hi guys. vasad here. when i stroll around this forum, it picked my interest right away, me being a debater myself during my time in high school. however after digging a bit deeper, i still couldn't find any debate thread here. and i thought, i should try making one. debating is one of the useful aspect in education- Socrates himself agrees that questioning everything is one of the oldest and best method of learning.

i always found learning through debate is fascinating. but i couldn't help but notice that Indonesian people seems to think that debate is not a good way to sort differences. of course, there are several reasons for this view. either the dead end in government talking which leaves words as words instead of converting it to actions, or most quarell between neighbors which will cause a long term effect outside the quarelled topic itself... one of the biggest problem in Indonesian problem solving system is that we do not have a proper mechanism to sort our differences.

in the international world, however, there are many systems to debate properly. these system are designed to keep a debate civilized, contained, smart, polite, and finally... clear. the points made in this debate are designed to clash with each other and make everything easy for the observer.

of course, these systems are complicated, and it would take awhile to master (thus, i shall only do so in other threads) however, there are several general things in these systems that should be applied in any kind of debate.

FIRST: STRUCTURE
in these systems, there are structure that must be followed in order to give a clear shape of an argument. the first general outline should consist of:

phase one
general definition in the debate, limiting the topic to a very specific (yet debatable) range, an opening statement, defining your stance in the topic, giving out arguments.

phase two
only consisted of rebuttals (kontra-argumen dalam bahasa Indonesia), and give out more arguments

phase three
the main purpose in phase three is weakinng the opponent's arguments as best as you could, and also rebuilding your own case to point out your arguments once more, making it clearer.

there are more to learn, of course. but this is sufficient to make a good case of your own. well, shall we practice?

let us start with an easy topic! the topic for the first practice will be...
"THIS HOUSE BELIEVE THAT DRUG DEALERS SHOULD BE SENTENCED TO DEATH WITHOUT ANY CHANCE OF PARDON"

let's start learning, guys! please post your questions if there are things you don't understand and i'll try my best to answer