What Alessan said. What you’re describing has no bearing on what is described in the article. No one is arguing that the rules of a debate can’t be changed. But whatever they are when you enter the debate should be adhered to. And sorry, but the rules of logic don’t transmute because, we’ll, you just happened to to want to talk about your personal experiences.
Before we address that question, it would be useful to know whether that has actually happened.
The guy who blew off the time limit lost. (Was his exceeding the time a contributing factor to the loss?)
Nothing in the linked story indicates that illogical arguments were promoted or accepted. There were references to arguments that employed personal experience and “artistic” presentation, but I saw no indication that violations of logic were ignored.
That’s so 1790s!
The article does a poor job explaining the racial bias. It quotes a professor explaining that a lot seemingly neutral procedures are actually not but doesn’t then connect that observation to the rules of debate. The white privilege here seems to be that traditionally research was prioritized which gave an advantage to students from high resource institutions like Harvard and Northwestern. Now that the standards of evidence are less formalized the ability and life-experiences of the debtors themselves are more important.
My concerns follow those of tomndebb. Debate is really selling itself short if it’s merely a contest to impress the crowd rather than to inform them.
Yes. That and the article’s examples outlining both who is not adhering to the rules of debate and why.
How do we know? How do we know they are not as bad at it as some kid who doesn’t even enter the debate?
Again, what is it about the rules of logic that are somehow “white”. Should the same be said of math? The Laws of Motion?
But what is the gain? Is it to just say, “Hey, look some Black kids won a debate against some rich White kids?” It seems so. Though the “victory” is not one at all. Those who tasked with judging the winners could save a lot of time by just kicking out all the White kids and give the award to the kid with the most passionate argument about anything at all.
As such what’s really sad for me is to read that last line in the article from one of the debaters: “No matter how people feel about my argument, they have to listen to me for all of my speeches…”
Or that you really deserve the prize.
You don’t get to change the rules in the middle of the game.
If someone wants to propose new rules, have it. If someone wants there to be no rules (or mushy rules), then what’s the point? Resolved: Debates Should Not Have Rules.
I’ve participated in formal debates at the collegiate level and, while I didn’t get very far, there were people in our group who competed on an international level. One thing that’s important to understand is that “debate” in the competitive sense bears as much resemblance to actual debate as fencing does to sword fighting.
And it’s racist in about the same way that fencing may be considered racist. That is, there’s no overt preference towards race but the high cost, investment in time and culture surrounding it inherently privileges upper middle class white people.
The argument that’s playing out is whether debate should remain a fusty old niche sport or re-invent itself to become more relevant for the modern world, especially for a more diverse audience. It’s akin to the kids who first picked up the football and invented the game of rugby.
Isn’t it right in the part quoted in the OP?
“Rather than address the resolution straight on”. Umm, no they ignored the resolution. Presidential war powers relating to a euphemistic “war” on Black people is a little hard to swallow.
Ignoring the time was just one example of flouting the rules. The article does not say if the loss was due, in part or in whole, to him ignoring the time constraint. The implication I got from the totality of the article is that no flouting of any rule had resulted in any negative consequence.
Here you go:
It seems to me that “the government being at ‘war’ with poor black communities” has pretty much nothing to do with the amount of power the President should have when we are fighting against the Germany, Japan, or some other enemy. One might as well choose to respond with a diatribe about the “War on Christmas”. The response defies logic, it is not on-point.
Here’s another: (emphasis mine)
One would think that just as conclusions should logically follow from premises, what you offer in an answer should logically address what was actually asked.
They’re debating like politicians. Get asked a question you don’t like, say “Let me tell you like the real issue is”. We’ve all seen it all a million times. It’s Politics 101: stick to your talking points and avoid actual debate.
What they’re doing isn’t new - it’s old, and boring.
So, it’s long been the purview of upper-crusty white kids—SO WHAT?!!! The same could be said of Medicine, Physics, Cosmology, hell, even Chess. Should each participant be allowed to wing it: “I shouldn’t have to set my Black piece down on a White square—they represent White privilege.” This is simply more politically correct nonsense sprouting from our schools.
Ignoring the resolution is a flagrant violation of the rules of the game.
However, nothing in either of your examples indicates that their presentations were, themselves, illogical.
I am not arguing that this practice should continue, (or that it be stopped). It is a game with a limited number of players and audience and I will let those who have a vested interest in it work that out.
However, you went beyond saying that they were being silly; you claimed that they were failing to demonstrate logic. I have not yet seen the evidence for that claim. They appear to have gamed the system by presenting a different argument before sympathetic judges. That is not the same thing as demonstrating a failure of logic.
Should tri-hulls and catamarans be permitted to compete for the America’s Cup? One may argue either side of that point. However, regardless of the decision, there, it would be false to claim that such vessels are not sailboats or that their crews did not sail them “correctly.”
I poked around a bit and it looks like the camps are so divided that there are “policy teams” and “K teams”. The policy teams are the traditionalists. What they want is to argue what they see as the nuts and bolts of policies. If asked to argue against (“the neg”) the Smoot–Hawley Tariff they will discuss economics. The “K teams” engage in “kritik” (German for critique.) They attack the foundations of their opponents arguments on the basis of racism, or feminism, or Objectivism, or whatever. What they want is to apply their philosophy to the question at hand. If they are asked to argue in favor (“the aff”) of Smoot-Hawley they will grind their philosophical axes against it.
The issue for the policy teams then is that if they go up against a feminist K-team on the question of Gay Marriage they will have an argument about feminism. If they face the same team again on the question of the Electoral College they will again have an argument about feminism. And the same thing if they face that team on the “nuclear option” or whatever. A K-team becomes good at arguing their philosophy and then deploys it against people who are not used to doing so. So policy teams not only end up having repetitive debates but find themselves at a disadvantage.
Again this is just what I’ve picked up reading in the last few minutes. If we have actual participants they can tell us more.
The problem with your argument here is that it ignores the more pressing issue: the War on Blacks. Why should I give examples of illogical arguments when so many black people make up the American prison population?
Yes, but the difference there is that there are clear advantages to sticking to the rules of Medicine, Physics, Cosmology etc. Even Chess has shown, through surviving while new variations fell by the wayside, that it’s better the way it is.
I don’t see that Debate has shown that. There’s no great benefit to mankind that’s being discovered or maintained by virtue of the Debate rules staying as they are, unlike Medicine or Cosmology. It may well be that the changes being pushed by these kids will make it *better *- not just in terms of breaking it out of the rich white ghetto it’s apparently got stuck in, but in terms of making participants think faster, speak more persuasively and argue better.
I think if you want to argue that it’s wrong for debate rules to be challenged, you’d have to show the big advantages that are coming from keeping them as they are.
(My background - I did debating in the UK, where tactics like disregarding the motion were commonplace. It made for sharper debates, much wider background knowledge, and people who could think on their feet.)
If I asked you to give me reasons why you thought Muhammad Ali was the greatest boxer of all time, and you answered, “Filet-of-Fish is better than a Big Mac—WAY BETTER!”, would you be of the mind that your answer to the question was logical one?
That’s a blatantly antisemitic argument.
FWIW, a quick image search seems to show that last year two black guys won and in 2008 as well.
If I presented a coherent argument for that position, it could, indeed, be logical, if off topic.
However, your scenario is merely absurd to try to make your point.
A more realistic scenario, in keeping with the examples in your linked story, would be that given a topic that Muhammad Ali was the greatest boxer, the kids might attack Boxing as a brutal sport or society for creating a situation in which only the poorest people are reduced to engaging in it in order to escape their poverty. In making those arguments, they would need to present supportable assertions and logical arguments. It would be (in my view) a flagrant violation of the rules, but it would not be illogical.
Having participated in CEDA debate at the high-school level, I think that it is important to remember that this is a sport, not a search for truth or an effort to pass legislation or even to simply convince the judges of you position. The high-school teams in Anchorage AK, where I debated, generally stuck to a more persuasive/rhetorical style of debate, and were almost invariably crushed in the first rounds of the national competition. The same debaters often went on the dominate the national circuit on the UAA parliamentary debate team.
CEDA debate is the most artificial I’ve seen (compared to Lincoln-Douglas and parliamentary styles). Even sticking to actual policy debate, the way that scoring is done rewards fast speech over logic or rhetoric. It is even worse than Gish-galloping, in that individual points only need to be barely comprehensible. When the winning strategy is to spout off a case like someone listing 50 states in one breath, I think a meta-debate on rules or judging philosophy is no less harmful. You can claim that abandoning the resolution is violating the “rules” of the debate, but if the team doing so wins you have to recognize that the rules of the debate are not what you thought.
I sympathize with the frustration here, because the P-team is faced with either talking past their opponents or engaging them on severely lopsided grounds. The solution must be in training the judges. I am less concerned about kritik arguments focused directly on the opposing team’s language. Either way, every P-team needs to have a convincing argument prepared that makes the case against kritiks generally, and probably additional arguments for kritiks that go further afield. If the judges entered the room expecting to evaluate a policy, arguments for that evaluation method needn’t be as convincing as arguments that the judge should be evaluating the social good of having a debate at all.