The Time A Debate Judge Docked Me Based On Utilitarianism Being All Lives Matter Logic

The judge also wrote the hilarious line "Even though racism comes first, as per the framing debate, that doesn't mean extinction isn't like, a bad thing at all."

I’ve elsewhere talked about my experiences in high school debate. Picture the most extreme-leftwing, woke, language obsessed DEI coordinator. That was about a third of judges. Worse, the ideology of such people is taken for granted in debate. Merely pointing out that an argument is right-wing, or sounds vaguely right-wing, or could be misinterpreted as right-wing if you really squint is seen as immediately disqualifying. In fact, as I documented, at the most competitive national tournament, of the top sixteen teams, five of them were reading crazy nonsense, making claims like:

The end is already here – ecological catastrophe is a structuring condition of Black life that cannot be disimbricated from the enduring social life of the plantation. Reliance on better science, or more empirics, or more data, or extinction as a predictive tool, only reproduces cruel mathematics and fatal liberalisms that make Black life into ecological excess and refigure European Man as the core of environmental politics

And

The juridico-economic is cohered through its faux inclusion of Blackness, rendered fungible and casted “personhood” to provide coherence. Governance WOULD not and COULD NOT redress anti-blackness.

Only a fool could think the juridico-economic is cohered through anything else!

The 1ACs attempt to extend the social contract is a death sentence for trans-life – the law, rights, and duties presume a position of consent and agency that is universally shared, erasing the mundane denial of trans personhood before the law. This condemns trans people to a scopic economy that pathologizes their survival

If you advocate for giving rights to rivers, you are literally killing trans people…apparently. This is because it attempts to expand the social contract (or something) which LITERALLY is a death sentence for trans people. If your first reaction is “what the fuck does this mean and how did this become normal?” you’re far from alone. There is a puzzle about how we got there. How did this insanity that’s utterly repulsive to anyone normal, no matter how far left they are, become such a dominant force in debate.

Anyway, I decided I’d recount one of the funnier stories from my high school debate experience that I don’t think I’ve told before. This story, while utterly insane, is largely unremarkable compared to most of the insanity that is rampant in debate. It’s almost beyond self parody. But first, a bit of context.