EPTDebating It All
I have been an active member of my school's debate club since it began. I was a founding member, and we have really advanced since those Sophomore days. Debate changed rapidly then, us being sophomores trying to figure out what the hell we were supposed to be doing and what not. Since then, debate has slowly wrapped me around it, demanding my presence for each debate tournament that my school goes to. I've flirted with debate a lot I'd say, hell I'd say that it has toppled model UN for my most important school based extra-curricular activity; considering I already bitched about that extra-curric first.
This is a vent blog, mostly because my team and I couldn't break quarters. Normally I'm annoyed that I didn't win first place blue ribbon, but that is just being a perfectionist. In this case, I can't believe how badly this tournament was run. Granted it was a large tournament, but I have never seen so many issues plague a tournament. Normally tournaments suffer from the normal debate issues, banal arguments, a mix of bad judges with the good ones, a lack of real understanding of important concepts by the debaters, and of course all the logistical issues any director can pull out of his sleeves while running to fix those issues. In this case, all of these issues were present, as they always are at a highschool debate tournament, but with one exception; the judges were absolutely awful. I don't know what is worse about the judges, I don't think there is any mot juste to describe them, there is no word to describe the neglect for the actual rules of debate that I saw.
RESOLVED: ON BALANCE THE RISE OF CHINA IS BENEFICIAL TO THE INTERESTS OF THE UNITED STATES was the topic of the debate. I mention this now to show a couple issues I had with the judges before I go into further detail about them and the other debaters. Because of the term "On Balance," the judges are supposed to holistically look at the debate, and more importantly, leave their biases at the door; that is key to any Public Forum debate, and is in the NFL rulebook as one of the most important parts of being a lay judge. The most egregious error that every judge their had was neglecting this. Every time my partner and I lost a round (2 out of 6 were lost, which let us break to quarterfinals), it wasn't because we argued badly. In fact, every lost round the judge would say that we were more persuasive, but that they couldn't believe what we said was true, despite us citing everything we had. One judge went as far to say that we had manipulated the truth, which made me incredibly angry. Literally every loss was us hitting cognitive dissonance, despite having facts and numbers to back up everything we said. The reason I stressed holistically above is because no inter-country diplomacy is ever wholly positive, unfortunately it seems that every judge who voted against us believed that we fabricated facts to make China not look evil.
I was speechless concerning the judges. The worst part was that the judges that were 4 year highschool debaters had no idea what to do. They were the worst debaters I've seen when it comes to public forum debate rules, and consequently were the worst judges there. They had everything from incredulity bordering on ignorance to arrogance bordering on pretentiousness. I have never seen so many college students that were that immature and ignorant of even the basics of China (like the civil war and then the 4 modernizations to the present), even to the point where one of them (the most pretentious of the bunch) declared that obviously we were all new and were terrible, went on to say that she liked our argument about Comparative Advantage because the world isn't like 1700's mercantilism, and then state that the U.S. greatest ally was either Britain or Canada (sic); it was ok though, because she thought I was eloquent and told me so after rolling her eyes at me constantly during my speech right before she told us that the only reason that the Kyoto Protocols were not signed by the U.S. Congress was due to issues with sovereignty. I'm pretty sure she was on her period, but my partner disagreed.
Worst of all was the quarterfinals. The judges were conducted in a classroom for 9th graders, it was obviously a math room because they had terms for what looked like geometry with a bit of algebra thrown in. Our judges trickled in, one of them looked like Shaggy from Scooby Doo, and he came in first. He was definitely eclectic, wearing 3 shirts, all meticulously arranged to be differing shades of light blue, followed by blue jeans all pulled together by his capricious facial expressions (he would look up and smile, look down and frown, repeat the process every 5 seconds while we debated, I can't tell if this was him trying to have a poker face or he just loved looking at us but hated what we said) When I tried to shake his hand, he pulled away, sat as far back in his chair as he could, and managed to draw the sentence, "I just got over being sick," and crossed his arms less to be defiant and more to protect himself from the imminent threat that my hands posed. The second judge to come in was an Asian girl who was not Chinese from her looks, and refused to shake my hand also while not only not giving a reason, but also just mumbling something. The final judge was a white girl who was not paying attention the entire time. We debated against a team that broke the rules constantly by using the internet to look up information mid-debate, but we couldn't say anything about this because we were told not to by another judge who actually got angry at me for pointing that out. By the end of the debate, we had thoroughly trashed our opponents argument, and they knew it - one opponent, a tall, black girl, was so flustered she wasted about 20 seconds of a 2 minute speech trying to push words from her mouth and coming up with nada - the judges even told us so. Unfortuntately, the first judge, the bro in blue, told us that he couldn't believe our argument because of his biases against China and then accused us of lying. The second judge, the girl who never paid attention, told us that we both sucked and that she just thought that our argument made more sense but stressed the fact that she was better than us at debating. The third judge, the asian girl, did not finish actually writing her decision until after the bro in blue had finished talking and never even finished her written critique. Apparently she and the 2nd judge chatted away the entire time. She then told me that I should have never attacked my opponents sources and then proceeded to say what the first judge said. In the end they all agreed that we were more persuasive, had a better flow of argument, but we just couldn't be trusted because we were obviously lying despite our opponents blatant cheating.
Fuck Vestavia Hills judges. If anyone on here has ever gone to that tournament, done debate and had a similar experience or anything like that, I want to hear it. Thanks, for listening to my rant TL.
fuck 'em lol.
