Trouble. Right here in Bromance City.

The DJ has filed for Chapter 11 protection again. Been there, done that, and I'm optimistic that the outcome will be beneficial to the company, and also beneficial to this writer.

Meanwhile, there was much discussion about evidence in PF down in the City of Bromance. (Bromance is Brotherly Love, isn’t it?) Those of us sitting in the tab room, with about 8000 years accumulated debate experience, all think about the same way, that evidence needs to be presented a certain way that is verifiable and accurate. That is, the evidence has to say what you claim that it says in its original context, and you need to be able to present it in that context. I remember back to the very first time I ever called for a piece of evidence in an LD round, when a debater made a claim that I found well nigh ridiculous. She handed me her case, with the quote she had read in it. Nothing else, just the words I had already heard. I can remember my sigh to this day.

One of the nice things about the rise of evidence in LD is the concurrent rise of meaningful presentation of that evidence. People can pull cards that show the whole article, or at least the whole paragraph, from which the quote is redacted, as often as not as something both separate from their case and within their case. If you’re going to quote Joe Blow, we need to know what Mr. Blow said in its entirety, so that when we hear your quote from that paragraph, it is, while edited, still representative of Mr. Blow’s claim. In other words, saying that Mr. Blow says, “China will never attack ... the United States” would not be a representative take of Mr. Blow’s original statement, “China will never attack Bolivia unless the United States closes all the beaneries in Des Moines.” Not only does your evidence need to be honest, it needs to presented in such a way that we can evaluate its honesty.

In LD and Policy, we handle evidentiary issues in-round. Any rules that exist expect that to happen, and the judge is empowered to act accordingly. If evidence is to be impugned, by the opposition or by the judge, it will be done before the ballot is written and anyone leaves the room. When it comes to PF, there are no particular rules about evidence as such; as with most of forensics, there aren’t actually many rules at all, as such. But in most forensics activities, ad hoc and what we can refer to as stare decisis rules exist that provide parameters for adjudication. In LD and Policy we call for the evidence, evaluate it and make a determination. But PF, judged as it is so often by, at best, occasional judges—in fact, because the very existence and survival of PF depends on lay judges—we have a judging pool with no training in the fine points, and certainly no lore and community experience to draw upon. If evidence is challenged, or should be challenged, the average PF judges are suddenly out of their depth. 99.9% of the time we want them exactly at the depth where they are. In this .1% situation, we don’t know what to do.

We don’t empower tournament directors or tab rooms to handle these situations, and I don’t know whether or not we should. You hadda be there, you know? But if situations do arise, how should they be handled?

There is no answer to this, and that was how it was answered in Bromanceville. None of us speak for the mainstream of the PF community, or are particularly connected to it. But as long as we prefer lay judges in the rounds, we won’t have a built-in mechanism for solving claims regarding disputed evidence. What the PF community needs to do is hitch up its pants and roll up its sleeves and put its nose to the grindstone and its back to the wheel and grab the bull by the tail and look it straight in the eye and figure out a solution to this problem. It’s not the world’s biggest problem, but even as the most occasional of problems, when it does arise at the moment it is incapable of being satisfactorily resolved. And the debate community should not have an area of dispute for which there is no resolution. Lack of a solution won’t lead to more abuses—most teams are doing their best to be honest and forthright and the lack of oversight will never turn them all into evidence-manufacturing demons—but it won’t solve abuses, advertent or inadvertent, that do arise. And they’ll arise again and again, exactly as before, unsolved yet again. The other debate activities have, in their history, evolved, one way or another, as a result of community action and pressure and desires. The PF community needs to declare itself and proceed accordingly.

As a newcomer to PF, I’m very fond of this activity. I like its leanness, its reliance on both oratory and evidence, and its demand for lay audiences, which keeps it as the immediately accessible debate format. But universal expectations need to be outlined. Rules need to be presented. Coaches need to get together and figure out best practices. Every last second doesn’t need to be accounted for in a round—far from it—but the powers that be need to find unity among themselves (which, in my experience, they are far from having, much unlike LD where the community, even when we disagree, is fairly close and pretty good at evaluating problems and working toward solutions), and then solve its problems so that when these problems do arise, there are reasonable solutions at hand. I don’t think that’s all that much to ask.