Why Am I Not Qualified to Judge TOC Debaters?

March 2, 2008

I just finished competing at my favorite tournament, Stanford, and for the 1st time I put myself in the Varsity Pool so that I could become more of an expert on the TOC style of debating. To my surprise every time the ballots were laid out, my name was no where to be found. But when you have a judge that has coached for 23 years and has coached students that have won at every tournament we attend (including Stanford) with the exception of the Varsity Division of Berkeley and the State tournament, wouldn’t you think that any school would be happy to have me as a judge – apparently not. However, because they were short on judges, I did happen to get a few varsity scraps and then I began to realize why I’m an outcast. I’m an LD traditionalist and most TOC debaters are merely fast talkers that spew out meaningless rhetoric.

What’s an LD traditionalist? It’s a judge that likes debaters that can defend their case and attack their opponent’s case in a structured manner. The TOC debaters that I have encountered no longer have the skills to refute arguments. Therefore, they spend most of their time using silly techniques in order to avoid debating like Off Cases, Spikes, Overviews, Underviews, and let’s not forget Spreading. To top it off, there are TOC judges and coaches encouraging these techniques so now it has become a norm. But if I’m judging the round, at least you know where you stand. If you can’t turn arguments or you continually avoid arguments, odds are you will lose my ballot. If it’s a TOC judge, you have a chance because all you need is one good argument to drop your opponent’s case. Never mind that your opponent supplied you with great examples, those examples no longer matter because in your Observation #24 you stated that “examples don’t matter.” Since your opponent didn’t contest it, you now win. How does this encourage good debating? Also, how do you pick a winner when both sides avoid arguing? Even the TOC judges can’t get it right half the time. With this style of debating, I firmly believe the TOC judge needs to intervene after both CX’s, and tell both debaters which arguments are most important so at least they know what the criteria is to win. When the round is over, most TOC debaters don’t even know why they won or lost the round. Even if you dominate your opponent, you could still lose because of Observation #24.

Now let’s look at the problem I saw with this latest topic, “Resolved: It is just for the United States to use military force to prevent the acquisition of nuclear weapons by nations that pose a military threat.” Every time the Aff supplied solid reasoning as to why this it true, the Neg would run and hide from the examples and claim it didn’t matter. For example, terrorist have proven that they are dangerous so any nation harboring terrorist definitely shouldn’t be allowed to have access to nuclear weapons. Most Negs never wanted to touch this argument. How can you win a round if you can’t at least justify why a nation harboring terrorist should be allowed to have nuclear weapons? However, Negs were winning by claiming terrorist are not a part of the debate. Are you kidding me? Now let’s look to the Neg. The biggest example the Neg was using was the Iraq War as an example of the catastrophe you can create when you use hard power. Most Aff’s didn’t want any part of this example so they either ignored it or brought out a card that claimed hard power is always best. I squirreled in a round where I picked the Neg because they came the closest to a traditionalist, and the other two judges picked the Aff – even though the Aff dropped the Neg case – because the hard power card that was used cancelled out the Neg’s case. Once again, are you kidding me? How is it possible to win by avoiding arguments or speaking so fast that your opponent can’t catch everything? How is that even debating? Also, how does one argument knock out an entire case?

At any rate, I now feel I’m even more qualified to judge than TOC judges. The only problem is that if I’m your judge, you have to actually debate because I don’t decide winners based on silly techniques.