Tag: Worlds

  • Competitive Debate is not in the Hands of Educators

    The biggest issue facing the Tournament Debate Regime around the world is that they willfully exclude the educational perspective and also work to exclude educators from participating in the creation and administration of debate events. The biggest shock during the pandemic is that debate tournaments continued, unimpeded through online means. There was no discussion and…

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  • Defending Confusion and Uncertainty in Debates

    My recent attendance at a High School tournament made me realize how often we associate the presence of simplicity or clarity in argumentation with good argumentation. How many times have you seen a team win a debate, or even an argument, by using a strategy saying that their policy or principle makes things uncertain, unclear,…

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  • What’s Left Out?

    Giving a talk today via Skype to a policy debate team about Worlds style debating. The question that I am using to orient my comments is one that might be a bit Lacanian: What’s left out? Or, since it’s a format that was created in Britain perhaps the better lecture title might be “Mind the…

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  • American Debate Sediment 1: Student Judging

    There are several issues standing in the way of the creation of an American national circuit of WUDC debating. All of them are quite serious issues, and they are going to take a generation to fix. Fix? Not really the right word. Brush away, clear away, something like that. For these are best considered a…

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