Quotulatiousness

July 23, 2015

I didn’t know formal debates are now also performance art

Filed under: Randomness, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 05:00

Kathy Shaidle posted this video, which to be honest I first thought was a poorly done parody. I still rather hope to hear that it’s just somebody pulling a fast one on Fox …

1 Comment

  1. “Every day I thank God for making Canada too cold for cotton.”

    Very classy…

    I agree this is a weird video. But that was obviously the intent of whoever edited it (Oh, look it was an American radio personality!). There’s no way that that is a live recording of the original Fox broadcast. The original interview probably had zero, or less crazy, clips of the real debate. Someone has taken this and spliced in their personal highlight reel in order to increase its shock value (for reference, here is the entire championship round — all 4 hours of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFbQftMe6qY ). Given that the shock comes from “Ooooooh black people talking all black!”, it made this video really uncomfortable to watch!

    So, your observation that this is too cringe-worthy to not be satire is kind of correct. It was intentionally edited to be that way. This is a video made to appeal to a specific group of people. I find it really weird that you wish to be associated with these people by linking this video to your own name forever on the internet. Midway through writing this comment I checked the author of the video by following it back to Youtube. But I had Gmail signed in on a different tab. That video is now forever part of Google’s profile of my browsing habits. That on its own makes me feel just a little bit dirty. By the way, if you haven’t followed this back to the source, I suggest you do. Take awhile and cruise the comments. Those are the people this video was made for.

    Finally, this is from spring 2014. What’s interesting is that MALE black teams won this same event with similar tactics in 2013 and 2015… But didn’t wind up with nearly as much frothy backlash on the internet. Simply Googling the CEDA championships pulls up this team’s controvery from 2014 even before the event itself. So, while being quite obviously racist on its own, it gets bonus points for having a totally unexpected mysogynist angle as well.

    However, it was interesting to see some confirmation of a different point about modern debate that I’d read about elsewhere (I think in Wired where, surprisingly enough, they managed to avoid discussing the plague of black debaters ruining it for all the whites and asians): Everyone talks as fast as they can.

    This is a bit like how olympic fencing compares with the real thing. Because of the rules in place, it no longer really bears any resemblance to its progenitor. In this particular class of modern debate, any point made by one team which isn’t refuted by the other is counted as truth. This leads to an escalating arms race of cramming as many points into your 2 minutes (or 5 or whatever, I don’t know the format) as possible in order to minimize your opponent’s ability to refute your claims. And, boy, was the “talk as fast as possible” gambit on display here.

    Comment by Liam — July 24, 2015 @ 09:03

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