In my experience, many debate clubs have at least a few members who are wankers like Kirk.
For example, Ted Cruz was a debate whiz kid in college. But outside that artificial, controlled environment, he still resorts to bullying and flooding the zone with bullshit. That’s because propaganda is a different game than debate, and debate skills have limited relevance to political discussions.
I didn’t know that. I always assumed people who argued like he did would quickly be shut down by the basic rules of the format and give up if they couldn’t learn to adapt
Know how everyone hates lawyers because they basically manipulate the meaning of the rules to serve themselves? It’s like that.
If you’re an absolute killer at the kind of rules and admin of debate, you can rack up points with nonsense and keep your opponent from doing the same.
It was bad arguing. There’s a reason why he only argued with children and never with any actually serious debate clubs.
In my experience, many debate clubs have at least a few members who are wankers like Kirk.
For example, Ted Cruz was a debate whiz kid in college. But outside that artificial, controlled environment, he still resorts to bullying and flooding the zone with bullshit. That’s because propaganda is a different game than debate, and debate skills have limited relevance to political discussions.
I didn’t know that. I always assumed people who argued like he did would quickly be shut down by the basic rules of the format and give up if they couldn’t learn to adapt
Know how everyone hates lawyers because they basically manipulate the meaning of the rules to serve themselves? It’s like that.
If you’re an absolute killer at the kind of rules and admin of debate, you can rack up points with nonsense and keep your opponent from doing the same.
It’s an insanely stupid use of people’s time
This. He was terrible at arguing. You are describing a terrible orator with no skill to analyze it present ideas.
But we took humanities out of school curriculum long ago, so most can’t tell.
In the land of the blind the one-eyed is king.
We can probably thank decades of shout shows on television, especially cable, in which “debates” took place that were not really actual debates.
Same with the way our “debates” are run when it comes to politicians running for office.