It's not a failure of the rules. I was a big debate nerd for three years, and the article is somewhat misrepresentative of how the game works. To be clear, the

It's not a failure of the rules. I was a big debate nerd for three years, and the article is somewhat misrepresentative of how the game works. To be clear, there are no "rules" in debate except that the judge gets to decide who wins, and perhaps the amounts of speaking and prep times allotted each team. There is no scorekeeping other than W or L on the final ballot. One might reasonably expect that the human element would force debaters to "keep it real", so to speak - speed-reading through a bunch of obviously-bullshit argumentation that a policy will lead to half a dozen different global nuclear wars is not something that most people would find convincing, after all. What's actually happened is that debaters have built up an elaborate metagame, debating with their own terminology and conventions that have grown obnoxiously opaque to the uninformed viewer, and they've been enabled to do so by some unfortunate realities of the debate environment. Since it's hard to find normal people willing to spend their Saturdays sitting in a high school classroom listening to teenagers role-play as politicians, debate judges are frequently sourced from within the community - they'll be former debaters, or debate coaches from a different school. Debating for a "flow judge" ("flowing", in debate jargon, is how argumentation is tracked on paper) is a very different thing than debating for a "lay judge", and the debate techniques described in the article are vastly less prevalent in the latter case. Most hardcore debaters, however, prefer to have a flow judge - it enables them to use their entire bag of tricks, and frankly is more fun. This ends up allowing the craziness of the debate metagame to perpetuate by a couple means - for one, it means that schools hosting debate tournaments are pressured to supply flow judges for as many rounds as possible, especially for important finals rounds (if they don't, students won't want to come back, and tournament registration fees are important part of a debate team's funding). Secondly, it alienates lay judges, who often come out of a round feeling "unqualified" to render a decision, overwhelmed with anxiety about being forced to assign a winner and a loser among teams who might as well have been speaking a different language. Finding a layperson willing to judge policy debate more than once is really rare. So the problem really isn't that the rules encourage degenerate behavior, it's that flow judges do by continuing to award wins to that bullshit. And in the context of policy debate, I don't even know if I'd call this a problem - we enjoyed our made up rules just fine, and if you wanted something more down to earth you could just move to LD or PF styles.