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.



Caffeinated Content

Lee Siemon asked:

One of the things I miss from the past is my family’s debates over current affairs and such. I come from a family of five boys and a couple of intellectual parents (I don’t think that rubbed off).

I remember that we used to sit in my parent’s living room or out on their spacious lawn on a Sunday afternoon and someone would ask an opinion on something — the debate was on. Often there were seven or more different opinions and no consensus when the debate ended. It was a stimulating time.

I had a high school teacher, Mr. Smithers, who really knew how to start the debate with fire. He would come into the classroom and make an inflammatory statement about a current event, and the reaction from the class was instantaneous. I discovered that most of the time he didn’t necessarily believe the stance he took, but he did know what position would inflame his students. This was a high school English class not a debate class, and most of the students would not have had the least bit of interest in debate per se, but they were unknowingly dragged into one on a weekly basis.

The one I remember best was the Cuban Missile Crisis. The morning after President Kennedy announced his intentions on television, Mr. Smithers walked into the room and said something to the effect “What is Kennedy thinking, he has no business telling the Russians what they are allowed to do”. Almost every hand in the class when up and many had already started raising their voice. He would then guide the conversation, all the while pretending to be upset at the president.

I believe that debating is a healthy way to open our minds up to different perspectives on a subject. Sometimes we change the view point of others, sometimes they change the way we see the issue, and often we all just come away with an understanding of how everyone sees an issue. We have to approach any debate, be it an organized one or just a discussion between two people, with the mindset to hear and understand the opposite view point.

If you get fired up about things that are going on around you, put it up for debate and see how many others agree or disagree with you. There are many forums on the Internet where you can spawn lively debates on just about any subject. One such is www.as-i-see-it.com I hope you get into the fun of debating.

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