Rumbaugh,+Wes

Wes Rumbaugh Missouri State Oak Park High School, Pembroke Hill School

I have a STRONG presumption that the question of the debate is whether a topical plan is comparatively better than the status quo or a competitive policy option. This does not mean no crititques, just that critiques should be framed as a reason the PLAN is a bad policy option.

I take my flow seriously and will assign great weight to dropped arguments. However, "dropped" arguments that are responded to logically by other arguments in the debate are not dropped in my opinion.

I think modern debate is a bit too caught up in impact and uniqueness first. Sometimes I find myself still thinking about debates through this frame despite this criticism, but I will make a conscious effort to avoid that frame. Arguments about why I should or should not use that frame are obviously welcome.

Generally controlling the framing of issues (uniqueness v link first, structural v terminal one shot impacts, qualifications on evidence) is important to me and I will give the team controlling these sorts of issues a more favorable reading of their evidence.

I will generally read lots of evidence after a debate that I think is close to gain more context for evidence and resolve issues that were not resolved by debaters.

I view topicality through the lens of competing interpretations, though the negative has to be able to prove a substantial disadvantage the the affirmative interpretation.

My presumption is that counterplans that include the possibility of doing the whole plan are not competitive. Affs should make sure they are thorough on these issues though because the way negative debaters get away with these CP's is by having some spin that the Aff didn't answer.

I'm not familiar with most critique literature, so explanation is important if that is what you do. Explaining your argument at its most banal level will help me understand things. I usually think of these args in components like value to life, knowledge production, etc.

Theory is presumed to be an argument to reject the argument not the team. Cheap shots make me uncomfortable because of the tension in my mind between punishing teams for dropping things and not wanting to reward teams for proliferating stupid arguments. This tension usually makes me just want to resolve the rest of the debate instead of thinking about theory.

Conditionality is the only theory argument that I would think of as a reason to reject the team. I find negative counterinterpretations arbitrary but aff teams also fail to point that out for the most part. The negative does not need a counterinterpretation to prove that they should be able to rigorously test the aff. Arguments about the nature of the CP making conditionality worse (i.e. conditional CP's that result in the Aff are bad) is a good way for the aff to distinguish their interp.