Anders,+Eli

Eli Anders Harvard

Some thoughts (rants?), in no particular order.

-Clarity matters: I am increasingly frustrated with the lack of clarity in the debates I judge. If I don't catch a tag or two, no worries. But if I have no idea what you are saying for a protracted portion of your speech, I am unlikely to want to reconstruct what you said after the debate. This has happened more times than I find acceptable for a communications activity. If you're not sure, **look up while you talk**, I'll usually be sending pretty strong signals if I find you unintelligible. Most importantly - SLOW DOWN WHEN YOU READ THE PLAN AND CP TEXTS - there is nothing more frustrating than two teams arguing over some textual intricacy that they have both read on a piece of paper while I sit there wondering what the CP was. My understanding will benefit you much more than the 8 seconds of your speech that you lose, I promise. Moreover, the more I can understand of your evidence during the debate, the more likely I am to give it credibility when I am evaluating it. [N.B. If you are using a laptop, make sure that it is sufficiently to the side so that it does not block my ability to see your face. When the screen is between you and me, my comprehension of what you are saying decreases exponentially]

-Strategy outweighs tech: I am likely to default to whichever team did the better job of debating the key nexus questions in the debate. This doesn’t mean that dropped arguments aren’t important; rather, it means that an argument isn’t dropped if it is answered by the ‘thesis’ or meta-argument of the other team.

-Defense is often a winner: I find that I am much more willing than some judges to assign an argument zero weight if the other team decisively wins persuasive defense. I do not think you need offense to win a position. If the aff wins a defensive argument on a disad (or the neg on an advantage) that is sufficient to prove the disad untrue, then the fact that the aff doesnt have offense doesnt make the disad any more true. In other words, I don’t find the concept of “there's only a risk” compelling.

-Evidence: 1. Just because you read a card doesnt make it true. I find myself assigning zero credit to many more cards than I would expect because they are so truly awful. Don't waste your time or mine reading bad ev. 2. Debate about the evidence! Good cards are important. Good ev comparison is more important.

-Impact calculus: is very important. However, I find that a lot of teams, especially when they are negative, spend more time trying to win "disad turns the case" arguments than they do actually winning the disad itself. While this type of terminal impact inter-relationship matters on the margins, the PROBABILITY of the link/disad determines whether your impact calculus is relevant in the first place.

-Your crappy 15 second ASPEC shell annoys the hell out of me. Don't waste my time or the other team's. Even if the 2A ignores it, it's not an argument until you've developed it more.

-Topicality: I think topicality is about competing interpretations of the topic. However, this does not mean that I think that the negative can win simply by presenting a slightly more limiting or better interpretation than the aff. I find aff “reasonability” arguments relatively persuasive, so long as they are not couched in terms of “our aff is reasonable” but rather “our interpretation of the topic is reasonable,” in so far as it allows for predictable, two-sided debates and a sufficiently limited number of cases. Just because the neg wins that the aff’s interpretation is bigger than theirs doesn’t mean they win. If the neg can win that the aff’s interpretation of the topic allows for a highly unlimited or unpredictable set of cases, then I think they win.

-CP Theory: I’m not really a fan of the “negative gets to do whatever they want” school of CP theory that seems all too prevalent. On the other hand, aff theory arguments should be well developed and specific to the CP at hand. In general, my biases about the legitimacy of counterplans are as follows: 1. the counterplan should probably present an opportunity cost for a rational decisionmaker (i.e. international fiat is out) 2. You cannot fiat a negative action (i.e. it is legitimate to fiat that the executive establish a policy of not launching nukes in response to a terrorist attack. It is NOT legitimate for the CP (or the plan for that matter) to fiat that the president simply WON'T launch nukes if there is a terrorist attack. 3. I'm pretty sure timeframe/delay counterplans are not competitive. This probably depends on how the 1AC CX goes down, however. 3. Theory is almost always a reason to reject the argument, not the team.