Rothenbaum,+Nathan

Nathan Rothenbaum Oak Park River Forest – Debater 2008-2012 Trinity University – Debater 2012-2016 University of Georgia – Coach 2016 – Current  **The DR:** My favorite part of debate is that you, the debater, determines what debate is. I will do my best to evaluate the substance of your arguments, and have a pretty high opinion of myself. Three things to vastly improve your speaks when I am in the back: 1.) Recognizing arguments are rarely conceded. 2.) The first sentence of your 2ar/2nr should strive to be the same sentence I use when I tell the other team why they lost. 3.) Your CX strategy is better served by getting your opponent to say things and using those things in your following speeches than by posturing or trying to make them look foolish. *I am more concerned with tech over truth, but also recognize that “good” tech needs to (at least) look true from afar. *If it isn’t in the tag, then the 2ac didn’t “drop it” *It is possible to win terminal defense – but usually even the most sympathetic read of an argument is far from terminal *I am fine with K’s *Reading an untopical aff is not a death sentence *If you are wondering if a CP is cheating it probably is *I think CX is very important for controlling the spin of a position *I think of the 1ar as the same way I think of the 1NR – ideally a rebuttal, but capable of doing some quasi-constructive things. *Condo is ok. I find myself more persuaded by the aff side of arguments but, unfortunately, not often enough to vote the neg down. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">If you do not like my rfd, feel free to post-round me. I won’t take any offense (I am dead serious. in fact, I’d like for you to fully internalize why you lost). <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">**The TL:** <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">I think as debaters progress through the activity, their approach to judge philosophies change. When I was in high school I felt so badass saying I was “tabula rasa”. In college my philosophy kept some of that “tabula rasa” sprinkle, but also noted my biases as a judge a bit more: where I was weakest, and my predispositions over certain issues. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">Now, with my debate career completed, I am reflective not just on the micro-parts of a debate round (the K, the CP, the DA, T, etc), but also the activity as a whole and my relationship to it. What am I? I like to think of myself as a critic of argument. What does that mean? As an argument critic, I DO NOT see myself, first and foremost, as an educator. This is not to say that I don’t think debate has pedagogical value – in fact, I can scarcely think of any activity which has shaped me more. Rather, it means that I task myself with helping debaters find the best vocabulary to express their beliefs, persuade their audiences, and fine-tune their arguments. I do not think my role is to “educate” students on the “proper” and “right” conclusions they should come to – only to help them articulate whatever conclusion they are arguing on behalf of. I say this at the top because I am deeply invested, as a critic of argument, in the game of debate. A game where the only two things known for certain are speech times, and the eventual winner/loser. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">As your judge, I oversee a free-floating space where speakers clash for the most lucrative prize that I know: the ballot. My job as a critic is twofold. First, I will give those most deserving my ballot. Second, I will offer advice to help the loser (and winner, to a lesser extent) win it next time. Best of luck to you both. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">**Case** <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">-**Case Debate is Amazing :** Bring back case debate. I want to see more of it, and I really enjoy these types of debates. If you accept the aff’s framework for the debate, then the surest way for you to win the debate is to prove their proposal fails their own criteria for evaluation. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">- **I reward evidence analysis:** If an aff or neg team reads a piece of evidence, and you can interpret parts of that evidence (even if they did not read those parts) to make an argument for you, I do not think you need to actually read those parts in the debate. It is sufficient for me if you highlight your “reading” of the card, tell me your “spin” of the evidence, and go from there. I find the most entertaining parts of the debate are when debaters are actually debating (go figure?) Hopefully in a decade or so, our activity will decide that both teams can simply “submit” cards into evidence. A boy can dream. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">-**I reward evidence comparison:** Author quals used to be important. Debaters no longer think so. I still think so. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">-**Terminal Defense is Possible:** Solvency presses at the internal link level are infinitely more valuable than presses at the impact level. I can easily see myself deciding that even if a plane crashing into the water wouldn’t kill anyone, it would still be something I should spend effort trying to prevent. I can’t see myself deciding that this effort should be manifested in crushing Dr. Pepper cans into my forehead out of hope that such an act will appease a mystical god to save me. Try or die only makes sense if the aff is an actual “try”. And, by the way, if the neg is going for the adv/il is NUQ, then it isn’t try or die anymore. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">-**Logic Trumps Evidence:** A great analytic beats a decent card 9/10 – this is unless the team with the decent card has a decent response to the analytic – in those situations, evidence is a strong tie-breaker. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">**Disads** <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">-**I will listen to, begrudgingly, the politics disad – but prefer topical DA’s:** The politics disad is shit, everyone knows its shit, and I am anxiously waiting for it to burn in hell. Just waiting for the killer argument to get rid of it so we can have the real disads again. Different judges have different opinions about what argument is the nail in the coffin. For me, it’s the double bind between “fiat means passing the least means of resistance” and the neg’s “PC key” evidence – if the plan is such a fight, why would President Trump spend all his PC on it before he builds Trump Casino? <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">-**Impact Calc is Very Important to Me:** Disad turns the case is valuable because it also functions as case defense. The neg should consider using the internal link level of the disad to turn the case, not just the impact. While it may be true that economic collapse would turn the aff’s advantages, it is also probably true that mere economic slowdown could prevent the strength of aff solvency. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">-**Please Explain What You Mean:** X controls the direction of the Y never really makes any sense to me, but it sure seems like a useful way to cover up the fact that Y is the weaker part of your disad. This should not be read as me telling you not to make this argument (I would never tell you not to make an argument) – just that I have yet to hear a particular compelling explanation of it yet. Fingers crossed. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">**CP** <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">-**States CP and I-Fiat are Bad:** My personal beliefs are that counterplans which use a different actor than the aff are bad because there are few situations than someone is poised to make an informed cost-benefit analysis between the two. Rarely is someone positioned to decide whether it should be the states or the federal government that does something, or whether China or the United States should be the one to do X activity. You can still win on these counterplans infront of me, and I often will vote on them because the aff drops crucial negative offense, but I lean heavily aff on these. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">-**If Your CP Does the Aff, I also think its bad:** Process counterplans are somewhat disingenuous. If process focus is so good, why are we forcing the aff to defend a version of the 1ac completely devoid of process? <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">-**New Affs = Free License for the Neg to Wreck Shit:** But, Conditionality is barely defensible. The reasons that it is bad are much more persuasive than why it is good, but the neg is usually able to eek out a claim that what they did does not justify a loss / is not as bad as the other team thinks. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">-**Aff teams go for bad theory args:** Textual competition is a made up standard to defeat counterplans that compete functionally but are bad for debate. Just win they are bad for debate instead of having your interp be nonsensical. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">**Kritiks** <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">-**Framework is the Fulcrum of the Debate:** The fact that the alt debate has become separate from the framework debate in many K rounds is the cause of quite a bit of confusion and frustration. No wonder the aff thinks the K alt is incapable of solving – if we accept your model of what the debate is about, most alts amount to little more than “we said X is bad, if its bad we win.” My advice to both teams is to control the framework for the round/evaluating impacts. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">-**The Perm Needs to be Explained:** The discrepancy between framework and the alt goes double for the discrepancy between framework and the perm. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">-**No One Cares how much Lacan you’ve read unless you make it matter:** A distinction without a difference is not a distinction. If there is a difference in the literature base between how your two authors/theories interact with each other, and if that difference doesn’t produce different normative judgements on certain practices or differing political endgoals/demands then for most debates it will not help you. One of the wonders of policy debate is that it demands theories apply themselves to particular case-studies: make sure your theory has a different conclusion on that case-study than the aff’s. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">**-Unless both sides decide to agree, I am inclined to think ‘metaphysics’ is not an impact.** <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">**Topicality** <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">-**Limits Over Ground:** Predictable limits is where the debate is running to. Get there first. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">-**Reasonability over Competing Interps:** Justice Potter Stewart’s decision in Jacobellis v. Ohio best encapsulates what I feel is the most persuasive 2ar on reasonability. Namely: “Yes, we might not be able to define “exactly” what X word is, but any definition which does not include our aff would be incredibly bad for a variety of reasons.” <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">-**Consider Impact Turning Commonly Held Assumptions on T:** Stale debates are apparently bad? I find this an interesting conclusion. On reflection the debates that I’ve had the most throughout the years in this activity (heg good/bad, state good/bad, cap good/bad, etc) are the ones that I am most unsure of concerning where I stand. The more you learn about an issue and the two sides subtending it – the more you REALLY learn – the less able you are to come to dogmatic conclusions. It seems to me that these “stale debates” are pretty important in terms of shaping us into the caring, self-reflexive, and informed scholars debate likes to claim it makes us. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">**Framework** <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">-**I hold no grudges:** These were my favorite debates as a debater. They get to the heart of what we are doing here, and how we as individuals and as a community should approach important subjects of controversy. Few things are as worthwhile and transformative as a framework debate. I find it a crying shame people on both sides of ideological spectrum want these debates to go away. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">-**Framework is no Excuse for Avoiding their Arguments:** If you don’t want to lose your framework debate, you need a theory to justify your worldview. Two questions this theory needs to answer: How does change happen? Under what circumstances does the left win/lose? My advice? Framework should be as you would a K with a link the aff cannot deny: they didn’t [see your interp]. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">**-Contradictions can hurt you:** If your K links to framework, you better pray the aff doesn’t have a link turn. The best way to avoid a contradiction is to read philosophically compatible positions. The second best way is to make one of your arguments a prior question (hint: to avoid self-destructing, it’s usually the K and not T).