Padrta,+Garry

Garry Padrta USC debater 8th year of debate-currently a senior at the University of Southern California 4th year judging

Fundamentally I think debate’s highest value is its ability to teach debaters logical decision making skill through hard work and clash with their opponents’ arguments. Accordingly, I will both appreciate and award debaters who demonstrate a commitment to hard work. This can be accomplished through a variety of means on both the aff and the neg: disads and critiques with links to the plan, counterplans with solvency advocates (particularly ones that compare the desirability of the counterplan to the plan and establish a net benefit), T arguments with interpretations supported by evidence that has intent to define and is used contextually in the literature, impact turns, add on, specific link turns ect.

I think I’m at a point in my career where I am willing to vote on anything, as long as it is well warranted. Of course I have my own preferences for arguments I prefer to go for/listen to over others, but those should, ideally, have no relevance to how I judge a debate. My role is to judge the debate presented to me, not to be mad that the debaters aren’t making the arguments I prefer. To me content is not nearly as important as style, and by style I mean clash. Again because I will vote on anything, I think I give more weight to logical analytic arguments than most. I really value debaters framing things - whether it be impact calculus, how I should read a piece of evidence, or even if statements. Along this line of thought, I place a lot of value on the final three speeches and try to evaluate the debate based on the frame the debaters leave for me.

The only thing that I think I should add is that I’m more aff leaning on a lot of theory issues I can easily be persuaded that agent, consult and condition counterplans undermine the things I discussed above. I really struggle with conditionality while I think the amount of conditional advocacies 1NCs are reading is getting a bit excessive, its logical benefits are difficult to deal with. My default is if 2AR proves a conditional counterplan advanced in the 2NR is undesirable I would still need to evaluate the aff vs. the status quo. I could easily be persuaded not to do this should the neg make an argument in the 2NR and the 2AR fails to beat it.

If you have any questions feel free to ask.

Fight On!