Yes, we are the winners! Huge thanks to Rapolas, Aurimas, Aurimas, and Arvydas. It was a pleasure to be in a team with you all :) Very briefly about the competition:
The competition. It was hosted by debatewise.com. There were teams from all over the world. The judging panel was impressive. It extended from middle August to the beginning of October.
The format. Two teams compete in a round. After the motion is announced, the proposition has 24 hours to write their arguments, afterwards, opposition has its 24 hours. As if it was not enough, same procedure is repeated once more and afterwards teams write their summaries.
The motions. We had five debates, most of them very challenging.
R1 against Latvia (these cool guys are also from SSE Debate Society) ==>
- Democracies should ban the display of communist and Nazi symbols (link). We tried hard not to use arguments from Euros’08. Freedom of expression and all the public discourse arguments bought the judges’ vote.
R2 against Canada on somewhat economic motion ==>
- All taxes on inherited wealth should be abolished (link). Dont redistribute that wealth!!
QF against South Africa on economic motion ==>
- Interest rates on personal lending should be capped at 20% (link).Extensive arguments about how banks set interest rates. Easy.
SF against South Korea on somewhat law’ish motion ==>
- All evidence gathered by intelligence agencies should be admissible in courts of law (link). After extensive research and killer introductory arguments we found out that Koreans forfeited.
Final against England, hardcore as it should have been ==>
- We should prize freedom over security and abolish anti-terrorism laws (link). Defending personal liberties for some reason is a natural thing in our debate society. This was a very hard debate: worthy opponents and even more research than in SF. To mix things up, due to IT problems we whote the summary in the last 35 minutes.
The conclusion. It was a good experience. At least now I know massive amounts of random trivia.
There will also be a post describing how we coordinated ourselves from three different countries and managed to produce reasonable arguments.
Keep it real.
