Barney

This debate never rose above assertions. That said, pro insists all communist countries are poor and are ruled by dictatorships; con brings up an example of Auroville which is neither poor nor a dictatorship yet is apparently communist in spite of that.

I am assuming this is a school assignment, to which I wish you both the best of luck.

https://youtu.be/NisCkxU544c

Too weak of an affirmative case to reach BoP. Some interesting questions about interconnected roles, does not dismiss authority of various boss roles as con was easily able to show; further con was able to wholly falsify the framework that with examples of religious workers and homeless people who answer to no one.

Pro ultimately missed half the debate, leaving con's refutations unchallenged, thus reducing the debate down to a foregone conclusion.

My main advice is to separate paragraphs with an extra space. For writing essays it's a no no, but for presentation online it is essential.

Obvious setup flaw in not forcing con to assume a religious stance. This debate needed a scope limiter (such as "Assuming any deity exists outside of mythology, there is most likely only one.")

I found pro's opening to be an enjoyable read, but he's against a good debater, so it was of course going to be immediately and effectively Kritiked by the suggestion that no god is necessary and thus no god is more likely. Con then goes on to leverage the problem of suffering to dispute that if there is a god, it is more likely multiple to explain the sad state of the world.

From there pro gets lost in the weeds, talking about types of gods and Thor specifically (I agree with con's defense that he didn't argue Thor). ... And ending the round with this: "Even more evil proves that Satan exists." I literally facepalmed. Conceding a god named Satan exists, while also arguing a god named God exists, suggests a henotheist rather than monotheist world. Even not caught by con, this is a huge blunder.

Con basically repeats some of his points.

Pro accused con of ad hominems. He does show why he made the point, but it doesn't really challenge con's logic which did not rely upon Thor or the Easter Bunny.

As for the 4 theodicies, this is Gish Gallop terretory, and pro is lagging too far behind already.

Sources:
Largely awarding this due to con openly challenging a source. He otherwise came in ahead with a variety of good sources such as Scientific America, to support polytheism as more likely if any gods exist; but really, what got me to pay attention to sources was engaging with the opponents source as not properly tied into the debate.

Forfeiture.

Concession.

Pro argues free markets lead to more wealth and other improvements within areas which practice them or strive toward them.

Con kritics that free markets are really still regulated, so shouldn't be called free... This was already headed off in the description "free market is an economic system based on supply and demand with little or no government control." Thus, a little government involvement is still allowed.
Pro defends that the resolution does not have the qualifier "pure" next to free market.

Con goes on to talk about Merchant Capitalism, which was a cool history lesson, but doesn't connect the dots back to what free markets are defined as in common use today. He does slide in a nice point about slavery being banned means it's not a pure free market, but this needed to be built up a lot more if trying to show the horrors of the free market; and ultimately, some other system which is better is all but essential for this type of debate.

I like the vibe of the double speak talk, but it was not executed with the grace needed to have it override everything... I'll give more feedback in the comment section.

Conduct for missed round.

Kudos points to con for "...Free Markets are amazing, everything good on this God-forsaken planet comes from Free Markets, the Sun orbits around Free Markets and so forth..." It made me laugh.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ9rUzIMcZQ

As far as magical thought experiments go, it's a decent setup; save for the basic flaws of LGBTQ being a very wide and varied group, and the timing and method of removal being open to interpretation (is it they never existed, or magic purple man snaps his fingers and they disappear?).

R1, PRO:
Suffering:
Pro says LGBTQ people cause suffering, and backs this up that they are disproportionately the targets of violent criminals. They also suffer more in their youths for other reasons. Pro concludes they'd be better off not existing.

Persecution:
Pro adds that they are more frequently the victims of violent crazy people in power.

Diseases:
Pro argues that they have higher STD rates.

Social Implications:
Pro argues some pronouns and other cultural shifts make some people uncomfortable.

R1, CON:
Mechanics:
Con treats this as a proposal debate, and catches If the How is missing, they are easily countered with impracticality. He argues that the means by which LGBTQ people are made to cease to exist, will outweigh whatever benefits pro believes will be attained by said removal. He lists three ways it could be evaluated, each of which builds inherent horror to the proposal. Under the best of the three, we have a world without computers to hold this debate on, where the Nazis won (more likely WWII stretched on a bit, but con's argument that they would have won is unchallenged), and Queen's music never came to be.

R2, PRO:
Pro counters "CON's case is entirely irrelevant" which is where I lost faith in him standing a chance. He goes on to argue that it's pro's least bad world choice in which those people never existed (he implies it, without admitting it's from con), and then proceeds to ignore the harms con built out to declare himself the winner and that con might have secretly conceded...

So with half the debate read, we have a hypothetical world ruled by Nazis, without computers, no Queen music or any music inspired by it (honestly, ruled by Nazis would rule out any music made after the 19th century; but con's focus here was on Queen, so for weighing the debate just no Queen); but for the trade off of... A few less victims for the Nazis to murder suffering that fate? Pro declares it to be self-evident that this would be better... Nay is self-evident at this stage.

R2, CON:
Con argues that to create the world pro proposes, would require genocide, rather than magic painless genocide. He attacks the framework of the debate as being too poor to allow a cost/benefit analysis, and adds that pro refuses to clearly pick a means of removal for the comparison.

Civil Rights:
Con builds out that LGBTQ people were key to the civil rights movement. And that while there's strife from it, it's healthy strife which helps us grow.

Computers:
Con repeats

Queen:
Con repeats.

Violent crazy people:
Con points out that violent crazy people have issues that make them violent and crazy, so removing one target, they would substitute another.

R3, PRO:
Pro coasts into the finish, repeating some of his harms without challenging the harms con listed. He has one decent note against the civil rights movement, that because there's no evidence for what it would really look like, we can dismiss it... Which while decent, adds a lot of validity to cons points against the pro side being able to be weighted at all without evidence.

R3, CON:
Con repeats that it cannot be determined to be better without weighing it.

...

Arguments: Con
This is a landslide. Pro offered no challenge to Nazis taking over the world or cons other harms from a concurrent world where every LGBTQ person never existed, and while con leaned more on how impossible to weigh the benefits would be (a little risky with shared BoP), he well established some massive harms.

Forfeiture.

Forfeiture.

In short:
Con wishes to protect animals from wealthy gay people, in a proposal that pro is able to show would actually be harmful to said animals.

...

Tortured animals:
Con argues that no one deserves to eat meat because animal cruelty is bad.
Pro argues that wealthy people buying meat causes the meat industry to produce higher quality meat using less torture.
Con argues he did not read pro's replies, and they therefore do not exist.

Cannibalism:
Con argues that eating meat is secretly cannibalism and slavery. This is just too big of a leap in logic to take seriously.
Pro's responses about hunted animals really should have been in R1 instead of R2.

Vegans:
Con argues that vegans are healthier, and it decreases the number of animals raised for slaughter.
Pro counters that less animals would live (intuitively leveraging the better quality of life lived by the organic farm raised cows and such).
Con repeats that less animals would die.

Economics:
Pro leverages massive harm to the economy inherent to the proposal. And further that buying nice organic meat is a deserved reward for capitalistic success within our economy.
Con counters with a Institutional Kritik comparing the meat industry to the African slave trade, but this misses the mark by way too much; failing to really refute pros points (particularly the earlier one about harm to animals).

Forfiture.

I think pro was hoping to debate against a hater. While their limited arguments would do well against the lowest denominator, they fall short against someone who points out the weaknesses to their case.

Tautology and Kritiks:
Pro argues absolutely everything exists so is natural. Some good lofty imagery mixed in. IMO this is a kritik of the topic (I understand the tactic, and won't overly begrudge a new debater thinking of such a clever angle... But it's still off-putting for the instigator to question the very validity of the question implied in the resolution they wrote).
Con challenges that we can't know if the universe is deterministic or not, so we cannot conclude if something is natural. Also something about us being machines (it's cool, but too wild for me to want to delve into right now).

Tautology 2:
Con leverages definitions of various terms, to show that deviating from the normal is technically considered unnatural in English; and wisely explains why this is good and fine to do. He reminds the audience and his opponent that we don't have another metric to measure.
Pro engages with the spirit of the debate, accepting cons definitions, and making a case that we should consider natural within humans, rather than within the cosmos (refining their stance rather than doubling down, is great to see). He does a really cool steel man technique (I had to look it up; it's that rare). And points to the animal kingdom changing sexes... And before I read it, I can already tell what con will do; point to natural within humans as pro shifted to, and remind us that the animals in question are not humans, with the norms of one not being the norms of another.
Con reminds us that the scope is humans, and further that the changes in the animal kingdom are not what we refer to as a human transgender person.

In the end pro is left trying to carve a path of steps seeming natural; against con's reminder that they're unnatural by definition but that there is nothing wrong with unnatural.

...

@pro: My main suggestion is in future debates to set bold headings to make argument lines easier to follow between rounds.

While pro was a little less bad at conduct, it's a comparable level with zero arguments or even assertions posted.

Full forfeiture.

Full forfeiture.

Cons case goes to 11.

Pro's case is largely a semantics kritik, executed via hiding his definitions until R1; and then cherry-picking ones against common usage, in a basic lawyering tactic. Ultimately pro himself doesn't even seem to buy that, as he switches to advocating a different form of creationism than he locked in on originally.

Pro argues general information on the belief existing part of history and science, in addition to religious studies at a university level. In addition to philosophy just because. All this counts as teaching it.
Con uses an effective appeal to absurdity to challenge this notion, via pointing out that it would be the same to claim they are teaching "alchemy, flat earth theory and slavery." He then builds the distinction in teaching using math as an example showing how the word is understood in common English.
Pro does an ok defense of the math with pointing out how few students go on to become mathematicians by trade.

Semantics:
Con immediately attacks the BoP rests on the contender proclamation as disingenuous, as well as the claim that school usually refers to universities instead of the much more common k-12 environment.
Pro challenges that schools ought to include any place of learning, to include trade schools (I'm scratching my head at this one; but con misses it, so not damning).
Con catches that pro is having to use secondary definitions, and calls to pro's own sources that include dancing schools as a reference to his cherry-picked definition to dismiss it from consideration.
Pro basically calls it unfair to have his case attacked on multiple fronts here (I'm left somewhat curious what a dancer needs to know about creation myths).

Con further builds that creationism refers to an anti-science movement, linked directly to pro's own definition.
Pro oddly immediately at the start of R2 doubles down insisting that con's wrong and that his definition is binding... The definition that con agrees to, and was just leveraged against pro's case. Later in R2 pro does better by trying to separate his case from the movement, by reminding us he is not endorsing all other ideas that movement would demand.

Intelligent Design:
Pro quotes the pope, to argue that we should teach ID. Pro goes to some lengths here about how ID doesn't contradict evolution.
The big obvious problem here is that it's pre-refuted by con having already reminded us with the authority of the pope that ID goes against the branch of creationism this debate is centered on. Which pro catches and reminds of of the "rather than" part of the definition.
Pro tries to double down on ID in a repetition fallacy, which fails to challenge his chosen and locked in definition for creationism being specifically mutually exclusive. This is ironic given the earlier lawyering, and then trying to move the goalpost for the one definition which was pre-agreed.

Ultimately, without some value shown to teaching that evolution is wrong (as the specific branch of creationism this debate began on demands), I cannot favor pro, even while I do respect his efforts. In retrospect, cons case could have been a lot stronger with explicit focus on the value of science over superstition, but it was pro who held the primary BoP for the proposed change.

Full forfeiture.

I get that silence is a form of free speech, but it's rarely a winning form in debates...

Full forfeiture.

Full forfeiture.

Full forfeiture.

Full forfeiture.

Full forfeiture.

Full forfeiture.

I agree with con that the US would win, but find his core reasoning of Nukes Nukes Nukes firmly defeated as a likely occurrence.

Lets see...
It seems clear that Steve can kill a tank in one punch, destroy or place 1 meter of material per second, and if well managed is nearly bulletproof. Additionally he can fly, teleport and summon monsters.
The US military has nearly limitless resources, but time and space are factors.

Minigun:
Con argues the rate of fire would overtake Steve's apple eating abilities, especially if hitting vulnerable points (a near certainty if hitting his general area 1000 times per seconds).
Pro counters that Steve can turn invisible. Con does slide in that invisibility does not prevent damage (this is more applicable to carpet bombings), but it rules out damage from firearms unless a way to aim for his approximate is determined.

Making Steve lay down:
Con states that Steve is a reverse turtle, but does not support it.

Atomic Bombs:
I like the point about radiation, but as pro points out, they are unlikely to be deployed.
Con's defense of this point moves the goalpost to can instead of most likely. He argues the US could nuke Alaska a bunch before Steve arrives... Without trying to show how any plausibility.
Pro of course does a good job explaining how Steve can survive withering effects (at least for long enough to win the campaign).
Con argues the USA would just continuously nuke Alaska in fear... Doubly so when combined with trying to mention the USA has allies, this is non-sequitur.

carpetbomb:
In reply to Steve's ability to teleport some distance, con brings up carpetbombing. Con did a disservice to his own case by burying this great point, and focusing on nukes instead of conventional bombs and missiles.

What counts as defeating the US Military?
Con argues that defeating the US military isn't defined, so Steve could not do it. Pro sets the goal of the White House and explains it would destabilize the military, thus count as defeating them in this campaign.

Full forfeiture.

Full forfeiture.

Full forfeiture.

Implicit concession.

No constructive case from pro, makes the outcome a foregone conclusion.

While pro did assert that requirements exist, he never attempted to imply they are harmful. Whereas con denied the requirement, meeting his minimal goal against the lack of a pro case.

Full Forfeiture.

Implicit concession.

For this debate on if combat units are better off if they exclude all women, pro was not able to sufficiently prove the merits of their case as applicable to all graduated female soldiers (as opposed to just random sampling of trainees). While pro repeatedly showed that female trainees are less effective than male combat veterans, this really doesn’t secure and hold the BoP to be applied to all female soldiers.

Continued at:
https://www.debateart.com/debates/3355/comment-links/41282

Good start to a debate. I appreciated seeing arguments on sources (including pro catching a quote mining... FYI, quote mining usually goes unchallenged, so it's a fine tactic). However, with con missing two-thirds of the debate, a full review is unmerited and pro's victory is assumed.

No contest.

Oddly conflicted on this one.

Con was able to incredibly concisely show how K's can be harmful to the spite of debate, and had serious dedication in his follow-up.

That said, at least pro shows that he read con's case. I am voting for pro on the grounds of a Foregone Conclusion (instead of as an FF).

No contest offered.

As I am not part of the defined mod team, nor am I mentioned in the debate, nor do I care that much about the election, I’ll try to review this… I’ll outright state that I would prefer to be voting in favor of pro on this (it’d be great optics), but I would have to grasp at a lot of straws to try to justify that outcome.
Pro did manage to demonstrate that a MEEP was not honored to the letter. Were the resolution MEEP centric, he probably would have won. As the resolution was election centric, with a focus on fairness highlighted in the resolution, ensuring a fair election becomes more important to consideration in this debate than fine print on a different document.

ARG1: election not carried out precisely as planned.
Pro shows that the election started late, with a shortage on communication, and a modified voting window.
Con counters this with his “paramount duties” contention. He argues that the goal was a representative election with a trusted outcome, and that rescheduling it allowed such to occur. He also implicitly passes blame onto a previous moderator who picked a time window which did not work for the ones supervising it, which defangs some potential argument lines. His main point here seems to be that the real neglect would have been in just letting the election just run itself on the timetable originally planned.
In R2 this starts to overlap with Burdens Analysis.
Pro dismisses if the delay improved the outcome, to repeats and repeats that the election did not occur precisely when originally planned. There’s something about one president over another due to moderation supervision (honestly not sure where he was going with this, as the demonstrated cheating was 1 vote; possibly 2 had an account not been banned), and a declaration that whiteflame and Supadudz disrespected everyone by delaying; and the delay was akin to killing a dog by locking it in a hot car…
Con points out that an unsupervised election might have been ripe with obviously bad votes and correcting them after the fact would leave massive damage to the confidence of the election as it was ongoing. His case is clearly that it was fairer to delay so as to supervise.
Pro insists the better outcome doesn’t matter; it should have just been done when originally scheduled. He repeats that a whole MEEP should have been done to authorize to the delay, and further blames mods for the very existence of the account that was banned.

ARG2: fake votes
Pro seems to infer that Airmax multi-accounted to vote for himself. He concludes that mod team is negligent for doing nothing about it (even allowing a vote from it to stand).
Con cites that it was only 1 questionable vote, with a weighted difference of 8 votes, making the one have no significant impact; and further demonstrates that moderators did ban a multi-account preventing more.
Pro misses that a multi-account was banned, and repeats that nothing was done.

ARG3: future slippery slope
Pro argued that the mod team committed an unauthorized intervention and are now empowered to change the length of presidencies at will, which is self-evidently unfair.
Con counters that a future referendum can handle this, which somewhat misses the main complaint that referendums are not honored to the letter.
Pro repeats his uncertainty point and accuses the moderation team of disliking the candidates so falsifying the election results (this really could have done with some support. If warranted, it would have easily won the debate).
Con denies that uncertainty is an impact (it is), and defends against the corruption citing pro’s own evidence of Supadudz apologizing which shows integrity (“honesty” being his direct word choice, likely due to the definitions in the debate description). He further reiterates that “greater confidence” was achieved the delay for supervision (which while admitting uncertainty is an impact, does refute it well).

Burdens Analysis
Con argues that pro must demonstrate what should have been done. Which he has already strongly; but it would be nice to have it clarified from pro for precisely what the election should have looked like.
Pro says that the election should have either done another MEEP to reschedule, or proceeded without moderation involvement until after the fact.
Con points out the existence of competing duties. Harming himself slightly he points out that only Supadudz’s reason for delay was cited, with whiteflame’s unknown… As he is whiteflame, this question of doubt falls against him.
With pro explicitly refusing to show how his desired course of action would have been better, it’s hard to weight the election outcome as favorable to his case.

Wow. So much debate!

Non-contested.

Concession, but neat debate. Not positive if pro was playing devil's advokate or not, but he certainly put himself out on a limb with such an unpopular position; which con seemed to rely too heavily on it being unpopular and everyone hating Covid rather than properly supporting the clear larger harms.

A highlight from pro's case was that governments cannot lie anymore about not having enough money for social programs (which I find well reasoned but shaky on that conclusion), and likewise other politicians having something real to complain about. He managed to argue peace (ironic timing as he cited Russia not going to war with Ukraine, but not was not leveraged by con). The environment ('nuff said). And medical research for once being prioritized properly with less barriers.

Con of course argued students (a lot of young people here, so a good appeal to a likely voter pool), and the economy (pro does well by going after the framing of these as primarily psychological torment). One moment that stood out against con was:
"But did we need to suffer all of this, lose trillions of dollars, scar billions of people to reach the place we find ourselves at now? If Covid never happened, sure it would have taken a few more years, with not the same effect."
Which was nearly a concession in itself, as it's not actually disagreeing with pro, just saying it sucked that we had to go through all this (all this needed to be expanded to show proper impacts) for the benefits pro outlined.

Pro also came ahead on sources (conceded debate, so I am not going to take the time to drill down into them as would otherwise be required).

Leaving conduct tied in spite of the forfeiture due to the insult at the end of R1, as much as I admit I enjoyed the humor.

Con basically sealed this focusing on how time is spent no matter what we do with it.

Pro's counter example of a veteran, while showing generalized sacrifice failed to expand how that was indeed a sacrifice of time itself. The student attending their classes example, again did not address time specifically but merely showed how 'theirs' can apply to abstract non-commodities.

Without solving the issue of time being lost no matter how we utilize it, pro moved on to the core appeals of malnourished children; which I admit I see the need for in this debate to reach minimal BoP (showing some net harm), but in addition to the time factor, con had already brought up that many women enjoy raising children making things not clear sacrifices. This leaves a lot of cons case begging the question of why not leave motherhood to the women who enjoy it?

...

For extra insight, this is a two part resolution...
1. Time, which con won
2. Energy, which I would say is more of tied. Sacrificing glucose for some greater good seems worthwhile and not a big deal (it would be expanded, but IMO con would have done better to concede this to focus just on time).

Pro needed to uphold both parts to win, thus victory goes to con.

Concession.

Right away I have to disagree with pro's assessment of BoP "If CON does not prove this to be false, CON has lost the debate" pro has to first give warrant for it being true. Granted, pro is swiftly able to do just that.

The core of pro's argument is distilled as follows: "Young children need empathy, attention, and comfort. Women are on average, better suited to provide this to the young."
The core of cons seems to be that men are better with money, therefore better parents.

R1:
Pro builds a good case with lots of sources, and con phones it in with a simple declaration that men make more money so are in general better suited.

R2:
In gist... Pro clarified that he worded the resolution to avoid certain obvious k's, and generally disagrees with cons assessment of his case.
Con adds warrants to his case about money being more important, including a surprisingly clever twist on the sex pay gap using PewResearch for support.
Con adds that mothers get lonely (presumably fathers don't?), that empathy is not better than rationality, that men tending to abandon children doesn't reflect on if they are good parents, and finally (in response to pro's weakest argument) that playground behavior is not indicative of adult behavior nor is false praise superior to rational criticism.

R3:
Pro accuses con of Strawmanning his case. Cleverly uses a financial site to show to women are psychologically better with money than men (even if culturally that isn't rewarded with more of it), and raises the point that the pay gap is largely due to men working more and deprioritizing their children (with a quote mined from cons own source).
Con phones it in again, drops almost everything, and raises this rather obvious strawman (without defending the other allegations of Strawmanning) of pro's case: "They would be better parents if they quit their jobs and came home to gaze empathetically on their shivering children, according to Pro." Con further doesn't defend on that huge sex pay gap angle but still calls men better planners (I sincerely hope they didn't plan their way into that >$100K debt).

Arguments: pro
While I like concise, con ended up dropping way too much. I do agree with con that money is required to properly care for children, but this debate showed that men are less good at that, which is only magnified if they are raising children.
Looking back at the empathy angle, it feels like a dead end.
Men being more likely to abandon children, of course did them no favors (even if there are some men who extra not abandon their children to counterbalance this). Comparatively, women wanting to raise children, is a very favorable indicator of their psychology towards it.

Sources: pro
Pubmed.gov was good, the Berkeley.edu one not so much at first glance (con did well against this, but in the final round pro did an amazing job defending it as written by a doctor as a direct interpretation of findings from scientific research).
Cons own pew research one was directly quoted against him (more on that in the main analysis).
There were plenty more (mostly from pro), but those were the most interesting to me.

Con easy showed that pro's case was built on a false dilemma. Plus forfeiture and pro violating his own rules from the description.

Concession.

In the debate Donald Trump > Millard Fillmore, pro cried about Biden instead of trying to show any way Trump is better than a guy who con admits did literally nothing; and then forfeited the remainder of the debate when reminded of the complete lack of any achievement from Fillmore.

Pro had the clear burden to join into contrasting the two presidents, but outright refused, thus was not even an active participant in the true debate.

Pro's R1 seems to be just plagiarism.

Con could have done better with examples, instead of trying to cite quantum mechanics. He did better later, wish such moments as "Free will being true would dismantle the pill by simple virtue of making choice and personality non-determined. If you can freely chose to marry an uggly person then the blackpill loses its foundation that is biological determinism."

The resolution calls for pro to show "sexual and romantic attraction is almost purely decided by ones looks and genetic features, they also believe ones looks are extremely important in terms of career and how people treat you." To which "20% of men is being judged purely on ones looks" does not meet minimal BoP to be taken seriously.