Okay, I wanna talk about The Debate Mindset and how it’s escaped collegiate debate. I wish I could leave this thread open to replies, but I can’t - I’ve seen how defensive debate people (not just “bros”) get about their community. (Thread on collegiate debate as a social factor)

So, collegiate debate is an activity I actually only wished I could do until my last two years of college, and ended up coaching at Texas A&M - I don’t think I was a terribly good coach, but I do understand the activity, and I also took a course on coaching it. >

There are a variety of, well, varieties of collegiate debate, and these largely exist at the high school level too. These are debating activities, usually combined at the lower levels with forensics (as in prepared speech and theater-like events), with academic prizes

As in, like,trophies and stuff. The politics of the debate community is inherently weighted slightly to the right - this is one of the places where I expect debaters to pop in to, well, debate me, but it’s just inherently going to attract ppl comfortable with defending abhorrence

That sounds a bit judgmental, because I ran out of characters, but essentially the thing about all debate is, you get assigned your side, on an arbitrary topic, and your goal is to win. “Policy” debate is the most prestigious and “difficult,” I never competed (but did coach)

All forms of debate, though, including “parliamentary,” which I both competed in and coached, essentially devolve into policy. In theory, a parliamentary debate is (weirdly enough) supposed to focus on values, but it never does.

Essentially, most debate rounds that don’t get completely wild end up being decided on “policy basis” which is usually some sort of utilitarian weighing of the pros and cons of each side IN THEORY, but in reality was described by one of my coaches as being like football

Every argument is like a player; you’re hoping one of your players scores a touchdown. You want to block everyone else’s “players” from scoring a touchdown

So this is not really how any sort of reasonable discussion in everyday life goes, no? But, it’s a game.

And the game is fun. If it could stay just a game, that’d be great. But to be good at this, you have to be good at twisting your mind to nitpick and sabotage, and you have to be willing to utterly wall off any feelings you have about who’s actually right, to win.

Compounding this is the fact that because you do have liberal and leftist debaters, and because forensics, the broader activity, includes theater kids and more left-leaning people, there’s enough of an ideological conflict at a speech meet to incentivize certain topics of debate.

stuff like LGBT rights, police violence, etc. are going to be uncomfortable enough for a large enough percentage of your debater population to take one of the sides of that you pick a more “innocuous” issue

Of course, the strategies carry over into discussing other topics

common debate topics when I was in including “resolved: this house will legalize marijuana for recreational purposes” (Parliamentary phrasing)or “this house will limit lobbyists” (I had an epically embarrassing for the other team round w/that,they didn’t know what a lobbyist was)

So, here’s the “harm” (that’s a debate term right there, a policy term): people essentially get coached to argue losing issues that they know are losing. SO MANY Republican congressmen are former debaters (Democratic, too, but I think the GOP benefits so much more)

Out of the issues I mentioned, one (limit lobbyists) would force one side to argue an absurd absolutist free speech position, or something similar; obviously lobbyists should somehow be regulated! And the pot thing, well, the evidence is overwhelmingly on the pro-legal side.

One of the biggest moments for me realizing cannabis legalization was 1) probably going to happen and 2)clearly correct was that conservative debaters absolutely understood that the negative position was wrong, and were as good as liberals if not better at arguing the affirmative

But this is what it boils down to: you want one less of your little argument-guys to make it to the end. So if you draw the negative on pot legalization, regardless of your personal position, you know you can’t actually win on the merits

So you use whataboutism

The most extreme form of this is “the nuclear war card,” which is a literal evidence card which has changed over time; it’s a badly written academic article you can cite which makes the case along the lines of >

“any major alteration in Econ/IR will lead to a 5% increased chance of nuclear war; any increase in the chance of an event that will kill all humans is unacceptable, therefore even though legalizing pot [or any aff. Case] is largely good, it’s bad, bc nuclear war”

Today’s equivalent of this is the climate change card. Ideally you play both. (Hypothetically the affirmative team could end up doing this; there’s something called a “counter-plan.” The strategy is the same.)

So anyway, there’s a less extreme version of this which is probably more insidious, and that’s... well, I sometimes go over old debate rounds I lost in my head and I thought of how a pot legalization debate round I had could have gone

I should’ve argued on buzzed driving.

Specifically, I should have maintained that the inability of police to test if someone is intoxicated on weed easily would provide a horrific burden which would kill enough people that it would outweigh any social benefits

This is obviously bs but:

The counter from the affirmative team would be that it’s possible to prosecute a DUI case based on testimony that someone was obviously intoxicated, that it’s a non-issue

Which is mostly true

But that’s what it would come down to, that or climate change nukes

The point is to win the argument and the literal trophy by nitpicking your opponent’s case and finding any possible downside to not doing things exactly your way

And it’s how “just very concerned” trolls argue on here

I would go so far as to say that the activity of debate is a form of consensual harassment. And that statement is why this thread is follows only :P