Ding,+George


 * Name:** George Ding


 * Affiliation:** Stuyvesant High School '13, Cornell University '17


 * Contact:** gd264@cornell.edu


 * Experience:** Debated four years in high school for Stuyvesant High School on the national circuit. Went to debate camps at Dartmouth and Harvard my sophomore year summer and junior year summer, respectively. Judged the high school circuit a few times.


 * Short Background and Introduction:** Hi. I debated four years throughout high school, in a relatively small debate school, and have always been intellectually engaged/fascinated with the activity. In fact, luckily for y'all debaters, I have always found a greater enjoyment in spectating and judging the activity rather than participating in it. I truly believe that participation and observation of debate are completely unique experiences in their own means and each are intellectually rewarding in completely different ways. And so although I am not exactly as involved with the activity now in college, worry not! I am confident that through my enthusiasm and recollection that I will be able to successfully judge your round with minimal bias or complication.

I will try to go through as many of my personal philosophies as possible in this paragraph and my argument specific philosophies a bit further down the page. I believe in a theoretical tabula rasa. This means that I will actively and consciously remove all prior biases pre round but most likely will retain some of those biases subconsciously as the round progresses. With this I encourage debaters to read and go for any argument that they are most comfortable with but they should keep in mind that arguments with extreme or polarizing positions might be hit or miss because of the subconscious biases I mentioned earlier. Speed is okay as long as tags, the main things that I write on my flow, are emphasized in a comprehensible manner; given this freedom please do not abuse it, because stark contrast between the text of your cards and the text of your tags is bad debate practice and will result in lower speaker points from me. I think cross-x, like debate as a whole, is governed only by the rules that the debaters create themselves and by the time constraints. With that being said please conduct cross-x in any agreeable manner(agreeable with the other team) you wish–i t, of course, goes without saying that you should always keep physical violence, emotional violence, intellectual violence, digital violence, imaginary violence, quantum violence(violence started in another universe), racial slurs, rudeness, profanity, and other tasteless practices to a minimum. I can't exactly think of any more judging niches to put in this introduction that aren't argument specific but I will add on if I ever do. Oh! As for specific pleasantries to give me in round to perhaps steer me towards your liking or perhaps, dare I say, increased speaker points(dun dun dun), I think this list will tell you what you need to know:

-I will not take prep for flashing; prep ends when you're done editing your doc. Of course, take this with a grain of salt. Do not abuse the privilege of paperless debate. -Do not steal prep. It is terribly distasteful and will it will negatively affect my perception of you as a person and my perception of what your potential speaks are going to be. -(really thought there were more debate procedurals to put here when I made this section but I only came up with two...will update when I think of more)
 * Now just a few more procedurals before I can get to the good stuff:**


 * T-** I've always been a huge fan of it and have closed on it in many rounds. I probably default to competing interpretations unless told so otherwise but have a fairly high threshold for reasonability too. I am probably not going to be too read up on whatever topic is being debated so please make sure your interpretations, extrapolations, and insinuations are made clearly enough for me to understand and clearly enough for me to look at with an objective lens; big, fancy acronyms should also be well explained. T should be impacted in the round like any other argument and I should be given clear warrants for why topicality is/was a voter this round and these warrants should be responsive to your opponents' claims that T is/was not a voter this round. Saying something is a voter does not make it one, round specific evidence and substantive debate has to be shown/made(respectively) for me to vote on T. As a result, your decision to go for T should not be directly correlated with how poorly your opponents have answered it but rather with how well you have invested yourself in the topicality debate this round. If you talk about topicality for 10 seconds in the block and the 1AR pseudo/almost/basically drops it in his/her speech I still would find myself hard-pressed to vote on a topicality 2NR. Topicality, like almost any other argument in debate, needs to be nurtured, and given close care throughout the round before it can be employed as a game-winning strategy.(Also explain your acronyms! I will most likely not be read up on the topic!)


 * K-**Towards the end of my debate career I found myself debating these much more–on the aff and the neg . Although I never read up on the authors/literature and researched as intensively as I would have liked I still find myself most fascinated with these arguments. With that being said, if you are to go for a K, especially one that is not standard fare(cap,security,etc), please make your overarching ideas/claims clear and slow down a bit in the rebuttals. A really good k debater, in my opinion of course, does not find himself/herself practicing only the arts of tech and speed but also the arts of nuance and persuasion; he or she is able to become the voice of his/her author and resonate this author's ideas in the context of debate. And no matter how complicated your kritik is, with clear explanation and reasoning I should at least be able to understand its thesis by the first cross-x. If you are not able to clearly explain your kritik in cross-x, you probably need to do a bit more work understanding it before you can expect me to understand it. The best piece of advice I was given for debating the kritik is to change the tag lines of the cards for each and every aff you encounter. And with that I think it is certainly useful to find a really good piece of kritik evidence but it is probably even more invaluable to find a GOOD SPIN on that piece of evidence. Your links should be specific to the aff. I also think that the hardest thing to overcome for a lot of k debaters is the burden of proof on the alternative. In my experience most judges find themselves conflicted when looking at the solvency of a meta-constructive alternative versus the solvency of an actual plan and I think that I will run into the same conflicts, as a judge, unless convinced otherwise. However, if you are somehow able to overcome this issue, I think you will be in a very good spot. Now wrapping everything I said into a small, cutesy package: make sure your claims are overarching but also specific to the point where it hurts, be well versed on the tech and the line by line but also have enough chutzpah and persuasion to sell me the argument at talking speed, float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.


 * K Affs-** Always been a fan of these. Most of what I said about the k on the neg probably applies here; in fact, certain things are probably doubly as true for the k-aff as they are for the k on the neg. Your 1AC evidence should be well researched and fully optimized for the debate. I should be able to understand your thesis by the end of the 1AC.


 * Performances-** Am a bit less experienced with these. Just make your thesis clear and unambiguoutize any ambiguous things in cross-x.


 * CPs-** These are fine. Competition is important so make sure you have it figured out if you're going to go for your cp. Burden of proof is on the neg for these so I probably have a higher threshold for believing case args but a well defended CP is just as good at taking out the aff if not better.


 * DAs-** These are fine. I think that it's really really important that your impact calculus/framing is responsive. Try to make turns/subsumes/short circuits arguments rather than straight up beating a dead horse with huge magnitude claims. Make sure tricky politics acronyms are explained since I don't keep up as much anymore.

will update this as often as necessary.

edit:

I am now a senior in college and my last interaction with debate was Harvard 2014. Harvard 2017 will be the last tournament that I will judge for a while.