Paradigm

Shreeram Modi

Lynbrook, NYU

CME and UC Berkeley

College Policy Chain

debate@smodi.net;caldebatedocs@googlegroups.com;debatedocs@googlegroups.com

HSLD Chain

debate@smodi.net;dolsd@googlegroups.com;lddocs@googlegroups.com;

HSCX Chain

debate@smodi.net;dolsd@googlegroups.com;

My strongest and only conviction is that debate is a strategy game where everybody wants to win; the rest is all malleable. I will strive to be technical and—as any technical judge would profess—am not interested in the proximity of your arguments to the resolutional controversy or commonly-held belief. Any and all argument will be judged equally dispassionately; I will reward approaches that demonstrate you're interested in improving your chances of victory, and won't punish you for taking the easy way out.

Evaluation

I don't believe in the distinction between ‘claims’ and ‘warrants’; both are merely premises that have a truth-value. What many refer to as ‘warrants’ are just further claims that have a causal influence on the truth-value of a prior claim. The position of a claim in a speech has little bearing on its implication.

My default is to assess arguments in terms of offense and defense, meaning everything is probabilistic and there's no such thing as “zero risk” barring concessions.

Flowing

I will flow each speech straight down, and will not attempt to align arguments for you. Giving a speech in the order that reflects how arguments were placed in previous speeches is therefore recommended.

I will have documents open to check for rules violations such as clipping, but will not refer to them when flowing.

I may refer to evidence after the round to resolve questions my flow is insufficient to answer, for instance if there is a lack of clash or impact calculus in final speeches or if litigation of evidence is a deciding factor in the round.

Procedure

I will not say “clear” during your speech unless your lack of clarity is nearing a rules violation. Prompting you to be clearer would be no different than telling you to change your speech, i.e. intervention. It is the burden of debaters to make complete and flowable arguments in their speeches.

I can understand English, and to a lesser extent, Marathi and Hindi.

I will disregard speaker point instruction.

Topicality

My default is plan text in a vacuum. This does not mean that inclusion of certain words in the plan text is the basis for topicality. Rather, it's a question of whether there is a permissible reading of the plan text that falls under the bounds of the resolution.

Critiques

Critical teams should take me if they're confident in their technical aptitude.

Critiques on the negative are best when advancing a plan-exclusive framework. By nature, most criticisms are not plan-focused arguments, and therefore have difficulty establishing uniqueness for their impacts.

Teams who wish to deploy critiques and win under a plan-focused framework need compelling answers to “permutation do both” and utilitarianism combined with an appeal to the magnitude of the aff’s impacts. The latter usually demands some alternative to utilitarianism.

Counterplans

The outcry over process CPs is overwrought. Critics have a point; most of the mechanisms are contrived: fiating interbranch conflict, a constitutional crisis, or federal shutdown, etc. But appealing to that alone and vaguely gesturing at the benefits of discussing the resolution is insufficient. If the net benefits are so contrived, it should be striaghtforward to construct a deficit, and the inability to do so likely speaks to poor preparation by the aff.

The ‘sequencing’ permutation is a variation of ‘permutation do both’, and requires the affirmative to win—via reading definitions—that it is permissible for the affirmative to occur in the future. The negative can defeat this by winning definitions that impose expediency or an order of sequencing on the affirmative, and cross applying deficits to ‘permutation do both’.

By default I will judge kick CPs and grant the negative limitless conditionality.

Disadvantages & Case

Impact calculus is overrated. Winning that the case or the DA is larger is more relevant than the terminal being slightly faster or slightly broader in scope. If you access an impact terminating in extinction to a large degree, you likely already have the stronger impact.

Philosophy

Skepticism is not self defeating. There is a distinction between ethics-based arguments won for the purposes of evaluating impacts in a debate and what a judge should abide by in procedure. Consider: if a team dropped an ethical framework that demands that I hand over my laptop to the opposing team, would I be under an obligation to do so? No.