Fact War Debates

[McGreevy]

I thought I would add this in to start off a set of tips for people actually looking to improve their debating skills

This relates primarily to environmental debates, but can apply to anything that has crucial facts associated with it.

The way these debates play out is that teams do not accept the facts of another teams case, and they spend the entire debate bitching about who is right and who is wrong. It consumes the debate and the analysis overall suffers as a result.

One of the best tips I received for these kinds of debates is to, in the event you see one of these debates arise, use the even if argument. Accept that, on probabilites, the opposing teams facts could be true. Then use said facts to show why they support your case, or why they are not a major factor, or something like that.

Take your opponents matter and make it your own.

[smartarse]

Its important to remember that the 'even if' strategy (which is the right one by the way) involves running BOTH arguments - making the argument for why your set of facts and analysis is right, but then - without conceeding that you are wrong - you make the argument for why 'even if' we accepted their facts/analysis their case would still fall because....

Don't drop your own argument, just take some time to attack the issue from their perspective as well as yours.

And just as an aside, you'll find these sorts of issues can come up in a range of debates (although McGreevy might be right that they are more prevelant in environment debates). The most famous MAD example was an Australs Quarter or Semi in 1998 between Monash 1 and the hosts Sydney (1 i think, but maybe not..). The topic was about reforming NATO, Syd were Aff and argued that Russia should be admitted as a member, Monash at neg shocked the room by arguing that Russia was already a member, having been very recently admited to NATO.

Sydney responded with increasingly furious denials and derision, but Monash stuck to its guns and said that Sydney obviously were not up to date on the latest developments.

When the debate was over and the panel went off to make their decision we asked the Monash team what the fuck had possessed them of the idea that Russia was a member of NATO? A speaker (who shall remain nameless) replied that he had seen the cover of the recent Economist which had a picture of the NATO and Russian flags and had assumed that it meant they had joined, even though he admitted that he had not read the article.

Assuming Monash would get slammed unanimously by the judges the Sydney contingent was part shocked, part angry, part euphoric. It took a long time for the judges to come back and when after announcing that in a split decision Monash had won, they quickly left the room before being lynched.

The moral of the story isn't that you can or should lie in debates because you absolutely should not, but the moral is that there are few things more valuable in debating then the capacity to project credibility. A majority of judges simply didn't know the answer but they trusted Monash because overwhelming we debate fair and honestly.

[McGreevy]

Is there a way to build (or fake) confidence in your material in that way, or does it come with time? I personally have grown in confidence as a debater, but when it comes to some high-end rooms I still feel overwhelmed sometimes.

A classic example of this was ADAM last year. First round, the random draw had given us a very strong opposition (I cannot fully remember who that was, it could have been ANU 1 or a team from Sydney. Either way we got decimated). In a debate about Zimbabwe, and our proposition that we should impose sanctions or harsher sanctions upon it, the 1st negative got up after my speech and outlined 'the only times when sanctions ever work'.
Being a young debater, and since she was speaking right after me, I was not only rattled but believed it because of the confidence she used when making that argument. I still can't think of a way in which I could have brought myself back to reality whilst listening to her speech to find flaws in their case.

Although that would probably be a good separate topic for discussion at some point: listening to speeches and how to best glean information from them

[smartarse]

Thats a fantastic question. In some ways its the question for debaters who are beyond the basics, but don't yet know how to break into the highest tier of debaters.

The short answer to your very timely question is to read the next Silvertongue. I have written an article which to a large extent addresses your question. So for the moment i'll refrain from repeating myself for the moment.

I don't know exactly when Silvertongue is scheduled for publication, but it can't be too far away.

But as I imagine that this is a very unsatisfactory response so i'll try to offer a quick response.

Simply put, you can project more credibility and gravitas than you might think you generally deserve, but you can't do it by lying or being dismissive of objectively more credible opponents. Practice is the most important thing (as you yourself have found), firstly because you'll learn more arguments, but also because you'll keep your cool, which is usually the difference between winning and losing when your opponents are better than you on paper.

I debated at Sydney Worlds with Amanda W, and we were both young and certainly I was very inexperienced at IV debating. Because we broke last our octo final was against the first ranked team - Oxford A, featuring the previous year's Best Speaker, and who had won every round that year save one (which they disputed the result of) in which they came second. So its fair to say that Amanda and I were extremely intimidated. When we pulled OG and Oxford were OO we really felt like we were going to get crushed in the most brutal fashion.

Our model was for an Asian "European Union", including ASEAN (plus 3), Australia and New Zealand. To say it was optimistic is an understatement. Oxford were openly contemptuous of the idea and spent as much time rebutting our arguments as they did ridiculing it.

Amanda and I responded by sticking to our guns - we remained calm (outwardly at least), we acknowledged that our idea was improbable, but not impossible, and we argued that an Asian Union was no more unlikely than a European Union was in the 1940s and 50s. The point of our case was not to show that an Asian Union would happen, but simply that if the relevant political leaders listened to our ideas with an open mind, they would be convinced that they should.

In the end we made it through the round and Oxford did not. I'm not saying we were more credible than Oxford, but we managed to convert their inherent credibility into a sense that they were too focused on what would happen, and not what could happen.

Without having seen your debate I suspect a similar response would have worked - firstly you can disagree with the analysis that sanctions only work under specific circumstances which do not apply to your model (see my Silvertongue article for how you would do that), but also I would simply say that international relations is complex. There are few if any circumstances in which a nation has been subject universally to sanctions, or universally to engagement as a strategy to promote positive change. Even under apartheid some States continued to trade and interact with SA, and obviously contemporary examples like Burma and North Korea are simply messy. IR's not a science, and even if it was, the application of sanctions has never been scientifically applied. So even if there is no situation that is totally analogous to your case, the issue is whether you can show how sanctions will interact with the specific political, economic and social realities in that State specifically. Analogies strengthen arguments, they do substitute for them.

To put that another way, things are always impossible until they happen. The EU was impossible until it happened, States giving up nuclear weapons was impossible until it happened (in Ukraine and elsewhere), a government abolishing its military was laughably utopian until it happened (in Costa Rica, and New Zealand has effectively abolished the combat elements of its airforce), etc, etc, etc.

But read my article (maybe I can post it on here once its published) and then we can talk about it some more. It really is an excellent question.