Showers,+Eric

I debated for four years in high school and have limited experience debating for Stanford. I’d like to think that I have no argumentative biases and that I’m willing to vote for anything as long as it’s coherently articulated, but I think any judge comes into a round always already compromised in some way or another, so I’ll list some of the more important points.

All other things being equal, I’m going to vote for the team that tells me why they win. If one team is giving me good impact calculus and the other isn’t, I’ll vote for the former team because I really don’t want to do work on your behalf even if I think your impacts really would have outweighed had you made the proper analysis.

I think I default to the standard that conditionality is good, but that doesn’t mean I won’t vote for the opposite argument—just know that you might need to do a little more work on the flow.

If you don’t want to defend a plan text on the aff, I’m more than willing to vote for you as long as you make clear to me what exactly it is that I’m voting for. That said, I think negative teams do a fairly poor job of answering critical affs of this sort. If you run into this argument in front of me, I would be much more receptive to a nuanced framework argument explaining why the aff’s approach to the problem is an ineffective methodology than to one that merely argued that running the argument in the first place is unfair. Engaging the K is always a better strategy than trying to silence it. I’ll still vote on fairness if you win it, but I’ll be sad about it.

I think creativity is a good thing. I’m much more entertained by original arguments than the same K, counterplan, or disad that’s read by everyone else who has access to the same evidence pool. That’s not to say that I’m against your running what works for you—I’m just a good person to run your crazy stuff in front of if that’s what makes you happy.

Snark is good, but being outright rude to each other is a great way to lose speaker points.

Brief point about theory: I think that good theory debates are really interesting to listen to. If the theory debate is just two opposing blocks being read and extended with no independent analysis at each other, I’m more likely to, in the absence of gross concessions, just declare the whole thing a wash and move on to something that involved actual argumentation. You might also want to go a little slower on theory in general—if you deliver 15 one-line blips at lightning speed, I doubt I’m going get all of them down.

Ultimately, I like good arguments. I think the way the debate unfolds should be governed by debaters, not by judges enforcing their preferences as normative statements about the activity. Be smart, tell me why I should vote for you, and have fun.