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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

> If someone is trying to spread you or put an independent voting issue on something inane, critique that entire style of debate.

Doing this in LD might fly, but in CX it's basically an obnoxious way to throw the round. (Which I did back in high school, repeatedly, with as much success as you'd expect.)

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By CX I assume you mean policy and no, it's really effective. I did it for 4 years and it was rare if my partner and I didn't place and one of us nearly always won a speaker award.

Nuke War impacts? yeah, I'm running Compassion Fatigue K. On AFF you better believe I'm running a kritikal case with 'dismantling patriarchy through discussion' as my primary voting issue against the ridiculous Mead cards the neg was going to bring out.

All I'm saying is that it certainly can be effective as this is what I did and found great success both locally and in the national circuit

I guess I was a much shittier debater than I thought, and I absolutely was not a good debater. I don't think I ever saw this type of thing work - maybe our schools were just in completely different skill tiers.

Also judges in different circuits are probably more tolerant of different things.

It totally depends on what the judging pool looks like. In a different state your strategy would have worked fine.

Yeah my experience was mostly limited to the national circuit and GA where the judges were typically WestGA, Emory, or UGA debaters (or debate coaches) trying to make extra money on weekends when they didn't have a college tournament

This is the exact opposite of my (now two decade old) experience. We had a team (honestly, one guy) who did the most ridiculous meta Ks and the LDers were almost scornful of it. Their debates were ideological and drew from a much wider range of sources, but there was virtually no meta involved.

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