>the more Machiavellian debaters attempted to gain an edge by overwhelming their opponents with as many arguments and as much supporting evidence as possible. T

>the more Machiavellian debaters attempted to gain an edge by overwhelming their opponents with as many arguments and as much supporting evidence as possible. This was because if a team “dropped” an argument by its opponent—if it did not respond to the other side’s claim—that argument was conceded as “true,” no matter how inane it was. So in high school debate I didn't do so well. I think primarily because I didn't have enough information prepared before going in to respond to an opponents case. I had routinely been smacked down by judges who felt I didn't attack a point sufficiently to avoid conceding it. So for one tournament, the proposition at hand was whether global concerns ought to be held above local ones. I stated case that aliens had infiltrated most, if not all, national governments, and they had a goal of putting the human race into slavery, or worse. Clearly global concerns for survival trump local government concerns that may be based on ulterior motives. Hey, it was the mid 1990s, and X Files was all the rage among nerds. My opponents would say they wouldn't even dignify that stuff with an answer. I responded that they conceded my point, then, and judges agreed. Out of 4 matches that tournament I won three. The fourth time, I got an opponent who actually called my bluff since I obviously had no evidence to back up my assertion. My debate coach got the scores back and wondered what happened, because I was otherwise the losingest member of the debate team. She congratulated me on winning and hacking the rules, and then told me she never wanted to hear about me composing a case like that again.