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 thread couldn’t possibly doubt my pro-choice credentials. And this 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.