votes
here are my votes on these debates:
debate 1: the__lord vs fireuzer
i vote the__lord: I think fireuzer's arguments merely impact the short-term: there might be increased disruption of low-wage jobs if the US has increased numbers of unskilled mexican laborers enter the US, but this shouldn't impact the US overall over the long-term, since these aren't the types of jobs most americans want to do anyways. The increased economic efficiency combined with the ending of human trafficking outweigh the loss of low-wage, undesirable (for americans) jobs as the__lord argues. So, vote for the lord.
debate 2: brainlesswonder vs thechuck_2112
I vote brainlesswonder by a hair. However, it boiled down to this: I tend to agree with bw's factual assertion, which I felt was not refuted well enough by chuck, that torture is generally not incredibly effective. given that torture is also morally wrong, as is shipping people abroad to do so (chuck's analogy to a US corporation going to mexico to pollute is misguided: that also seems morally wrong: he would have to provide a compelling argument why that was morally acceptable for the analogy to work) because it is illegal to do so here, and given the fact that it is incredibly alienating to the already somewhat estranged allies we have to kidnap their citizens and send them to repressive regimes for months on end to torture them and end up not even charging them, that this all adds together to suggest the practice is not a good one.
I would have liked to see bw also add in the point, which he seemed to skirt around a bit, that such extraordiary rendition renders such suspects (practically-speakign) ineligible to be tried in any american court of law. Thus, by deciding to torture them, even if guilty, then we are giving up the right to ever prosecute them in the future, since almost no conviction could ever be obtained. This might very well end up hurting our national security. But either way, I still gotta say why chuck did some very good debatin, the facts and most compelling arguments belong to bw.
debate 3: lovecrafty vs imaybeparanoid
I vote lovecrafty. While imaybeparanoid is correct that strong statistical evidence does not support a brutalizing conclusion, the evidene at hand does suggest that there is no detterent effect. This means that there must be some other justification for the death penalty. imaybeparanoid says that the lack of a detterent doesn't make him change his mind on the death penalty, but the focus is on convincing the judges here, not on convincing yourself. What, exactly, is the justification for the death penalty, according to imaybeparanoid, if it isn't detterence?
However, I would have liked to see an argument from lovecrafty specifically detailing why the death penalty is wrong prima facia. If you grant imaybeparanoid's "mend it, don't end it" type of response to the death penalty, what exactly is wrong with only executing, say, serial murderes who show no signs of potential rehabilitation, given a large expenditure of resources to be very, very sure of their guilt and within a framework that corrects for the racist inclinations of prosecutors, juries, and all that. That would have won the debate right there, absent any positive justification from imaybeparanoid. However, lacking that, the debate still goes to lovecrafty due to the fact that the system of the death penalty has not be fixed in the 30 odd years since its reintroduction, and that there are systematic methodological problems with its implementation. This implies that it may be practially impossible to have a totally fair and just death penalty system, or at elast that should be our presumption from the evidence. given this presumption, the death penalty should be abolished, and lovecraft wins.
debate 4: princessmerbear vs badlydrawnjeff
hmm, this was the toughest one to decide yet. Ultimately I went with badlydrawnjeff: while I felt that princessmerbear made a compelling case, it seemed misguided: she should have decided earlier on whether to concentrate on preserving social security's role as only a social safety net, and left out the arguments about wealth creation, poverty, alternative retirement plans, and so forth. Private accounts may very well harm the ability of social security to operate as a safety net, depending on the details of how the private accounts are set up. by concentrating on the "reptetiveness" of social security's private accounts as a retirement plan, she opens the space for badlydrawnjeff too argue that many people do not have the ability to set up alternate retirement plans given their lack of disposable income, which he exploited quite nicely, and was thus able to frame the argument as one that extends the ability to create wealth to those in poverty. princessmerbear, i felt, never adequately responded to this, and thus despite the fact that I in general oppose private accounts in social security, I felt that badlydrawnjeff made the more compelling argument.
debate 5: the_sicilian vs goatunit.
victory to the_sicilian, due to goatunit's concession.
debate 6: killtacular vs colintj.
KILLTACULAR IN A LANDSLIDE. just kidding, this one is for an alternate to judge.
debate 7: mrexcess vs skaloop
due to mrexcess apparently getting wasted for a week or so and forgetting to finish this debate, the win goes to skaloop.
debate 8: somnambulisa vs cargill
crap, this one was long as shit. However, my vote goes to somnambulisa. The question was somethign of a difficult one to argue for decisively: it requires an induction over history (to judge the relative merits/demerits of religion), but such an induction is impossible due to the fact that most human societies have been totally religious for all but the last couple hundred years (if that): this makes relative comparisons hard. So I'll leave the "who killed more" argument at a wash, and make the judgments where actual disagreements can be discerned.
cargill said:
Somehow my opponent failed to realize that I was discussing philosophies answers to the questions we ask and that there is no Scientific or Logical answers to these questions. I in no way stated that religion cannot give us the answers to these questions - but I will submit that they certainly cannot give us answers that can be proven through science or logic.
This, and other statements, puts it as a bonus of religion incapturable by atheistic philosophies to answer "Why" questions, or more broadly, "unanswerable" questions. However, cargill is on extremely shaky ground when he admits that, while religion can provide answers to this that an atheist philosophy (perhaps) cannot, that these answers are incompatible (or at least incomparable) with logic or science. Why, then, should we accept religion as providing answers at all, then, if we can't get at the justifications for those answers. Or, as somnambulia put it:
Your argument has turned away from an attempt to disprove that religion's demerits outweigh its merits, and you're now focusing on the idea that religion provides benefits which cannot be duplicated by other means: answers to unanswerable questions. But such things can be duplicated by anyone or anything.
And she is absolutely right: without a rigorous criterion for deciding the acceptability of such existential answers, the answers are literally meaningless.
Further, somnambulisa goes on, those meaningless answers all display a common critical failure for religion:
The fatal flaw, which all religions share in common -- from the divine pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the Zen Buddhists at the yoga center across from Starbucks -- is the idea that this life is to be endured and/or escaped, even suffered through. Christians, Muslims and Jews are awaiting their eternal reward in paradise. Hindus, Buddhists and pagans look forward to a better incarnation, or escape from the cycle of rebirth.
Basically, I don't buy somnambulisa's historical argument that religion has lots of "demerits" via the crusades et al for the same reason I don't buy cargill's argument that religion inspired many great thinkers, philosophers, inventors, scientists, etc: all was done in a totally religious context, which makes separating out what was truly "religious" about the events impossible. Thus, because we don't have enough non-religious context to argue for the relative merits/demerits of religion, we have to examine religion itself to find if it is flawed or not (religion may be corruptible, as somnambulisa says, but so may be any ideology, which I think was cargill's point, and as such it can't be counted as a demerit of religion itself, per se). And, religion indeed is flawed: it's notion of something beyond this life, which has no rational basis, is a flaw of religion, because it distorts people's thinking in the here and now. Thus, taking away the probably undecidable question as to the historical merits/demerits of religion, we can still say that the false confidence of religion is outweighed by the flawed thinking it produces. So the win goes to somnambulisa.
phew.
debate 1: the__lord vs fireuzer
i vote the__lord: I think fireuzer's arguments merely impact the short-term: there might be increased disruption of low-wage jobs if the US has increased numbers of unskilled mexican laborers enter the US, but this shouldn't impact the US overall over the long-term, since these aren't the types of jobs most americans want to do anyways. The increased economic efficiency combined with the ending of human trafficking outweigh the loss of low-wage, undesirable (for americans) jobs as the__lord argues. So, vote for the lord.
debate 2: brainlesswonder vs thechuck_2112
I vote brainlesswonder by a hair. However, it boiled down to this: I tend to agree with bw's factual assertion, which I felt was not refuted well enough by chuck, that torture is generally not incredibly effective. given that torture is also morally wrong, as is shipping people abroad to do so (chuck's analogy to a US corporation going to mexico to pollute is misguided: that also seems morally wrong: he would have to provide a compelling argument why that was morally acceptable for the analogy to work) because it is illegal to do so here, and given the fact that it is incredibly alienating to the already somewhat estranged allies we have to kidnap their citizens and send them to repressive regimes for months on end to torture them and end up not even charging them, that this all adds together to suggest the practice is not a good one.
I would have liked to see bw also add in the point, which he seemed to skirt around a bit, that such extraordiary rendition renders such suspects (practically-speakign) ineligible to be tried in any american court of law. Thus, by deciding to torture them, even if guilty, then we are giving up the right to ever prosecute them in the future, since almost no conviction could ever be obtained. This might very well end up hurting our national security. But either way, I still gotta say why chuck did some very good debatin, the facts and most compelling arguments belong to bw.
debate 3: lovecrafty vs imaybeparanoid
I vote lovecrafty. While imaybeparanoid is correct that strong statistical evidence does not support a brutalizing conclusion, the evidene at hand does suggest that there is no detterent effect. This means that there must be some other justification for the death penalty. imaybeparanoid says that the lack of a detterent doesn't make him change his mind on the death penalty, but the focus is on convincing the judges here, not on convincing yourself. What, exactly, is the justification for the death penalty, according to imaybeparanoid, if it isn't detterence?
However, I would have liked to see an argument from lovecrafty specifically detailing why the death penalty is wrong prima facia. If you grant imaybeparanoid's "mend it, don't end it" type of response to the death penalty, what exactly is wrong with only executing, say, serial murderes who show no signs of potential rehabilitation, given a large expenditure of resources to be very, very sure of their guilt and within a framework that corrects for the racist inclinations of prosecutors, juries, and all that. That would have won the debate right there, absent any positive justification from imaybeparanoid. However, lacking that, the debate still goes to lovecrafty due to the fact that the system of the death penalty has not be fixed in the 30 odd years since its reintroduction, and that there are systematic methodological problems with its implementation. This implies that it may be practially impossible to have a totally fair and just death penalty system, or at elast that should be our presumption from the evidence. given this presumption, the death penalty should be abolished, and lovecraft wins.
debate 4: princessmerbear vs badlydrawnjeff
hmm, this was the toughest one to decide yet. Ultimately I went with badlydrawnjeff: while I felt that princessmerbear made a compelling case, it seemed misguided: she should have decided earlier on whether to concentrate on preserving social security's role as only a social safety net, and left out the arguments about wealth creation, poverty, alternative retirement plans, and so forth. Private accounts may very well harm the ability of social security to operate as a safety net, depending on the details of how the private accounts are set up. by concentrating on the "reptetiveness" of social security's private accounts as a retirement plan, she opens the space for badlydrawnjeff too argue that many people do not have the ability to set up alternate retirement plans given their lack of disposable income, which he exploited quite nicely, and was thus able to frame the argument as one that extends the ability to create wealth to those in poverty. princessmerbear, i felt, never adequately responded to this, and thus despite the fact that I in general oppose private accounts in social security, I felt that badlydrawnjeff made the more compelling argument.
debate 5: the_sicilian vs goatunit.
victory to the_sicilian, due to goatunit's concession.
debate 6: killtacular vs colintj.
KILLTACULAR IN A LANDSLIDE. just kidding, this one is for an alternate to judge.
debate 7: mrexcess vs skaloop
due to mrexcess apparently getting wasted for a week or so and forgetting to finish this debate, the win goes to skaloop.
debate 8: somnambulisa vs cargill
crap, this one was long as shit. However, my vote goes to somnambulisa. The question was somethign of a difficult one to argue for decisively: it requires an induction over history (to judge the relative merits/demerits of religion), but such an induction is impossible due to the fact that most human societies have been totally religious for all but the last couple hundred years (if that): this makes relative comparisons hard. So I'll leave the "who killed more" argument at a wash, and make the judgments where actual disagreements can be discerned.
cargill said:
Somehow my opponent failed to realize that I was discussing philosophies answers to the questions we ask and that there is no Scientific or Logical answers to these questions. I in no way stated that religion cannot give us the answers to these questions - but I will submit that they certainly cannot give us answers that can be proven through science or logic.
This, and other statements, puts it as a bonus of religion incapturable by atheistic philosophies to answer "Why" questions, or more broadly, "unanswerable" questions. However, cargill is on extremely shaky ground when he admits that, while religion can provide answers to this that an atheist philosophy (perhaps) cannot, that these answers are incompatible (or at least incomparable) with logic or science. Why, then, should we accept religion as providing answers at all, then, if we can't get at the justifications for those answers. Or, as somnambulia put it:
Your argument has turned away from an attempt to disprove that religion's demerits outweigh its merits, and you're now focusing on the idea that religion provides benefits which cannot be duplicated by other means: answers to unanswerable questions. But such things can be duplicated by anyone or anything.
And she is absolutely right: without a rigorous criterion for deciding the acceptability of such existential answers, the answers are literally meaningless.
Further, somnambulisa goes on, those meaningless answers all display a common critical failure for religion:
The fatal flaw, which all religions share in common -- from the divine pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the Zen Buddhists at the yoga center across from Starbucks -- is the idea that this life is to be endured and/or escaped, even suffered through. Christians, Muslims and Jews are awaiting their eternal reward in paradise. Hindus, Buddhists and pagans look forward to a better incarnation, or escape from the cycle of rebirth.
Basically, I don't buy somnambulisa's historical argument that religion has lots of "demerits" via the crusades et al for the same reason I don't buy cargill's argument that religion inspired many great thinkers, philosophers, inventors, scientists, etc: all was done in a totally religious context, which makes separating out what was truly "religious" about the events impossible. Thus, because we don't have enough non-religious context to argue for the relative merits/demerits of religion, we have to examine religion itself to find if it is flawed or not (religion may be corruptible, as somnambulisa says, but so may be any ideology, which I think was cargill's point, and as such it can't be counted as a demerit of religion itself, per se). And, religion indeed is flawed: it's notion of something beyond this life, which has no rational basis, is a flaw of religion, because it distorts people's thinking in the here and now. Thus, taking away the probably undecidable question as to the historical merits/demerits of religion, we can still say that the false confidence of religion is outweighed by the flawed thinking it produces. So the win goes to somnambulisa.
phew.