Mangus,+Michael

LD paradigm
background: i debated four years on the national LD circuit for st james hs (AL), clearing at the TOC twice. at the university of pittsburgh, i qualified for the NDT and reached outrounds at CEDA nationals. i'm now a graduate student in communication at UC Santa Barbara.

short paradigm: speed is usually good. weigh your impacts. K’s and other “policy arguments” are just fine. i love a good theory debate if you execute it well.

UPDATE: Meadows 2010 - i'm "unretiring" for a weekend, so i thought id list three important caveats: (1) as of this year, i am no longer actively involved with debate at any level, (2) most of my recent experiences in debate were in college policy land, and (3) i have not been active in LD for a few years. i've worked at UNT's MGW over the summers, but since 2008 i've only judged LD twice (the '08 and '09 TOCs). i do not know what is trendy, nor how the idiosyncrasies of LD jargon have evolved lately. however, my argument range in policy spanned from DA/CP debate my first year to what is widely called a performative style in my last two seasons. you should therefore not take the view that my policy background means i want to see whatever PIC you've got in your files; debate with the most analytically and technically sophisticated arguments available, rather than letting the labels get in the way.

an update for the 09 toc: from what i understand, this is a counterplan heavy topic. a few notes on the counterplan:

1) for me, the counterplan debate is a question of net benefits. this means that mutual exclusivity is a possible mechanism for competition (in the sense that some benefit would accrue in the world of the cp but not the aff and those worlds cannot coexist) but not a strict requirement. in other words, if the cp and the aff are not logically incompatible, there may still be some compelling reason to believe that doing the counterplan in isolation is superior to doing some combination of the two (i.e. the perm). so your perm needs to be more than 'not mutually exclusive, do both' - you need to win that the benefit of the aff alone or the permutation is greater than the benefit of doing the cp alone. on a related note, i usually find that if the net benefit of the perm is 'tied' with the net benefit of the cp, the aff is ahead.

2) i think conditionality bad (in the policy sense) is usually a fairly easy argument for the aff to win. of course, you are free to argue whatever you want - i just think the "you should be dispo" interp is a pretty solid strategy.

3) i think its much easier to get away with intrinsic and severance perms in LD, and that's probably good given the way most affs work.

i try my best to view debate as an abstract form - i value good arguments but not any particular kind of argument. so in other words, content is secondary to the validity of your claim. i always prefer deeply developed arguments to less developed arguments. i always prefer clever arguments to mundane ones. i find it easiest to judge debates that clearly revolve around one issue. this is often the best strategy anyway. i think the pinnacle of strategy is finding a way to trap your opponent into a debate that you know well and are on the right side of. pick an issue, make it the only issue that matters, and go deep on it.

be (at least moderately) fast unless you have a good reason not to be. i dont like watching very slow, rhetorically-focused debates unless theres an explicit purpose to the stylistic approach (there are plenty of good reasons to go slow, but preserving oratory-style LD from "the good ol' days" is not one of them in my opinion).

if you're going to be “mean”/aggressive, at least be funny; being mean for its own sake looks stupid.

i dislike how most people use the criterion. i'd rather you not use one. i think you should compare impacts directly. it makes little sense to have a general, decontextualized debate on one part of the flow that is supposed to account for an array of impacts on other parts of the flow. have specific weighing debates on each impact as you go.

i think both t and theory are issues of competing interpretations. potential abuse can certainly be a voter if you defend it well.

i like arguments from all intellectual traditions, but am most familiar with more 'critical' theories. if you can offer a good defense of something, i will most likely vote for it.

i treat the resolution as a way to divide ground rather than a truth statement. consequently, i am not likely to vote for "the resolution is tautologically true/necessarily false" arguments (where you extend a shady definition) or "we cant evaluate the truth of the resolution" arguments (where you claim language has no meaning or some other skeptical argument). if these arguments are given offensive impacts, i will happily vote for them (i.e. "people exploit structuralist notions of language to marginalize certain groups" or something that impacts beyond truth or falsity). if you can turn the frog into a prince and make these sorts of arguments good, i will reward you with a bounty of speaker points in hopes that your approach will catch on.

i strongly favor offense to defense. i am unlikely to vote on a defensive answer to a case if there is a large offensive impact going the other way. this means you should read lots of "disads," k's (not necessarily more than one, but hey, whatever you wanna defend) and turns if you're neg. it means you should turn negative positions and heavily weigh your case impacts if you're aff. don't interpret any of this to mean that i only evaluate utilitarian impacts. you don't need a nuke war, but you do need some meta-ethical justifications for deontology (not just reasons util is flawed).

policy-style presumption doesn’t make sense in most LD rounds because there is usually no obvious SQ. in the event of a “tie” i’ll vote for whoever had stronger warrants. if you disagree, youd be wise to make it an issue in the debate.

given the way ld works without plans, permutations are tough. if the aff doesn’t have a plan, i believe that aff permutations must include doing the resolution and all or part of the neg counter-advocacy/alt. if you don’t have a plan then not doing the res is severance. doing more than the alt or res is intrinsic (possibly legit in LD, but probably not - be ready to defend it if need be).

debate is a game of time trade-offs. doing tricky and, frankly, frustrating things is a good way to get a positive time trade-off in your favor. however, please don't actually go for these arguments - that defeats the purpose. i think time-skew is inevitable but might be sympathetic to theory arguments about why the strat i just suggested is bad.

i like discussing debate. it is one of my favorite things. i think its important that debaters be able to challenge their judges if they disagree with a decision, but i hope that both judge and debater can avoid taking the exchange personally. i don't really care if you argue with me after the round, but i'm usually pretty certain about my decisions and am somewhat lacking in tact. i promise not to hold it against you unless you really go over the top.