Kilpatrick,+David

David Kilpatrick

I am in my third year debating for University of Texas-Austin. I've judged several tournaments on the surveillance topic and led a lab, but don't expect me to be an expert or to know how the topic has developed in terms of things like case lists. This isn't to discourage you from making topicality arguments, but you should take nothing for granted as it relates to "community consensus" or topic development. I will try to continually change this philosophy as I become a more experienced critic. The way I evaluate debates the summer after high school is much different from the way I think about debate today. I generally think of debate as an activity about persuasion and communication. While this statement may seem both obvious and unhelpful, I think its meaning is important and often ignored. First-arguments must be communicated, if I can't understand what you are saying either because you are unclear, haven't coherently explained it (don't assume I've read whatever author you're deriving your position from, even if you know I have), or developed it into a full argument-claim, warrant, impact; you shouldn't be surprised when it isn't relevant to my decision. While there are some exceptions, most debaters I've judged the last two years are pretty unclear, so its likely I will miss some arguments. Final rebuttals offer you a space to retrace the part(s) of the debate you think are most relavant to the decision. This both makes it much more likely I will understand your argument and will likely improve your speaker points. The winner of the debate will nearly always be the team able to identify the central question(s) of the debate and explain why you are winning that argument, and the implication to winning that argument. The final rebuttals should be an opportunity for writing the ballot. Virtually nothing you can possibly say or do offends me, if you can't beat a terrible argument you probably deserve to lose anyways. I think the terms of the debate should be established by the debaters, and will do everything I can to refrain from interjecting personal conceptions into my decision. In fact, I believe the reason that the game of debate is so special is precisely because its rules can almost entirely be decided by its players. That being said, there are inevitably some arguments I will naturally find more or less persuasive than others, and I don't think its possible to be completely neutral. I have, however, been increasingly judging "clash of civilizations" debates recently, and while I'm far from perfect, I think I am becoming a better critic for evaluating these sort of discussions with an open mind. Additionally, I think that there is more than one way to be persuasive. Ethos and Pathos can be just as important as logos, and ignoring them can result in a pretty easy loss. The reverse, however, is also true, as I will have difficulty voting against a team where the line-by-line points to a clear victor because of a powerful emotional appeal. I think its important for both teams to either engage the other teams style, or have an argument for why they shouldn't have to. Framing the ballot is crucial in this context. Side note "framing/writing the ballot" is not the same thing as "roll of the ballot." The ballot's general purpose is to decide who did the better debating. While I end up sometimes voting one way in part because of a conceded roll of the ballot, the proliferation of completely arbitrary designations for what the ballot means is usually asinine. If you want to give the ballot a designation other than who did the better debating, it needs a more lengthy and coherent explanation than the one or two sentence statement of what the ballot means. I think its certainly possible for the ballot to be about endorsing "the best model of debate" or for the ballot to be currency for a social movement, but I think this generally requires more attention and explanation than I typically witness. Strong, well-warranted analytics can always best poorly extended or poorly cut evidence. Don't be afraid to stake the debate on an ethics challenge-if some form of cheating has occurred, I think it can be grounds by itself to decide the debate. HOWEVER I do think the other team should have an opportunity to respond to the challenge, etiher by denying its truth, impact turning etc. I'm going to refrain from going through my thoughts on various types of arguments both because I think its unhelpful to say "disads-cool I like them you should weigh things" and also because I want to strongly encourage that the core of how I evaluate debates is to refrain from interjecting personal beliefs. Ultimately, I think good debaters work extremely hard, and I believe its my responsibility to work as hard as I can to be a good critic.

The rest of this philosophy will be what is probably an annoying rant about theory debates, which is probably a waste of pre-round prep for you to read in most instances, although is probably important for how I judge framework debates.

Perhaps the only place where I've found myself making decisions based on my "defaults" are theory debates, but I think that stems mostly from a combination of teams blitzing through short, unexplatory, poorly warranted theory blocks at such a rapid rate that I can barely catch anything being said, and from poor 2NR/2AR extrapolation and comparison of the rapidly spewed theory blocks.

I tend to conceptualize theory arguments as falling in three categories-the game, skills (portable or otherwise), and education. While these certainly can overlap, I find these as genrally useful. A succesfful 2AR on theory usually involves identifying the importance of one value (they don't have to be the three I layed out, obviously, that's just useful for my thought process), and explain why 1. that value is the most important and 2. why their interpretation is best for accessing/fostering that value. I find myself sympathetic to the affirmative in most instances in conditionality debates involving multple conditional options, especially when they allow the possibility of the negative cross-applying offense from one to the other and thus negating the 2ACs ability to put forward their best offense against each conditional position, but almost never vote affirmative because the 2AR is an endelss stream of shallowly extending almost everything said in the 1AR without an in-depth explanation of any one issue. For me, less is almsot always more, and a 2AR that picks just one or two arguments and wins why those matter more than anything else, is much more likely to be successful. Some general defaults in theory debate--a good debater can render this irrelevant quite easily. -counter plans that do the ENTIRETY of the aff are probably illegitimate <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">-it is unlikely that counterplans competing on the "certainty" or "immediacy" of the plan are legitimate <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">-word "PICs" that exclude a word not written in the plan are probably unpredictable and should probably be read as a disad or a link to a word critique <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">-disads should be intrinsic to the plan, by this I mean they must generate a relevant opportunity cost <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">-shotgunning a bunch of contradictory interpretations of fiat against the politics disad in the 2ac and hoping the block drops one of your 4 7 word theory takeouts is an unpersuasive strategy, and i'll likely find myself giving the 1ar a lot of leeway in responding. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">-counterplans that fiat both the uniqueness and link for the net benefit are probably bad for debate <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">-PIKs don't float, if your PIK doesn't have a written text, the affirmative generally doesn't have to say much for it to be dismissed. <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">-dropped "floating" PIKs are only round winners if you can explain them to me. A critique that says civil society should be burned to the ground but includes the passage of a state regulation on the NSA (where the NSA is still a thing post-plan) is likely incoherent <span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">-phrases like "reasonably topical" and "race to the bottom" are vacuous without giving them context. What do you mean by reasonability? Is it that T should just be a question of what interpretation seems "most reasonable" if so, what does reasonable then mean. Is it an AFF predictability argument, where "if we found all these contextual examples/definitions in the literature base for our aff, its reasonably predictable for the AFF to be topical? These distinctions are important when framing T debates.