Instigator / Pro
6
1450
rating
10
debates
30.0%
won
Topic
#219

The Republican Party Is Existentially Racist

Status
Finished

The debate is finished. The distribution of the voting points and the winner are presented below.

Winner & statistics
Better arguments
0
6
Better sources
2
4
Better legibility
2
2
Better conduct
2
2

After 2 votes and with 8 points ahead, the winner is...

Alec
Parameters
Publication date
Last updated date
Type
Standard
Number of rounds
5
Time for argument
One day
Max argument characters
30,000
Voting period
One week
Point system
Multiple criterions
Voting system
Open
Contender / Con
14
1596
rating
42
debates
63.1%
won
Description

The Republican Party Is Existentially Racist

Criterion
Pro
Tie
Con
Points
Better arguments
3 point(s)
Better sources
2 point(s)
Better legibility
1 point(s)
Better conduct
1 point(s)
Reason:

Pro concedes everything and every time Pro concedes they bring up something totally different. Dirty tactics but not enough to take conduct in my eyes. Pro keeps saying how everything that the right-wing do to attack the poor is racist because most poor people in the US are of non-white races but this is confusing correlation for causation which Con explicitly explains again and again to the extent that Pro physically says in the penultimate Round that they concede and decide to try a new tactic in the LAST ROUND which was totally different to anything before and still Con dismantled it.

Criterion
Pro
Tie
Con
Points
Better arguments
3 point(s)
Better sources
2 point(s)
Better legibility
1 point(s)
Better conduct
1 point(s)
Reason:

Arguments to con: in debates like this, unless otherwise specified the claimant has burden of proof. In this case assessing all of pros claims, he has not met his initial burden of proof. In offering his opening and subsequent gambit, pro claims the GOP is existentially racist, but offers mostly generic blanket statement: that of “identity politics”. Without any specifics at all, and without making any arguments at all to tie the specific actions directly to racism, and above that racism based upon the existence of the party - the BOP is not met by pro. I’m very flexibile in BoP, and this decision is based on falling very far short in this regard. Even with raising Lee Atwater, pro mostly just cites this case but doesn’t use any specifics, making this simply a single anecdote / which con points out.

If pro had given multiple specific examples of actions, or provided a substantive argument concerning why the Republican parties actions explicitly merit red being called racism, this would not be the case. It’s s shame, as I don’t actually disagree much with pros debate contention.

As pro does not meet his burden of proof, con wins arguments by default.

Cons arguments were not in themselves particularly great: the crux of them was that the GOP is inclusive of other races, and that they don’t make laws that are specifically racist. These were supported by citations, these weren’t fully addressed by pro either saying that Ben Carson and Kanye aren’t big thinkers does not refute the argument that the GOP is relatively diverse, arguing that having few minorities doesn’t mean the party isn’t racist - but didn’t go to any length to establish that the lack of diversity made it racism either - pro needed to go into more detail in the refutations.

Either way, my weighting is that as Pro didn’t meet his burden of proof, 4 rounds of con posting “derp” would still have been sufficient and thus pro loses this point.

Sources: in the same vein as above, con provides citations that backed up his position, and demonstrated the points he was making, which bolstered his argument. Pros citations all failed to directly support his primary contention, the lack of such citations in part cost him the arguments portion of this debate.