You’d be surprised. I was a nationally ranked competitor in the public forum event during highschool. Like, my partner and I put up single digit placements in both NFL and CFL nationals (I know, I know. National forensics league, catholic forensics league. Not football) during my senior year. “Pound the table” (ptt, ill be using it a few times) was a strategy that represented roughly 1/3 of the competition. At that point it was down to judge variance; you could win over some ptt friendly judges by making the other team look and feel stupid, but a lot of them you basically had to figure out how to more belligerently speak over the other team without crossing the judges’ line of “too far”. Baiting them into rage meltdowns worked at lower levels of competition, but the best ptt teams could recognize and avoid that. For some meets we’d literally dumb down our cases for the area we were competing in. “Christian science monitor” was a source that would get you laughed out of the room in some areas, but in other areas you basically couldn’t win unless you somehow verbally fellated the big imaginary friend of whatever shithole southern highschool you were competing in.
TLDR: a large number of highschool debate judges have few enough braincells that the gish gallop absolutely works
You’d be surprised. I was a nationally ranked competitor in the public forum event during highschool. Like, my partner and I put up single digit placements in both NFL and CFL nationals (I know, I know. National forensics league, catholic forensics league. Not football) during my senior year. “Pound the table” (ptt, ill be using it a few times) was a strategy that represented roughly 1/3 of the competition. At that point it was down to judge variance; you could win over some ptt friendly judges by making the other team look and feel stupid, but a lot of them you basically had to figure out how to more belligerently speak over the other team without crossing the judges’ line of “too far”. Baiting them into rage meltdowns worked at lower levels of competition, but the best ptt teams could recognize and avoid that. For some meets we’d literally dumb down our cases for the area we were competing in. “Christian science monitor” was a source that would get you laughed out of the room in some areas, but in other areas you basically couldn’t win unless you somehow verbally fellated the big imaginary friend of whatever shithole southern highschool you were competing in.
TLDR: a large number of highschool debate judges have few enough braincells that the gish gallop absolutely works