whiteflame

What do you mean by “exceptions”? Personally, I’d prefer automatically extending voting periods when no one votes, but I don’t control that.

Cute. There a point to this?

At some point, sure. Any topics in mind?

Most recent one was essentially a Jewish advent calendar for the current month. It was a bit frustrating to make due to how the stickers worked, but I enjoy getting creative and I still have it, so it was a good time.

Depends on the video and the claims being made. If you send me a couple, I’ll give them a watch and let you know.

42.

It'd be a long list to go through all of them, so I'll stick to some of my better picks. I'll try to stick to groups in case there's a genre you're interested in.

For music, I've enjoyed putting on playlists, particularly for covers, from the following channels:

https://www.youtube.com/c/CalebHyles
https://www.youtube.com/user/chaseholfelder
https://www.youtube.com/c/JaredHalleyMusic

I think they all bring something novel to the table. Caleb is just an excellent singer who brings a bit of a tone shift for a lot of songs that I like. Chase dramatically changes the tone of his songs to give them entirely different meanings. And Jared does incredible work harmonizing with himself to do acapella versions of some great music. For more inventive music:

https://www.youtube.com/c/WhitneyAvalon

Whitney does a lot to include mostly Disney with some other fandoms in her music, often using known songs as a base to build new songs with great accompanying videos. Her rap battles are also a lot of fun.

I also watch a lot of review channels and review-adjacent channels. For analysis videos, nothing quite beats:

https://www.youtube.com/wisecrack

Great for philosophical analyses of favorite television and movies of all kinds.

For all things anime, I usually go with channels like:

https://www.youtube.com/c/animezone
https://www.youtube.com/c/GlassReflection
https://www.youtube.com/c/mothersbasement

All three have their own unique tones to strike. Anime Zone is more comedic, Glass Reflection is more of a methodical breakdown, and My Mother's Basement is somewhere in between, though it often goes off on more of a thematic bent. For other review channels that fall into a wider set of categories:

https://www.youtube.com/c/LindsayEllisVids/videos
https://www.youtube.com/c/Johnny2Cellos

The former is more focused on live action with long video essays, the latter is more animation focused with shorter videos. I also like theory-crafting, so I watch a couple of channels that do that very well:

https://www.youtube.com/c/GameTheorists (also Movie Theorists and Food Theorists, though this is the OG and best)
https://www.youtube.com/c/SuperCarlinBrothers

I also like a number of channels that do like just for the amazing animations/other creative projects they produce. It'd take me a while to go through all of them, so I'll just give the basics:

https://www.youtube.com/c/cracked - just recently started again, but these guys produce some of the best listicals and original content, particularly fond of their much older People Watching series
https://www.youtube.com/c/donthugmeimscared - long senescent, but has some of the most shocking and expertly produced horror content on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/c/inanutshell - they produce some incredible animations depicting various scientific facts and theories, easily one of my favorites in recent memory
https://www.youtube.com/c/SpindleHorse - another recent favorite with a unique animation style, this one's actually getting a show!

There's also a handful of parodies/different takes on properties.

https://www.youtube.com/howitshouldhaveended - unique animations depicting different ways movies could have ended, loved a lot of these
https://www.youtube.com/user/TeamFourStar - it's one of the best long-running abridged series (for Dragon Ball Z), only sad it's over
https://www.youtube.com/c/SomethingWittyEntertainment - it's the best abridged series I've ever seen, this one for Sword Art Online (also doing one for My Hero Academia)

I watch a few others for history-related material that I think both have their own styles that I really enjoy, as well as a few other odds and ends:

https://www.youtube.com/extracredits
https://www.youtube.com/c/OverlySarcasticProductionsChannel

That... took longer than I expected, but it covers all the bases, past and present.

Disagree. It's gastric trouble.

Nothing. I don’t go there.

Hey welcome back!

Technically, I'm the current chief moderator. I'm not clear on the problem, though. What data has disappeared from your account?

Don’t understand the question.

I do donate money to my synagogue, though for us it’s called tzedakah. That’s a catch-all term for giving to charity, but it applies to giving to your synagogue. They usually have annual dues as well for members.

There are a few. The Jungle was honestly the saddest book I've ever read, hard to recommend but important and influential (basically led to the FDA). The Great Gatsby was an excellent book that had me invested throughout. It invests you very well in the relationships between its characters, and particularly Gatsby himself is enigmatic and intriguing.

However, if I had to recommend just one, it would be Catch-22. It was on my summer reading list for one of my classes, and remains the best novel I have ever read. It makes you feel the insanity of its characters, the story has one of the best twists I've read in literature, and everyone in it is amazing. Absolutely worth the read.

I can't say I learned much from him. His RFD basically told me that he latched onto a specific aspect of the debate and never let go, which is indicative of his perspective, but not of what the majority of the debate focused on and not what most of the people in that round believed was more important. I've gotten advice from similarly ranked debaters that has been a lot more informative.

Not that I can recall, though I had a pretty small set of students I coached. The coach the I started with when I joined the debate team was someone I could beat within a year or two, though the coach we had after that was a nationally-ranked debater during his time, and he'd always destroy me. Debated on a team with him once, that was incredible.

Lol, not a whole lot. Experience, for one. You see enough debates, either by debating in round or judging, and you tend to find trends and tendencies that you can use to teach others. I also have a knack for teaching in general (or so the professors I worked with told me), so there's a lot of complexity that I think I'm pretty adept at scaling down to an understandable level.

Couldn't say precisely. My parents were definitely a factor, as was just starting debate and having to know a good deal to be effective. I remember being puzzled by everything going on during the impeachment trial for Bill Clinton, and that might have been the first time I gave a damn about anything going on politically.

The short version is that I was more interested in research than I was in practical medicine. The slightly longer version is that my dad’s a psychiatrist and gave me an idea of what it takes to get through med school, and I didn’t think it was for me.

No clue. My experience listening to him is that he's pretty good and probably has a wider breadth of knowledge than I do. Don't know what his background in debate is, though, and it would most definitely depend on the topic.

Depends what you mean by "more or less". I think our effort to maintain both hard and soft power over much of the world is a losing gambit, and while we can do a lot with what we have, we spread ourselves too thin. We need to pick our battles in both arenas, and exercise our power in ways that recognize that we're not the only world power on the stage. So, we should be more involved in some areas, but we need to draw down in more areas than we ramp up.

For the most part. Everything's bad in the extreme, and capitalism is no different on that front. I feel capitalism is a necessary element to every successful economic doctrine, but knowing where the balance is is less clear.

Hard to say precisely. It wouldn't come easy for them, to be sure, and the effort should include an in-depth look at where their funds are currently going and where they'd be pulled from. If it's done without addressing these facets, then it could seriously hamper military strength.

If it were me, I’d probably focus on addressing much of the overspending we do. It wouldn’t be the military alone, but the amount they’ve been getting hasn’t been reflected in their output, and I would advocate cutting a lot of their administrative budget.

Well, we could talk about a lot here, but I'll restrict it to 4 tips:

1. Know your burdens. It should be very clear what you have to do to win, and what your opponent has to do. This is how you set yourself up for success in any debate.

2. Make sure you're always building out to solid impacts. You need to consistently build out to a terminal point where it's clear why something matters.

3. One of the most important things to do to round out a debate is to compare two worlds. That requires some acknowledgement that your opponent may be winning some points, including a number of "even if" statements, to compare the strength of your arguments with those of your opponent.

4. Rebuttals need to be more focused on offense, particularly turns, rather than focusing on mitigation. Take the time to address points that your opponents make in a way that adds to your point instead of just detracting from theirs.

At this point, text-based. Used to be better at video and verbal debates, though I'm out of practice now.

If I’m just going with the top 10:

Gattaca
Inglorious Bastards
Schindler’s List
The Princess Bride
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
12 Angry Men
The Elephant Man
Young Frankenstein
A Silent Voice
The Big Lebowski

A lot of great films didn’t make this list, but I’d say this is pretty solidly my favorite set, perhaps with one or two possible exceptions.

Not sure. It's modified from its original version by RationalMadman, and it just looked cool.

Tell everyone I know “suck it, I’m going to Mars!”

Gattaca.

Not really sure. I've had lots of weird dreams over time, certainly had more than a few nightmares. If I had to pick just one, my favorite would probably be one where I showed up to school with no pants and, because I'd seen this play out a few times, realized I was in a dream and just started seeing if I could break it. Had some fun messing with a lot of other students.

Hard to say - I honestly haven't been that involved for a while, so I haven't monitored who's up and coming. That being said, there are plenty of debaters that just haven't done enough debates to really get noticed yet. armoredcat is good, as is Tejretics. bmdrocks21 also knows his stuff.

A combination of timing, luck, and persistence.

Not brilliant, but competent (I haven't seen enough of what they do to call them brilliant). I think both of them care enough about the process of voting and are capable of understanding what separates sufficient and insufficient votes.