Every time I read about LD debates as the height of civility I think about how much of this idea of civilized, rational debate solving out disagreements is a complete confection that contradicts the historical record. I think of the attack ad which Douglas aimed at Lincoln called him the leanest, most ungainly mass of legs and arms and hatchet face ever strung on a single frame. The Church Fathers were absolutely brutal in their takedowns of one another. This is an excerpt of Tertullian's intro to Adversus Marcionem, which reads like a diss track:
'[Entire paragraph describing Pontos as a horrible shithole]
However, nothing in Pontos is as barbarous and sad as the fact that Marcion was born there. More repulsive than any Scythian, less stable than a wagon-dweller, more inhuman than the Massagetians, more audacious than an Amazon, darker than fog, colder than winter, more brittle than ice, more treacherous than the Ister [Danube], more precipitous than the Caucasus mountains. Even more, the true Prometheus, Almighty God, is mangled by Marcion’s blasphemies. Marcion is even more savage than the beasts of that barbarous region. For what beaver was more self-castrating [beaver’s were believed to castrate themselves with their teeth] than he who has abolished marriage? What Pontic mouse ever had such gnawing powers as he who has gnawed the gospels to pieces?'
Just my two cents, but rhetoric has always been seen as the power to move a crowd, as a specific skill the end goal of which is to sway opinion to your side. Insults have always been a part of that if you are trying to sway a crowd against a person and their ideas. They are almost a form of rhetorical punctuation, and in the sort of debates that actually matter they are used to great effect. Teaching debaters-in-training that they are bad is just handicapping them.
