Email chain - solomonsonofwat@gmail.com
-Grady (now Midtown)/Atlanta Urban Debate League 2018
-University of Texas of Dallas 2022
-Former Assistant Coach for the Atlanta Urban Debate League which includes Midtown, Decatur, Cross keys, Westlake, Rockdale, and Roswell.
-Currently coach for UTD
Between my times in HS and college I found the most success debating as a flex team but have oscillated from the far right to the far left at different times. I have debated almost every style of (policy) debate, and I have likely gone for more types and genres of arguments than you have. This is to say I have a familiarity with a wide range of perspectives in debate, and will likely understand enough of what you're saying/doing to render a competent decision.
Biases are inevitable I do my best to check most of them at the door, but some degree of intervention is inevitable, below are some you may want to be aware of.
The question I ask myself the most in listening to debates is, "why do I care?" the team who answers this better almost always wins. Everything you say in front of me needs to have a impact attached to it, a reason why this means you win, if the argument you are making doesn't have this odds are its a waste of both our times.
I view my role as a judge first and foremost as an educator. What does this mean? It means I view debate as an inherently educational activity and my role as a purveyor should be oriented to increasing its pedagogical value. My role can change according to appeals made by debators but this is my default.
This means in Theory/T/FWK debates I am less persuaded by fairness and ground claims that rely on some intrinsic value to those things, and that you are going to need to convince me there is some value to your model of debate beyond fairness. Not to say that I won't vote on fairness claims. I have and I likely will continue to in the future, I just will be rather grumpy about it.
A note on community --- because so many of the fwk debates ultimately deal with questions about orientations to debate as a community, here are my vibes. My life is forever changed by people in debate, some of the most important people in my life and my favorite people generally I met through debate. However, trying to find community in debate is bit like finding community on the battlefield or in a warzone. So many of us meet as enemies and competition oversaturates every aspect of this activity. If debate is your only or primary source of community that is problematic, I wouldn't have made it through my career without my communities outside debate. However, debate as a community is hyper competitive, has a number of systemic social problems, and could do with some chilling out.
Please do not make sweeping adaptations in front of me. I would much rather see a debate where two sides are executing what they are best at rather then changing what they are about in some skewed rush to appeal to me. I have, and will continue to, vote for everything.
I come from a technical background so I usually do my best to default to LBL, meaning what the debaters themselves said how they said it. AS opposed to reconstructing debates through reading cards after the fact. I read along as the debate goes on, but I will really only read ev after a round if I've been instructed to, or a core part of the debate hinges on a interpretation/quality of one or several pieces of evidence.
An ethics challenge suspends the debate. If you call for an ethics challenge in front of me that is the end of that debate.
Truth holds a strange place in debate, debate requires a certain suspension of disbelief in order for it to function. As arguments from the real world, be it academia or the public sphere, go through the debate machine and it's various funhouse mirrors they come out distorted and sometimes even unrecognizable from their original counterpart. However, this becomes necessary for us to have the types of debates debate seems to like, given time constraints and the need to make the game operable. While criticisms of this model of debate and its consequences are certainly invited, this is simply where we are. However, what does this mean for truth in debate? Do we throw it out with the baby? As of now I have not come down on a clear answer, and prefer to cop out to deferring to the terms the debaters set for the standard of proof for argumentative claims in the round. Usually this means defaulting to tech over truth since that seems to be the game model most teams choose to play by, but appeals to truth over tech in the 1ac may shift my default.
Considering most the rounds I judge are clash, I have found that in policy aff v K debates I weigh fwk more heavily than other judges. In so far as fwk is a debate about the terms of the debate, what matters in this debate, what this debate should be about, what my role or perspective should be, what kind of decision making process are best for this debate, and the kinds of research that should or should not be promulgated. For me these are filtering/judge instruction arguments that operates as a kind of way to interpret say the link debating alt debate and so on. And it seems I am more conscious of or find arguments about the hat I should wear/lens I should look through more important than others. Aff teams strangely do a bad job of pushing back here opting to a non fwk fwk of I should get my aff, which most K fwks are never really gonna disagree with rather its the terms at which the aff should be understood or debated at. Arguments about fiat being illusionary are not very important to me, which is the only kind of fwk arg this seems to be effective against. It seems more effective for aff teams to defend institutionalism or a games perspective since that is where the debate is happening.
I ultimately want to see that you had a plan for the debate and that you executed it, that plan can differ from team to team but ultimately I want to see effort because the thing that frustrates me most in debates is laziness.
In T v policy aff debates I tend to be a bit more in the reasonability camp in so far as I ultimately see alot of the value of debate is its ability to allow for experimentation which enables new educational opportunities and arbitrarily limiting topics becomes a bit frustrating for me. However on the flip side this also means that I also think there are plenty of policy affs that are unreasonably topical and are therefore easier to win T in front of me with. Ultimately it becomes a question of if T is "true" which I understand is a bit relative. That being said this should really only matter in the closest of debates because I try to default to LBL as much as possible, because I understand T holds more utility for some than for me.
For CP + DA debates competition is through NBs. Even in process CP debates ultimately you still gotta win some typa opportunity cost that creates a da to the aff. I tend to think the negative should be able to experiment to its liking all the different ways it might test vulnerabilities and weakness in a 1ac, ultimately this back and forth between neg terror and 1ac terror is what makes debate engaging. So I tend to let the neg get most types of international fiat/consult/process etc cps. There are some like delay or in some cases 50 state fiat/lopez debates where I can be convinced otherwise. This is also why I tend to let the neg get condo, and condo is a yes no question. Except in the case where negative is reading a cp that is not trying to solve the aff or have a NB attached to it, but to deter the aff from reading offense. This is counter to the spirt of experimentation and innovation in debate as it serves to only deter the aff from reading offense in response to the neg. Not only this an important to check to 1nc that overextend, but ultimately that research is itself valuable because it usually ends up revolving around different questions than in your neg debates. 2nc cp are probably fine. Kicking planks is fine. I default to judge kick.