[atypicaluser]

Genuine question--if one isn't willing to debate the question at hand, then why debate at all? Why not, as a point of pride or honor or authentic rejection of the topic, withdraw from debate and take the L? It seems the side bringing up the K either is an activist for a different topic no one else wants to hear or is just someone(s) wanting to get one over (even embarrass) their opponent(s) by blind-siding them.

[dontparticipate]

Because competive debates are dumb and a dumb way to make up your mind about anything. The objective of the competitive debate is not to find some kind of truth or meaning or understanding but to win the debate. No honor or pride or authenticity needed. It's meaningless. And Ks are just the inevitable endpoint of this pointless exercise. They don't even have to pretend to debate the topic now, just win becaue that's what the judges like. It's actually always been like this, even without the Ks. If it was a right leaning jury you could win using what abouts and saying "woke" as many times as possible. The Ks just make the uselessness of debate as a format more obvious.

[tekla]

This kind of argument is starting to really bother me. Do you really think that the only part of the debate that matters is the actual debate itself? Are you ignorant of the massive amounts of shit that we learned when researching a topic?

I'm bringing up some old memories now, but lets go with some random topics that I recall

a) We should increase USAID funding to Africa to fight HIV/AIDS

b) We should increase alternative energy incentives in the US.

With the USAID topic, we had to learn in high school:

- What is USAID, how does it work

- How does foreign aid to Africa work

- How does the Govt actually allocate funds

- What is HIV/AIDS, how does it spread, and what work is done to prevent/cure it

With the alternative energy topic, we learned:

- How does national alternative energy policy work

- How do states deal with their own energy security vs others

- Does nuclear count as alternative energy

What high schooler is being tought these topics in class. I definitely see debates on HN that are FAR worse than a High School debate since so much research and planning is done by debaters on these topics, and probably know far more than most people.

[mensetmanusman]

Here is the nihilism

[tekla]

Because its all part of learning how to think critically. Policy Debate is not about actually expecting policy outcomes. It's about learning how to think and argue.

These kinds of questions are not interesting, because EVERYONE ASKS IT. Every single HN question on this topic of "why would you do this" would have reams of evidence/theory to refute it and explain why you're a crazy person for questioning this strategy.

Even back in my day, we definitely had debates where the argument effectively was "This debate is racist, and if we don't win you are all racists" And so you would have to figure out strategies to fight back.

You can see it all the time in the rhetroic online with activists and whatever, people who don't know how to argue, arguing with others that are making either bad faith arguments or trying to figure out how to deal with Kritique style arguments. It waste's their time and everyone elses time.

By being able to argue for/against Kritiques, you gain the ability to quickly call out the fucking bullshit and go straight to the meat.

[atypicaluser]

> By being able to argue for/against Kritiques, you gain the ability to quickly call out the fucking bullshit and go straight to the meat.

I'm not so sure about that. Because, if what Bodnick says is true, the judges never go for the meat but always vote for the sizzle. As she herself wrote, 'For example, many leftist judges will not accept a response to a Marxism kritik that argues that capitalism is good.' Sounds more like the K advocate (with the aid of the judge) is more interested in diffusing aromas than putting ribeye on the table.

[livueta]

> By being able to argue for/against Kritiques, you gain the ability to quickly call out the fucking bullshit and go straight to the meat.

This! I actually laughed out loud at the following line from tfa:

> A Public Forum debater who reached Semifinals at the Tournament of Champions told me: “I had to know critical theory to win... you have to be prepared in case you have to run it or go against it.”

Literally what? That's the entire fucking point. This is like people complaining about squirrels in debate or cheese in an RTS: if it worked, you suck, so maybe try not to suck instead of whining about it? I mean, I, personally, find arguments and worldviews rooted in appeals to authority to be quite gross, but I don't pretend that I can bury my head in the sand and cry unfair if someone deploys an argument like that against me and I can't deal with it due to lack of familiarity. Not really seeing how this scenario is any different.

Even in the extreme case of an outright biased judge, that's still in the game: inverting the K to demonstrate that, actually, the side that raised it are arguing for structural racism or whatever is both a ton of fun and really good experience.

Bias disclaimer: ran/defended against Ks in PF to great success long ago

[acomjean]

I didn’t do debate in high school, but I remember a class in the late 80s we had a class “world crisis” which covered the past/current states of Chile, Cuba, Ireland, Israel and South Africa.

We were supposed to debate a South African about apartheid. He couldn’t make it so we debated our teacher (who made his opinions known he was not a fan). He destroyed our arguments one by one. We knew for the rest of the class we would have to up our game.

[kalkin]

The way policy debate works (traditionally) is that the affirmative side gets to choose a particular policy to advocate within a broad space. A negative side that sticks to refuting the particular details of that policy is putting themselves at a severe disadvantage - they're always going to be behind in research and debate experience on that topic relative the affirmative (unless maybe they happen to use that same policy proposal themselves when assigned the affirmative). So debaters have used generic negative strategies for many decades, not just meta-critiques of their opponents discursive approach or assumptions ("Ks") but also "disadvantages" based on generalities like "your proposal will use up political capital and prevent Y from happening", and topicality arguments, where e.g. there might be two (or more) facially plausible interpretations of what's in scope for the topic, and they'll argue that whichever the affirmative has used to justify their proposal is incorrect.

Debate is competitive. Yes, each side wants to "get one over" or "blindside" their opponent, but that's not different with the K than with any other creative argument or novel bit of research, and at higher competitive levels everyone is going to be quite comfortable debating the K (at least since the 1990s).

[Seattle3503]

> The way policy debate works (traditionally) is that the affirmative side gets to choose a particular policy to advocate within a broad space.

This seems like an advantage to the affirmative side. in that light, Ks are a strategy to negate the affirmative advantage.

[brightlancer]

> Genuine question--if one isn't willing to debate the question at hand, then why debate at all?

Why do people cheat at anything? Because they want to win.