[lambdaloop]

There was a radiolab episode about the other side, interviewing the people advocating for critical theory in debate: https://radiolab.org/podcast/debatable

It's true that it goes against the debate in the moment, but if you zoom out and look at the role of debate within greater society, I think it makes sense to challenge the topics brought up for debate and the whole system that we live in.

[cmdli]

The trouble is that it ignores the very thing that debate is trying to teach: the ability to sympathize with, understand, and argue for a position even if you don’t agree with it. It is meant to encourage a greater understanding of the world through different perspectives.

[kalkin]

People do exactly this with Ks in policy debate - the same person presenting a K in one round will be defending against it in another round. Nationally competitive debaters don't (in my experience) choose Ks because they believe in them, but because they're tactically effective.

[mellosouls]

it makes sense to challenge the topics brought up for debate

Sure. But not in the debate itself.

That's classic bad faith participation and means the argument you are representing is being ill-served to the point of dishonesty.

[Paul-Craft]

That's absolutely untrue, at least in policy debate, which I participated in during high school.

There are 5 of what are called "stock issues" that are the basis for judging a round, and the affirmative side must win all of them to take the round. The negative side need only win one.

One of those stock issues is "topicality." The affirmative wins topicality as an issue by affirming the resolution. The negative is not so bound. This leads to an absolutely classical negative strategy called the "counter-plan." Essentially, what this is is a strategy where, rather than the negative simply saying "nuh uh" to the affirmative's points, they put forth their own plan and argue that it is better than the affirmative's plan.

There is some thought that the negative counterplan must explicitly be non-topical, i.e. not advocate for the resolution. So, for instance, the the resolution might be something like "Resolved: That the United States government should reduce worldwide pollution through its trade and/or aid policies," which was actually the 1992-1993 high school policy debate resolution. The negative could argue that the US should reduce worldwide pollution by means other than trade and/or aid policy, or that the US should do something completely unrelated to pollution reduction, because that action would create bigger benefits than the affirmative plan.

For this strategy to work, it's best if the counterplan and the affirmative plan are mutually exclusive, so it's a common strategy to simply hijack the affirmative plan's funding plank to make it all work.

Absolutely none of this is any sort of bad faith tactic. An affirmative team must always be prepared to argue a comparative advantage case. As I said, this is completely bog-standard, classical policy debate strategy, and in no way constitutes bad faith. But, yet, because the negative has no duty to be topical (and, indeed, could possibly be more convincing if they are explicitly non-topical), they might spend half their time talking about something not mentioned at all in the resolution.

[msla]

Nothing is solved by high school debate. Nothing. Ever. The only point it has is teaching kids how to debate, which is negated by giving the kids instant-win buttons in the form of Correct Opinions they can spout to adoring judges.

[kalkin]

Good thing nobody gets an instant-win button! (That would actually kill the activity which is why even this rather poorly-argued article doesn't claim it's happening.)