Stockholm School of Economics in Riga Students' Magazine

The Case

This is about how we advanced to the point of winning in the first ever World Online Debating Championship. A team of SSE Rigans with a distinctive team name "Lithuania" decided to spend time arguing about and crafting arguments on such topics as freedom of speech, economics, law, and how to bring all the members to one Skype conversation. Here is how Mc Rapolas, Mr Balsiukas, Sir Arvydas Ž, señor Račas, and myself brought the trophy for the Debate Society.

Round one. Democracies should ban the display of communist and Nazi symbols

Here in www.debatewise.com/wodc-debates we met "Latvia", the other first-class team from SSE Riga. As in all other rounds, they had 24 hours to write their case and produce some arguments before we started the opposition case. Our disorganization together with the fact that it was still summer and our general laziness did not add to the quality of the text: "In this debate both sides struggled to develop substantive matter." We didn't bother to do any research or support our arguments with facts, which is especially important in online debates. Nevertheless, after three 24 hour sessions our opposition case proved to be better. 

Round two. All taxes on inherited wealth should be abolished

Native speakers in the opposition from Canada were good contenders on this somewhat economic and somewhat 'I can do anything with my wealth, bitch' motion. Needless to say that defending this was much fun. It would be tempting to post-rationalize and say that our case was much stronger but in fact the debate was a very close. Also, our work patterns started to take shape. Usually only two or three people worked together on the arguments and others occasionally contributed their ideas. It definitely paid off to have a large five person team. 

Round three. Interest rates on personal lending should be capped by law at 20%

Oh, we like economic motions! This time it was South Africa. The guys did a very good job at arguing in favour of this heavy intervention to the banking sector. Their case would probably win sympathy of the general public, but one can be sure that people from SSE know something about economics. And that something smashed the South Africans. We didn't even elaborate the non-economic arguments, and that was a bit risky. At this point of the competition our team started to fully operate in the three kingdoms: the kingdom of Netherlands, the kingdom of Norway, and the kingdom of E&Y Lithuanian office. 

Semi final. All evidence gathered by intelligence agencies should be admissible in courts of law

Only motions on family policy can be worse than law - SSE teams struggled with them in the past. Keeping that in mind and keeping some slight panic in the background we dug deep into internet and read everything we could find what the status quo is and why it is so bad. After extensive research and killer introductory arguments we found out that the Koreans forfeited. They apparently were from a prestigious school "for gifted people" and our arguments were just unbeatable. Or they just got drunk and missed the deadline, which is equally likely. Anyway, we got into the final.

The grand final. We should prize freedom over security and abolish anti-terrorism laws

The last hour of this lengthy competition was the most intense. We had spent many hours researching the laws (and actually reading them), scanning though anti-terror cases, and arguing about the best arguments. The other team, opposition from England, had also done a nice job and it was far from clear who would win. What we needed was a strong summary that would explain why our line of thought was better. The only problem was that we did not know that Sir Arvydas Ž, who volunteered to write our summary, had a major computer crash and was not able to send his summary.  Nonetheless, during the second half of the last hour Mc Rapolas and myself put together something that was labelled as summary and, following the tradition, uploaded it in the last minute. A few days later we found out that we won the debate. One of the judges even remarked that „I think it is the best of the debates I have judged with the two best performances I have seen…" (taken out of context). 

All in all, it was a nice competition. We learned billions of random facts and won a trip to a conference in London. It will be nice to finally see our team offline.

By Ervinas Skikunas

Team "Latvia"

Here is a story about World Online Debating Championship from the perspective of the other team from SSE Riga called “Latvia”. The first time when we were told about this competition, we were quite skeptical about it. How come you could debate on the Internet? Anyway, we decided to give it a try. When we made up our minds, we understood that, as usual, we had missed the deadline for the registration. Fortunately, the organizers still allowed us to register. Also, as usual, we hadn’t read any rules of the tournament, and that’s why only two of us registered. As it turned out, having more people in a team was somewhat beneficial. Fortunately, Martins V. joined us during the process.

Round one. Democracies should ban the display of communist and Nazi symbols.

Finally, it started. It was a big surprise to see the people from SSE Riga going for their country against us. I was still in Russia when the tournament started and had to write the case during the last two hours before the departure of my train. The case was later completed by Martins and Roberts, but we lost anyway. The only hope was to get in the list of top losers that were going to advance in the next round.

Round two. All drugs should be decriminalized.

We got to the top loser list! This debate was not hard at all, except that we had to write the first part a couple of hours before an SSE Riga party and the second part while having hangover after the party. However, Bulgaria was defeated, and we proved that we deserved to be in the second round. In addition, we learnt plenty of trivia about the harms of drugs.

Quarter finals. Heavy drinkers should be denied liver transplants.

Now we were facing South Korea. We tried to argue that giving transplants to alcoholics is both unfair, since they are the ones to be blamed for the disease, and inefficient, since their devastated body is less likely to accept the organ. If the first line was still defendable, it turned out that there is no medical evidence for less successful transplantations among alcoholics. We made a mistake by trying to defend this argument of inefficiency, while all the facts were against us. Also the Summer Symposium was a bit hardcore and writing arguments after massive partying was a bit tough.  South Koreans were too good at mining the data, thus they defeated us by providing plenty of evidence against our case. However, we were not sad, since the adjudicators labeled the debate as “good”, saying: “Overall, I felt this was the best of the three debates I have judged in this competition. Thanks to both teams.” Another thing keeping us happy was that binge drinking turned out to be not bad at all. Any heavy drinker whose liver fails could get a new one. Later it turned out that South Korea forfeited to Lithuania in the semi-finals, which was pretty disappointing, since we would have enjoyed the rematch against our friends very much. 

Overall, it was a good event: we have gained plenty of experience, learnt plenty of random trivia, and advanced to the quarters. We would enjoy participating in the championship next year and hope it is going to become a tradition. Finally, we would like to congratulate the team called “Lithuania” with their win once again. This is an incredible achievement proving that Baltic (at least Lithuanian) debaters could successfully compete on the international level.

Nikita on behalf of Latvian team (Nikita, Roberts, Martins V.)