this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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This was super enlightening, I appreciate the effort to let me know what I was experiencing all those years ago.
It's just ONE of the problems with competitive debate. Another is that debaters figured that they could win based on "impact". Meaning, "what bad things will happen if my opponent's arguments became reality?". This required a kind of slippery slope fallacy in which everything results (literally) in Nuclear war.
China's GDP growth outpaces the US? Nuclear war. The US invests more money in NASA? Nuclear war. Students are no longer required to take SATs? Nuclear war.
Because if your opponent's impact is simply "the economy will shrink by 2% year over year" or "people will have a harder time finding jobs", the threat of nuclear war will ALWAYS outweigh that.
The other alternative is to go the more philosophical route: If you are on the Negative side of the argument, you look for a VERY tenuous way to say that the affirmative is racist in some way, and then you spend the rest of your allotted time quoting James Baldwin and calling your opponent a racist (this is called a Kritik, or just a K for short). I saw many potentially interesting policy topics such as space exploration get completely sidelined by whatever Critical Theory shit the negative wanted to talk about instead, because it was easier for them to write a single case once and just recycle it between topics than it was for them to research the actual topic.
In 2013 a team won the National Debate Tournament (like the NFL of college-level debate) by essentially arguing:
https://youtu.be/RZrWfDIediU?t=7788
The topic was about energy policy: