Jordan Eller asked:


The Decline of Debate

Debate is, potentially, a great thing. It’s a chance to air your opinions and have others agree or disagree with you. It’s like a sword duel in a way, strike with stats, parry with logic, etc. It’s an intellectual wonderland, and in the end, if one can say it ever truly ends, maybe someone will change their view.

However, it seems that lately debate has become a series of personal attacks and hasty generalizations, which are both, ironically, logical fallacies. It has become constant attacks of: -you’re just ignorant-, -two kids died imitating a stunt on TV, so TV is evil-, and the like. Another common attack is –they manipulated the facts-. That last one is particularly amusing, as both sides tend to use it and, often, both sides are right to varying degrees. People manipulate facts, there’s a big surprise! How often, readers, have you yourself stretched the facts (truth) to get yourselves out of a jam? I’m not saying it’s right, but if every debater told the absolute truth and the exact facts, a lot of debates would be settled very quickly.

Although this may seem to just be an attack on how people debate (the process, not the people, mind you), it’s really more of a way to get others, like you readers, to really think about debates on TV, radio, the Internet, etc. and think to yourself “Is this logical or just a bunch of generalization and fancy-sounding words?” Maybe if enough people really consider how they debate and how others debate, we can return the activity to its rightful place as an intellectual and honorable event.



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