# BLM antics like this at Depaul probably make Trump more popular **URL:** \ **Category:** Politics & Elections\ **Created:** [May 26, 2016, 1:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blm-antics-like-this-at-depaul-probably-make-trump-more-popular/755720 "2016-05-26T01:23:09Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Memnon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f1d935/32.png) [@Memnon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Memnon)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2016, 8:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blm-antics-like-this-at-depaul-probably-make-trump-more-popular/755720/41 "2016-05-26T20:50:19Z")
> [@Left Hand of Dorkness](#): > > I’ve not followed Tithonus around. But my impression of him is that his liberal leanings are, on the message board, confined almost entirely to disclaimer paragraphs at the beginning of rightwing posts. > [@Bridget Burke](#): > > My memory of various Tithonus posts also makes me doubt his liberal credentials. Well…it’s true that I’m not as liberal _as I could possibly be_, but I think most people would consider me pretty liberal. On the Political Compass test, I score X-4/Y-5, which puts me square in the “Economically left, socially liberal” quadrant of the graph (not too far away from Gandhi, incidentally). On economic matters I’m downright socialist. Not the kind of namby-pamby, watered down, milquetoasty fake socialism you guys have but proper, no holds barred “Eat the rich” European style socialist. As for my postings here…well, anyone who read [this](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=764670) thread couldn’t possibly doubt my pro-choice credentials. And [this](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=18699696&postcount=149) post pretty clearly demonstrates that I’m strongly anti DP. Most of the time, I don’t bother arguing liberal positions here because I’d just be preaching to the choir, and where’s the fun in that? For example, I have blog and I recently wrote a post called “The Quick and Dirty Case Against Donald Trump”. I _could_ post it here in GD, but what’d be the point? Everyone here already hates Trump. I tend to stick to the areas where I diverge from most liberal posters here because that’s just more interesting. You’ll find me in immigration threads and anti-SJW bullshit threads like this one because, for me, that’s where the fun is. Anyway, enough about me. Back to the thread. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_Ace](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/6bbea6/32.png) [@Johnny\_Ace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_Ace)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2016, 8:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blm-antics-like-this-at-depaul-probably-make-trump-more-popular/755720/42 "2016-05-26T20:50:39Z")
> [@Salvor](#): > > Where some black participants changed the topic of the debate and went on their own rant and got accolades and \*\*_ **spoilers** _ won the effing championship. It absolutely infuriated me that this was allowed to stand, that these mealy mouthed judges/administrators were so flippant about any standards and rules. It’s close to anarchy in my view. It’s called a counterplan, and it’s a legitimate formal debate tactic. ---
**Author:** ![octopus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/octopus/32/3716_2.png) [@octopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/octopus)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2016, 8:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blm-antics-like-this-at-depaul-probably-make-trump-more-popular/755720/43 "2016-05-26T20:53:26Z")
> [@elucidator](#): > > Your point being? The point is self-evident. ---
**Author:** ![octopus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/octopus/32/3716_2.png) [@octopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/octopus)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2016, 8:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blm-antics-like-this-at-depaul-probably-make-trump-more-popular/755720/44 "2016-05-26T20:55:56Z")
> [@Johnny\_Ace](#): > > It’s called a counterplan, and it’s a legitimate formal debate tactic. And it’s straight up retarded. But if that’s the metagame that’s the metagame. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_Ace](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/6bbea6/32.png) [@Johnny\_Ace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_Ace)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2016, 9:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blm-antics-like-this-at-depaul-probably-make-trump-more-popular/755720/45 "2016-05-26T21:13:32Z")
> [@octopus](#): > > And it’s straight up retarded. But if that’s the metagame that’s the metagame. No, it’s not. This is how it works out: First, you have your debate topic, whatever it happens to be, and has been for the entire debate season. The ‘pro’ side presents a plan to accomplish the objective provided by the topic. Normally the debate devolves into the ‘con’ side criticizing the ‘pro’ side’s plan, and the pro’s defending it. However, the con’s can instead present a counterplan and try to prove that their plan accomplishes the objective of the topic better than the pro’s plan. Then it comes down to both criticizing the opponents’ plan and defending your own, and each team has to decide what amount of time to allot to each. It generally makes for a more interesting debate, because the vast majority of the time everybody has set lines of attack and defense that they’ve used for an entire debate season. The counterplan shakes things up and forces you to go in other directions. Nevertheless, when you get to the level of championship debate, you should be prepared for either eventuality. If not, you generally lose to a well-crafted counterplan. ---
**Author:** ![Sherrerd](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sherrerd/32/8_2.png) [@Sherrerd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sherrerd)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2016, 9:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blm-antics-like-this-at-depaul-probably-make-trump-more-popular/755720/46 "2016-05-26T21:34:57Z")
> [@Broomstick](#): > > The reason that more and more protesters on all sides of this election are getting violent is because for years they’ve been becoming more and more desperate, feel they are not heard and/or ignored, and feel they can’t win under the current system. When people get desperate and feel backed into a corner they tend to get less civilized. > Dismissing these people as “thugs” or whatever is ignoring this serious symptom of underlying serious problems in our society. So you’re saying that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi were simply not all that upset about the things they were protesting? You’re saying they were too complacent and accepting of the status quo? Too accommodationist, perhaps? And that if they were more upset, they’d have been violent? Because: no. ---
**Author:** ![octopus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/octopus/32/3716_2.png) [@octopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/octopus)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2016, 9:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blm-antics-like-this-at-depaul-probably-make-trump-more-popular/755720/47 "2016-05-26T21:36:52Z")
> [@Johnny\_Ace](#): > > No, it’s not. This is how it works out: > > First, you have your debate topic, whatever it happens to be, and has been for the entire debate season. > > The ‘pro’ side presents a plan to accomplish the objective provided by the topic. Normally the debate devolves into the ‘con’ side criticizing the ‘pro’ side’s plan, and the pro’s defending it. > > However, the con’s can instead present a counterplan and try to prove that their plan accomplishes the objective of the topic better than the pro’s plan. Then it comes down to both criticizing the opponents’ plan and defending your own, and each team has to decide what amount of time to allot to each. It generally makes for a more interesting debate, because the vast majority of the time everybody has set lines of attack and defense that they’ve used for an entire debate season. The counterplan shakes things up and forces you to go in other directions. > > Nevertheless, when you get to the level of championship debate, you should be prepared for either eventuality. If not, you generally lose to a well-crafted counterplan. Clearly you haven’t seen the “debate” videos. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmO-ziHU\_D8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmO-ziHU_D8) ---
**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2016, 9:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blm-antics-like-this-at-depaul-probably-make-trump-more-popular/755720/48 "2016-05-26T21:38:08Z")
And if I have to watch an ad for Holiday Inn, I ain’t gonna! ---
**Author:** ![Memnon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f1d935/32.png) [@Memnon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Memnon)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2016, 9:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blm-antics-like-this-at-depaul-probably-make-trump-more-popular/755720/49 "2016-05-26T21:40:13Z")
> [@octopus](#): > > Clearly you haven’t seen the “debate” videos. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmO-ziHU\_D8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmO-ziHU_D8) To be fair, that _is_ a recognised style of academic debate. It’s totally stupid, and the average person would look at that and just see a bunch of gabbling idiots, but every team in that competition was “debating” the same way. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_Ace](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/6bbea6/32.png) [@Johnny\_Ace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_Ace)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2016, 10:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blm-antics-like-this-at-depaul-probably-make-trump-more-popular/755720/50 "2016-05-26T22:14:48Z")
It does look pretty stupid, and that’s not the way people did it when I was part of it. Basically, what it appears to be is trying to get in as much as possible in the limited time allotted to each team. See how she’s reading evidence from the computer? (Btw, we didn’t have such luxuries when I did it. We had big card files filled with index cards that we’d have to rummage through to find particular pieces of evidence. No quick word searches for us. Normally you’d have one person speaking while his/her teammate would be finding the evidence for the next speaking period.) Aside from who wins or loses, each speaker is rated by the judges, giving what are called ‘speaker points,’ and whoever has the most speaker points throughout the debates in the tournament wins a Best Speaker award. As I recall it was on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being best, for each debater. And people actually spoke in relatively normal tones and weren’t gasping for breath between sentences. That rap thing was a joke. He’d have been laughed out of the debate room I was in. I didn’t get a single point out of what he said that was germane. If I were a judge I’d’ve given the girls about a 2 or 3; at least they were giving evidence. The rapper dude would get a 1. Only thing is, one of the girls at the beginning mentioned something about the topic being about the War Powers Act, and nothing I saw had anything to do with that. The Cross-Examination Debate Association isn’t anything I’ve ever heard of either. The Council of Forensics Associations or the National Forensics Association are the biggies. ---
**Author:** ![treis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bc79bd/32.png) [@treis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/treis)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2016, 10:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blm-antics-like-this-at-depaul-probably-make-trump-more-popular/755720/51 "2016-05-26T22:20:14Z")
> [@Johnny\_Ace](#): > > Only thing is, one of the girls at the beginning mentioned something about the topic being about the War Powers Act, and nothing I saw had anything to do with that. The Cross-Examination Debate Association isn’t anything I’ve ever heard of either. The National Forensic Association is the biggie. Right that was another big aspect of the controversy. The debate was supposed to be about the war powers act. Their argument was “Forget the war powers act, what about the war on black people?”. Which may or may not be a valid argument. The problem, however, in competition is that the argument “Forget X, what about the war on black people” is valid for every X. So they only have to construct one argument for any debate they are in. That doesn’t quite seem fair. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_Ace](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/6bbea6/32.png) [@Johnny\_Ace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_Ace)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2016, 10:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blm-antics-like-this-at-depaul-probably-make-trump-more-popular/755720/52 "2016-05-26T22:27:32Z")
I guess if the other side accepts it, the judges have nothing else to go on. Knowing that’s the case, as a judge I’d’ve refused to assign speaker points for any of them. ---
**Author:** ![Salvor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b5e925/32.png) [@Salvor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Salvor)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2016, 10:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blm-antics-like-this-at-depaul-probably-make-trump-more-popular/755720/53 "2016-05-26T22:38:10Z")
> [@Tithonus](#): > > To be fair, that _is_ a recognised style of academic debate. It’s totally stupid, and the average person would look at that and just see a bunch of gabbling idiots, but every team in that competition was “debating” the same way. Totally agreed, that debate style to me is as awful if not more awful than changing the topic to something completely unrelated to talk about your own hobby horse. ---
**Author:** ![Salvor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b5e925/32.png) [@Salvor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Salvor)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2016, 10:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blm-antics-like-this-at-depaul-probably-make-trump-more-popular/755720/54 "2016-05-26T22:48:26Z")
> [@Johnny\_Ace](#): > > It’s called a counterplan, and it’s a legitimate formal debate tactic. The way it was discussed in the radiolab podcast, if that was even a counterplan as you call it, did not seem legitimate at all. The debate topic was completely unrelated to what the winners talked about, they just went on a rant about being downtrodden or whatever (hard to make out since everyone talks so damn fast), they did nothing to argue for or against the topic at hand, or offer up another alternative plan in the affirmative, it was just a frothing rant that had zero relevance to the debate. One earlier example where they did not win had them question the legitimacy of the entire debate because their opponent teams had more resources to research pros and cons for a given topic than they did coming from a school with less resources… So f\*cking what? Go suck a lemon and deal with it. You want the entire universe to be a perfectly level playing field? Grow up you CHILD. Now part of the problem is that treating the volume of points with greater weight than the quality of arguments and counterarguments inflates the value of having more researchers giving ever more argumentative examples and points. That would matter far less if quality came to the fore, a single solid argument is worth more than a dozen weak arguments, but if that is not what is rated more highly in college debates, the entire enterprise is worthless. ---
**Author:** ![HurricaneDitka](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/96bed5/32.png) [@HurricaneDitka](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HurricaneDitka)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2016, 10:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blm-antics-like-this-at-depaul-probably-make-trump-more-popular/755720/55 "2016-05-26T22:55:19Z")
Debate competitions seem to be one area where higher education has completely gone off the rails. And on an unrelated note, I live in a state with a huge % of our land controlled by the Bureau of Land Management, and they can all go die in a fire. ---
**Author:** ![Salvor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b5e925/32.png) [@Salvor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Salvor)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2016, 10:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blm-antics-like-this-at-depaul-probably-make-trump-more-popular/755720/56 "2016-05-26T22:59:26Z")
> [@HurricaneDitka](#): > > Debate competitions seem to be one area where higher education has completely gone off the rails. And on an unrelated note, I live in a state with a huge % of our land controlled by the Bureau of Land Management, and they can all go die in a fire. Just to highlight that it’s not just picking on black people. Take an earlier sample. ... it's a joke. I would be embarrassed to preside over such a competition. ---
**Author:** ![Measure\_for\_Measure](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/measure_for_measure/32/557_2.png) [@Measure\_for\_Measure](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Measure_for_Measure)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2016, 11:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blm-antics-like-this-at-depaul-probably-make-trump-more-popular/755720/57 "2016-05-26T23:10:10Z")
> [@HurricaneDitka](#): > > Debate competitions seem to be one area where higher education has completely gone off the rails. Well, we’re discussing an extra-curricular activity conducted by a small number of undergraduates. It’s not exactly high status: Ted Cruz is the only adult I know of who has bragged about his participation in it. It’s not surprising that participants have gamed the rules. Take a look at high level Scrabble games some time for another example of rules degeneracy. It happens. ---
**Author:** ![Stringbean](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d6d6ee/32.png) [@Stringbean](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stringbean)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2016, 11:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blm-antics-like-this-at-depaul-probably-make-trump-more-popular/755720/58 "2016-05-26T23:19:50Z")
LMFAO THESE DEBATES!!! What a stupid garbled load of dogshit. I wish extinction upon humanity after witnessing this. ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [May 27, 2016, 1:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blm-antics-like-this-at-depaul-probably-make-trump-more-popular/755720/59 "2016-05-27T01:10:40Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > Single Jewish Women? > > Several Japanese Weevils? > > Soviet Jumpsuit Workers? > > and why do they use the acronym if they deplore it so badly? Yeesh. Social Justice Warriors. Shitbrains. ---
**Author:** ![bobot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bobot/32/21622_2.png) [@bobot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bobot)\ **Post date:** [May 27, 2016, 1:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blm-antics-like-this-at-depaul-probably-make-trump-more-popular/755720/60 "2016-05-27T01:36:29Z")
Am I the only one that noticed after clicking the OP’s dumb link that BLM is stated there to mean Belligerent Loud Monkeys? What the racist fuck? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blm-antics-like-this-at-depaul-probably-make-trump-more-popular/755720.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blm-antics-like-this-at-depaul-probably-make-trump-more-popular/755720.md?page=4)