King,+Sam

Sam King (email: sam@samking.org -- that's .org, not .com)
 * General Info**

I went to South Eugene High School from 2004-2008 and did policy debate in the national circuit. I went to Stanford for undergrad and for a masters from 2008-2013. While there, I did some debating, and I coached Palo Alto High School. I haven't been consistently involved in debate since 2013, so don't expect me to be intimately familiar with the topic.

I try to be tab, so run whatever you're most comfortable with. I have biases, but I will try to suppress them when evaluating the round. I list my biases below in an attempt to be honest, not because you should do anything to adapt. You will do better debating something that you're comfortable with than something that you think that I like. Most of my biases aren't too significant, anyways.

Also, I developed my general philosophy of debate from listening to Owen Zahorcak, and I learned how to answer the K by listening to Jessica Yeats, and I also agree with a lot of what Calum Matheson and David Heidt have to say, to varying degrees.


 * Arguments I like or dislike:**
 * Any type of argument is fine. As a debater, I had a more or less equal propensity to go for the cap bad k, t / theory, or a case specific pic / sneaky counterplan DA strategy.
 * Don't be afraid of impact turning
 * I love well-run critical affs, case specific pics, counterplans with Ks as net benefits, and good case debate.
 * I think that Ks and performance arguments are interesting, and I'm moderately versed in the literature, but you should be sure to think about how it's relevant for a debate round or in the context of policy analysis.
 * Bad theory debates are boring. Good and innovative theory debates are interesting.
 * Generic "using your agent is bad" das like politics, hollow hope, and prez powers tend to be boring unless they're non-standard or sneaky. So are consult counterplans.
 * Sneaky arguments in general are good if you can defend them.
 * Winning "terminal defense" is hard absent a concession or something that really doesn't link.
 * Gendered language is bad. There is no good offense against the critique of gendered language. I don't understand why any debater ever lets another team that uses gendered language win. If you don't have a gendered language file, then ask me for one or check out [|bit.ly/genderlanguage].


 * General stylistic things:**
 * If you are bigoted, don't expect very many speaker points.
 * Don't be afraid to extend your cheap shot.
 * Argumentative depth is good.
 * Speed is good. However, in the first 30 seconds of your first speech, I probably won't be able to hear you because I'm not used to your voice, so don't start out at your max speed, and don't start out on the theory debate. I probably won't yell clear because I expect you to get clearer anyways. I probably won't yell at you as often as I should.
 * When you're debating, my face is a very transparent reflection of what I think if your arguments. If I look confused, it's because i don't understand your argument. If I'm nodding or waving at you, you have already made your point and should stop beating a dead horse. If I'm looking up and thinking, it probably means that you said something dense that I'm still processing.
 * New Arguments: I was a 1a2n, so I'm fairly critical of new 2ar arguments. I consider an argument in the 2ar new if it isn't on my 1ar flow. For all speeches before the 2ar, I do not care if your argument is new unless the other team tells me to care: since the other team has an opportunity to respond and flag an argument as new, I won't bother looking to verify if it's new.
 * Arguments are new or not new; I'm not sure how it's possible to have a "new cross application." Either the argument was in the previous speech or it wasn't. Everything else is just an artifact of particular styles of flowing, which has little bearing on the legitimacy of an argument.
 * Cross-X: CX can be the most important or least important 3 minutes of the debate. I pay attention to CX, so make the most of it. Be aggressive (but not rude).
 * Debating Theory: recognize that every argument is some combination of disad and advocacy. In theory, the interpretation is an advocacy; the standards/voters are disads. That means that you need impact calculus and that you should use counter interpretations on theory for the same reason you read counterplans. Also, I prefer debates that discuss general rules of debate rather than ad hoc rules. The rule "a counterplan is illegitimate if there is no agent who could decide between the plan and the counterplan" makes much more sense and is probably more predictable than the rule "the China counterplan is illegitimate." Adopting this style of theory debate will also make you more likely to think about the DAs and impact calculus involved in adopting a given standard for debate.
 * You don't need to generically re-extend every card in your scenario. If the other team only attacks your uniqueness, you don't need to specifically extend the link and impact. Just answer the other team's responses and do some comparative analysis between your scenario and theirs.


 * My theoretical conception of debate as an activity:**
 * Fairness and Education are Connected: Debate is a game. Being a fun and fair game is necessary to maintain participation. Debate, as a game, is valuable because it's educational. Speaking fast, thinking technically (including in theory arguments), the K and debates about values, discussions about the political process and policy, and thinking in a policymaking mindframe (ie, uniqueness/link/impact, impact calculus) are some of the different and valuable types of education that debate offers. Competition gives debaters a very strong extrinsic motivation to pursue this education. Competition also, by pitting ideas against one another, increases critical thinking and acts similar to a peer review, helping debaters get closer to the Truth.
 * Performance: To win that debate should be changed, you need to win that a world that includes your modified version of debate would be superior to a world with the status quo form of debate. Both teams will argue that debate is a unique form of education. The question is how to best utilize that uniqueness. Maintaining the rigor of debate while incorporating personal experience might make debate both more unique and more accessible. In other words, in order to convince me that debate ought to be change, you would have to win that your plan for debate has a better internal link to (inclusive / good / meaningful) education than their counterplan for debate. Alternately, you could just say that status quo debate educates people in a form of policymaking that leads to imperialist unilateral policymaking (ie, the Spanos critique of debate).
 * Framework: No one really believes that signing an aff ballot means that congress will vote for your aff. That doesn't mean, however, that 'discourse' trumps 'fiat' in terms of a framework for evaluating the round: I vote for which (theoretically acceptable and competitive) advocacy the debate has established is best. To be clear, if I vote neg, it does not mean that I actually reject development discourse or that I will solve any of the real world impacts of your critique; voting for a negative critique is just as theoretical an act as voting for an affirmative plan.
 * Specific Arguments: (And, remember, I suppress these biases if there's a debate about them) Floating pics are vulnerable to cross-x and theory. Condo is good. Advocacies without specific solvency advocates are annoying and generic. Advocacies that are not an opportunity cost DA against the aff don't make sense (that means, for instance, that if there is no agent who could choose between the plan and the counterplan, then the counterplan doesn't make sense. Feel free to get creative with how some third party might decide between the plan and counterplan, though. This also makes utopian advocacies problematic). Every plan has an implementation (defined by plan text, cross-x clarification, and evidence about what normal means is), and every part of that implementation is vulnerable to a counterplan; some people call this 'functional competition.' That generally means that things like pics and delay counterplans are fine as long as the aff is willing to clarify that their plan does something that makes the counterplan mutually exclusive.


 * Stuff for LD:**
 * First, read the stuff above. A lot of it applies to you!
 * What Theory Should Be About: In policy debate, theory is usually reserved for advocacies (plans, counterplans, and critiques). In LD, theory is bandied about for every argument, even arguments of the form "X is true." I don't believe that making any truth statement (a claim that something is true) is theoretically objectionable. I avoid intervening, but if the other team makes halfway decent arguments, you probably won't win the claim that I should reject the other team for arguing that something true is true. However, since there is a significant side bias in LD, I could see arguments for restricting negatives as being more persuasive.
 * "Do you default to reasonability or competing interpretations?" I would only default to something if neither debater argues either way in a theory debate. If that happens, assume that I will default to whichever one is least favorable to you.
 * "What is your threshold on theory?" I vote for well impacted arguments. Theory can be a well impacted argument if you're a decent debater.
 * "How do you feel about pre fiat implications?" I vote for well impacted arguments. Pre fiat can be a well impacted argument if you're a decent debater.