By the way, Freshyill (#2) wins.

Love it. I once heard a teacher say, ” Let’s crystalize our facets.”

http://www.hbo.com/docs/docuseries/resolved/index.html

Watching this and the link above that documents the portion of debate leading to the fight was interesting. I never realized the activity involved spitting out your argument as fast as possible. How do you judge an argument no one has time to process?

If debate is about teaching critical thinking skills to young people (and thats its fundamental goal, most people agree), then the kritik is a really good addition to the canon. The kritik forces you to not just address the other side’s case on a point by point basis but to consider the larger more philosophical assumptions the other side is making and refute those. It has allowed a whole world of thinking into the debate round. While some argue that that takes the emphasis off the resolution and the specificity of the topic, I don’t think anyone will argue that the kritik doesn’t teach people to think critically on a whole range of different issues.

All the stuff about talking fast, the craziness of people like Bill Shanahan, the idea that the affirmative would run a meta-argument about racism in an actual round in an attempt to win the round, that’s all the product of an evolving culture. We often look at folks like cosplayers in equally negative terms. But just because the man is insane and behaved shamefully doesn’t mean he hasn’t made meaningful contributions to the sport.

Also, I’m with Marrz: the best part is when the guy who just pulled his pants down says he’s not acting immaturely.

#59, thanks for the summary.

#28, Kritiks are both reasoned arguments (often more logical than Disads which have strange causal chains) and require research. They’re also not always “deconstructionist,” in fact the vast majority aren’t anymore. I used to run Marxism almost every neg round because I believed in it and found it interesting, and if that makes for bad debate then I wouldn’t have done debate at all and wouldn’t have read Foucault, Deleuze & Guattari, Lacan, etc…

Speed in debate rounds is a form of nuclear proliferation. At some point someone got the bright idea that they can win rounds by making as many arguments as possible in the allotted time, essentially spreading the opponent too thin and requiring them to answer too many arguments. At some point your opponent will skip one or cover one too thinly or just run out of time, which gives you an opening. You then drop all your arguments except that one and go to town. You would end up sacrificing “speaker points” (points given to individual speakers for their eloquence) but that wouldn’t really matter since you would usually win. To defend against that other teams got faster, and then faster, and faster, and so on.

At first speed was a really controversial thing – I remember debating in high school against teams that didn’t use it and with judges that would vote against you if you used it. But over time as more speed debaters grew up and became judges and coaches it has generally been an accepted part of the debate round.

And it’s not that hard to understand or process. Like Shakespeare, it takes a certain amount of time to get your ear used to hearing it and then it’s pretty straightforward. Speed is also generally used more when reading evidence as opposed to making your own arguments. You’re required to read aloud all your evidence, usually in the form of a paragraph or two per point. This takes up precious time, so you read the evidence as quickly as possible. It’s not hard to read something out loud really quickly. When a round begins everyone is just throwing piles of evidence at each other at breakneck speed, but by the second half of the round the pace has slowed considerably. It’s still pretty fast, but since the arguments being made are no longer based on evidence but rather based on the back-and-forth in the round it’s less straight reading and more on-the-fly. Of course in a college round of this caliber it’s super fast all over the place.

Where is that? At 5:10 I just hear Bill saying “I have no problem with that,” and then asking if Shanara wants to know why he struck her.