Saunders,+Daniel

I debated for four years at Andover Central high school, am currently debating at Wichita State University (3 years) and am an assistant coaching for Derby high school. I mostly read T and kritiks but I still do really enjoy watching old school policy debates. I believe it is important not to bring any arbitrary rules to judging a round and I am willing to evaluate the arguments as they are presented rather than according to some preconceived paradigm. With that said, I have a number of thoughts about debate that I default to and will do my best to lay out my potential biases. **General things** - Talk as fast as you feel comfortable, I will say ‘clear’ if I can't understand you. The less clear you are, the more difficult it is for me to hear the warrants of your evidence which means I will give it less relative weight as the debate proceeds. I really appreciate it when teams will front load their arguments by putting neat labels at the front of the explanation. Also, I'm really bad at catching author names so try to extend your evidence with some reference to the tag or warrants. Having a last name doesn't hurt but isn't really necessary. I am annoyed when a rebuttal sound more like a bibliography than a persuasive speech. I try to review the minimal amount of evidence necessary to make my decision and won't give much credibility to warrants within evidence that weren't also extended in the rebuttals. The gist of what I'm saying here is I'm more interested in what you have to say than what your cards have say. I have recently noticed that when some teams get asked "theoretical reasons to reject the the team?", they will make new theory arguments in cross-ex that weren't in the 2AC. I don't think this is a good practice for debate or terribly ethical either. Certainly don't try to extend theory arguments that you cheated into the debate. Cross-ex is three minutes long. As soon as the timer goes off, you're entitled to stop answering the question. Please be cooperative and courteous in cross-ex. I absolutely hate it when it takes a whole minute to answer a simple question because someone is trying to show off how cool they are. If a team wants to take prep to ask more questions, the other team isn't obligated to answer those questions but can if they want to. I believe the minimal threshold for the extension of an argument is a claim and warrant. I don't care if you think your opponent dropped something, a blip of the tagline doesn't count as extending it. I'm not a big fan of this "any risk of a link" business. If you cannot articulate a plausible story of what the link is, there isn't a link. **Disadvantages and counterplans -** yup. **Framework vs Critical affs** - These debates are super interesting and I have no apriori resistance to critical affirmatives. I think that for a critical aff to be defensible, they have to either win a counterinterpretation that is preferrable to the negs which they meet or they have to win an impact to framework. I tend to evaluate these debates like I would a regular topicality debate, teams need articulate the difference between their interpretations and why that difference matters. I view T Version of the aff arguments as an argument that demonstrates that some or all of the affirmative can be included in the negs interpretation which resolves offense predicted upon the exclusion of the aff. I think people often take T Versions of the aff to mean much more than that. It's fundamentally a defensive argument and only helps you out on the standards debate, but not a round winner. **Theory** - I am far more inclined to vote for a theory argument that your average judge. Although reasonability versus competing interpretations is a debate you can and should have in front of me, I find myself more compelled by the competing interpretations side of things. A team need only win that their interpretation is marginally better than their opponents to win a theory argument. The magnitude of abuse needed to justify a ballot for theory is relative and not absolute. Those thoughts apply to both topicality and counterplan theory. Furthermore, I can also be persuaded that a cheating counterplan is a reason to reject the team, not simply the argument. All that said, you have to be very thorough when going for a theory argument. Simply saying 'delay counterplans are cheating because time skew' is not enough. **Kritiks** - Often times kritik debates are decided by largely vacuous one-liners like "they conceded the root cause debate, gg" and while that sort of argumentation is fine in one-sided debates, it won't get you very far in a close round. It is very important that you explain the level at which your impact claims operate i.e. a framework-esque argument even if no one makes a formal framework argument. For example, if you are reading an ethics impact to your Foucault K, include at least a sentence in your impact discussion about how ethics interacts with aff’s impacts. Too often teams get away with non-sequiturs like "Biopolitics causes genocides. The aff is biopolitics. The aff causes genocides" which is caught up in the casual logic of disads and that makes no sense when applied to Foucault. In terms of literature, I consider myself fairly well read. I’m super into psychoanalysis right now so if you can do that stuff, I will probably really enjoy the debate. If I’m not familiar with the argument you’re reading, I'm sure I can piece it together from your cards.