Box,+Brian

I am the debate coach at Blue Valley North High School. I previously coached at the University of Kansas and Glenbrook South High School. I debated at Wichita State University (2012) and Campus High School. -- I don't really have a paradigm or philosophy but here are some of my biases/thoughts: The negative must prove that the affirmative is a bad idea. Burden of proof and rejoinder matter. The negative must establish a point of contestation and disprove the affirmative. Topicality is a voting issue and never a reverse voting issue. I do not think topicality represents an attempt to exclude people from debate, and I do not find defending a topical plan to be an unreasonable burden. Topicality is a substantive response to the affirmative. Reasonability makes no sense to me. It would be much wiser to spend your time on limits bad + aff flex good than babbling about reasonability. I am more likely to be persuaded by aff arguments about why the resolution is structurally unfair or precludes the only acceptable analysis of an issue than I am by hyperbolic analogies about topicality (targeted killing, stop-and-frisk, "ground? this is stolen ground!" etc.) or a generic claim about "the thing we said is important."

I am old and cranky and easily annoyed by teams who are bad at paperless. Be organized and efficient. Do NOT read directly into the computer screen, angle the computer or stand. Clarity matters a lot to me. Reading the tag like a normal person and then reading the text of the evidence in an annoying, quiet, or dying-animal-like voice will irritate me beyond belief and results in a significant loss of speaker points.

"Truth" = evidence quality + technical proficiency. Both evidence and author quality are essential. I am becoming more evidence-driven in my old age. I read a lot of evidence and it heavily informs my decision.

Presumption doesn’t mean zero risk; it means the aff isn’t relevant enough to warrant a shift from the status quo.

Try or die doesn’t make any sense if the aff doesn’t solve.

Link often matters more than impact.

I only write down what the person who is designated to give the speech says. Each debater must give a constructive and a rebuttal. I am pretty neg leaning on the scope of neg fiat and pretty aff leaning on competition.

The chances of me voting aff on conditionality are minuscule, but if you do find yourself in such a situation, I am far more likely to be persuaded by a qualitative interpretation than a quantitative one. I still haven't been convinced that 5 conditional is worse than 4 is worse than 3. "Judge kick" is the logical extension of conditionality. Do not go for "you can't kick the counterplan for them" in the 2AR if you didn't say something about conditionality in the 1AR. I cannot imagine how you would go neg on this topic without the uniform 50-state fiat counterplan but also think it is absurd.

I like Kritiks but want them to be about the aff. K teams that invest in topic research and specific application of their argument will be rewarded. I find laughably generic K arguments to be more annoying than bad policy arguments. I am a great judge for impact framing or epistemology arguments that highlight the absurdity of traditional policy impacts or argument construction, but will not find "and of course you can't trust their authors bc they're capitalist" to be a persuasive deployment of it. I have no idea what is going on in most framework debates. It seems like no one ever says what the impact to framework is or explains how I should evaluate the debate if they win it. Given this, most framework debates seem like a giant waste of time. A little judge instruction would go a long way here. It is important to have external offense. Impacts should be specific. "Violence" is not an impact. Neither is "worse forms of violence.”