Lamballe,+Alex

Alex Lamballe

See Seth Gannon’s philosophy.

Additional comments…

Be smart, funny and strategic.

In general, you should do what you want in debate rather than overcompensating for my preferences. Debate should be fun. If you’re working long hours and giving up your weekends for this activity and not having fun, I don’t know what you’re doing with your life. Actions that serve only to make the debate less fun will be frowned upon.

Don’t walk the plank. Play like a champion.

One of Seth’s best points that I would like to reiterate is to be aggressive. Aggressive strategies are fun and produce interesting debates even if the argument itself is bad. Conditionality bad, wipeout, coercion etc – all bad arguments but can be very entertaining and strategic.

Clarity – I find many debates difficult to understand because debaters are far too unclear. This is not a critique of talking fast, just talking unclearly. Speed is the number of arguments effectively communicated to the judge per minute. I will give great preference to the teams that explain their arguments clearly and will have few qualms about dismissing arguments that I did not understand during the debate. I tend to be far more persuaded by the arguments that I actually understand. All of this applies to cards as well as tags. I should be able to listen to the cards and understand them too. Not only will clarity help you win the debate, it will help your speaker points.

Line by line – In a lot of debates I judge, the line by line is largely or completely ignored. I don’t really get it. The word “they said” really need to be in your debate vocabulary. I find your arguments much easier to evaluate if you specifically answers the other teams arguments. The team that sticks closest to the line by line is generally doing the best job of comparing arguments and evaluating the debate. Debaters that stick to the line by line tend to get higher speaker points.

Topicality – I usually prefer substance debate to topicality debates. However, I certainly understand the strategic importance of topicality and think that it can sometimes produce interesting debates. A discussion of framework on topicality often gets lost despite being the most important part of the debate. Focus on what the topic would look like in the world of your interpretation. Reasonability is often compelling but needs to be accompanied by arguments about why debating the affirmative in a certain way is good.

Disadvantages – I don’t really understand the cult of uniqueness. The link is far more important for me because it establishes causality between the plan and the disad impact. Uniqueness is simply a component of the link. Uniqueness is always between zero and one hundred. I can’t predict the future so you can’t either. I also don’t think you need to win offense to beat the DA. If there’s no link, there’s no link.

Counterplans – Conditionality seems pretty logical to me. Aside from that, I’m pretty convinced by the logical policy making paradigm. States cp, international fiat, multi actor fiat, etc. all seem to miss the point and fail to provide a logical reason to reject the affirmative. Presumption is with less change. Theory is a reason to reject the counterplan and rarely a reason to reject the team.

Kritiks – Kritiks when debated at their best sound like disads. They prove that the plan is bad or that the way that the plan has been represented makes the plan a bad idea. I probably could be persuaded that some forms or discourse are so bad that I should forget about the aff and reject the team anyway, but debate is generally about the plan.