Paradigm

Paul Villa
Diablo Valley College.

Updated: May 2025 post NPTE

National Circuit Relevant Stuff

- I am paradigmatically opposed to RVIs and IVIs that aren't about the other team doing something heinous in round.

- In general, I find the arguments for "Framework comes before the K" more persuasive than the arguments in the other direction. Feel free to read any aff you want in front of me, but if the other team reads framework, you should be prepared to answer it with more than cross applications of your case or root cause claims.
- At NPTE 2025 I judged 5 debates and all of my panels were 2-0s. These panels included June Dense, David Worth, David Hansen, Hunter Parrish, and Chris Lapee. The neg won all 5 of these debates, none of them read framework, no affirmative team read condo, and the one negative team that was condo in front of me won their debate. All of that is to say:

1. Still got it.
2. As long as you are doing your job, you will probably find my decisions to be in line with the judges you are more familiar with on the national circuit regardless of the preferences I have indicated here.

TLDR:

Aff - Be Topical or exceptionally good at answering T-framework, Consider going for Condo

Tier List of Neg Collapses in Front of Me:

S - T-Framework, Non-Vacuous Topicality, Case
A - DA/CP
B - Non-PoMo K
C - Vacuous T
D - PoMo K

F - IVIs, RVIs, Anything a high schooler would describe as "Tricks"


In debate, the most important thing to me by far is fairness. Fairness gets a lot of lip service in debate and is frequently treated like any other piece on the game board, which is to say that it is wielded as a tool to win rounds, but that isn’t what I mean. I don’t think fairness is an impact in the same way nuclear war or even education are. Fairness is a legitimate, ethical consideration that exists on the game board and above it, and as such, weighs heavily in how I make decisions.

In the context of the game itself, all arguments and strategies exist upon a continuum from a mythical “completely fair” to an equally mythical “completely unfair”. I am willing to vote on the vast majority of arguments regardless of where they fall on this continuum, but it is certainly an uphill battle to win those that I perceive as falling closer to “completely unfair.” Arguments that I would say are meaningfully unfair include:

- Conditional Strategies (Especially multiple conditional advocacies)

- Untopical Affirmatives

- Vacuous Theory (think Sand paradox or anything a high school LD student would find funny)

- Arguing Fairness is bad (obvi)

- Obfuscating


In the context of things that occur above the board, I similarly observe this fairness continuum but am even less likely to vote for these unfair tactics because I view them as a conscious decision to exclude people from this space. I view the following as falling closer to the unfair part of the continuum:

- Refusing to slow down when asked to

- Using highly technical debate strategies against new debaters

- Being bigoted in any way

I tend to find myself most frequently voting for arguments that I perceive as more fair and that I understand and feel comfortable explaining in my RFD. With all of this said, I have voted on Aff Ks, theory I didn’t especially like, and conditional strategies, I just want to be upfront that those ballots are certainly more the exception than the norm.

Background: I am the Co-Director of Forensics at Diablo Valley College, I competed in LD and NPDA at the University of the Pacific for 3 years and then was an assistant coach for the team during grad school, and I coached the most successful NPDA team of all time. I can hang, I just hate sophistry and vacuous debate.