Baxter-Kauf,+Mike

Updated 11/8/2012 St Paul Central High School Experience: 14ish Years Rounds on the Topic: Lots

I have been judging debates for a while now and haven’t full rewritten a philosophy in at least 6-7 years. I don’t think brief updates are doing the job anymore.

I am generally open to whatever, I will attempt to vote on whatever. I stick with my general statement that you should do what you want and explain why it means that you should win.

There are two things that are not up for debate in my mind:

1) temporal elongation of the debate (I am amenable to proposals which shift the organization of the speeches, etc.)

2) speaker points—I reserve these as a subjective evaluation of the quality of your arguments and the skill with which you utilized them

 **__ Brief general notes: __** I don’t think I am as lazy of a critic as I used to be. That is to say, I think more at the end of debates now and I don’t know how to get away from it. If I could criticize some of my judging from earlier days, it would be that I would look for a dropped argument and vote on it. I find it increasingly true that even when an argument is dropped, it just doesn’t matter in the overall conceptualization of the debate. I still consider it true, but that’s just a start to what I need from the final rebuttals. I’m willing, maybe more than a lot of people, to simply admit that I don’t understand something and I won’t vote for it if I can’t explain what it is and why it is decisional. Finally, I am still a “risk of a link” person. I don’t understand how it can ever be a tie, so I need a great deal of explanation as to what would need to occur for me to vote for a “no risk” situation. Offensive arguments solve this entire problem. Unless it is explicitly explained within the round, I do not “kick arguments for you.” If you expect me to evaluate the status quo in the event that the counterplan isn’t competitive, you need to explain to me what is going on.


 * __Evidence: __** I read more of it than I used to, still a lot less than most people. I am much more likely to read evidence in the event that it is clear to me what I am looking for, that is to say, you are indicting their cards or pumping up your own. If I am reading lots of cards it probably means I am a little lost. I would still stick by my previous statement: “ if you intend to get your wins predominantly based on the strength of your cards, I am prolly not your d00d.”


 * __Theory: __** Used to vote on theory a lot, virtually never do anymore. If they make some arguments about why condo is good, you are probably better off going for a solvency deficit. It has to be straight dropped or REALLY REALLY REALLY abusive for me to think this is the way to decide the debate. I give “reject the arg not the team” a pretty high degree of credit. Kicking an argument in the block pretty much always remedies the abuse. I will give a lot of leeway to cross apps that eliminate theory debates (i.e. reasonability on T).


 * __Topicality: __** Dig it. Clear breakdown of what your interp allows or doesn’t would be nice.


 * __Critical Arguments: __** Sure. I know a lot about this stuff, my doctorate is in comparative literature, focusing on Lacanian psychoanalysis. I am pretty well read and enjoy these debates. Most of the teams I coach at the high school and college levels roll with these sorts of arguments. I am definitely most helpful as a critic in debates like these, since I will have more original thought and intellectual energy invested, even though I think I can adjudicate “policy throwdowns” just fine.


 * __Framework: __** There are really 2 different arguments that people lump under the tag “framework.” One is a question of how we should think in response to a given question: these are defenses of pragmatism, realism, empiricism, etc. These are legitimate questions which are a focus of any intelligent response to a criticism. The other is “they ran an argument with big words so we should get to not answer it and still win.” I hate this argument ,like whoa, do I hate this argument. Don’t get me wrong, I vote for it, but I hate doing it and the the threshold for rejecting it is pretty low. You are way better off answering the thesis of the argument and defending your approach to whatever the question is (YOUR epistemology, YOUR ontology, etc.)


 * __Paperless: __** We are far enough into this process that we should be operating on a consistent standard. It appears to me that the best standard is that prep time stops when the jump drive leaves your computer (the file is emailed, whatever). That is both approximately equivalent to the process of standing up with your stack of evidence and means that you do not get charged for the time it takes for the other team to get things up on their computers. You should assume this is what the standard is going to be in virtually all debates in the near future, if it isn’t for you already.