Barney

Understand that I am being intentionally lax in point allocation, to help guide these new debaters in how to seek such points.

Arguments go to con:
He has the asserted positive point of social benefits, and more importantly he counters pro's only point by suggesting expulsion of sexual predators.
Pro whereas just has that sexual harassment occurs, but did not defend his point when it was challenged by a counter plan (a good defense would have been that the explosions fail to occur in the real world).

Sources go to pro:
Pro well utilized both newspapers and peer reviewed study, to well support his case in favor of single sex schools. The evidence was powerful, and had he not forfeited half the debate it no doubt would have bolstered arguments enough to secure a victory.

Legibility to pro:
While everything was readable, con set an entire one of his rounds in bold; harming his side.

Conduct to con:
Pro missed a round, which came to half the debate. This also impacted arguments, due to the dropped case.

Forfeiture.

Concession.

Forfeiture.

This debate required some assessment of the resolution, which con engaged in and pro dropped. This leaves the interpretation as "12-year-olds and 13-year-olds should be treated equally"

Pro went all over the place unsure how to phrase his reasons for belief. Had he buckled down on any one point and supported it, he might have taken the day; as is, his points were assertive but mostly unsupported. He did well with showing that the laws are arbitrary, but not in that they were actually wrong.

Con really dragged it out, attacking pro on angles pro had not actually advocated. But within there, eventually he formed a couple clear lines which did win the day. A syllogism of the need to protect children, and of course pointing out that each person is more developed on their 13th birthday than they were on their 12th.

One point I really did like from con was that we value children more, thus in civilized countries do not allow child soldiers. This was a fun way to both challenge pro's preconceptions that 12 year olds are worth less, but also refute the resolution that 12 and 13 ought to be equal.

Conduct (tied):
Technically both forfeited, but con did so while trying to honor pro's request, whereas pro did so as part of a due diligence failure. However, con repeatedly engaged in some obvious strawperson arguments (these go a bit far when talking about what world someone wants, when they did not say anything to imply such), and focused on 18 year olds vs 12 year olds, when the description clearly specified the focus was to be limited to 12 vs 13.

Sources (con):
Pro used quora, one that he had to put a disclaimer because it also countered his case (also it's just an opinions board, an extra non-expert opinion isn't any better than your own opinion, even if articulated well). Whereas con had a few. My favorite was the human rights watch was well used in a fun argument about child soldiers. The psychologytoday one could have been utilized much better, as it was near the end when repeated and expanded.

Forfeiture.

Pro makes a case for preventing bullying. Con adaptly steals this by saying it would be better if the schools enforced that, as opposed to the parent sets individually opting in or not. Pro tries to defend that parents could reinforce it, but this misses the thrust of the K that all stated benefits would be better attained if the schools did it (it honestly could have been a good defense if built out a little, such as parents prohibiting their children from violating kindergarten dress codes in general).

Con explores different angles with this, such as "Why are skirts even a 'thing' if they're a sore spot for feminine boys and masculine girls?"

Sources lean con, but they did not appear to be built into the case (with how little effort pro put in, I'm admittedly skimming).

Conduct for forfeiture. While some might find con's closing to be bad conduct, even were that true, being egotistical isn't a comparable magnitude of infraction.

Credit to both debaters for a fun read.

To me this dilemma can be summarized down to one phrase from con: "Survivors have a better chance of surviving Chinese occupation than of surviving another Chinese nuclear retaliation."

If retaliation risks extinction of the human race, just to spite the Chinese, our few remaining people and significant others would be harmed worse by it than by a potential invasion. With pro's claims of how many Chinese would die anyway, it really sounds like they would be ill-suited to continue. Even if they were out of nukes, that sounds like a double edged sword from us nuking them making the planet harder for our few survivors to survive on. As for there being uncertainty if quite every human would die from us retaliating: It's intuitively not an all or nothing thing, any statistically significant advance toward that tipping point is to be avoided (particularly if some of them are ours).

I agree with pro about the resolution, as much as I don't care that much about resolution and definition nitpicking. I was further impressed by his use of evidence of the trolly problem, and calling the people liars for saying they would aim for killing less people (weird to counter your own evidence, but fun to see).

Pro also did well in questioning if China could launch more nukes. Still, the damage to the whole planet of our nukes hitting them, seems really bad for us.

Con of course could have easily won by pointing to how many US Citizens live abroad. An angle I was surprised pro did not push was finishing off our own population with making things worse, to be an act of mercy; as opposed to them slowly suffering under barely more than lethal radiation levels. Which wouldn't make it ethical, but pro was quite clear that his case was an appeal against conventional ethics.

On a smaller scale, pro's embrace revenge argument would have been harder to resist.

Dual forfeitures.

Pro chose to not pollute the argument section with any of his words... FF

Implicitly, the second officer using a prioritization rule lead to his life boats being full; whereas the first officer acting on whims without a clear policy (or treating it as an 'only' policy, which is not pro's side of the BoP to argue in favor of), lead to increased loss of life. Thus, implicitly a flawed prioritization policy would be preferable to no policy at all.

R1:
Con opens with an appeal the company policy violating equality.
Pro explains the order from the captain, and how the first and second officers interpreted it differently (the first officer basically killing people... he goes back to this to show that this is not the one that should be looked at, since it violated the 'first' rule by intentionally wasting seats). Then goes into the numbers, that less than half the space in the life boats would have been occupied by the women and children (really surprised I am not seeing mention of children doubling up in the seats), leaving plenty of space for men.

R2:
Con insists that fault for what happened rests with the captain, and then largely drops pro's numerical calculations to repeat his earlier pathos appeal that it's not fair to decide who lives and dies.
Pro goes into a side tangent about how the tragedy would help inspire reform and a mere 61 years later there would be enough seats (it's neat, but is off topic).
Pro then outlines that no such policy actually existed for White Star Line cruise ships (with some minor confusion as to who is pro). The captain's directives, do not make it a policy, but as evidenced by his officers it was a whim.
Pro points counters cons appeals to fairness with class discrimination, which a policy of women and children first would have equalized for them (had there been such a policy, as the evidence clearly shows increased rates of deaths for their lower class).

R3:
Con calls each of pro's previous arguments irrelevant, and gives a review of some argument lines he believes pro should have used (I tend to agree with these).
Pro generally defends, then expands to conclude that BoP was really on the other side (this should be front loaded into the first (or second) round, not at the end).

Arguments: Pro
I am giving this to pro by only a slim margin. I must agree that he really should have argued some increased benefit to saving children. That said, con effectively stomping his feet and saying 'not fair' did not suggest any better means to fairly distribute seats in the life boats; and as pro effectively pointed out, trying to not have that form of unfairness would intuitively lead to increased unfairness along other metrics (such as class... and I got to say it: I feel really bad for the crew!).

Sources: Pro
This goes to pro by a landslide. All the numbers he was able to find for passengers and crew, the lack of the existence of a policy, information about the life boats on other ships... That compared to nothing, the non-nothing takes it.

Conduct: Tie
This side goes a little against pro, but not by enough of a degree to award the point. There was not much ambiguity as to the intent of the debate, and con engaged in the comment section prior to the debate (even changing things in the resolution or description). Which made pro's kritiks of no policy and BoP a little bastardly.

Pro's dedication to applying plain packaging laws to his case, did not compare to con's compelling and well researched case.

Concession.

Concession.

More in comments #45-43.

My general takeaway is that the senate went about the impeachment trial in non-constitutional ways, not that impeaching a president or thereafter holding a trial inherently were in violation. That as a private citizen a former office holder can face normal criminal charges for their actions in office, was an excellent point to support this theme of how pointless holding a trial after they’ve left office is; however, I was not convinced that it would outright be unconstitutional, merely a waste of time (intuitively, both democrats and republicans are probably disappointed said criminal trials do not seem to occur with any regularity… I could have sworn each side promised to lock up the other’s presidential nominee for 2016).

In essence con was caught in a couple Catch-22s:
I. The actions of the senate could be considered constitutional because they did it, setting a new precedent and all that; but con was insisting from the outset that we should stick to an originalist interpretation, even while admitting there’s bizarre things like a Trump presidency they never could have imagined.
II. the senate only being able to try Mr. Trump if trying him as the president, but then deciding to not use the judge required for trying the president. This is a having your cake and eating it too kind of situation.

Well I feel sources lean toward pro, con did an adequate job engaging with them for me to leave this within the tied range.

They did such a good job protecting their mental health, they abstained from the debate... If they should have done so, was not proven.

Conduct for forfeiture. There was also a mild bit with the sarcastic over reactions.

Legibility took a minor hit with formatting issues highlighted by an all bold and underlined paragraph, but it’s not bad enough to cost the point.

I suspect con has earned sources, but I’m on my cellphone right not waiting on something, so can’t review those properly for their impacts right now.

This is kinda falling down to definitions. We have two definitions for being immediately offered by con, which clearly pro does not want his God to fall within the first (existing, at least in the usual sense within time and such), but does not seek to show why there’s a personal intelligence to make God a being as opposed to something akin to a force of nature.

So much depth, there just aren’t enough words to describe it...

A weird one since con is the instigator and declared himself to have BoP... However, as he was the only one who tried to take part in the debate, I cannot in good conscience vote against him.

Conduct for forfeiture (this debate also qualifies as a full forfeiture).

Pro failed to argue what this would look like or even why, he merely asserted circularly it should be so because it should. Whereas con leveraged such things as the meat industry to imply lost benefits for people if animals had proper rights, which is a harm without any shown benefit to counter it.

The resolution was in clear terms, not maybes. Under this pro all but needs another builder, without this there's no reason to doubt con's case of the historical record of them growing more complex with time and manpower (asserting that they were all built in the first dynasty, against the presented evidence, really did pro no favors).

Pro does a very straight forward benefit analysis including creating stable jobs, and pulling in foreign money. Con counters with a weak whataboutism that healthcare would also be good to subsidise... Nothing about this implies they are mutually exclusive. As pro points out, his actual argument went unopposed.

Sources:
This is a no brainer. Con offers a single one showing that yes, medicine is a business. Pro uses numerous courses showing the benefits of tourism, and people being fine with taxes.

Conduct:
Forfeiture.

Pro left this very open to interpretation, for which con trolls him by contracting animal kingdom vs young humans.

Con has two points of non-comedic merit: "Inferior rights" and "Inferior legal culpability" If it should be so in either case, does not change that it is so.

Pro tries a religious appeal of one noteworthy child, to which con aptly replies: "The presence of one non-inferior being does not mean that entire species is of their status. "

Pro's case was riddled with half-concessions, such as people only finishing developing their brains at 25 (implying that younger than that are mentally inferior, to which children are much younger).

Ultimately pro questions if children should be treated as inferior, but does not seek to prove that they are really equal or better by any standard other than the one argued by assertion that they are human too so possess the same intrinsic value.

Conduct: Leans pro
Had pro engaged more with the debate instead of dropping so many points and still declaring victory, I would probably be awarding this to him due to con's obvious trolling.

Legibility: Leans con
Organization to follow arguments is important.

This is a really straight forward BoP failure. This is not to discredit pro. He has some valid points about certain things being suspect, the problem is he does massive leaps of faith instead of connecting the dots. Had the resolution contained the word "probably" then this would merit much deeper analysis.

Con effectively dissected pro's case for the many faults, including likely disinformation. Things like kicking out poll watchers does not prove voter fraud (it proves they disliked the poll watchers in question). To me the highlight of con's case is the too many people needed to remain silent point. While on topic, "See this link for further research because the facts matter" was a key weak point from pro, since with access to a clear researched list, asked the voters to go read it, instead of actually detailing facts from within it for consideration (I am not suggesting gish galloping, but a direct debate could be held on the worst offenses within it as a lead up to this larger debate). The invented quotation from Churchill being caught by con was a pretty bad blunder, but the antifa point had already failed (yes, at least one of the riots was a member of Antifa, but that does not even begin to imply enough of them for it to be a false flag operation).

I initially wasn't going to vote on this, but skimming it I spotted con multiple times falling back on arguing in favor of random murders as a strawman to pro's case...

There is a lot to unpack here... Pro argues 13 weeks, con counters that the brain structures start to form earlier, pro points out that it's only the start to formation not actual function, and con rebuts with a repeat that the brain structures start to form earlier.

I do like pro's simple syllogism of people valuing their well being, so should value that in others. Since this is a philosophy debate instead of a politics or science one, it's a decent starting point for morals. Sadly, as he admits, con does not understand the relevance.
I found con's offered syllogism to be immediately unsound due to being circular (it could easily be condensed to "(abortion=murder) x 3".

I liked the "A potential economic contributor" of sperm cells bit, but mostly as comedy. Con was able to easily show there being valid differences. Con ended up losing ground on this when he declared somewhat counter-intuitively "a teen and a fetus are exactly the same." ... And wow, pro brought it back with complex DNA stuff using con's own source to show that the sperm was just an earlier state of the human being con argues is murdered. Somehow at the end con argued we shouldn't care about the physical differences, when that very notion was vital to rejecting the absurdity of every sperm is sacred.

The main weakness I'm actually seeing in con's case is that he takes it for granted that the audience wholly buys that abortion is the murder of a person, so tries to levage having already won in a circular fashion. Con gets better with tying things to suffering, but pro is swiftly able to show that the fetus is not made to suffer whereas the woman seeking an abortion would, and the loss of future value was preempted with the whole potentialities argument (including that 50% end in miscarriages anyway, taking a lot of the intended bite out of this point).

Sources: Tied.
I got to say, do be careful on sources. "The short answer is no." one literally points that duress is a valid legal defense.

Conduct: Tied
There were some ugly bits with implying the other side condones racist genocide, but not enough to greatly distract from the debate.

Flawless victory!

The outcome can be summarized with a single quote from con:
"A source and I can pretty muchagree that Stalin-era Soviet Russia is socialist[2], since Communismis a variation of socialism[3]. If you wanna critique these twoexamples, please use sources to do so, as Pro holds the BoP bydefault."

That said, I did find con to be quite eloquent, and look forward to reading more of their debates in future.

Sources:
Con used sources on Stalin, to show how bad one branch of socialism is, and support that it is void of liberalism. Pro failed to engaged with this, or otherwise offer counter sources to disprove the connection.

Legibility:
Sadly for con, the copy/paste from LibreOffice deleted many spaces, making his case unduly difficult to readinmanyplaces.

Pro ultimately forfeited the majority of the debate, and he had agreed to the primary BoP.

My two cents on this:
Christians can have contradictory sets of beliefs.

Con's case boils down to an effective syllogism:
"P1: The Bible supports science as glorifying God
P2: Science proves that the universe was is 14 billion years old (might change)
C: Christians should believe the universe is more than 10.000 years old"
Pro does a decent job challenging this.

Key quote from pro:
"Con has not provided any reason to reject YEC. HE has provided reasons to reject God. But not YEC from a Christian and biblical worldview."

Concession (and widening the safety net due to a recent voting issue)

Pro never attempts to attain BoP, which is ironic since they are calling for apparently obvious lies to be abolished but never try to abolish any (not even showing one debunked european crime statistic, while claiming they exist must exist). What they do instead, is try to make SJWs look bad in a poorly done mockery; even claiming whites were unable to thrive on their own (which would logically make them enslaving Africans an impossibility).

Con immediately shows that Europeans live in Europe, thus are not sneaking in everywhere to lie to everyone as some type of boogeyman. Some of the debate goes into the history of Viking exploration (con eventually used a source to prove it, to which pro kept claiming that's stupid without refuting it).

Sources:
Con offered so many more than the one named above, but ultimately pro's lack of engagement even to disprove them leaves no doubt.

S&G:
Pro decided he was opposed to people being able to read his case, so set most of it in all bold.

Conduct:
My gut reaction was conduct too, but failing to engage with the topic is already well represented in the argument allotment.

This debate may as well have been settled with pro's first sentence in R2, when pro stuck to e veganism vs carnivore comparison, when con had clearly built his case on vegetarianism being the better option (tying nutritional benefits of milk and such for poor people). That became four rounds without contest to con's case that vegetarianism is the right way to life, veganism was easily superseded as not the right way of life for the majority of people.

While I agree with con's conclusion and admire his very concise R1, the R2 forfeiture sealed the debate.

This seems intended to have been an interesting all or nothing debate, in which the damage suffered by certain animals is compared to the benefits received by others. The single contention con offers is there would be a harm to current ones if they were suddenly cast out, whereas pro has gone into exacting detail about the harms currently in place suffered by others.

So pro argues dangers to us and toward exotic animals. He further uses a legal website to defend his case as not a red herring (that the animals in question, do qualify as pets... on sources, this is a key one, but it's like 11 to zero, with no engagement on this level from con).

Concession.

Very fun setup. I occasionally made jokes along those lines when an opponent forfeited.

Seems like a comedy debate, but if I don't see some jokes, I'll need to be given some reason to believe there is a they.

Okay, a syllogism this bad (seemingly intentionally invalid) did make me chuckle:

"P1: They didn't get me yet.
P2: This implies they will get me in the future.
C: They are out to get me."

The inbreeding bit was good, particularly the source/footnote. The footnotes come up again in a great way a little later with the 14 impossible worlds bit.

Con offers an odd language Kritik about presence tense (pro does a good defense of this by saying they are trying to gaslight him), before joining in the fun of declaring himself to be one of they who have already gotten pro. Con does better in the followup, claiming they the presence tense is a conspiracy from they.

Pro makes fun of the words are violence crowd... Con gets properly invested in the comedy with talk of brain chips... The elephant point again made me laugh.

Con's final round actually did a good job with the claim of having then successfully gotten pro, thus at last falsifying the presence tense so validating the kritik.

As this is a comedy debate (currently considered a category of troll debate), it is unregulated. I am giving pro arguments chiefly for making me laugh more, and giving con S&G (which I would never do otherwise as it's supposed to be only if someone screws up) as a favorable callout to his efforts tied to the one metric he really tried to use.

The resolution is specific to Neo himself, which left me a little curious as to all the talk of other humans being better or worse off based on Neo's decision.

Pro made a case in favor of a boring utopia, and con made a case for apocalyptic excitement. Intuitively, the second sounds like a terrifying and short life; and even if other humans were factored in, apparently freeing them all from the Matrix (which I am pretty sure did not happen in those movies), was well argued as something which would lead to mass starvation among the youth and immediate death by redpill among the older.

Sources:
Pro of course gave lots of good information on the real world in question, which set the foundation for the debate. The psychologytoday one was critical, as it showed no world to be more real than the other. Con tried to leverage the year in the "real world," but failed to actually show these wonders which would make it preferable to live within.

In short: In light of con's analysis, pro was unable to maintain BoP. While pro was able to make a case for it being preferable if God were different than con presented him, he was not able to hold onto a case that belief in such a being was exceeding the bounds of reason (heck, multiple times he called God horrible, instead of sticking to the evidence denying the existence of said being).

1. "Greater Good" VS Sinning Repentance
Pro finds a contradiction with repentance and related double standards (while I'm read up on Kant, the average voter likely has not, so a little bit of sourcing would have been good here).

2. Natural Evils and Absurd Universe
Pro kinda rambles here. Issues of other planets seem far from the topic, lions and prey species I kinda get, but the end is a near concession ("These natural evils seem terrible to me, and lead me to conclude that the God must be evil"...).

3. In the beginning
This gets into assertions about creationism, pro counters kinda weakly... Honestly, this contention is drifting off topic from the problem of evil.

4. Tree of Knowledge
Con blames Adam for the negatives in our lives, and pro blames determinism.

5. But what of human suffering?
Con blames us being punished for our individual sins for the negatives in our lives. Pro goes onto a bit of a rant about animals (which in context to con's case, he explicitly said animals lack the Imago Dai, so don't matter), before hitting a good point on the disparity in suffering experienced by different humans regardless of their levels of sin (but brings heaven into it, which is stabbing his own case in the foot). Con counters that nothing in the bible suggests God is a utilitarian or a Kantian.

6. How have we fallen short?
Con talks of thought crime being biblically equal to real crime, and pro calls God a terrible entity.

7. Q&A
Glad answers were given, but no real surprises here.

...

Sources: Lean toward con, but not by enough to warrant the points.

S&G: Both were fine.

Conduct: Both were fine.

...

Feedback:
Pro, you need a more detailed setup. Your case against God is dependent on God being all good, but you did not pre-define God as that. In a debate God fails to live up to utilitarian standards, you would win. Similarly the problem of evil causes doubt. However, you need more to show if the problem of evil itself (as opposed to say evolution) makes it unreasonable to believe in God.
Con, if you had to do any research, I suggest sharing links related to the study of different concepts. With more than just the bible itself, you could have claimed the source point.

Forfeiture.

Enough said... Kidding.

Con was easily able to prove that the body is accepting of homosexuals via experiencing homosexual attraction. Pro attempted to argue gay sperm, but con showed a genetic component to gayness which invalidated this notion via showing it lead to more reproductive success!

Sources
20 to 0, not to mention that source on gay genes being better at making babies.

S&G
20k characters, and pro offered no distinctive section breaks, or any other formatting to ease readability. Whereas con put in efforts to make his case easy to follow. The mess pro chose to create, left me reading the debate using a word finder for key phrases carried between rounds.

Each consider the other to have sidestepped the issue...

Pro offers a strong case that bears would usually win in a hypothetical match. Whereas con bets the farm on a Semantic Kritik of the topic that the average bear and the average gorilla would never even meet and therefore not fight... I think con is right, and he proves that well, but as a voter I've got to look at the details in the resolution as expanded in the description... Were the debate that bears beat gorillas in fights, I would hand this to con without hesitation, but it was clearly intended to be a speculative matter, which aligns more into the what-if territory.

Of course there was some back and forth, pro even citing that bears used to be trapped specifically for gladiatorial matches.

Sources:
Leaning pro but con also did his work, so I'm leaving this a tie. That I ultimately preferred one argument, is not enough for me to to then dismiss sources that favor the other.

Conduct:
Missed round.

Forfeiture.

Doefiture.

Pro is definitely impassioned! However... In essence, harms and benefits should be shown more clearly.

Con counters the preamble brilliantly with an appeal to absurdity, highlighted with the rhetorical question: "Should Disney seek to properly represent Siberian transgender pansexual 37-year-old first-generation immigrant bank tellers in California?"

I. Inadequate representation, profit vs equality
This was missing the why. As a reader, I was literally asking why Disney should include the Star Wars kiss in a country which would punish them for it. I am not trying to be too harsh, but in most writings this would all be fine, but in a debate the truth of the conclusion taken for granted.
Con's defense echoes this, as much as I feel he misunderstands pro (he seems to think pro was arguing here that Disney would make more money in Singapore if they had same sex kissing, when pro actually argued here they should sacrifice profits to show these kisses... later he argued that such things would be good for marketing).
Pro echoes his earlier sentiments.

II. Underrepresentation of Women
The Captain Marvel point really should have been in here. I'm kind of getting it, /think of the children/, but again it's arguing from the perspective that the conclusion has already been proven.
Con pulls demonization of traits on villains to show how representation can be bad (really could have used a source on the history of this).
Pro does a bit of a strawman (err, strawperson), implying con would like certain groups of people to be barred from appearing in Disney movies... He used a rhetorical device related to the absurdity of this, but argued directly against it.
Pro ends up giving a mild concession that Disney should not seek full diversity ('Of course, it would be silly to have the next Disney movie to have a cisgender black woman who is asexual, merely for the "Greater representation".') and their current efforts are already fighting against issues of inequality via having Captain Marvel at all.

The Unidentifiable Problem
Con drills down on criteria for implementation, showing the problem of vagueness. This is a powerful counter to proposals on the How. Which he follows through with precise questions (which before were really rhetorical, so I don't see why he acts like direct answers should have already been given). Pro chose not to respond to the explicit questions.

Conclusion:
Pro seems to hedge his bets on the resolution being weakly defined, yet as con points out, he fails to show the why and how. Instead pro relies on the zietist to carry him instead of the strength of the proposal. When you want something to change, you really need to show benefit in excess of harm.

Sources:
Lean toward pro, but not by enough to take it. His R1 felt like the opening to a school paper, sourcing every claim; but in a debate this falls flat to me as it's largely common knowledge stuff. That example of the kiss was a good one to source, that Disney is a movie studio feels like source spam. Had there been any more source utilization after R1, sources would probably go to pro.

S&G:
Not damning, but a small thing con could improve in future, is being careful with adding special characters to quotes. "relatively equally?" should have been "relatively equally"? It was not originally a question, so even while being used as one, the content inside the quotation marks do not change (other basic punctuation can).
Pro of course should have continued to use section headings. It felt a little bit like someone else wrote his R1.

Conduct:
Pro took a hit here in declaring con sexist and racist for showing that not all groups should be represented (saying we don't need pedo superheroes, isn't comparing black superheroes to pedos). I personally do a bit of a tilt on these points, if pro was winning arguments I would definitely be penalizing him on conduct, as is, I'll leave it within the tied range.

FF. .

A very promising R1, followed by forfeitures.

Pro had the start to a good case on the subjective nature of existence, but it lacked follow through on other related angles of attack, which made con able to counter on that the core point of language and legal ruling for how it is interpreted.

Plus, Pro majorly did himself in with his own offered definitions, including the copy/pasted links within. A little advice: This was a time to cherry pick definitions, rather than showing one that says to exist is to be real.

This debate is extra neat to me, because I've used pro's arguments before. A good way to strengthen this argument, is pointing out not merely that Santa Claus exists within the subject of a sentence, but places he exists even as a fictional character in marketing campaigns. The comparison to Harry Potter was a good start to this (even if Harry Potter existing would not directly prove that every other fictional character does likewise).

Sources are a little light, but with pro shooting himself in the foot, and con's legal practice one really enhancing the impacts to his claim of how language is interpreted, I've got to give credit where it is due.

Ff. .

full forfeiture.

As much as this debate never advances to minimal BoP, pro makes a topical claim (naming two genders), whereas con merely claims if we do outside research we'll come to believe he is correct (never himself naming any third option).

It's a truism debate, but the truism was never challenged, and the trolling was not humorous enough to be noteworthy.

This is a case where I really want to make arguments worth 2 points instead of 3, to give con due credit for the quality case he offered.

That said, pro drilled down on a single point, and framed the defenses to require either nonsense or God to be a deceiver who actively wants the observable evidence to indicate a much older universe (not merely stars created in their mature light emitting state, but that said light is sped up to reach us 2,642 times faster than it otherwise would). So either the universe is at least 2,642 times older than 10,000 years, or the creator of it wants us to think it is due to the setup, or the creator wants us to ignore observable evidence of his creation... Therefore, the intuitive conclusion is the one that doesn't logically and morally contradict itself; as much as creation by a deceiver is within the realm of possibility (merely less likely).

I am slightly torn on if con committed a Gish Gallop or not, as he never did anything to imply he wins the debate if each flood myth isn't proven... Yet the evidence as presented does look a lot like a Gish Gallop... So identifying it as that seems a fair way to try to move past it, but I don't believe con was commiting a conduct violation associated with true Gish Gallops.

Pro did very well on the general reply to the creationism/evolution arguments, with the age of the earth being unimportant to the age of the outside universe (as much as con did well on presenting the YEC arguments).