Emelianov,+David

David Emelianov

Affiliation: Westwood High School

During my debate career, I debated on the local circuit in Austin and made appearances at national tournaments such as Greenhill, Grapevine, Glenbrooks, Lexington, and St. Marks. I bid at Berkeley my senior year. My coaches back in high school were Ben Clancy, Jeremy Martin, and (for a while) Tyler Cook. Since then, I've worked as a lab leader at the University of Texas National Institute of Forensics debate camp.

I graduated in 2012, so I'm pretty new at this judging thing. That being said, I don't really have many predispositions in terms of what I like/dislike being run in front of me. Obviously there are certain arguments that I'm better at evaluating than others, but there aren't really any styles of argumentation that I just flat out reject.

I'm fine with speed as long as you don't suck at it.

I will vote on any arguments that is warranted, impacted, and won. Tell me how/why it wins you the round, and I'll listen to it. I promise you I've run a worse argument than the one you're making. If not, I'll just be straight up impressed.

When I competed, I was very truth testy. I was big on abusive positions, like cases with multiple necessary but insufficient burdens and such. Which isn't to say that you shouldn't run comparative worlds positions in front of me. I don't think that the truth testing paradigm is significantly better than comparative worlds one, especially if we're making the comparison through the lens of fairness and education.

Theory is cool. People ran it against me a lot. I think that nowadays, theory can be just as abusive/more abusive than the argument that it's being run against, but I'm perfectly fine with that. Run theory on whatever you want to, and I'll listen to it. Of course, theory run for dumb reasons will probably be dumb, so your opponent should have an easy time answering it. I prefer comparative interps to reasonability, mostly because I'm not really sure how to evaluate the latter. RVIs are cool. A lot of judges will throw out the theory debate is both debaters forget to address one specific part of a theory shell (why fairness is important, the link from standard to voter, why theory is an a priori issue). I won't do that. Obviously if your opponent stands up and points out that you forgot to include one of those crucial steps in the logic chain of a theory shell, I will listen to that argument that evaluate theory accordingly. However, if both debaters just engage in a theory debate that doesn't have a warranted voter, without ever acknowledging that the voter doesn't have a warrant, I'll just go ahead and play along and pretend that it does too. On that note, for the love of god please tell me what to do with theory. Do I drop the debater or do I drop the argument? If neither of the two debaters address this issue, I'll try my best to pick up some context clues that would indicate which one of the two you want to happen (your speaks will reflect this extra effort on my part). If I can't figure out what you want me to do, I'll just default to "drop the argument".

I really really suck at evaluating dense philosophical debates. It wasn't my forte in high school, and that is still the case. I know more about philosophy that most people, but that's really only because I did LD and my lab leaders at VBI made me read things. However, I'm really quite terrible at digesting and evaluating numerous complex arguments about the nuances of deontology when they're made at high speeds. This may only be an issue in late elimination rounds at highly competitive tournaments, but if you think this might apply to you, adjust accordingly. Dumb down your philosophical debate and make it easy for me.

When evaluating things: I look to theory first. I look to prestandard issues second. Then I pick a criterion that I think someone is winning, and evaluate offense impacted back to it.