Remarks on the Slow Boring post about “Kritiks” in debate, copied here for a friend who wanted to reference them, and lightly edited to fit the shortform format:
In the format of debate I do (“British Parliamentary” (BP), also my favorite, having also done “Public Forum”), this sort of thing is sorta-kinda explicitly not allowed. Ironically, I think BP is somewhere where this would be most appropriate—because you don’t have the ‘motion’ until 15 minutes prior to start, focus on ground-facts is low (only relatively, compared to other research-heavy styles); you spend a lot of time arguing about “moral weighing-criteria” and “framing” and things like this.
We do have a pretty clear line where you can, say, go full-Marxist in saying some particular impact is the most important—you have to defend this framing, not just assert “Marxism says X”—but you definitely can’t tell the motion to go fuck itself. (A late-debate reframing is called a “squirrel” and only allowed if the opening-half was batshit insane with the framing).
Specifically, you pretty much can get away with saying “zoos are anthropocentric and that’s bad because...”, but then you have to justify that and “weigh it out” against the other cases people bring. That is, you can win with a case that would be Kritik-adjacent (i.e. radical but you still can’t challenge the motion), but you then have to argue why that’s the relevant framing of the debate, why it’s the most important thing, etc.
I only know EU debate for BP, so it’s possible its just that US debate as a whole is weird, but I don’t think so since I’ve seen e.g. Princeton compete. In the slow-boring article they note that its worst in “Policy” debate which sounds reasonable since that’s always been the most Goodharted format (I’ve heard of classes where they teach you to speak at 350 WPM). Also worth noting that I never debated at an especially high level, and only in the Netherlands, but I’ve watched a few world-finals debates and some online workshops and nothing Kritik-flavored has come up.
I find BP is actually one of the best antidotes to Twitter hot-takes, in part I’d guess because framing etc. is an integral part of the debate anyways, so what would be Kritik “flip-the-table” BS in Policy can be (is required to be) much more productive in BP. Perhaps this is the structure of the format, but it may also just be the community.
Remarks on the Slow Boring post about “Kritiks” in debate, copied here for a friend who wanted to reference them, and lightly edited to fit the shortform format:
In the format of debate I do (“British Parliamentary” (BP), also my favorite, having also done “Public Forum”), this sort of thing is sorta-kinda explicitly not allowed. Ironically, I think BP is somewhere where this would be most appropriate—because you don’t have the ‘motion’ until 15 minutes prior to start, focus on ground-facts is low (only relatively, compared to other research-heavy styles); you spend a lot of time arguing about “moral weighing-criteria” and “framing” and things like this.
We do have a pretty clear line where you can, say, go full-Marxist in saying some particular impact is the most important—you have to defend this framing, not just assert “Marxism says X”—but you definitely can’t tell the motion to go fuck itself. (A late-debate reframing is called a “squirrel” and only allowed if the opening-half was batshit insane with the framing).
Specifically, you pretty much can get away with saying “zoos are anthropocentric and that’s bad because...”, but then you have to justify that and “weigh it out” against the other cases people bring. That is, you can win with a case that would be Kritik-adjacent (i.e. radical but you still can’t challenge the motion), but you then have to argue why that’s the relevant framing of the debate, why it’s the most important thing, etc.
I only know EU debate for BP, so it’s possible its just that US debate as a whole is weird, but I don’t think so since I’ve seen e.g. Princeton compete. In the slow-boring article they note that its worst in “Policy” debate which sounds reasonable since that’s always been the most Goodharted format (I’ve heard of classes where they teach you to speak at 350 WPM). Also worth noting that I never debated at an especially high level, and only in the Netherlands, but I’ve watched a few world-finals debates and some online workshops and nothing Kritik-flavored has come up.
I find BP is actually one of the best antidotes to Twitter hot-takes, in part I’d guess because framing etc. is an integral part of the debate anyways, so what would be Kritik “flip-the-table” BS in Policy can be (is required to be) much more productive in BP. Perhaps this is the structure of the format, but it may also just be the community.
(I was the one who asked Charles to write up his inside view, as reading the article is the only serious information I’ve ever gathered about debate culture https://www.slowboring.com/p/how-critical-theory-is-radicalizing )