Gray,+Cody

=Gray, Cody = Affiliations: Liberal Arts & Science Academy (LASA), Georgetown High School  Lincoln-Douglas Paradigm //Updated Fall 2009 //

There is a spectre haunting academic debate—the precipitous decline of argumentative agency. Far too many rounds are only loosely, if at all, based around advocacies. In advocating a claim, one accepts an obligation to defend that claim. Instead, the genuine qualities of advocacy and the resulting agency it engenders have been all but replaced by a seemingly impossible farrago of shallow and irresponsible assertions that actively avoid accepting any advocacy obligations. This sense of detachment associated with a lack of argumentative agency is highlighted in supposedly high-level rounds where one can catch debaters defending such absurdities as the justice of the Holocaust (because justice as an ideal does not/cannot exist). I shouldn’t even have to explain why I find this problematic.

 After a long internal struggle, I have decided that I am tired of being forced into positions of feeling like I “have to” vote for strategies that I hate and don’t want to vote for. I am tired of being forced into positions of implicitly supporting stuff that I think is ruining debate. And I am tired of telling people just please not to do this stuff in front of me and having them either not take me seriously or just flat out ignore me. Something with a more drastic effect on their bottom line is clearly needed to get debaters’ attention.

 Therefore, my new paradigm has a multi-tiered approach modeled after a structure that these debaters love so much. Any of the following offenses are “independently sufficient” to merit a loss and the lowest possible speaker points at that particular tournament:


 * 1) Fabricating, clipping, or otherwise misrepresenting evidence, and/or not having the full source citation available to all parties both during and after the round.
 * 2) Kritiks that lack competitive alternatives.
 * 3) "Truth testing" strategies that attempt to procedurally make debate impossible, including but not limited to: arbitrary burdens, definitional “arguments” (other than topicality), “instant win” strategies, and tautologies or other circular “arguments.” Radical skepticism positions that prove such things as the non-existence of justice or that the resolution is “nonsense” also fall under this category (see number two).
 * 4) Making new arguments in the 2AR (defined as those that are not explicitly derived from warrants/impacts read earlier in the round). The 2AR had better tell a similar story to the one found in your 1AC. Lying about your arguments or their status during the round is also considered cheating.

 Note that these decisions do NOT require that the opponent point them out, or that the opponent win the round in other directions, because the point is that all of them are procedurally unfair and operate to make debate impossible for the other side. In these very specific cases, I feel it is not only impossible, but in fact unfair, to make a decision. I’m not very impressed by debaters who try to prove the resolution nonsense or articulate non-unique disadvantages to the status quo because they’re just getting divide-by-zero errors as far as I’m concerned. When you start beating opponents instead of tricking them, you’ll start getting some mad respect from me.

 For those debaters who haven’t forgotten how to actually make arguments, I might be the best judge you could ask for, because I haven’t forgotten how to adjudicate them. All other strategies are “fair game.” I actively coach both LD and policy debate. I am 100% down with “progressive” strategies (critical arguments, counterplans, theory/topicality, etc.) for those of you who like that sort of thing, but please run them correctly. I can flow exact rhetoric at almost any speed that you can manage. I think non-intervention approaches are valuable, and I try not to intervene to the extent possible (meaning I expect you to do lots of work on the flow). If you’re still reading by now, you probably think that is ridiculous given the above, but it bears repeating that the reason I “intervene” against these things is that they make me unable to render a coherent decision and the opponent unable to formulate a coherent strategy. In short, they mandate intervention (although they just ask for it in the immediate favor of the offending debater), and I’m merely returning in kind.

 Those of you who have now decided that I’m a horrible judge, strike away; I will not be offended and neither will my teams. I have only one thing to say in my defense: I am anything but random and am therefore incredibly easy to adapt to if you care to try. I believe that offense wins debates. The side that accesses the largest/fastest/most probable impact scenario relative to their opponents’ will probably win. I am a heretic of the cult of “terminal defense” that seems to have emerged in LD. A poorly developed defensive blip (hint: any of those scenarios where one sentence is supposedly “taking out” the entirety of a competitive negative position) will lose to a carefully developed offensive argument every time. However, there is sometimes a defensive argument that is so well-developed that it can reduce the risk of an argument to functionally zero. My flows do not look like checklists, and I do not “cross off” arguments whenever they are “answered” by the other side; rather I evaluate the arguments in the round holistically and the relative risk(s) of their implications. **Overall, I find that the best debates are ones where extensive comparisons are made between your evidence/impacts and those of your opponent, either through a “criterion” or some other explicit standard. ** Candidly assessing the round and the relative significance of the arguments that you are winning in the last rebuttals will help you immensely. I do not hold grudges, so do not fear that if you have upset me in the past there will be any future repercussions; my decisions are still made solely on the events of that individual round.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> If you would like to discuss any of these issues in any more detail with me, I invite you to do so; I love quality discussions about debate, and I remain open to arguments (for all parties’ sake, outside of the context of the individual debate round) that run completely counter to my predispositions. If you would like to know more about ways to craft strategies that you want to run in ways that satisfy my misgivings towards them, or more specifics about adapting to me, I strongly encourage you to find and talk to me.