97
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
97 points (99.0% liked)
chat
8634 readers
371 users here now
Chat is a text only community for casual conversation, please keep shitposting to the absolute minimum. This is intended to be a separate space from c/chapotraphouse or the daily megathread. Chat does this by being a long-form community where topics will remain from day to day unlike the megathread, and it is distinct from c/chapotraphouse in that we ask you to engage in this community in a genuine way. Please keep shitposting, bits, and irony to a minimum.
As with all communities posts need to abide by the code of conduct, additionally moderators will remove any posts or comments deemed to be inappropriate.
Thank you and happy chatting!
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Yeah that makes sense. My era of policy debate had a lot of hard leftists in it, maybe it's a response to the fact the city I live in is libertarian central so a lot of the basis of leftism are there in our population.
The Mao K was based on the famous "No investigation no right to speak" speech. Honestly, it's probably the most on point and effective K I've ever read. I started running it as a joke, but the more I read it over the more I realized Mao was 100 percent correct. Same thing with my spreading K, I started running it because I have a stutter and couldn't counter spreading any other way, but then I realized that spreading in policy debate was actually 100 percent albeist and I was right. What's the Black Flag K? Never heard of that
The most successful debators in my mostly rural state were very obvious leftists. They only made arguments they believed in regardless of what side they were on, they didn't wear suits, they wore hoodies and sweatpants, they ran Ks on rural lay judges and managed to win all the time. They were the prime example of "you don't understand something if you can't explain it to a 5 year old". They didn't use any jargon, everything was easily understandable by someone who had never read any theory in their entire life.
Haha, same. When I was in college Ron Paul was running for president and our state is basically the buckle of the Bible belt. There were definitely more leftist representation in debate than anywhere else, but we were still a small minority.
Yeah, that would have been tough to overcome. I remember kids sticking pencils in their mouths while practicing reading to try and up their speed and annunciation.
One of my policy partners was a really tall and kinda creepy looking guy who was openly gay. He would wear old dirty hoodies and sweats, all around do his best to look as disheveled as possible, and then meticulously paint his nails whenever we got to the school we were debating at. During rounds he would stand as close as the judge would let him and read over their cards over their shoulder. It was hilarious how much he could weaponize homophobia back in the day. He would literally cause seasoned debaters to stammer through their cards.
It was a blanket term for any anarchy based k. We wrote up a file based on social and environmental ecology. Basically, environmental problems are caused by social ecology and how messed up the environment is directly reflects just how hierarchical a society organizes itself. The point was arguing that to fix environmental problems you would first have to rearrange how society is organized. Most of the stuff we had was based on stuff written by Murray Bookchin.
I think we did so well because a lot of people at the time had a hard time distinguishing between anarchy and libertarianism, and it was right when a ton of news about global warming was hitting the mainstream. It was also an easy k to slap on just about anything because it mainly attacked the idea of hierarchal systems.