Wong,+Nate

Last substantive update: October 2013

Affiliations: I debated at Bellarmine (2004-8) and USC (2009-12), and coached at Loyola (2011-2013)

I've been out of debate since 2013, so I don't know anything about the current topic.

__Short version__ The bottom line - Do you. I don't care if you read a plan or not, read K's or disads, or go for f-spec. I think debate is a game, if you win your argument and tell me why it means you win the debate, then you win. I obviously have proclivities regarding debate (below) that influence how I see rounds, but ultimately you should play the version of the game that you want to play and I will adjudicate accordingly. The judges I enjoyed having most when I debated were those that I thought would set aside personal proclivities regarding argument styles & judge solely based on what happened in the round; I try my hardest to judge debates in this way.

__Long version__ Some thoughts on debate as an activity:

- First and foremost, I approach debate as a game (moreso than an educational activity, though debate clearly has strong educational benefits & I do believe in the educational value of debate). Debate is the best, most fun game there is and that you should play the game in whatever way appeals to you the most. It is your debate and what you want to discuss should be subject to your personal argumentative preferences, not what you think I want to hear. I will do my hardest to judge the debate in the most fair and impartial way possible without bringing my personal preferences regarding particular arguments into the debate.

I think this probably makes me more accepting of arguments you may consider "questionable." I cannot think of an argument I would be unwilling to vote on. Whatever your game is, you should play it, whether it's F-Spec, malthus, or time cube. Some arguments will be more uphill battles than others given my proclivities (see: below), but nothing would be impossible to win. My only preference regarding these arguments is please don't turn the debate into a hostile/uncomfortable space for your opponents or me.

- The topic - I believe t he topic exists for a reason - and every year is about researching a specific policy area. The topic provides an opportunity every year to research a unique policy area, and the resolution sets the parameters for that research. The most enjoyable debates to judge are 1. those in which people are demonstrate that they’ve researched the topic thoroughly and created arguments germane and unique to the topic, and 2. those in which people are demonstrate that they’ve put in the research & hard work necessary to succeed.

- Debate is a communications activity - how you say things matters just as much as what you’re saying (and will be reflected in speaker points). I am quite worried about the recent trend of sacrificing clarity at the alter of speed. In this vein, things that will improve your speaker points significantly with me: Being able to make clear distinctions between the tags, cites, and card text, as well as between arguments to clearly delineate them from each other; if I can clearly understand the text of the cards you're reading, not just the tags; slowing down to read your t/theory blocks.

Some proclivities:

T/theory – you’ve gotta set up a framework for how to evaluate the impacts and explain how that framework impacts what debate should look like. Generally, I think most theory arguments are reasons to reject the argument and not the team in the absence of such a framework. The best impact work isolates whether the most important issue is the impact of an interpretation on quality of debates or on the way it influences the direction of the topic, and explains why one outweighs the other. I believe that the most important value of debate is the portable skills that we gain from competing in the activity. Debate teaches us a decision-making model and set of skills that we learn how to apply in our everyday lives, even if we do not become policymakers. So for me, the most persuasive impacts in these debates revolve around explaining how what happened in the debate fundamentally changes the nature of debate in ways that affect the things that we take out of it. I don't think you need to demonstrate an "abuse" story per se, discussions of potential/in-round abuse ("we couldn't read XYZ") tend to be incredibly tag-line/shallow, lose sight of the bigger impact questions related to fairness, and too often substitute as a crutch for more substantive impact work. "People quit debate" is close to a non-starter of an impact. I default to competing interpretations, reasonability only makes sense contextualized as a framing argument for how to evaluate some other part of the debate.

Although I do not think I’m a bad judge for T/theory, and am aff-leaning on a the legitimacy of a lot of theory questions (agents, conditions, condo, states), I find myself voting neg on theory and aff on T a a lot. This is because teams that have gone for T/theory in front of me holistically seem to suffer from a lack of impact calculus. “Limits,” “ground,” “predictability” are not impacts, they are internal links. “Education,” “fairness,” “portable skills” by themselves are just buzz words, they need to be explained in-depth and compared as to why one would outweigh the others. T/theory debates that I’ve judged __holistically__ have suffered from a lack of this impact calc, and in the absence of it I find myself voting on reasonability + defense a lot in these debates.

CPs – CP/DA debates are my favorite, although I think a lot of cps now aren’t competitive. I think that most counterplans that result in the entirety of the aff (e.g. conditions, consult, process cps, agent cps) are uncompetitive and can be beaten easily by a well-worded permutation and some investment on the theory debate. I generally lean aff on theory questions regarding the competition of these counterplans too. PICs are sweet, but need to have carefully-worded texts and competition cards that establish a clear delineation between the plan and the cp. Word PICs are meh – I don’t think there’s a good answer to “the CP must be functionally and textually competitive.” I also think conditionality is getting out of hand for the negative recently.

Disads – Impact calculus does not exist in a vacuum. If you win 100% risk of your impact but 15% risk of a link, then the probability of your impact has been reduced significantly. “UQ determines the direction of the link” doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. The link determines the direction of the link, and you can still win your link turns as defense even if you’re losing uq. You’re better off reading fewer impacts in the block but explaining them more in depth and in comparison to the case. I believe in zero risk of a link/internal link, and wish more people would point out the logical and large gaps that often exist between internal links and impacts (especially on the politics disad), even if these arguments are just analytics.

Ks - The way I’ve seen K’s become debated recently seems to be trending toward the block forwarding as many K tricks as possible and seeing what sticks through the 1AR in the absence of a larger story/narrative to contextualize these tricks around. For me, a well explained story contextualized around the link is much better, it strengthens the quality of these K tricks and makes them seem more grounded in the rest of the debate instead of disjointed. My default is that the aff should get to weigh the case, for the neg to win, the K needs to turn all of the case or have a reason why the affs impacts don’t matter. In the absence of the latter I find myself voting aff on case outweighs often in these debates. 1NC CX needs to pin down the alt on its specifics otherwise all alt tricks are fair game in the block. The K’s I went for were generally to the center-left but nothing too radical on either end of the spectrum. If that’s your game you will have to do more work explaining the link story for me since you shouldn’t assume I’ve read any of the lit. Two important issues I think that the aff needs to address in K debates: 1. I routinely find myself disappointed by the level of analysis done on the permutation debate by both sides, which means I usually find myself not voting aff on perms in these debates. The two problems I see often in these debates from the aff side is that the aff needs to do more work explaining why the perm avoids the links and what the net benefits to the perm are. In the absence of this analysis, I find it compelling to evaluate the perm just as another extrapolation of the link debate. I previously have voted neg on the K despite the 2NR not specifically going to the perm debate because I believed the 2NR’s analysis on the link debate was superior to the aff’s extension of the perm, even though the link analysis was not applied specifically to the perm (to explain why the perm would fail/gets coopted or footnoted/etc) in the 2NR. 2. I also think that affs need to impact out solvency deficits to the alternative more, particularly what these solvency deficits mean in terms of the alt's ability to access various portions of the case.

Misc:

Flowing - I keep a very detailed flow and I work hard to make sure I have an accurate recounting of the debate. If your strategy is to ignore the line by line and speak in large paragraphs, then I’m not a very good judge for you. I have very little sympathy for arguments along the lines of attributing flowing errors to paperless functions (e.g. “that arg wasn’t in the speech doc/doc map” or “we don’t know which cards they read because they didn’t indicate in the speech doc which cards they read and didn’t read”). Flow checks in CX = always ok.

Some misc things I enjoy seeing: Impact turn debates (winning uniqueness or an impact controlling/framing arg > reading a ton of new impact scenarios), good cross-ex (strategic CX that sets up future arguments, and general ass-beatings), bold strategic decisions, trolling, wit, brevity, rights malthus.