/no plan teams. I have gone for framework and I have read a no plan aff. I don’t have any theoretical leanings regarding counterplan theory and conditionality. You can convince me a disad is zero risk but this entails more than just saying that the link is small – you would have to make an argument about why change below a certain degree becomes background noise.