True enough, but wouldn't it be wiser to teach listening skills first. I belive most of us have speech class. Which, in my experience is a small percentage of the body of an arguement. After all who wants to speak when no one is willing listen?
The entire focus of “debate” was “the spread”. You read your arguments as fast as you can during your 8 minute (ten in college) Constructive speech.
AS FAST AS YOU CAN
The goal is to talk so fast that the other side doesn’t have time to respond to everything when their turn comes around.ideally, they can’t write or listen fast enough to even know what you said.
That was 90% of the competition. Talk so fast they can’t get to it all.
We debated interesting topics.
“resolved: the us should reduce its military commitment to one or more NATO member states.”
“Resolved: the United States should provide a guaranteed minimum income to all US citizens living in poverty”
In practice it was just read your arguments faster than the other side could.
Climate Change was the other cheat code. Turns out that it is almost impossible to do anything good without it leading to economic or population growth. And those are bad bad things so we can’t have that!
I remember the North Carolina team responding. “It’s not fair to blame us for the entire orientation of western society!!”
Tough luck. Growth is bad. Bring your”Paul Ehrlich is a nut” indictments next time.
I agree. Propaganda tactics should be taught too. I taught media in 2 high schools and tried to impart some of that, but I got blowback from the administration. They were Rush Limbaugh lovers. Debate is a lot of fun to learn and great for high school kids.
By the way. Kit, regarding your Facebook comment about cross-posting there, the web address that Substack offers (via "copy link") for your article may look something like this:
Hi Kit, I've admired your writing for quite a while now and know you have wondered whether it is appreciated. I hope this demonstrates that it is, very much.
I posted the following with a link to your article here in a private FB group that was started during the pandemic. The group began to deal with the pandemic's impact on our public schools but kept going to when Gov. Younkin's campaign, "Alliance for Defending Freedom", and used our school system (in Loudoun County VA) as a testing ground.
➖➖✂️➖➖
If our public schools aren't already doing it, should we convince them to include mandatory training in debate strategies and techniques? The linked Substack essay by Kit Thornton (aka Advocatus Perigrini here on Facebook) suggests we really should do that.
In Heather Cox Richardson's "Letters from an American" from June 27, the night of the presidential debate, she described Trump's use of "Gish galloping", the form of gaslighting Trump employed to make a mockery of the event. (See below for an excerpt.)
That was the first time I'd heard that term, but either had I participated in formal debate exercises in school. The pandemic taught me, if the preceding years since 2017 hadn't, that teaching our kids critical thinking skills so they could navigate run-of-the-mill logical fallacies is sometimes crucial for survival of our people and our society.
I used to believe fact-checking and the application of valid, inductive logic would be a sufficient and effective set of tools for our kids. Now that otherwise intelligent people in positions of power have learned to instill and leverage willful ignorance to gain advantage over rationality, we need to ensure our kids can recognize and counteract – or at least respond productively – to techniques like Trump used.
One might assume President Biden should have recognized Trump's Gish galloping and been able to respond more effectively to it. But as with so much of Trump's other reckless behavior, I wasn't expecting it at all formal debate, either, nor for anyone to employ it continuously for an hour and a half.
(Although I haven't thought through how Biden might have responded, perhaps he could have described the technique and suggested that a Commander in Chief willing to use such tactics for something as simple as a policy debate is something best avoided.)
--------
If you haven't read HCR's article, here's a relevant excerpt describing Gish galloping:
"It went on and on, and that was the point. This was not a debate. It was Trump using a technique that actually has a formal name, the Gish gallop, although I suspect he comes by it naturally. It’s a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them.
"It is a form of gaslighting, and it is especially effective on someone with a stutter, as Biden has. It is similar to what Trump did to Biden during a debate in 2020. In that case, though, the lack of muting on the mics left Biden simply saying: “Will you shut up, man?” a comment that resonated with the audience. Giving Biden the enforced space to answer by killing the mic of the person not speaking tonight actually made the technique more effective."
What an informative, wonderful post! 1000% spot on. Surprised that Biden wasn't prepped for it. Or, perhaps he was & just couldn't apply the knowledge in the moment. All those frames of Biden gaping I felt were of disbelief at the firehouse trump was spewing at him. I felt myself reacting in somewhat the same way. After all the years watching Cheeto operate, I still get flabbergasted at the outset. Hard to believe what's coming out of his mouth...he's a daily car crash that's hard to turn away from. By the time you've recovered, most of your allotted time is over.
Thanks for the article. I looked up ways to deal with a Gish gallop, and it seems that a Thematic rebuttal would be useful. Would it be useful to start each rebuttal with, "Everything he just said in nonsense or a lie, let me tell you what the truth is."
We would do a great service to kids with a course in media literacy. In fact, Hugh Downs and his daughter Dierdre, designed such a curriculum and it cut through a lot of the MSM palaver including advertising. Helping kids do their own research and sort fact from fiction would be a good start.
True enough, but wouldn't it be wiser to teach listening skills first. I belive most of us have speech class. Which, in my experience is a small percentage of the body of an arguement. After all who wants to speak when no one is willing listen?
I did NDT debate in high school and college.
The entire focus of “debate” was “the spread”. You read your arguments as fast as you can during your 8 minute (ten in college) Constructive speech.
AS FAST AS YOU CAN
The goal is to talk so fast that the other side doesn’t have time to respond to everything when their turn comes around.ideally, they can’t write or listen fast enough to even know what you said.
That was 90% of the competition. Talk so fast they can’t get to it all.
We debated interesting topics.
“resolved: the us should reduce its military commitment to one or more NATO member states.”
“Resolved: the United States should provide a guaranteed minimum income to all US citizens living in poverty”
In practice it was just read your arguments faster than the other side could.
Climate Change was the other cheat code. Turns out that it is almost impossible to do anything good without it leading to economic or population growth. And those are bad bad things so we can’t have that!
I remember the North Carolina team responding. “It’s not fair to blame us for the entire orientation of western society!!”
Tough luck. Growth is bad. Bring your”Paul Ehrlich is a nut” indictments next time.
I agree. Propaganda tactics should be taught too. I taught media in 2 high schools and tried to impart some of that, but I got blowback from the administration. They were Rush Limbaugh lovers. Debate is a lot of fun to learn and great for high school kids.
By the way. Kit, regarding your Facebook comment about cross-posting there, the web address that Substack offers (via "copy link") for your article may look something like this:
https://kitthornton.substack.com/p/the-debate-nerds-were-right?r=sald&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
That may take visitors to a page asking for their email address but isn't clear they can click a link and skip that to go directly to the article.
If you manually strip off everything after "?" and share this instead:
https://kitthornton.substack.com/p/the-debate-nerds-were-right
...that should bypass the email prompt page.
Hi Kit, I've admired your writing for quite a while now and know you have wondered whether it is appreciated. I hope this demonstrates that it is, very much.
I posted the following with a link to your article here in a private FB group that was started during the pandemic. The group began to deal with the pandemic's impact on our public schools but kept going to when Gov. Younkin's campaign, "Alliance for Defending Freedom", and used our school system (in Loudoun County VA) as a testing ground.
➖➖✂️➖➖
If our public schools aren't already doing it, should we convince them to include mandatory training in debate strategies and techniques? The linked Substack essay by Kit Thornton (aka Advocatus Perigrini here on Facebook) suggests we really should do that.
In Heather Cox Richardson's "Letters from an American" from June 27, the night of the presidential debate, she described Trump's use of "Gish galloping", the form of gaslighting Trump employed to make a mockery of the event. (See below for an excerpt.)
That was the first time I'd heard that term, but either had I participated in formal debate exercises in school. The pandemic taught me, if the preceding years since 2017 hadn't, that teaching our kids critical thinking skills so they could navigate run-of-the-mill logical fallacies is sometimes crucial for survival of our people and our society.
I used to believe fact-checking and the application of valid, inductive logic would be a sufficient and effective set of tools for our kids. Now that otherwise intelligent people in positions of power have learned to instill and leverage willful ignorance to gain advantage over rationality, we need to ensure our kids can recognize and counteract – or at least respond productively – to techniques like Trump used.
One might assume President Biden should have recognized Trump's Gish galloping and been able to respond more effectively to it. But as with so much of Trump's other reckless behavior, I wasn't expecting it at all formal debate, either, nor for anyone to employ it continuously for an hour and a half.
(Although I haven't thought through how Biden might have responded, perhaps he could have described the technique and suggested that a Commander in Chief willing to use such tactics for something as simple as a policy debate is something best avoided.)
--------
If you haven't read HCR's article, here's a relevant excerpt describing Gish galloping:
"It went on and on, and that was the point. This was not a debate. It was Trump using a technique that actually has a formal name, the Gish gallop, although I suspect he comes by it naturally. It’s a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them.
"It is a form of gaslighting, and it is especially effective on someone with a stutter, as Biden has. It is similar to what Trump did to Biden during a debate in 2020. In that case, though, the lack of muting on the mics left Biden simply saying: “Will you shut up, man?” a comment that resonated with the audience. Giving Biden the enforced space to answer by killing the mic of the person not speaking tonight actually made the technique more effective."
What an informative, wonderful post! 1000% spot on. Surprised that Biden wasn't prepped for it. Or, perhaps he was & just couldn't apply the knowledge in the moment. All those frames of Biden gaping I felt were of disbelief at the firehouse trump was spewing at him. I felt myself reacting in somewhat the same way. After all the years watching Cheeto operate, I still get flabbergasted at the outset. Hard to believe what's coming out of his mouth...he's a daily car crash that's hard to turn away from. By the time you've recovered, most of your allotted time is over.
Thanks for the article. I looked up ways to deal with a Gish gallop, and it seems that a Thematic rebuttal would be useful. Would it be useful to start each rebuttal with, "Everything he just said in nonsense or a lie, let me tell you what the truth is."
Well said, Kit!!
We would do a great service to kids with a course in media literacy. In fact, Hugh Downs and his daughter Dierdre, designed such a curriculum and it cut through a lot of the MSM palaver including advertising. Helping kids do their own research and sort fact from fiction would be a good start.