Isn’t it just a competition to see who can talk the fastest? I watched a video of it once and it seemed so dumb. It’s like the entire thing is just finding loopholes
Pretty much.
What I find most problematic is that this culture teaches younglings that there’s no such thing as truth. It’s just rhetorical trickery and gotchas.
That’s because that’s how politics works. If you can get enough people to believe that what you say is true and act on that belief, it doesn’t really matter whether it’s actually true or not.
That’s not the WHY. Debate isn’t trying to be like politics, but having formalized competitive rules for arguing is pretty difficult so there are a lot of ways to game the system. It’s not trying to model a broken world.
And that’s at least in part true, because people are taught that there’s nothing true, ever.
The media also react on that. All those “debates” between candidates for example. Most politicians would have to be interrupted every five seconds, because they tell obvious lies. Instead all the commentary focuses on debate style, which is utterly useless as a metric.
Rhetorical tricks and gotchas aren’t necessarily in opposition to the truth. You have to be able to communicate effectively to get the truth across, so knowledge of rhetoric is important for countering compelling bullshit.
My point is, that the debates never even get down to a level were truth has any meaning. It’s the simulacrum of a discussion, were the actual problem is just a backdrop for these rhetorical tricks. And that’s problematic.
I remember them being a lot more interesting to watch, and you got a real feel for the candidate’s positions (at least their public persona). But for the last ~8 years, it’s been just gish galloping.
E.g., Obama vs. Romney was honestly pretty interesting to watch.
There was actually a college debate team who argued about this. There was essentially no rules saying you had to follow the stated topic so they argued about racial prejudices in debate clubs and how it’s really a competition to see who talks the fastest. They ended up winning nationals if I recall correctly
Is this about political campaign debates or like high school debate club competitions?
Oh. Yeah. If you ever start to wonder if you might enjoy any part of our political process, you will not.
I did debate club in highschool and early college, but it was parliamentary style debate. I didn’t observe that much bullshit, so I’m guessing the US debate style is different
Nah that’s how debate club is everywhere. Middle, high school, and college.
The debates you see on TV are designed for whatever channel it’s on though.
Local councils are basically what you see on Parks and Rec. It’s where the OG crazies shine since they’ve mostly been banned from the internet lol.
Intelligence Squared has good debates. They have a podcast and a youtube channel I think. There’s only been one instance I can remember where one side of the debate was arguing in bad faith, and I’ve been listening for a while so I assume it’s pretty rare.
