Alyssa

"Independent of that do you even disagree with me that you imposed an additional requirement on your opponent that you did not impose on yourself"

Dude, if you can't determine my answer to this question by reading the debate, then there are literally no series of letters and words in the English language I can string together that will satisfy you.

"that you totally shifted the scope of the debate declaring "good" as specifically "good for Iran""

I'll respond to this with two questions of my own:

1. What do you think is good and bad, in the context of the topic?
2. Do you think objective morality exists?

Yeah but like hypothetically if Pro had actually done something in the debate.

What do you think improves the strength of my framing? I suppose I could've used a philosophical justification via something like structural violence and oppression.

The people who taught me to debate were huge philosophy buffs, so framing is something I consider a strong suit of mine. Love me a good framework debate.

Like I mentioned in my RFD, I think you set up good windows to establish pretty solid offense on the framing level of the debate. Just needed to flesh them out more and get less bogged down in the line-by-line contention debate.

Okay, cool, you don't want to actually engage with what I'm saying. You're entitled to whatever you want to believe, but the standards of the site are pretty clear that you're in the wrong here. If that's not something you're willing to reflect on, then okay, I guess.

What did you think about the justification for my framing? As much as I like relying on the words of Cheeto Man (I don't, I hate it), I feel like it was pretty easily attackable.

Also, I think my contention level offense could use some work. What would you think about reorganizing my offense to include a lot of the R3 and R4 turns (specifically the Strait of Hormuz attacks, the resumed missile strikes, and the civilian casualties) into a third and fourth contention within the case?

Jinx you owe me a Coke.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EfBpG541aFZRG1S158AfjrB4LwNEv9P0YU1gAwYhJCA/edit?gid=1713017994#gid=1713017994

You've yet to provide me anywhere within the debate that Pro voices these issues, despite my repeated and explicit attempts to get you to do so. You're welcome to believe that the time to establish framing is before the debate starts, but common sense (not to mention the voting rubric) is pretty clear that the only thing that matters is what happens within the debate.

Win or loss on this debate is irrelevant to me - there could be 100 votes against me and at the end of the day my life moves on. What matters is the quality of the votes and what it does to outside perception of the site.

1. Your take bothers me because it's objectively bad. You're certainly entitled to your own belief that your reasoning is fair, but based on all outside metrics (and common sense), your reasoning has absolutely nothing to do with what happened within the debate and everything to do with how you felt about what happened and what you believe should've happened.

Better quality votes encourages people who are looking at the site and unsure if they want to join or not to make an account and give it a go. The more high quality voters there are on the website, the more high quality debaters will make accounts and debate on here. The more high quality debaters on the website, the more likely I am to enjoy my time here. Pretty straight forward.

2) Honestly? I'm *still* not sure. Everything you've said up to this point has demonstrated a severe lack of understanding about how debate as an activity fundamentally works, which I'm sympathetic toward and happy to help teach and coach, but your apparent willful lack of desire to engage with what I'm saying suggests that there's a clear bias in your decision making. Either that or you're just painfully unaware. Neither of which is helpful to good voting.

And you're getting the 5th degree because the patient/constructive approach clearly wasn't working, so I've moved onto the frustrated/constructive approach. Happy to cool off once you've demonstrated a willingness to faithfully engage with what I'm saying.

LD debater here, myself xD my line-by-line is not my strongest trait for sure, so this was a fun challenge for me (even if it did give me a headache).

I'm not seeing you referencing any of Pro's arguments where they say the things you're basing your decision on. So let me be more explicit.

Provide me a quote from within the arguments of the debate where Pro makes the argument that my framework is unfair.
Provide me a quote from within the arguments of the debate where Pro makes the argument that my framework imposes additional burdens on them.

If you cannot do so, then why is it factoring into your decision?

Before I address things specifically, I'm just going to drop this here:

https://www.debatecraft.com/debates/vote-rubric

That is the rubric for Debatecraft uses for its utrarated debates. I'm aware this debate was Rated, but it does a really good job of outlining what makes a vote good and what makes a vote bad. If you want the site wide voting policy, you can find it here (info.debateart.com/terms-of-service/voting-policy) and linked in the comment below this one, where it outlines most of the same stuff.

That being said, you say "Im again unsure of what you feel a more fair evaluation could be and totally open to hearing it. I have no emotional attachment to the positions I am voicing. Just cold logic."

For someone who is driven by 'cold logic', you use the statement 'I feel' a lot to qualify the decisions you justify your vote on. When it comes to your job as a voter, your feelings are 100% irrelevant because it is your job, as a voter, to analyze and evaluate the arguments that are presented within the rounds of the debate and use those to determine a winner. It is 100% irrelevant if you feel any given argument in the round is smart or stupid, warranted or unsupported, or fair or unfair. If it doesn't come up within the debate, it doesn't factor into your vote.

You think my framework is unfair? Cool, point to me where Pro makes the argument my framework is unfair.
You think my framework poses additional obligations that Pro shouldn't have to prove? Cool, point to me where pro makes that argument.
And, hilariously, you think that: "I do understand you were responding to an argument in R4. But I also do see it as you invalidating their position bringing time into the situation."? Cool, then why aren't you voting Con? As you stated earlier, it should be my job to invalidate my opponent's position.

Okay, finally done. I hope to god there's not a character limit to the voting RFD box, because this is 12k+ characters...

I'm like 80% done at this point, but I want to address something quickly here and I'll elaborate further in my RFD.

Both sides need to doing a lot better of a job of impact weighing and making a point to clarify what arguments and impacts matter at the end of the day. As things are, it's borderline impossible to weigh impacts against each other and I keep finding myself having to personally step in to decide what matters in a way that I really don't like having to do just to be able to find a voting issue.

Also, no more distraction. I promised a vote, I'm getting it posted before I go to sleep tonight, work tomorrow be damned.

You blessed human being. Danke.

And yeah, it probably should be. Why not include it in the Site Intro thread? Maybe include a hyperlink to it inside the voting tab on a debate (that being a far more complex method than just stickying the thread in a forum, but it puts it in the space where people more likely to use it will see it)

Oooookay...

I have no problems with preferences on what the overall structure of the debate on a meta level being put in the description box as that is a socially accepted and understood thing. But that doesn't make it required or necessary. And I would hope we can agree that there's a difference between the description box here and something like on this debate (https://www.debatecraft.com/debates/d/7z/islam-makes-societies-dumber) where using the description box in the manner you're imagining is actually being done. Moreover, I hope we can agree that seeing the description box as in-round argumentation makes literally any debate extremely skewed towards whoever created the debate as they essentially get an entire extra round to make whatever kinds of argumentation they want in favor of their side that *can't be refuted*, which would enable a race to the bottom mentality that would prevent most/all debates from ever being accepted while simultaneously sabotaging any sense of competitive integrity that online debate websites could offer, which makes thinking of the description box as in-round argumentation nonsense.

And I want to make a very clear delineation between "formal" debates a la presidential debates and "richard dawkins vs christopher hitchens" style events and "competitive" debates a la high school and college tournaments, where debate websites like this one have always treated debates (and voting on debates in particular) as if they were competitive debates.

Now when you say that "Is setting a framework a "weird dynamic" or "unfair" no. Absolutely not. But in your case I see it as such because ...", you're putting me in a really uncomfortable situation where I just have to assume you didn't actually read Rounds 2-4. I would invite you to go to the extensions of my framework argument I make in those rounds and and tell me where you see me make the argument that pro has two burdens (that assassination promotes stability AND that assassination promotes peace).

Where you say "As to if you said pro has to prove "long term" regional stability your R4 argument...". When I make the argument "I categorically reject the idea of short term tragedies being worth long term prospects of peace.", *I am responding to an argument that PRO MADE in R4*. They are the ones making the argument that we should look to long term prospects. Nowhere in the debate did I ask them to make this argument.

Yeah, I accidentally set myself to a second debate to judge at the same time while trying to find a way to pull up the vote rating tiers page again (the one you get quizzed on before you can vote on Ultrarated). So I technically have two Ultrarated debates to judge (not sure I want to do the second one, though >.>).

That...makes so much sense. Okay, yeah, we really went all out on making this site an infinitely better version of DDO/DART. Sick, I'm a fan. It reminds me of highschool debating when you're in out rounds and you have three judges (I know at like TOC Circuit/Nat Circuit tournies some late out rounds can have 5 but I wasn't good enough to get that far in those caliber of tournies). It feels like a flavor win.

I...somehow have more questions than I started with with that explanation.

You do know that the description box isn't actually a part of the debate, right? Like the topic could be "THBT Capital Punishment is a morally correct punishment for criminals" and the description box could literally just be the Rick Roll youtube link and that's totally okay and doesn't affect the topic or the arguments made in round, right?

I'm also a little confused as to where you're getting the idea of Pro having to defend that they had to defend that the assassination creates peace in Iran. They didn't bring that up until R4, and I sure as hell didn't put that burden on them. I guess if you wanted to take R1 literally then technically peace is there, but I feel like R2, 3, and 4 made it pretty clear what I meant.

I'm also a little unsure why you think that setting a framework is a "weird dynamic" or "unfair". The topic is literally "Was Killing Ayatollah Khamenei Good Or Bad". I'm known to be quite cocky and full of myself at times, but I'm not nearly arrogant enough as to believe that my personal opinion can define good or bad. So we need some kind of metric that we can agree on (or debate over) to measure what is good and what is bad. That's not a 'rule', like a site CoC or me wanting to change the number of rounds in the debate or something. It's me making an argument for what kinds of arguments should matter more in the round.

I'm also not sure where you're getting that I say that Pro has to prove "long term" regional stability. Like we've gone from reading the framework extremely literally to not taking it that literally.

And I'm very confused as to how this debate isn't an example of "Pro needs to argue something and Con needs to counter it" or how both sides of this topic can be true. The topic is "was killing Khamenei good or bad". I'm not sure how both sides of that can be true at the same time.

And I apologize if this is coming off as confrontational, that's not my intention. I'm just trying to understand if your vote is from a fundamental misunderstanding of how competitive debate works or if this is just a case of "didn't read the debate but voted anyway". To be clear, I'm leaning towards the former pretty heavily.

Also, the whole nuclear facility thing is from an Iranian spokesperson. Of course they're going to paint themselves as the good guys. Wasn't really the point of that piece of evidence, but it is a little chuckle worthy lol.

Interesting analysis. Thanks for the vote.

I'm curious about what you thought about my framework argument within round one to establish the parameters of the debate. Your RFD suggests that it only really became clear within the last round, and I'm curious about how I could've been more clear about it. Further on this point, you said that the framework argument became clear as to the whole "the scope of the debate should be about whether or not the assassination is good for Iranian stability" in the last round. What did you think of the second framing rebuttal in R4 where I say that Pro's explicitly conceding the debate because they admit that the assassination created instability to try and create some longer term peace?

I'm also curious about your interpretation of my contention level arguments. You said 'neither side really substantiated a position'. I felt like I was being pretty clear about what my position was. What do you think I should've done differently to make things more clear?

Lmfao, that R4 is hilarious.

I wasn't aware that was a thing - I thought the timer was just until the voting period expired and then that would be that. That's good to know.

Also, yeah that's been my experience evaluating so far. I was already aware that you were a top-notch debater from DDO and Savant has proven to be equally skilled, so it's been a refreshing read.

Sorry, ended up being distracted by my own debate/getting rage baited by incels. I'll try to finish it before I go to bed tonight, but if not, then it'll be done tomorrow.

Lmao

Actually no, gonna take a small break to work on my own debate. I'm mostly through evaluating the framing, so we're like maybe a 1/3 of the way done.

Okay, I need to stop getting rage baited by incels and focus on, y'know, actually evaluating this debate, because it's turning into an all-day affair at this rate.

Also, because others in here have talked about it and I kind of share their sentiment, I'm gonna touch on my perspective of source usage briefly:

From my POV, it's the debater's job to explain to the judge (in this case, me) what your sources are saying, what about them is relevant, and why it's relevant. I've got a little under two days to post a vote - it'd easily take me that amount of time just to read through all the links present in this debate, much less evaluate what they're saying and form an opinion. So I'm going to almost exclusively be relying on the analysis presented within the debate to determine what the sources are saying.

This isn't me saying that I won't do link diving - I expect I likely will need to, as economics is far from my forte of knowledge (English major, reporting in). But that's going to be reserved for the more highly contested areas of the debate, and only in cases where I feel the analysis presented within the debate is insufficient for me to make a decision in either direction. I'll post a full list of sources I read when I vote, and if you have questions about sources outside of that list, I'm happy to go back and read them.

Okay, some modicum of sleep has been acquired. Re-reading now.

Okay, I've finished my initial read through. What a fucking slug fest. Well done to both of you.

That being said, I am currently operating on 0 hours of sleep. So I'm gonna go sleep and take another read through once I've gotten some shut eye. I'll aim to have my vote up by tomorrow. That failing, ping me on here if it gets to sub 10 hours left to submit my vote and I'll get on it in case I forgot.