Memes that are too meirl for /c/meirl.
Rules:
Respect the community. If you're not into self-deprecating/dark/suicidal humor then this place isn't for you. Kindly just block and move on. This is just how some of us cope.
Respect one another.
All titles must begin with 2meirl4meirl. This is for multiple reasons. One is just so you can be lazy with titles but another is so people who aren't into this kind of humor can avoid it.
Otherwise just the general no bigotry, no dickishness, no spam, no malice, etc stuff.
Sidebar will be updated when I feel like and considering I'm Sadboi extraordinaire we'll see when that will be.
I remember speech and debate in high school
Stupid, stupid, pointless club. Would never recommend anyone get involved with it.
Also if OP is the same age as me, then they were probably in Lincoln Douglas debate (the only 1v1 event in competitive debate) and this was probably the 2009 November/December resolution:
November/December – Resolved: Public health concerns justify compulsory immunization.
I was in the speech and debate club, but there wasn't a class. I remember it much more fondly than some of these comments. We worked on several areas, Group Discussion being one of them. Part of it was acknowledging and tracking how often other members spoke and bringing them into the fold and ensuring you didn't go too far above or below the middle line.
Genuinely taught me a lot about having meaningful conversations and well structured verbal arguments, and why I now know what to do with my wacky inflatable arms no one ever instructed me on the proper use of while speaking.
But if it's Ben Shapiro type shit? That's for the birds, I agree with that sentiment I'm seeing in some places.
Wouldn't Benny shaps completely fail at HS debate competitions because literally his only move is the gish gallop?
You'd be surprised. I was a nationally ranked competitor in the public forum event during highschool. Like, my partner and I put up single digit placements in both NFL and CFL nationals (I know, I know. National forensics league, catholic forensics league. Not football) during my senior year. "Pound the table" (ptt, ill be using it a few times) was a strategy that represented roughly 1/3 of the competition. At that point it was down to judge variance; you could win over some ptt friendly judges by making the other team look and feel stupid, but a lot of them you basically had to figure out how to more belligerently speak over the other team without crossing the judges' line of "too far". Baiting them into rage meltdowns worked at lower levels of competition, but the best ptt teams could recognize and avoid that. For some meets we'd literally dumb down our cases for the area we were competing in. "Christian science monitor" was a source that would get you laughed out of the room in some areas, but in other areas you basically couldn't win unless you somehow verbally fellated the big imaginary friend of whatever shithole southern highschool you were competing in.
TLDR: a large number of highschool debate judges have few enough braincells that the gish gallop absolutely works
Did you do competitive debate? Like travel to other schools for debate and stuff?
Yeah for a few competitions. It was a lot of fun for the one year I was still in school to do it.
My home room was next to the debate room and I was always so confused how a club about debating basically boiled down to how fast can you get words out of your mouth. I’m sure I’m simplifying it, but I swear that’s all they did. Just talk really really fast.
That's exactly what it is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMO27PAHjrY
Here's the core rule of debate: Judges must weigh ONLY the evidence which is presented to them. For example, if one debater (the Negative) argues that vaccines cause autism, and the other debater (the Affirmative) does not deny this claim, the Judge essentially has to accept it as a fact that vaccines cause autism - If they vote against the negative because they already know that vaccines are safe, that's called judge intervention.
The point is that judges are supposed to vote based on who is the better debater, not based on any pre-existing knowledge about the topic (called "a priori knowledge").
So for organization reasons, a single argument in debate is called a "contention" (colloquially called a "card" because historically evidence was clipped out of journals, newspapers, etc. and glued to a 3x5 index card). If a debater goes up and presents 3 pieces of evidence, that's 3 contentions.
Now, if the opponent fails to address a contention in their first rebuttal, they are not allowed to refute it in subsequent rounds. When a contention goes unaddressed, it "carries across the flow" (meaning it must be accepted as truth in the judge's eyes, because the opponent did not refute it).
So basically if one side (The affirmative) goes up and presents 3 pieces of evidence and the other side (the negative) refutes only 2 of them, the 3rd piece of evidence must be considered to be a literal fact by the judge when they weigh the final evidence.
So here's what happened: in the 1960s a competitive debater at Harvard figured out that if they just read as many pieces of evidence as fast as they possibly can, the other side won't be able to keep up and will lose by default in the first round. He won a national tournament with this tactic, and it has become the standard way to debate since then. Back then, he was just reading a little bit faster than normal - you could still understand him and his arguments, but the success of the tactic has led to debate events becoming faster and faster
This tactic is called spreading (short for "speed reading").
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:
Resolved: The United States Federal Government should substantially reduce restrictions on and/or substantially increase financial incentives for energy production in the United States of one or more of the following: coal, crude oil, natural gas, nuclear power, solar power, wind power.
Absolutely not mate! Watch a Ben Shapiro debate, he gets his splinter violated almost every debate! Sure, you might scare or stifle> quote the words into an unexperienced debater but thats not really an accomplishment!
Its kind of a trade off actually! You not answering a point might seem as you coinciding, or even agreeing to it: so it might seem brilliant to bring up 3-4 like benny boy does while only really giving the opportunity to answer one, but… you also give them the choice to pick the one they can answer best while personally pushing your own possibly better arguments away!
That's a specific event called "policy". The other competitive highschool debate events in the US (at least when i competed) are public forum, Lincoln Douglas, and student congress. The super fast speaking was referred to as "spreading", and it only happened in policy debate. Policy was pretty subjectively stupid imo. The year I started debate, the team that won nationals in policy won because their plan only destroyed the world 10x over, where the opponents plan destroyed it 20x over. Not that the other events were any less stupid. Granted that it was a small local tournament and I was against a team of sophomores, but I've successfully won a round of public forum debate by claiming that nuclear energy is good and we should make more primarily because that would increase the spawn rate of mutant ninja turtles thus reducing crime.
now we can just hit play on that hbmomberguy video and we're all set (unless you cite him as the source do not just summarise it, he will come for you)
No polio AND extra focus! It's a win-win!
I laughed out loud