LD Debate/School Debate

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Has anyone here ever done LD debate or any other form of school debate? Some other forms I’m aware of is public forum, policy, and student congress. I recently got asked to by my old high school debate coach to judge for an event. I remember liking some things about debate and its paid so I said sure. That being said I do remember a lot of bad things about school debate. I’ll share some more details on some of the stuff and I kind of want to go through some of the official rules of debate to see how it all works, but here’s a few things I remember that kind of sucked (specifically talking about LD):

  • It was supposed to be a moral debate with limited evidence. Use of a lot of evidence said at high speeds was called spreading and was not allowed. Didn’t matter. People who used a lot of evidence fast, won all the time.
  • Anything is supposed to go. You can write a whole case saying why stealing is good. Except you can’t because the average judge doesn’t like that. A team member of mine at the time lost a debate because the judge couldn’t let his case themed around being directly evil win. I’ve lost numerous times because I argued using Ayn Rand. I have had judges say to me, and my own coach at the time, that the only reason I lost was because I used Ayn Rand (not saying that was all my losses, but many).
  • This isn’t necessarily a criticism of LD debate directly, but I do remember it being very poorly ran. So much so that it felt like schools from different areas were taught debate in drastically different ways. I was taught to use very limited evidence. Others were taught to use a lot of evidence.

tldr: I think high school debates (and probably college debates) are a chaotic mess.

Has anyone here had any experience with those kinds of debates?

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Here’s an old debate case I found:

Affirmative

The illegal use of drugs ought to be treated as a matter of public health, not of criminal justice.

Illegal - contrary to or forbidden by law, especially criminal law. (oxford)

Drugs - a medicine or other substance which has a physiological or psychological effect when ingested or otherwise introduced into the body.

Ought - used to indicate duty or correctness, typically when criticizing someone’s actions.

Treated - behave toward or deal with in a certain way.

Public Health - the health of the population as a whole, especially as the subject of government regulation and support.

Criminal Justice - The system of law enforcement that is directly involved in apprehending, prosecuting, defending, sentencing, and punishing those who are suspected or convicted of criminal offenses.

Core Value - Societal Welfare - The well-being of the entire society. Social welfare is not the same as standard of living but is more concerned with the quality of life that includes factors such as the quality of the environment (air, soil, water), level of crime, extent of drug abuse, availability of essential social services, as well as religious and spiritual aspects of life.

http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/social-welfare.html

Value Criterion - Altruism - the belief in or practice of disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others

C1 - Treating drug users as criminals is immoral

What is the highest moral value and theory that we almost all of mankind agrees upon? It is the code of altruism. It is the the theory of negating one’s self from any and all actions. While true altruism has shown to nearly be impossible. That does not remove it from its place as the moral ideal that many people hold up. This means treating people we deem poor and against our values as our family, as our loved ones and respecting them. Imagine if you were in a world where you were the drug addict and you wanted help among other things you would wish for society to treat this as a public health issue. Yet if you were not the one suffering it doesn’t matter to you. This is selfish and vicious. The implicitly understood and brotherly code of altruism dictates that we need to remove our selfish concerns before making decisions. Therefore, the treatment of people who use illegal drugs should be treated as how you would wish to be treated and to treat them as they were family. Even if they lack virtue. To judge them and to force your values and virtues up to people who may not have a choice if that is not vicious I don’t know what is.

C2 - Punishing users does not help

According to Human Rights Watch “The 196-page report (from the UCLA and HRW)t, “Every 25 Seconds: The Human Toll of Criminalizing Drug Use in the United States,” finds that enforcement of drug possession laws causes extensive and unjustifiable harm to individuals and communities across the country. The long-term consequences can separate families; exclude people from job opportunities, welfare assistance, public housing, and voting; and expose them to discrimination and stigma for a lifetime. While more people are arrested for simple drug possession in the US than for any other crime, mainstream discussions of criminal justice reform rarely question whether drug use should be criminalized at all.” Punishing the drug users simply has been shown not to help. There is an enormous amount of evidence supporting this and I would be moving away from the core of LD mentioning it all. Again to be a truly moral people and country we need to consider this. Would we want ourselves to be punished for this? Would we want our family members who may have made a mistake to be treated like this? And more importantly even if I were to agree that it should treated criminally should it not be an effective deterrent and help those who may have again made a mistake? Would anyone not want that?

By punishing people who may be part of an epidemic such as the opioid epidemic where doctors over prescribe drugs and pharmaceutical companies push them to do that, instead of helping the affected, we punish them.

C3 - Decriminalization means help

By treating the situation as a public health issue this would mean a decriminalization of drugs. This would help in many ways. First this would allow doctors, rehab centers, clean drug use, among many other things to flourish. If people are going to do drugs while harshly punished.then at least opening up the paths to proper rehab and safe use will be the more altruistic thing to do. This would also help against the self-righteous war we have against drugs. Instead of now fighting and killing people over the drugs. We could work with drug dealers and regulate them. We regulate alcohol and marijuana and they have shown outstanding success.

Decriminalization of drugs means first that people can openly get help for their problems.without the fear of going to jail. We can also then use the government to properly control these things instead of putting in the hands of cartel. To put it another way, treating it as a public health issue puts the power in the hands of the people who are affected, the government of the people, and such. However, keeping it criminal puts all the power into the hands of minute individuals instead of the collective people. Who is more trustworthy greedy, selfish, vicious individuals who only care for their own profit as seen by many cartels or a government that can be be beholden to its own people. Or at the very least more beholden then a cartel.

That means the drug war doesn’t have to be fought anymore and instead we can focus on regulating the market like we do with everything instead including alcohol and make sure everything is fine.

Explaining some of the stuff in the case:

You write two cases on the same topic. One for, one against.

You have to define every word in the topic. I think this is stupid. Judges hate debates that waste time on nitpicking definitions. Debate topics are decided by this debate association: Topics | National Speech & Debate Association. I don’t know why they don’t go ahead and define it for us. Its dumb.

Affirmative cases are written with three main points and meant to be read in 6 or so minutes.

Core Values are what your case is supposed to be based on. Its what you are arguing for. Your value criterion is how you will achieve your core value. It’s what you are doing. People don’t understand this at all. These are meaningless in most debates I’ve seen and participated in.

lmao. reading this over I think wrote this in a way making fun of altriusm. i was probably an annoying objectivist teen looking back.

hmmm. uhh yes that one piece of evidence cited. the general guideline i was given was one to two pieces per contention/point. people spam evidence in each of their points most of the time. oh yeah their is no good method for judging the evidence people bring in. i’ve never been given a good answer to this and it drives me insane. for example: affirmative gives a piece of evidence saying, idk, video game good, negative gives a piece of evidence saying video game bad, affirmative addresses this by either undermining the source of their evidence or something else. idk. idk how im supposed to judge if that was a valid attack on their evidence. oh yeah also they need to defend the attack on the evidence otherwise that evidence is dropped, even if the attack is literally just saying “thats wrong”. leading to stupid stuff in debates.

debate rounds are ~50 minutes or so.

oh yeah final thing for this post:
affirmatives go first for 6 minutes then
negative gets three minutes to cross examine the affirmative
then negative goes up, they get 7 minutes to give their case and attack the affirmative
then affirmative cross examines for 3 minutes
affirmative then has 4 minutes to give a rebuttal and to defend against attacks
negative then has 6 minutes to defend against the attacks and explain why they should win
affirmative ends the debate with 3 minutes explaing why they should win

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Current LD debate topic:

Resolved: The United States ought to become party to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and/or the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

They are supposed to have a moral debate with limited evidence on this.

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I don’t know what that convention and/or statute are.

The whole system you explained is not seeking conclusive debate. It’s an adding weighted indecisive factors approach to debate with a significant focus on being persuasive to audiences.

As a judge, your job is roughly:

  1. Pretend to be a large audience and estimate how the audience would react to different arguments and the overall debate.
  2. Use some additional logic, analysis, rationality, objectivity and consideration of the actual debate rules and guidelines that many members of a big audience wouldn’t. Use this to adjust the results from (1) some.

For the evidence, you’re meant to just consider what was said and how convincing it seems to you and how convincing you think it’d be to audiences. If you find it really hard to judge, and hard to pick a side as better, then you should consider it around 50% convincing. The best way to think of this may be to evaluate issues on a scale from -1 to 1, so if something is 50% convincing its factor weighting is 0, and if it’s near 50% then the weighting is near 0 so it won’t make much difference when you sum up all the weighted factors. You can also think of it as a 0 to 1 scale if the issue can only benefit one side, in which case that side has to be more than 50% convincing to get a weight above 0, but anything under 50% also ends up at 0 since the issue can’t go negative for them.

So basically if neither side can get a clear win regarding a piece of evidence (or it can only favor one side but that side can’t get a clear win), just reach a conclusion using other factors.