‘A Gentleman’s Primer for Winning Debates with Your Friends and Enemies’ by Mitchell Shanklin

While others might advise you to train in rhetoric or logic, I maintain that the surest and quickest way to obtain victory over your debate partner is to steal the words from their mouth and hide them away.

First, you must craft the inverse of their argument. An inverse argument should invoke confusion, anger, and perhaps a dash of fear in the heart of your opponent. Conjure as many other emotions in as many different organs as you can manage. Ideally, their response should only involve emotions that originate below the neck; those of the liver or kidneys can be especially potent. If you are certain that your opponent possesses their original appendix, this is an excellent avenue of attack.

Search for concepts which rhyme with those employed by your opponent (both semantically and syntactically) but which are off-kilter, non-isomorphic. Disharmonic. For example, if they argue that it is heartless to withhold food from the starving, you might posit that rich foods can cause great damage to the human heart.

Second, you must whisper these words within the range of their subconscious hearing. This fluctuates throughout the day based on the amount of ambient astral radiation. If your area has few nearby ley lines, at noon on a clear day, place yourself no closer than twenty but no further than thirty feet away from your opponent. A whisper just loud enough to accidentally awake a sleeping babe should do the trick. Adjust your distance and volume as needed based on the local climate.