this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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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:
https://www.speechanddebate.org/topics/
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: