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... ... @@ -1,76 +1,36 @@ 1 -Cap K 2 -Part One: Links 3 -The U.S. police were created to protect the bourgeois and control the proletariat. The aff’s continued defense of the police reaffirms their protection of the bourgeoisie. 4 -Whitehouse 1 5 -While workers grew more conscious of themselves as a class, they also began to engage in more and more “run-of-the-mill” riots wherever crowds gathered, in taverns or in theaters or in the street. Such riots may have had no clear economic or political objective, but they were still instances of collective self-assertion by the working class—or by ethnic and racial fractions of the class. In the opening decades of the century, there was one of these riots about four times a year, but in the period from 1825 to 1830, New Yorkers rioted at a rate of once per month. One of these riots in particular alarmed the elite. Known as the Christmas riot of 1828, it actually happened at New Year’s. A noisy crowd of about 4,000 young Anglo workers brought out their drums and noisemakers and headed toward Broadway where the rich lived. On the way, they busted up an African church and beat the church members. The watch arrested several of the rioters, but the crowd rescued them and sent the watch running. The crowd picked up some more numbers and turned toward the commercial district, where they busted up the stores. At the Battery, they broke windows in some of the city’s richest homes. Then they headed back up Broadway because they knew that the rich were having their own celebration at the City Hotel. There the crowd blocked the coaches from exiting. A large contingent of the watch showed up, but the leaders of the crowd called a five-minute truce. This allowed the watch to think about the fight that they were about to get into. When the five minutes were up, the watch stepped aside, and the deafening crowd marched past them up Broadway. This spectacle of working-class defiance took place in full view of the families that ran New York City. Newspapers immediately began calling for a major expansion of the watch, so the Christmas Riot accelerated a set of incremental reforms that finally lead to the creation of the New York City Police Department in 1845. The reforms of 1845 enlarged the police force, professionalized them, and centralized them with a more military chain of command. The watch was expanded to 24 hours, and policemen were forbidden from taking a second job. The pay was increased, and police no longer received a portion of the fines that were extracted from offenders. This meant the cops were no longer going out on patrol looking for how they were going to make a living, a process that could lead to cause a strange selection of prosecutions. Eliminating the fee system gave commanders greater freedom to set policy and priorities—and thus made the department more responsive to the shifting needs of the economic elite. 6 -The concept and existence of the police will continue to enforce capitalism and cause your problems. This turns the aff. 7 -Whitehouse 2 8 -First of all, we need to put policing in the context of a bigger ruling-class project of managing and shaping the working class. I said at the beginning that the emergence of workers’ revolt coincided with a breakdown of old methods of constant personal supervision of the workforce. The state stepped in to provide supervision. The cops were part of that effort, but in the North, the state also expanded its programs of poor relief and public schooling. Police work was integrated with the system of poor relief, as constables worked on registration of the poor and their placement in workhouses. That’s even before the police were professionalized—the constables were sorting out the “deserving poor” from the “undeserving poor.” If people were unemployed and unable to work, constables would direct them toward charity from churches or the city itself. But if folks were able to work, they were judged to be “idlers” and sent off to the horrors of the workhouse. The system for poor relief made a crucial contribution to the creation of the market for wage labor. The key function of the relief system was to make unemployment so unpleasant and humiliating that people were willing to take ordinary jobs at very low wages just to avoid unemployment. By punishing the poorest people, capitalism creates a low baseline for the wage scale and pulls the whole scale downward. The police no longer play such a direct role in selecting people for relief, but they do deliver a good deal of the punishment. As we know, lots of police work has to do with making life unpleasant for unemployed people on the street. The rise of modern policing also coincides with the rise of public education. Public schools accustom children to the discipline of the capitalist workplace, including the submission to strict rules about the proper time to do things. The school reform movement of the 1830s and 40s also aimed to shape the students’ moral character. The effect of this was supposed to be that students would willingly submit to authority, that they would be able to work hard, exercise self¬-control, and delay gratification. In fact, the concepts of good citizenship that came out of school reform movement were perfectly aligned with the concepts of criminology that were being invented to categorize people on the street. The police were to focus not just on crime but on criminal types—a method of profiling backed up by supposedly scientific credentials. The “juvenile delinquent,” for example, is a concept that is common to schooling and policing—and has helped to link the two activities in practice. This ideology of good citizenship was supposed to have a big effect inside the heads of students, encouraging them to think that the problems in society come from the actions of “bad guys.” A key objective of schooling, according to reformer Horace Mann, should be to implant a certain kind of conscience in the students—so that they discipline their own behavior and begin to police themselves. In Mann’s words, the objective was for children to “think of duty rather than of the policeman.” Needless to say, an analytic scheme for dividing society between good guys and bad guys is perfect for identifying scapegoats, especially racial ones. Such a moralistic scheme was (and is) also a direct competitor to a class-conscious worldview, which identifies society’s basic antagonism as the conflict between exploiters and exploited. Police activity thus goes beyond simple repression—it “teaches” an ideology of good and bad citizenship that dovetails with the lessons of the classroom and the workhouse. The overall point here is that the invention of the police was part of a broader expansion of state activity to gain control over the day-to-day behavior of the working class. Schooling, poor relief and police work all aimed to shape workers to become useful to—and loyal to—the capitalist class. 9 -Part Two: Impacts 10 -Capitalism is the root cause of police brutality. I control the internal link to your impacts. 11 -Hedges 15 12 -More training, body cameras, community policing, the hiring of more minorities as police officers, a better probation service and more equitable fines will not blunt the indiscriminate use of lethal force or reduce the mass incarceration that destroys the lives of the poor. Our capitalist system callously discards surplus labor, especially poor people of color, employing lethal force and the largest prison system in the world to keep them under control. This is by design. And until this predatory system of capitalism is destroyed, the poor, especially people of color, will continue to be gunned down by police in the streets, as they have for decades, and disproportionately locked in prison cages. “The strength of ‘The New Jim Crow’ by Michelle Alexander is that, by equating mass incarceration with Jim Crow, it makes it rhetorically impossible to defend it,” said Naomi Murakawa, author of “The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America,” when we met recently in Princeton, N.J. “But, on the other hand, there is no ‘new’ Jim Crow, there is just capitalist white supremacy in a state of constant self-preservation.” “We should talk about what we are empowering police to do, not how they are doing it, not whether they are being nice when they carry out arrests,” she said. “Reforms are oriented to making violence appear respectable and courteous. But being arrested once can devastate someone’s life. This is the violence we are not talking about. It does not matter if you are arrested politely. Combating racism is not about combating bad ideas in the head or hateful feelings. This idea is the perfect formula to preserve material distributions in their exact configuration.” 1 +AC- Native Americans 2 +The USFG hides behind the veil of “respecting tribal sovereignty” to legally deny Native Americans protection from the nuclear waste industry 3 +Kamps 96 4 +http://www.nirs.org/radwaste/scullvalley/historynativecommunitiesnuclearwaste06142005.pdf 5 +Low-income and minority communities are disproportionately targeted with facilities and wastes that have significant and adverse human health and environmental effects.1 This places the burdens of society on those who are most vulnerable. These communities are at a tremendous economic and political disadvantage over the decision-making process that is dominated by large, wealthy corporations and/or government agencies. Ironically, low income and People of Color communities targeted with hazardous facilities often benefit the least from whatever societal “good” is purported to justify the generation of the hazardous substances in the first place.2 According to the 1990 U.S. Census (the very time period when the U.S. nuclear establishment intensified and accelerated its targeting of Native American communities with high-level radioactive waste dumps, as shown below), over 31 of Native Americans living on reservations had incomes below the federal poverty line.3 After centuries of oppression and domination, stripped of their lands, resources, and traditional governments, these communities lack political power, and desperately need economic development. The “tribal sovereignty” of Native Americans, which makes their lands exempt from state law and many environmental regulations, only increases their attractiveness as targets for facilities unwanted elsewhere. Native Americans have already disproportionately borne the brunt of the impacts from the nuclear fuel chain over the past 60 years.4 In the case of radioactive waste storage and disposal, the nuclear power establishment in industry and government is simply taking advantage of these vulnerable communities, attempting to hide from environmental regulation and widespread public opposition behind the shield of tribal sovereignty 13 13 14 -Capitalism is the underlying mechanism by which other forms of oppression function, meaning it is the ultimate restrictor of voices. Thus, combatting capitalist structures logically comes prior to all other frameworks. 15 -McLaren 1 7 +NEXT 8 +Moving nuclear plants and dump sites are not enough to solve the issue, the nuclear industry is dependent on Native American land for labor and mining. Even when industry leaves the area, the impacts continue to ravage the community 9 +Kamp 96 10 +http://www.nirs.org/radwaste/scullvalley/historynativecommunitiesnuclearwaste06142005.pdf 11 + The nuclear fuel chain involves the mining and milling of uranium, and the processing, conversion and enrichment of it into fuel for nuclear reactors and atomic weaponry. Most of the uranium in the U.S. is located on Native American lands. Uranium mines were, and continue to be, on Navajo lands throughout the Grants Mineral Belt (Arizona and New Mexico), on Laguna Pueblo land in New Mexico and tribal lands in the Northwest, as well as on and near Sioux Indian lands in western South Dakota. These mines have taken a particularly hard toll on the communities near them. Native Americans miners, most of whom were never informed of the dangers of uranium, were exposed to its particulate and radioactive gases in the mines for decades. They have suffered large numbers of lung cancer fatalities, a disease almost entirely unknown among the Navajos and Pueblos before uranium mining. Mining debris and mill tailings, as milling often takes place near the mines to minimize transport of waste rock, were put into unlined storage ponds or out in the open air, where often they leached into nearby soil and water. Groundwater that entered into the mines, and thus became contaminated, was regularly pumped out into rivers and lakes. Worsening this already poor situation, when mining ceased in the late 1970's (because of the drop in uranium prices), companies abandoned the mines. They did this without sealing the tunnels, filling the pits, or removing the large piles of radioactive and toxic tailings. As a result, Native American families have lived for many decades in very close proximity to the mines, grazed their livestock there, and had children playing in them. Uranium mine tailings have been used in roads, homes, buildings and school 16 16 17 -For well over two decades we have witnessed the jubilant liberal and conservative pronouncements of the demise of socialism. Concomitantly, history's presumed failure to defang existing capitalist relations has been read by many self-identified ‘radicals’ as an advertisement for capitalism's inevitability. As a result, the chorus refrain ‘There Is No Alternative’, sung by liberals and conservatives, has been buttressed by the symphony of post-Marxist voices recommending that we give socialism a decent burial and move on. Within this context, to speak of the promise of Marx and socialism may appear anachronistic, even naïve, especially since the post-al intellectual vanguard has presumably demonstrated the folly of doing so. Yet we stubbornly believe that the chants of T.I.N.A. must be combated for they offer as a fait accompli, something which progressive Leftists should refuse to accept—namely the triumph of capitalism and its political bedfellow neo-liberalism, which have worked together to naturalize suffering, undermine collective struggle, and obliterate hope. We concur with Amin (1998), who claims that such chants must be defied and revealed as absurd and criminal, and who puts the challenge we face in no uncertain terms: humanity may let itself be led by capitalism's logic to a fate of collective suicide or it may pave the way for an alternative humanist project of global socialism. The grosteque conditions that inspired Marx to pen his original critique of capitalism are present and flourishing. The inequalities of wealth and the gross imbalances of power that exist today are leading to abuses that exceed those encountered in Marx's day (Greider, 1998, p. 39). Global capitalism has paved the way for the obscene concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands and created a world increasingly divided between those who enjoy opulent affluence and those who languish in dehumanizing conditions and economic misery. In every corner of the globe, we are witnessing social disintegration as revealed by a rise in abject poverty and inequality. At the current historical juncture, the combined assets of the 225 richest people is roughly equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 percent of the world's population, while the combined assets of the three richest people exceed the combined GDP of the 48 poorest nations (CCPA, 2002, p. 3). Approximately 2.8 billion people—almost half of the world's population—struggle in desperation to live on less than two dollars a day (McQuaig, 2001, p. 27). As many as 250 million children are wage slaves and there are over a billion workers who are either un- or under-employed. These are the concrete realities of our time—realities that require a vigorous class analysis, an unrelenting critique of capitalism and an oppositional politics capable of confronting what Ahmad (1998, p. 2) refers to as ‘capitalist universality.’ They are realities that require something more than that which is offered by the prophets of ‘difference’ and post-Marxists who would have us relegate socialism to the scrapheap of history and mummify Marxism along with Lenin's corpse. Never before has a Marxian analysis of capitalism and class rule been so desperately needed. That is not to say that everything Marx said or anticipated has come true, for that is clearly not the case. Many critiques of Marx focus on his strategy for moving toward socialism, and with ample justification; nonetheless Marx did provide us with fundamental insights into class society that have held true to this day. Marx's enduring relevance lies in his indictment of capitalism which continues to wreak havoc in the lives of most. While capitalism's cheerleaders have attempted to hide its sordid underbelly, Marx's description of capitalism as the sorcerer's dark power is even more apt in light of contemporary historical and economic conditions. Rather than jettisoning Marx, decentering the role of capitalism, and discrediting class analysis, radical educators must continue to engage Marx's oeuvre and extrapolate from it that which is useful pedagogically, theoretically, and, most importantly, politically in light of the challenges that confront us. The urgency which animates Amin's call for a collective socialist vision necessitates, as we have argued, moving beyond the particularism and liberal pluralism that informs the ‘politics of difference.’ It also requires challenging the questionable assumptions that have come to constitute the core of contemporary ‘radical’ theory, pedagogy and politics. In terms of effecting change, what is needed is a cogent understanding of the systemic nature of exploitation and oppression based on the precepts of a radical political economy approach (outlined above) and one that incorporates Marx's notion of ‘unity in difference’ in which people share widely common material interests. Such an understanding extends far beyond the realm of theory, for the manner in which we choose to interpret and explore the social world, the concepts and frameworks we use to express our sociopolitical understandings, are more than just abstract categories. They imply intentions, organizational practices, and political agendas. Identifying class analysis as the basis for our understandings and class struggle as the basis for political transformation implies something quite different than constructing a sense of political agency around issues of race, ethnicity, gender, etc. 13 +The gratuitous mistreatment of the Native American community by the nuclear industry mirrors the slaughter of Native Americans by European colonists. Therefore the impact is the re-entrenchment of settler colonialism. 14 +Kauanui 16 15 +http://csalateral.org/wp/issue/5-1/forum-alt-humanities-settler-colonialism-enduring-indigeneity-kauanui/ 16 +As Wolfe noted, because Settler colonialism “destroys to replace”, it is “inherently eliminatory but not invariably genocidal.”3 He was careful to point out that settler colonialism is not simply a form of genocide, since there are cases of genocide without settler colonialism, and because “elimination refers to more than the summary liquidation of Indigenous peoples, though it includes that.”4 Hence, he suggested that “structural genocide” avoids the question of degree and enables an understanding of the relationships between spatial removal, mass killings, and biocultural assimilation.5 In other words, the logic of elimination of the native is about the elimination of the native as native. And yet, to exclusively focus on the settler colonial without any meaningful engagement with the indigenous—as has been the case in how Wolfe’s work has been cited—can (re)produce another form of “elimination of the native.” Because settler colonialism is a land-centered project entailing permanent settlement, as Wolfe points out in this same essay, “Settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event. 17 +I advocate a complete rejection of American colonial energy industry and the USFG – Giving first priority to Native Americans. Decolonization is a first priority for solving. Ward Churchill 18 +https://books.google.com/books?id=nrCWZZJD48MCandpg=PA550andlpg=PA550anddq=from+a+native+son+ward+churchillandsource=blandots=UcjntmjBi8andsig=Ak9QzP9xxYZl8VFXOUlNYF9szcUandhl=enandsa=Xandved=0ahUKEwjb7o6mOPNAhVB0oMKHRkZBSQQ6AEIUTAI#v=onepageandq=from20a20native20son20ward20churchillandf=false 19 +Finally, and one suspects this is the real crux of things from the government/corporate perspective, any such restoration of land and attendant sovereign prerogatives to native nations would result in a truly massive loss of “domestic” resources to the United States, thereby impairing the country’s economic and military capacities (see “Radioactive Colonialism” essay for details). For everyone who queued up to wave flags and tie on yellow ribbons during the United States’ recent imperial adventure in the Persian Gulf, this prospect may induce a certain psychic trauma. But, for progressives at least, it should be precisely the point. When you think about these issues in this way, the great mass of non-Indians in North America really have much to gain and almost nothing to lose, from the success of native people in struggles to reclaim the land which is rightfully ours. The tangible diminishment of US material power which is integral to our victories in this sphere stands to paves the way for realization of most other agendas from anti-imperialism to environmentalism, from African American liberation to feminism, from gay rights to the ending of class privilege – pursued by progressive on this continent. Conversely, succeeding with any or even all of these other agendas would still represent an inherently oppressive situation in their realization is contingent upon an ongoing occupation of Native North America without the consent of Indian people. Any North American revolution which failed to free indigenous territory from non-Indian domination would be simply a continuation of colonialism in another form. Regardless of the angle from which you view the matter, the liberation of Native North America, liberation of the land first and foremost, is the key to fundamental and positive social changes of many other sorts. One thing they say, leads to another. The question has always been, of course, which “thing” is to the first in the sequence. A preliminary formulation for those serious about achieving (rather than endlessly theorizing and debating), radical change in the United States might be “First Priority to First Americans” Put another way this would mean, “US out of Indian Country.” Inevitably, the logic leads to what we’ve all been so desperately seeking: The United States – at least what we’ve come to know it – out of North America altogether. From there it can be permanently banished from the planet. In its stead, surely we can join hands to create something new and infinitely better. That’s our vision of “impossible realism.” Isn’t it time we all went to work on attaining it? 20 +Therefor the Role of the ballot is the method for liberation from settler colonialism. 21 +Other forms of solvency claim to help but do so on stolen land, making all their attempts at reform futile. There is NO topical version of the aff—affirming would reinforce the power of existing colonial structures, re-ifying the violence and erasing the lived experience of Native people. Kauanui 2 http://csalateral.org/wp/issue/5-1/forum-alt-humanities-settler-colonialism-enduring-indigeneity-kauanui/ 22 +Why have few scholars taken up the question of indigeneity when it is something that implicates most aspects of American culture, politics, policy, and society because the United States is a settler colonial state? How can one understand the US Republic without accounting for the violent removal of the original occupants, indigenous peoples—the preexisting sovereign nations? Since attentiveness to indigenous peoples always entails an examination of prior occupancy, sovereignty, and nationhood, many scholars have arguably relegated it to the field of Native American Studies. Certainly, the study of indigenous peoples is foundational to American history, culture, society, and politics. Understanding settler colonialism as a structure exposes the fact that colonialism cannot be relegated to the past, even though the past-present should be historicized. The notion that colonialism is something that ends with the dissolving of the British colonies when the original thirteen became the early US states has its counterpart narrative in the myth that indigenous peoples ended when colonialism ended. Works on local settler history and settler governmentality explain the structure. Jean O’Brien, in Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England, theorizes the persistent myth of the vanishing Indian.11 She argues that local histories became a primary means by which European Americans asserted their own modernity while denying it to Indian peoples. O’Brien examined more than six hundred local histories from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Ranging from pamphlets to multivolume treatments, these narratives shared a preoccupation with establishing the region as the center of an Anglo-Saxon nation and the center of a modern American culture. They also insisted (often in lamenting tones) that New England’s original inhabitants had become extinct, even though many Indians still lived in the very towns being chronicled. Erasing and then memorializing Indian peoples also served a more practical colonial goal: refuting Indian claims to land and rights. 23 +Underview 24 +1. Colonialism exists as a structure, as its roots function within current institutions that perpetuate its impacts. Therefore mindset shifts are not enough to solve the harms as they do nothing to solve the problem. And, mindset shift alts and criticisms that critique my method or process are insufficient as they don’t do anything about the problem of colonization. Colonization can only be reversed through the aff, only then can we begin to question harmful mindsets. 25 +2. And, the pre and post fiat distinction is incoherent, as even if a debater claims that their advocacy is post fiat it still does not occur. In reality, debate is a comparison of two contrasting performances, your obligation as the negative is to prove why your performance is favorable. Means you can’t preclude the AC through generic theory first claims or pre fiat up-layering through Ks. 26 +3. Policy making is entrenched in a racist and sexist mindset. The decisionmaking paradigm inherent in the traditional forms of political engagement engages in an unconscious exercise of power over the self which regulates discourse and produces for itself legitimate methods for engagement which rarely result in change. Role Playing detaches debaters from real world participation. Reid-Brinkley1 27 +So, within public discourse, how race is coded rhetorically in public deliberation is of critical importance. Mitchell observes that the stance of the policymaker in debate comes with a “sense of detachment associated with the spectator posture.”115 In other words, its participants are able to engage in debates where they are able to distance themselves from the events that are the subjects of debates. Debaters can and throw around terms like torture, terrorism, genocide and nuclear war without blinking. Debate simulations can only serve to distance the debaters from real world participation in the political contexts they debate about. As William Shanahan remarks: …the topic established a relationship through interpellation that inhered irrespective of what the particular political affinities of the debaters were. The relationship was both political and ethical, and needed to be debated as such. When we blithely call for United States Federal Government policymaking, we are not immune to the colonialist legacy that establishes our place on this continent. We cannot wish away the horrific atrocities perpetrated everyday in our name simply by refusing to acknowledge these implications 28 +4. Debate has become the university with knowledge reproduction and the act of teaching. This is exemplified by the continued exclusion of minority voices in debate. Smith 29 + 30 +At every tournament you attend this year look around the cafeteria and take note of which students are not sitting amongst you and your peers. Despite being some of the best and the brightest in the nation, many students are alienated from and choose to not participate in an activity I like to think of as homeplace. In addition to the heavy financial burden associated with national competition, the exclusionary atmosphere of a debate tournament discourages black students from participating. Widespread awareness of the same lack of participation in policy debate has led to a growing movement towards alternative styles and methods of engaging the gatekeepers of the policy community, (Reid-Brinkley 08) while little work has been done to address or even acknowledge the same concern in Lincoln Douglas debate. Unfortunately students of color are not only forced to cope with a reality of structural violence outside of debate, but within an activity they may have joined to escape it in the first place. We are facing more than a simple trend towards marginalization occurring in Lincoln Douglas, but a culture of exclusion that locks minority participants out of the ranks of competition. It will be uncomfortable, it will be hard, and it will require continued effort but the necessary step in fixing this problem, like all problems, is the community as a whole admitting that such a problem with many “socially acceptable” choices exists in the first place. Like all systems of social control, the reality of racism in debate is constituted by the singular choices that institutions, coaches, and students make on a weekly basis. I have watched countless rounds where competitors attempt to win by rushing to abstractions to distance the conversation from the material reality that black debaters are forced to deal with every day. One of the students I coached, who has since graduated after leaving debate, had an adult judge write out a ballot that concluded by “hypothetically” defending my student being lynched at the tournament. Another debate concluded with a young man defending that we can kill animals humanely, “just like we did that guy Troy Davis”. Community norms would have competitors do intellectual gymnastics or make up rules to accuse black debaters of breaking to escape hard conversations but as someone who understands that experience, the only constructive strategy is to acknowledge the reality of the oppressed, engage the discussion from the perspective of authors who are black and brown, and then find strategies to deal with the issues at hand. It hurts to see competitive seasons come and go and have high school students and judges spew the same hateful things you expect to hear at a Klan rally. A student should not, when presenting an advocacy that aligns them with the oppressed, have to justify why oppression is bad. Debate is not just a game, but a learning environment with liberatory potential. Even if the form debate gives to a conversation is not the same you would use to discuss race in general conversation with Bayard Rustin or Fannie Lou Hamer, that is not a reason we have to strip that conversation of its connection to a reality that black students cannot escape. 31 +5. The strategy of the AC is a resistance from systems of racism that manifest in debate. Systems of exclusion intensify these skews, calling for their rejection. Vincent 13 32 +Vincent, Chrism, 2013, Re-Conceptualizing our Performances: Accountability in Lincoln Douglas Debate, VBriefly 18 18 19 - 20 -Part Three: Alternative 21 -The alternative is to disband the police. This is a necessary first step in advancing toward an effective revolution against the bourgeoisie and the capitalist system. The perm is impossible since the aff actively harms the proletariat by using the police. It fails to achieve a revolutionist mindset, which only the alt does. 22 -WWP 16 23 - 24 -Cops don’t just kill. They patrol schools, hospitals, and public transit. In most cities, they roam the hallways and walkways in housing projects and apartment complexes. They are stationed in the welfare office, the Walmart, the movie theater and the park. In all these spaces, they enforce white supremacy and protect property and commerce over human life. In fact, they carry out a vital task for capitalism: by disciplining poor, Black, queer, indigenous, trans, non-white and disabled people into accepting deteriorating living conditions, reproducing their social difference and isolation, and punishing any and all dissent against this status quo of alienation and exploitation. You can’t reform a landmine, but you can dismantle it, destroy the factories that made it, and dissolve the governments and businesses that profit off of its existence. In the same way, we’re not fighting for a new police–nicer, more diverse, with better training than their predecessors–nor even a new justice system. We’re fighting for a world without police. We’re working to disempower, disarm and disband police units and entire agencies wherever they operate, and revolutionize society as a whole. II. The strategy 8 disempower If, as the case of rapist Oklahoma cop Daniel Holtzclaw demonstrates, our bodies are not our own; if, as the cases of Eric Garner and Alton Sterling demonstrate, everyday survival in a capitalist world is punishable by humiliation, assault and death, then the struggle can not be one to get a more diverse, “softer” or more “community-based” policing. The absolute and unanswerable power the police have over our lives is directly proportional to the power we lack. This reality can only begin to change when we disempower the police in all the spaces they operate. 25 - 26 -Part Four: Framework 27 -The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater who best methodologically deconstructs capitalism. 28 -The judge is in a position to be an inclusive educator, and has an obligation to open up the space for multiple pedagogies, or polyvocal debate. 29 - 30 -Koh and Niemi 31 - 32 -For as long as there has been debate, there has been the debate about what debate is. We are not against a discussion of what constitutes debate. In fact we are absolutely for it. We argue that this is a crucial debate within debates. The question should not be “what is debate?” The proper question is “what can debate do?” The constitutive feature of debate that we are most abstractly interested in is the precise one that is so often banished by debate pundits – the possibilities of what it can do. We do not yet know what debate can do. All are welcome to accept the challenge of forcing debate into a linear and instrumental framework, but be warned it will certainly fail. Debate is a process and a field, not a mechanism. This is the case for polyvocal debate. Our current definition (which is open to redefinition) is that debate should be thought of as a complex assemblage of voices (the debaters, the judge, audiences, coaches, the authors quoted, and so on), and that it is wrong to limit the possible voices or the possible enunciations of those voices. Debate is always about multiple voices – multiple ways of sensing/expressing. Even non-sense and non-expression have their own voices. This is not a paradigm. It is a hypothesis about the system of relations that co-creates debate. The power and potential of polyvocal debate is not located in some far-off future. It is right here right now, and it is also capable of contact with the outsides of one perspective on time and space. To paraphrase June Tyson – Don’t you know? It’s after the end of the world. Within the system of relations composed by polyvocal debate, we always have the ability to ask “should we believe in something in the first place?” as well as “if we believe it, what are its normative implications?” These questions, in whatever form they take, are some of the most primal elements of debate. Restricting the scope of debate to only some of these questions is a serious loss. More absurd is the justification for restriction based on the value of being able to ask and engage with these questions in the first place. It is wrong to assume that chaos and doubt are bad. It is even worse to argue for a progressive fallacy that chaos and doubt can be removed from debate without debate ceasing to be debate at all. Debate is not soccer, or chess, or playing the trumpet. Perhaps it can do similar things to those activities, but if so it is because it does not feature the limits that define soccer or chess or playing the trumpet. It is apparently very easy to make assumptions about what education is. Most often this is accomplished without citing a single theorist on the subject of education OR a robust understanding of what education could be outside of “commonsensical” assumptions (which are less common and relatable that they initially seem). As we often like to tell our students – read the literature. We call the kind of education that is often assumed “banking-style education” after Paulo Friere. This is the notion that education is about accumulating knowledge. 100 facts are better than 99 facts. People devalue education because they think of it only in these calculated terms. To the banking conception, the end game of education would not be an increase in self-respect, a commitment to social justice, or a development of communication and empathetic powers. It would be the resume statement of “things I’ve learned.” We must not buy into this conception of education. In debate, the collaborative way voices intertwine builds a world of speech and frames it. No debate performance can be perfectly reproduced. The judge’s interpretation and voice are then added. The desire for absolutely objective or procedurally exact judging is a desire for an impossibility. We should not be afraid of the judge’s voice. We recognize it as one among many. Some judges speak loudly and have particular desires. We do not begrudge them this. What is important is that they acknowledge that theirs is only one voice among the many and one way of sensing among all sense and nonsense. It is not a question of excluding the chaos or controlling it, but understanding the value in hearing the clash of multiple voices. For nowhere else in school are we given the vibrant opportunity to be as real in the academic space as is in debate; where we are able to read multiple arguments from multiple views from multiple bases. We must encourage debate to be an outlet for the chaotic and doubtful elements of our beliefs for it’s an opportunity to bridge debate’s separation from the real world into our own world. Our lives aren’t always smooth unwavering stories. They are often a chaos that is hard to grasp outside the lens of community. Polyvocal debate is inclusive and encouraging of this chaos, of the hard questions and life changing moments of realization. A form of debate that acts as if it can omit doubt is not a true form of debate at all. This isn’t just an argument for “unique educational value” in the banking-sense. Debate should not be thought of as an esoteric extracurricular designed to spice up the resume. Paradigms of debate that stop at the moment of rational justification treat the issue of what world we create for ourselves as an unnecessary step, but this conversation is what must happen in our lives and further what must happen in debate. Polyvocal debate allows for this discussion. We should not just ask “is deontology true” but further “is it good for me to believe in deontology” or util or contractarianism, etc. Rationality cannot be trusted to judge itself, but abandoning logic altogether isn’t necessary just yet. It is too easy to take up one side or the other (only truth matters or only the good matters). Debate is harder. The tenets of logic and justification can create questionable conclusions, and a truly valuable form of debate must allow us to criticize and reevaluate these conclusions to live our lives to the fullest. We must be able to ask if beliefs empower or disempower our lives. We always have the power to ask should we believe it or is it correct, and exercising this capacity is the practice of debate. There are two ways in which we can understand and consider what we ought to believe – what is rationally justifiable, and what is good for us to believe for ourselves. In our lives we cannot just ask “what do I think is true.” We must always end up asking “is it good for me to believe in what I believe?” This is how we must act in our own lives outside of just the debate space. When we are faced with a difficult situation be it in our personal lives, work, etc., we are inevitably going to be confronted with moments of seemingly undeniable hopelessness; where despite our best efforts and our thinking, we cannot justify or rationally see a way to be happy or push ourselves through to the other side. Is it good for me to believe that no matter what I will do, that I will get a bad grade in this class? Is it good for me to believe that I will fail in my work? Is it good for me to believe in hopelessness? Our answer is no. Our answer is that debate helps you learn new questions as well as new answers. Again and again we’ve heard the articles and arguments that collapse everything to the old questions: education versus fairness, the rules versus innovation and expansion, correct ways of being versus incorrect ones. Bizarrely there are some who like to play with the same questions forever, perpetually flipping bits between one and zero, never writing new code. We are tired of these questions. Perhaps they would be enlivened by new voices. Polyvocality is the necessary and explosive generation of new questions. The practice of debate is an educational activity because it is generative and interrogative of voices. Use it for what it’s used for. Education can be praxis – where the abstraction of theory becomes lived abstractness inside the fabric of everyday experience. Where a radical new way of thinking-feeling the world becomes possible. Where you don’t just learn about quantum physics, but cry at how beautiful the expression of quantum interactions can be and feel blessed to be a part of them, and then teach them to your friends and family. But this is only part of what education is. Education is a becoming that is necessarily political. Often times it is anti-reactionary or anti-conservative, not because it includes some biased political position, but because it is impossible to actually experience learning without it changing you – what you think is right and wrong, what you want to do, and who you think of yourself as. On our view, this makes education necessarily anti-fascist (where fascism is defined as the tendency to over-represent and prefer certain ways of being to others based on normative, intuitive, or ontological claims). No matter your petty political affiliations, too many people in our world must attempt escape everyday, live as targets, suffer, and experience domination. If education is not a force to help us address this, it is not a properly empathetic education. Even if the educational space of debate allows for slightly more opportunities to escape the everyday and find new connections and places to dwell, this is a greater benefit to everyone than any obedience to respectability politics, norms of conduct, or “correct ways of being” could ever achieve. This is how the world works. We should not abandon the cause of empathy just because we can have that elsewhere. It’s not as if we should not care about others at certain times because we do so in others. Debate is foundationally about empathy. Arguments are only persuasive in the ability for their to be foster a shared experience of understanding. Judges vote for arguments that have a particular effect on them – the effect of “being convincing.” Arguments that win send the judge on a path of becoming-convinced. In order for this to happen, the debater must actually get through to the judge on some level, whether intuitively, emotively, via rhetoric, the flow, or explanation. The best debating promotes empathy. Not empathy defined by biased terms – empathy defined by actual contact with actual others, perspectives, and ways of expressing oneself. It is not that young people are in need of moral training or must be told what is right and wrong or that debate should erase and conquer disagreement. Rather, it is that we should strive to learn to live with disagreement. For it is too simple and brute to believe in a monovocal system of thought – that your language is the only Rosetta Stone to translate the world through. Debate must be a place to see how to live with ourselves and live among others. If being the better debater means being the worse person, we should NOT endorse this conception of better debating. 33 -The judge has an obligation to reject capitalism as an educator. Neoliberalism ideology forces pedagogies of maintaining the capitalist state among students. The K comes prior to any epistemic knowledge since capitalism asserts control over our systems of thought. 34 -Mclaren 2 35 -The epistemological presuppositions that undergird neoliberal capitalism can be unraveled like an unspooled film; each application of neoliberal prescriptions to knowledge formation can be scrutinized in the context of the larger mise-en-scène. Cultural theorists have done an excellent job of understanding the impact of neoliberal ideology on the production of space, place, scale, historical time, and race, gender and class identity and human agency. I agree that this is important work and we need to look at such production in relation to the commodification of everyday life. Among other things, neoliberal logic is a logic of the lowest common denominator, a technocratic rationality in which value is accorded to how much surplus value can be extracted and accumulated..¶ While well-meaning progressive educators might be willing to criticize the manner in which humans are turned into dead objects that Marxists refer to as fetishized commodities, they are often loathe to consider the fact that within capitalist society, all value originates in the sphere of production and that one of the primary roles of schools is to serve as agents or functionaries of capital. Furthermore, they fail to understand that education is more reproductive of an exploitative social order than a constitutive challenge to it precisely because it rests on the foundations of capitalist exchange value. Reading Marx and Freire may not alchemize us into revolutionaries capable of transcending capitalism but ignoring what they had to say about transforming education in the context of class struggle would be a huge loss to our 36 - 37 -We don’t need to reject all of capitalism in once instance – moving in the right direction is key and the alternative is the best way to approach it. 38 -Herod 04 39 -Thus capitalist structures (corporations, governments, banks, schools, etc.) are not seized so much as simply abandoned. Capitalist relations are not fought so much as they are simply rejected. We stop participating in activities that support (finance, condone) the capitalist world and start participating in activities that build a new world while simultaneously undermining the old. We create a new pattern of social relations alongside capitalist relations and then we continually build and strengthen our new pattern while doing every thing we can to weaken capitalist relations. In this way our new democratic, non-hierarchical, non-commodified relations can eventually overwhelm the capitalist relations and force them out of existence. This is how it has to be done. This is a plausible, realistic strategy. To think that we could create a whole new world of decent social arrangements overnight, in the midst of a crisis, during a so-called revolution, or during the collapse of capitalism, is foolhardy. Our new social world must grow within the old, and in opposition to it, until it is strong enough to dismantle and abolish capitalist relations. Such a revolution will never happen automatically, blindly, determinably, because of the inexorable, materialist laws of history. It will happen, and only happen, because we want it to, and because we know what we’re doing and know how we want to live, and know what obstacles have to be overcome before we can live that way, and know how to distinguish between our social patterns and theirs. But we must not think that the capitalist world can simply be ignored, in a live and let live attitude, while we try to build new lives elsewhere. (There is no elsewhere.) There is at least one thing, wage-slavery, that we can’t simply stop participating in (but even here there are ways we can chip away at it). Capitalism must be explicitly refused and replaced by something else. This constitutes War, but it is not a war in the traditional sense of armies and tanks, but a war fought on a daily basis, on the level of everyday life, by millions of people. It is a war nevertheless because the accumulators of capital will use coercion, brutality, and murder, as they have always done in the past, to try to block any rejection of the system. They have always had to force compliance; they will not hesitate to continue doing so. Nevertheless, there are many concrete ways that individuals, groups, and neighborhoods can gut capitalism, which I will enumerate shortly. We must always keep in mind how we became slaves of capitalism; then we can see more clearly how we can cease being slaves. We were forced into wage-slavery because the ruling class slowly, systematically, and brutally destroyed our ability to live autonomously. By driving us off the land, changing the property laws destroying community rights, destroying our tools, imposing taxes, destroying our local markets, and so forth, we were forced onto the labor market in order to survive, our only remaining option being to sell, for a wage, our ability to work. It�s quite clear then how we can overthrow slavery. We must reverse by this process by. We must beginning toreacquire the ability to live without working for a wage or buying the products made by wage-slaves (that is, we must get free from the labor market and the way of living based on it), and embed ourselves instead in cooperative labor and cooperatively produced goods. 40 - 41 -My analysis of history is an important tool to create a counter-history that destabilizes White Supremacy. 42 -Yancy 43 - 44 -A genealogical examination of whiteness, following the lead of Foucault and Nietzsche, involves showing how whiteness is not a natural given, or has to do with an ontology that cuts at the joints of nature, but a kind of historical emergence (Entstehung). Upon examination, whiteness, contrary to its historical performance as a natural occurring kind, emerges as a value code deployed by a certain raciated (white) group of people that delimits and structures what it deems intelligible, valuable, normal, abnormal, superior, inferior, beautiful, ugly, and so on. As the presumed sovereign voice, treating itself as hypernormative and unmarked, whiteness conceals its status as raciated, located, and positioned. Because of its presumed ahistorical stability and ontological “givenness,” whiteness is an appropriate target for genealogical examination. Commenting on the value, aim, and practical consequences of genealogy, Alexander Nehamas, with Nietzsche in mind, writes: Genealogy takes as its objects precisely those institutions and practices which, like morality, are usually thought to be totally exempt from change and development. It tries to show how such changes escape our notice and how it is often in the interest of these practices to mask their specific historical origins and character. As a result of this, genealogy has direct practical consequences because, by demonstrating the contingent character of the institutions that traditional history exhibits as unchanging, it creates the possibility of altering them. Nehamas’s point concerning how certain practices attempt to mask themselves is key to understanding whiteness; for the hegemony of whiteness is partly contingent upon its capacity to conceal or mask its own historicity, thus representing itself as universal, decontextual, and ahistorical. With equal insight, Fred Evans writes: The values and practices that genealogists evaluate present themselves as “universal” or as “true” in an unqualified sense. By revealing the value creating power that these values and practices serve and disseminate, however, genealogists show their “grounds” or basis—how it was possible for them to appear universal or true without qualification—and their limits, that is, their necessary partiality. In carrying out this critique, moreover, genealogy itself is a value-creating power, one opposed to the “life-denying” and hegemonic tendencies of practices that the genealogy attempts to critically evaluate and overcome. 45 -Extra Shit 46 -Topical AC on case Turns 47 -1. Limiting qualified immunity just means that more cases will go to trial. When cases go to trial, juries are still more sympathetic towards police officers. 48 - Brown11, 49 -“‘Everybody knows policing is violent, and jurors don't want to second guess those decisions,’ says Philip Stinson, a researcher at Bowling Green State University in Ohio and former police officer. 50 -Juries - both grand juries and trial juries - tend to ‘give every possible benefit of the doubt’ when it comes to police officers who have killed while on-duty, Dr Stinson says. But the secrecy of the grand jury proceedings make it hard to know why that was. He adds this tendency to not charge does not exist as strongly for police officers investigated for non-violent crimes, including corruption cases. Comprehensive nationwide numbers of how many police officers kill individuals while on duty do not exist.” 51 -And, since this tendency is stronger for violent crimes, which is when culpability is most important, it means that it really doesn’t matter whether these cases go to trial. 52 - 53 -2. Even though more cases with fatal police shootings have gone to court, the number of convictions hasn’t increased significantly. 54 -Elinson12, 55 -“More U.S. police officers have been charged with crimes for deadly on-duty shootings in 2015 than in any year going back a decade. But not a single officer has been convicted of murder or manslaughter this year. Experts say bringing such cases remains challenging for prosecutors, with judges and juries loath to second-guess decisions made by police in the line of duty. 56 -Those challenges have been on display this week in this city about 30 miles southeast of Austin, where prosecutors have been arguing that a white former Bastrop County sheriff’s deputy should be convicted of first-degree murder in the 2014 shooting of a black woman they say was unarmed. 57 -‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a typical murder case: It’s not about malice, it’s not about hatred, it’s not about premeditation,’ Forrest Sanderson, a special prosecutor assigned to handle the case, told the jurors. ‘It’s about what you feel is reasonable conduct for a peace officer.’ 58 -The former deputy, Daniel Willis, is accused of murdering 47-year-old Yvette Smith on Feb. 16, 2014. Deputies had been dispatched because of a fight between two men at a residence. Mr. Willis shot Ms. Smith with an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle seconds after she stepped out onto the home’s porch. 59 -Robert McCabe, Mr. Willis’s lawyer, said he was protecting himself and others, because he believed Ms. Smith was armed. ‘Deputy Willis had a reasonable belief that deadly force was necessary,’ he said.” 60 -When these cases go to trial, it is statistically unlikely for a seemingly guilty officer to be convicted because of juries’ reactions to these cases, nullifying aff solvency 61 - 62 -State Links 63 -The state is controlled by the capitalist elite; the aff isn’t really a solution to suffering, just a means for them to control the masses, 64 -Nadesan ’11 65 -Efforts to reign in and regulate the excesses of transactional capitalism will fail in the absence of widespread popular resistance. Established governance institutions reflect the interests of elites who profit from speculative capitalism. For instance, in June 2010 the United Nations (U.N.) cautioned “against onerous restrictions on speculative investors in commodities markets” (Hotter and Raff, 2010, p. C2) despite conclusive evidence that speculation in food commodities in 2007 and 2008 massively increased global hunger (Kaufman, 2010).10 Thus, the U.N. followed the rhetorical lead of the “chorus of authorities challenging the popular belief that financial investors were the primary culprits in the run-up in commodities prices that culminated in the middle of 2008” (Hotter and Raff, 2010, p. C2; my italics). Those that benefit from speculative capitalism will use political appointments and pressure to bend policy and popular rhetoric to justify the decisions of agencies enthralled by regulatory capture, or “control fraud” (Black, 2010).” 66 -The state exists to perpetuate capitalist exploitation; the aff’s use of legal measures will always be skewed in favor of the rich, Organise: 67 -Consider the following facts: 1. Capitalist society is class society. Despite the claims made by the most powerful people in our society—who, we might add, have vested interests in doing so—the unity of the nation-state is an illusory one, because capitalist society is divided into economic classes. On the one hand we have those who own and control social resources, and who enjoy the economic and social privileges that accompanies such ownership and control, and on the other those who lack such ownership and control and are obliged by the circumstances of their birth to sell their labour for a wage, which is generally most of us. 2. Exploitation is inherent to class society. The foundation of meaningful freedom is economic independence, and economic independence on a social level derives from the ability of each of us to control the fruits of our labour. This is a basic human right. In capitalist society the propertied classes own and control the tools of production, the places where we work and the things we work with, which means that those of us who don't own and control the tools of production are forced to work for those who do. Needless to say, this situation deprives us of our economic independence and forces us into a position of submission and subservience. But it gets worse. The capitalist class generates profits from the wage system by paying workers less in wages than the value of the product of our labour, which they take for themselves. This is exploitation, period, and any sort of exploitation is inconceivable in a free society, because as long as one person can be exploited none of us are free. The only difference between chattel slaves and wage workers is that the former were owned, whereas the latter are rented. Seen in the cold hard light of day, wage labour is really wage-slavery. Suffice it to say that the economic and social privileges that the propertied classes enjoy in our society depends for their existence on the denial of elementary human rights to the vast majority of society. 3. The exploitation inherent to capitalist society is protected by the state. The denial of the basic human right of economic independence to the working class is protected by the institutionalied violence of the state, by the police, military and judiciary. The primary function of the state is to protect and defend the social and economic privileges of the propertied classes. It is an institution of class domination which lords over the whole of society and imposes economic dependence and servitude on the great mass of humanity in the service of an opulent minority. (Some will argue in the defense of the state that it 1) maintains order and 2) protects us from violent crime. To this we pose the counter-arguments as follows: 1) what sort of order and in whose interests, and 2) that being 'protected' against 'crime' by the state is like being 'protected' against 'crime' by the mafia, and that as the state bequeaths its 'protection' to the working classes, facilitating the theft of the wealth it produces, so too does it perpetuate crime in the name of stopping it. Since the system of deterrence has failed to stop violent crime, we suggest alternative strategies such as addressing the causes). 4. The primary function of the state as a defender of privilege and injustice is reflected in capitalist law. The character of the state as an institution of class domination and the nature of its basic function (to protect the privileges of the propertied classes from the rest of us) forms the basis of capitalist law. The golden rule is that those with the gold make the rules. The basic fraud behind the doctrine of equality before the law, the foundation for capitalist democracy, derives then from the fact that the laws are made by and for the rich. The fact then that, in applying the same law to all, capitalist law has overcome the arbitrariness of kingly despotism is ultimately irrelevant for those of us in a state of economic servitude, since the law itself is unjust; being grounded as it is in the protection of elite privilege and the perpetuation of the master-slave relationship at the core of the wage system, it perpetuates the arbitrary rule—the despotism—of a 68 -Extinction Impact incase Weird Util Shit Happens 69 -Capitalist practices result in biodiversity loss, which leads to extinction. 70 -Smith 13 71 -Capitalism is, overwhelmingly, the main driver of planetary ecological collapse From climate change to natural resource overconsumption to pollution, the engine that has powered three centuries of accelerating economic development, revolutionizing technology, science, culture and human life itself is, today, a roaring out-of-control locomotive mowing down continents of forests, sweeping oceans of life, clawing out mountains of minerals, pumping out lakes of fuels, devouring the planet’s last accessible natural resources to turn them into “product,” while destroying fragile global ecologies built up over eons of time. Between 1950 and 2000 the global human population more than doubled from 2.5 to 6 billion. But in these same decades, consumption of major natural resources soared more than sixfold on average, some much more. Natural gas consumption grew nearly twelvefold, bauxite (aluminum ore) fifteenfold. And so on. At current rates, Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson says that “half the world’s great forests have already been leveled and half the world’s plant and animal species may be gone by the end of this century.” Corporations aren’t necessarily evil, though plenty are diabolically evil, but they can’t help themselves. They’re just doing what they’re supposed to do for the benefit of their shareholders. Shell Oil can’t help but loot Nigeria and the Arctic and cook the climate. That’s what shareholders demand. BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and other mining giants can’t resist mining Australia’s abundant coal and exporting it to China and India. Mining accounts for 19 of Australia’s GDP and substantial employment even as coal combustion is the single worst driver of global warming. IKEA can’t help but level the forests of Siberia and Malaysia to feed the Chinese mills building their flimsy disposable furniture (IKEA is the third largest consumer of lumber in the world). Apple can’t help it if the cost of extracting the “rare earths” it needs to make millions of new iThings each year is the destruction of the eastern Congo — violence, rape, slavery, forced induction of child soldiers, along with poisoning local waterways. Monsanto and DuPont and Syngenta and Bayer Crop Science have no choice but to wipe out bees, butterflies, birds, small farmers and extinguish crop diversity to secure their grip on the world’s food supply while drenching the planet in their Roundups and Atrazines and neonicotinoids. This is how giant corporations are wiping out life on earth in the course of a routine business day. And the bigger the corporations grow, the worse the problems become. In Adam Smith’s day, when the first factories and mills produced hat pins and iron tools and rolls of cloth by the thousands, capitalist freedom to make whatever they wanted didn’t much matter because they didn’t have much impact on the global environment. But today, when everything is produced in the millions and billions, then trashed today and reproduced all over again tomorrow, when the planet is looted and polluted to support all this frantic and senseless growth, it matters — a lot. The world’s climate scientists tell us we’re facing a planetary emergency. They’ve been telling us since the 1990s that if we don’t cut global fossil fuel greenhouse gas emissions by 80-90 below 1990 levels by 2050 we will cross critical tipping points and global warming will accelerate beyond any human power to contain it. Yet despite all the ringing alarm bells, no corporation and no government can oppose growth and, instead, every capitalist government in the world is putting pedal to the metal to accelerate growth, to drive us full throttle off the cliff to collapse. Marxists have never had a better argument against capitalism than this inescapable and apocalyptic “contradiction.” Solutions to the ecological crisis are blindingly obvious but we can’t take the necessary steps to prevent ecological collapse because, so long as we live under capitalism, economic growth has to take priority over ecological concerns. We all know what we have to do: 72 - 73 -Biodiversity loss results in extinction. 74 -Nair 2012 75 -Sruthi Nair May 22, 2012 http://dailynexus.com/2012-05-22/decline-biodiversity-lead-mass-extinction/ 76 -Researchers integrated data from over 200 published studies to trace the effects that different rates of species loss have on various ecosystems. The team of scientists from the United States, Canada and Sweden, headed by Western Washington University biology professor David Hooper, concluded that decreased levels of biodiversity are far more detrimental to ecological progress than previously believed. According to NCEAS Postdoctoral Fellow Jarrett Byrnes, research shows that with the current level of biodiversity loss, Earth faces a potential mass extinction in about 240 years. Byrnes said part of the problem stems from constant environmental alteration as a result of pollution and habitat destruction. 34 +Debate should first and foremost be viewed as a performance. Every action taken, every word said, and every speech given reflects a performance of the body. Yet in an age where debate is about how many arguments a student can get on the flow, white students’ performances are consistently allowed to be detached from their bodies, performance by the body, while students of color must always embody their discourse. As a result universal theories are allowed to be viewed as detached from any meaning outside of being just an argument. My argument is three-fold. First, debaters have adopted a “universal principle,” which has allowed them to be detached from the practical implications of what they said. Second, is that we must re-conceptualize the role of speech and the speech act to account for the in round performances of the body. The final part is that judges must begin to view their roles as educators and must be accountable for the discourse they endorse with their ballot. In his chapter on “Non Cartesian Sums,” in Blackness Visible, Charles Mills argues that “white experience is embedded as normative, and the embedding is so deep that its normativity is not even identified as such.” Historically, universal theories never intended to include black bodies into the cannon. Mills argues that in philosophy: “A reconceptualization is necessary because the structuring logic is different. The peculiar features of the African American experience—racial slavery, which linked biological phenotype to social subordination, and which is chronologically located in the modern epoch, ironically coincident with the emergence of liberalism’s proclamation of universal human equality—are not part of the experience represented in the abstractions of European and Euro-American philosophers.” We generate universal theories and assume they can be applied to anyone. These abstractions assume a conception of universality that never intended to account for the African American experience. This drowns out the perspectives of students of color that are historically excluded from the conversation. Normativity becomes a privilege that historically students of color do not get to access because of the way we discuss things. These same philosophical texts have served as a cornerstone in Lincoln Douglas and in turn have been used to justify exclusion. That is why it is easy for a white student to make claims that we do not know whether racism is bad, or even question whether oppression is bad, since after all it is just another argument on the flow. They never have to deal with the practical implications of their discourse. These become manifestations of privilege in the debate space because for many students of color, who have to go back to their communities, they still have to deal with the daily acts of racism and violence inflicted upon their homes, communities, and culture. 35 + 36 +This justifies a rejection of normative thought that attempts to pose a universal maxim onto a debate space, as it would only function to exclude those voices that have been restricted from accessing the same form of discourse - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,69 +1,46 @@ 1 -Qualified immunity allows for the continuation of government self checking, which fuels legalized oppression and creates an illusion of change. 2 -Bernick’15 3 -(Bernick, Evan is Evan Bernick is the Assistant Director of the Center for Judicial Engagement at the Institute for Justice, the national law firm for liberty. “To Hold Police Accountable Don’t Give them Immunity.” Foundation for Economic Education. https://fee.org/articles/to-hold-police-accountable-dont-give-them-immunity/ . 2015) 4 -In the wake of the tragic deaths of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Eric Harris, Freddie Gray, and others at the hands of police officers, it’s a question that many Americans are asking themselves. It’s a question that the Institute for Justice is familiar with. In 2005, we litigated the case of Kelo v. City of New London, which dealt with the question of whether a private developer, exercising the government’s power of eminent domain, could bulldoze an entire working-class neighborhood for so-called “economic development.” The Supreme Court said yes. And Americans were outraged — how could that happen in this country? Susette Kelo, who lost her home, might not seem to have much in common with Freddie Gray, who lost his life. But both were victims of unchecked government power. For decades, we have had rights without remedies. The sad fact is that it is often effectively impossible to hold police officers accountable for unconstitutional acts. That fact is attributable in large part to a potent well of unchecked power that many Americans have never heard of. You will not find it in the Constitution. You will not find it in any federal law. It is a judge-made doctrine, invented by the Supreme Court. It is called qualified immunity. Section 1983, the federal law that allows citizens to sue for constitutional violations, is broad, unequivocal, and unambiguous. It says that “every person” who is acting “under color of” law who causes a “deprivation of any rights… secured by the Constitution and laws” “shall be liable to the party injured.” Section 1983 embodies a foundational principle of justice that resonates with Americans who have never heard of Marbury v. Madison: where there is a right, there is a remedy. But for decades, we have had rights without remedies. In the 1967 case of Pierson v. Ray, the Supreme Court held that police officers sued for constitutional violations can raise “qualified immunity” as a defense, and thereby escape paying out of their own pockets, even if they violated a person’s constitutional rights. This decision was unabashedly policy-oriented: it was thought that government officials would not vigorously fulfill their obligations if they could be held accountable for actions taken in good faith. Under current law, the general rule is that victims of rights violations pay the costs of their own injuries. In practice, qualified immunity provides a near-absolute defense to all but the most outrageous conduct. The Ninth Circuit has held that throwing a flash-bang grenade “blindly” into a house, injuring a toddler, isn’t outrageous enough. Just last year, in Plumhoff v. Rickard, the Supreme Court decided and firing 15 bullets at a motorist is a reasonable method to end the driver’s flight from the police. So much for “every person” “shall be liable.” Qualified immunity shields police misconduct not only from liability but also from meaningful judicial scrutiny. Private lawsuits are an essential tool in uncovering the truth about police misconduct. The discovery process can yield information that makes broader policy changes within police departments possible. At trial, judicial engagement — an impartial, evidence-based determination of the constitutionality of the officer’s actions — can take place. Qualified immunity can cut this search for truth short. If qualified immunity is raised as a defense before trial and the judge denies it, that decision is immediately appealable. If it is granted, discovery stops, and there is no trial on the merits. 1 +Wilderson The 1AC attempts to use the institution of the state to assist disadvantaged /African American groups. Their focus on empirical conditions obscures the reality that civil society is fundamentally incompatible with the ontology of the black body. 2 +Wilderson, Frank, B; "Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics, Red, White, and Black, Structure of U.S. Antagonisms" (2003) Award winning author of Incognero, Print, pg. 15-16 3 +Regarding the Black position, some might ask why, after claims successfully made on the state by the Civil Rights Movement, do I insist on positing an operational analytic for cinema, film studies, and political theory that appears to be a dichotomous and essentialist pairing of Masters and Slaves? In other words, why should we think of today’s Blacks in the United States as Slaves and everyone else (with the exception of Indians) as Masters? One could answer these questions by demonstrating how nothing remotely approaching claims successfully made on the state has come to pass. In other words, the election of a Black president aside, police brutality, mass incarceration, segregated and substandard schools and housing, astronomical rates of HIV infection, and the threat of being turned away en masse at the polls still constitute the lived experience of Black life. But such empirically based rejoinders would lead us in the wrong direction; we would find ourselves on “solid” ground, which would only mystify, rather than clarify, the question. “We would be forced to appeal to “facts,” the “historical record,” and empirical markers of stasis and change, all of which could be turned on their head with more of the same. Underlying such a downward spiral into sociology, political science, history, and public policy debates would be the very rubric that I am calling into question: the grammar of suffering known as exploitation and alienation, the assumptive logic whereby subjective dispossession is arrived at in the calculations between those who sell labor power and those who acquire it. The Black qua the worker. Orlando Patterson has already dispelled this faulty ontological grammar in Slavery and Social Death, where he demonstrates how and why work, or forced labor, is ”a constituent element of slavery. Once the “solid” plank of “work” is removed from slavery, then the conceptually coherent notion of “claims against the state”—the proposition that the state and civil society are elastic enough to even contemplate the possibility of an emancipatory project for the Black position—disintegrates into thin air. The imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic on the Middle Passage. Put another way, No slave, no world. And, in addition, as Patterson argues, no slave is in the world. If, as an ontological position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is not a laborer but an anti-Human, a position against which Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence, its corporeal integrity; if the Slave is, to borrow from Patterson, generally dishonored, perpetually open to gratuitous violence, and void of kinship structure, that is, having no relations that need be recognized, a being outside of relationality, then our analysis cannot be approached through the rubric of gains or reversals in struggles with the state and civil society, not unless and until the interlocutor first explains how the Slave is of the world. “ The onus is not on one who posits the Master/Slave dichotomy but on the one who argues there is a distinction between Slaveness and Blackness. How, when, and where did such a split occur? The woman at the gates of Columbia University awaits an answer. 4 +Link: Junior Partners 5 +Wilderson The 1AC’s focus on using the institution of the state satiate the demands of civil society’s junior partners perpetuates the notion that civil society can be inclusive to marginalized groups while ignoring the fact that blacks can never be included within that structure. This obscures the fact that civil society is fundamentally irreconcilable with the black body. 6 +Wilderson, Frank B., ‘The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal’, Social Justice, 30 (2003), 18–27 7 +Here is something organic to black positionality that makes it essential to the destruction of civil society. There is nothing willful or speculative in this statement, for one could just as well state the claim the other way around: There is something organic to civil society that makes it essential to the destruction of the Black body. Blackness is a positionality of “absolute dereliction” (Fanon), abandonment, in the face of civil society, and therefore cannot establish itself, or be established, through hegemonic interventions. Blackness cannot become one of civil society’s many junior partners: Black citizenship, or Black civic obligation, are oxymorons. In light of this, coalitions and social movements, even radical social movements like the Prison Abolition Movement, bound up in the solicitation of hegemony, so as to fortify and extend the interlocutory life of civil society, uItimately accommodate only the satiable demands and finite antagonisms of civil society’s junior partners (i.e., immigrants, white women, and the working class), but foreclose upon the insatiable demands and endless antagonisms of the prison slave and the prison-slave-in-waiting. In short, whereas such coalitions and social movements cannot be called the outright handmaidens of white supremacy, their rhetorical structures and political desire are underwritten by a supplemental anti- Blackness. 5 5 6 -The system of self regulation halts any real change from occuring and covers up violations in rights for the convienience of those in power. The main problem is that there is no way for the public to check the police themselves. 7 -Madar 1 8 -(Madar, Chase is a civil rights attorney in New York and the author of The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story behind the Wikileaks Whistleblower. “Why it’s Impossible to Indict a Cop.” The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/why-its-impossible-indict-cop/ . 2014) 9 9 10 -The lethal use of police force typically sets off an internal police investigation to determine if departmental regulations were violated. The regs and the law are not the same thing. Case in point: the chokehold that NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo used to strangle Eric Garner, suspected of selling loose cigarettes, on Staten Island last July. (The grand jury bill on that case has still not been decided.) The chokehold is not prohibited by law, but it is by departmental rules. The violation might earn a departmental censure of some kind, from like a loss of vacation days to getting fired, but they tend to be radically mild, when not nonexistent. What about internal affairs investigations? On television they are aggressive, dogged, uncompromising. In real life they tend to insulate the police from serious external sanction. “I stopped cooperating with the IABInternal Affiars Bureau ten years ago,” says Jason Leventhal, a former assistant district attorney in Richmond County, Staten Island who now works as a civil rights litigator, often suing the police. “IA will never, ever credit the claim of police abuse. They hide witnesses, they push witnesses around. The only time I cooperate with them is when I know I have their hands tied behind their back.” Are there any effective civilian oversight systems at any major police department in the US? Nobody I interviewed for this article could name one. New York’s Civilian Complaint Review Board occasionally docks vacation days from police officers but the board has no real teeth. Even staffers at the New York Civil Liberties Union have candidly told me that the board more or less worthless. “I don’t have any faith in the CCRB or the Internal Affairs Bureau or any other internal mechanism,” says Ron Kuby, a civil rights and criminal defense lawyer in New York. Civilian complaints rarely even get in the way of an individual officer’s career. In New York, CCRB complaints don’t even go in a police officer’s file, says Kuby. “The PBA just says that the more aggressive officers will get excessive force complaints.” Firing a police officer with a record of abusive behavior (or worse) is often extremely difficult and can carry a heavy political cost. Patrolmen Benevolent Associations, which have escaped the kind of resentment directed at other public-sector unions, tend to be powerful players in local politics able to inflict pain on any politico who would cross them. (Remember when Sarah Palin struggled to fire a state trooper and ex-brother-in-law who had allegedly acted like a thug towards her sister?) The reality is, it is extremely difficult to get law enforcement to police itself, and self-regulation is here, just as it is in poultry processing or coal mining, a sick joke. 10 +Impact 11 +Wilderson 2 The impact is ontological death. The structural violence against the black body is not contingent, but gratuitous, irrational, and incoherent. The black body is labeled as a scandal, reduced to mere flesh just so that whiteness can continue to sustain itself. 12 +Wilderson, Frank B., ‘The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal’, Social Justice, 30 (2003), 18–27 13 +Fanon (1968: 37) writes, “decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder.” If we take him at his word, then we must accept that no other body functions in the Imaginary, the Symbolic, or the Real so completely as a repository of complete disorder as the Black body. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Real, for in its magnetizing of bullets the Black body functions as the map of gratuitous violence through which civil society is possible: namely, those bodies for which violence is, or can be, contingent. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Symbolic, for Blackness in America generates no categories for the chromosome of history, and no data for the categories of immigration or sovereignty. It is an experience without analog — a past without a heritage. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Imaginary, for “whoever says ‘rape’ says Black” (Fanon), whoever says “prison” says Black, and whoever says “AIDS” says Black (Sexton) — the “Negro is a phobogenic object” (Fanon). Indeed, it means all those things: the aphobogenic object, a past without a heritage, the map of gratuitous violence, and a program of complete disorder. Whereas this realization is, and should be, cause for alarm, it should not be cause for lament, or worse, disavowal — not at least, for a true revolutionary, or for a truly revolutionary movement such as prison abolition. If a social movement is to be neither social democratic nor Marxist, in terms of structure of political desire, then it should grasp the invitation to assume the positionality of subjects of social death. If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must admit that the “Negro” has been inviting whites, as well as civil society’s junior partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They have been, and remain today — even in the most anti-racist movements, like the prison abolition movement — invested elsewhere. This is not to say that all oppositional political desire today is pro-white, but it is usually anti-Black, meaning it will not dance with death. Black liberation, as a prospect, makes radicalism more dangerous to the U.S. This is not because it raises the specter of an alternative polity (such as socialism, or community control of existing resources), but because its condition of possibility and gesture of resistance function as a negative dialectic: a politics of refusal and a refusal to affirm, a “program of complete disorder.” One must embrace its disorder, its incoherence, and allow oneself to be elaborated by it, if indeed one’s politics are to be underwritten by a desire to take down this country. If 14 +Alternative 15 +Wilderson 5 The alternative is the unflinching refusal to succumb to the demands of civil society – the world must go. 16 +Wilderson, Frank, B; "Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics, Red, White, and Black, Structure of U.S. Antagonisms" (2003) Award winning author of Incognero, Print, pg. 15-16 17 +The woman at Columbia was not demanding to be a participant in an unethical network of distribution: she was not demanding a place within capital, a piece of the pie (the demand for her sofa notwithstanding). Rather, she was articulating a triangulation between two things. On the one hand was the loss of her body, the very dereliction of her corporeal integrity, what Hortense Spillers charts as the transition from being a being to becoming a “being for the captor,” the drama of value (the stage on which surplus value is extracted from labor power through commodity production and sale). On the other was the corporeal integrity that, once ripped from her body, fortified and extended the corporeal integrity of everyone else on the street. She gave birth to the commodity and to the Human, yet she had neither subjectivity nor a sofa to show for it. In her eyes, the world—not its myriad discriminatory practices, but the world itself—was unethical. And yet, the world passes by her without the slightest inclination to stop and disabuse her of her claim. Instead, it calls her “crazy.” And to what does the world attribute the Native American man’s insanity? “He’s crazy if he thinks he’s getting any money out of us”? Surely, that doesn’t make him crazy. Rather it is simply an indication that he does not have a big enough gun. What are we to make of a world that responds to the most lucid enunciation of ethics with violence? What are the foundational questions of the ethico-political? Why are these questions so scandalous that they are rarely posed politically, intellectually, and cinematically—unless they are posed obliquely and unconsciously, as if by accident? Give Turtle Island back to the “Savage.” Give life itself back to the Slave. Two simple sentences, fourteen simple words, and the structure of U.S. (and perhaps global) antagonisms would be dismantled. An “ethical modernity” would no longer sound like an oxymoron. From there we could busy ourselves with important conflicts that have been promoted to the level of antagonisms, such as class struggle, gender conflict, and immigrants’ rights. One cannot but wonder why questions that go to the heart of the ethico-political, questions of political ontology, are so unspeakable in intellectual meditations, political broadsides, and even socially and politically engaged feature films. Clearly they can be spoken, even a child could speak those lines, so they would pose no problem for a scholar, an activist, or a filmmaker. And yet, what is also clear—if the filmographies of socially and politically engaged directors, the archive of progressive scholars, and the plethora of left-wing broadsides are anything to go by—is that what can so easily be spoken is now (500 years and 250 million Settlers/Masters on) so ubiquitously unspoken that these two simple sentences, these fourteen words not only render their speaker “crazy” but become themselves impossible to imagine. Soon it will be forty years since radical politics, left-leaning scholarship, and socially engaged feature films began to speak the unspeakable. In the 1960s and early 1970s the questions asked by radical politics and scholarship were not Should the United States be overthrown? or even Would it be overthrown? but when and how—and, for some, what would come in its wake. 11 11 12 -Next, standards for qualified immunity are based on oppressive statues that are getting worse for police action determined by those in positions of power. Standards of objective reasonableness originates from the indictment of a police officer in an unarmed shooting of a 15 year old, unarmed, black kid. 13 -Madar 2 14 -(Madar, Chase is a civil rights attorney in New York and the author of The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story behind the Wikileaks Whistleblower. “Why it’s Impossible to Indict a Cop.” The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/why-its-impossible-indict-cop/ . 2014) 19 +Role of the Ballot 20 +Yancy 05 The role of the judge is to vote for the debater who better offers the best liberation strategy for black bodies. Traditional ethics fail to recognize the problem of anti-Blackness, as it roots in a philosophy that originates in a view from nowhere. The lack of embodied experience in discussions of ethics and philosophy allows the white body to assume the status of normativity by bracketing all others into their universal ethics. 21 +Yancy 05 22 +I write out of a personal existential context. This context is a profound source of knowledge connected to my "raced" body. Hence, I write from a place of lived embodied experience, a site of exposure. In philosophy, the only thing that we are taught to "expose" is a weak argument, a fallacy, or someone's "inferior" reasoning power. The embodied self is bracketed and deemed irrelevant to theory, superfluous and cumbersome in one's search for truth. It is best, or so we are told, to reason from nowhere. Hence, the white philosopher/author presumes to speak for all of "us" without the slightest mention of his or her "raced" identity. Self-consciously writing as a white male philosopher, Crispin Sartwell observes: Left to my own devices, I disappear as an author. That is the "whiteness" of my authorship. This whiteness of authorship is, for us, a form of authority; to speak (apparently) from nowhere, for everyone, is empowering, though one wields power here only by becoming lost to oneself. But such an authorship and authority is also pleasurable: it yields the pleasure of self-forgetting or End Page 215 apparent transcendence of the mundane and the particular, and the pleasure of power expressed in the "comprehension" of a range of materials. (1998, 6) To theorize the Black body one must "turn to the body as the radix for interpreting racial experience" (Johnson 1993, 600).1 It is important to note that this particular strategy also functions as a lens through which to theorize and critique whiteness; for the Black body's "racial" experience is fundamentally linked to the oppressive modalities of the "raced" white body. However, there is no denying that my own "racial" experiences or the social performances of whiteness can become objects of critical reflection. In this paper, my objective is to describe and theorize situations where the Black body's subjectivity, its lived reality, is reduced to instantiations of the white imaginary, resulting in what I refer to as "the phenomenological return of the Black body."2 These instantiations are embedded within and evolve out of the complex social and historical interstices of whites' efforts at self-construction through complex acts of erasure vis-à-vis Black people. These acts of self-construction, however, are myths/ideological constructions predicated upon maintaining white power. As James Snead has noted, "Mythification is the replacement of history with a surrogate ideology of white elevation or Black demotion along a scale of human value" (Snead 1994, 4). How I understand and theorize the body relates to the fact that the body—in this case, the Black body—is capable of undergoing a sociohistorical process of "phenomenological return" vis-à-vis white embodiment. The body's meaning—whether phenotypically white or black—its ontology, its modalities of aesthetic performance, its comportment, its "raciated" reproduction, is in constant contestation. The hermeneutics of the body, how it is understood, how it is "seen," its "truth," is partly the result of a profound historical, ideological construction. "The body" is positioned by historical practices and discourses. The body is codified as this or that in terms of meanings that are sanctioned, scripted, and constituted through processes of negotiation that are embedded within and serve various ideological interests that are grounded within further power-laden social processes. The historical plasticity of the body, the fact that it is a site of contested meanings, speaks to the historicity of its "being" as lived and meant within the interstices of social semiotics. Hence: a) the body is less of a thing/being than a shifting/changing historical meaning that is subject to cultural configuration/reconfiguration. The point here is to interrogate the "Black body" as a "fixed and material truth" that preexists "its relations with the world and with others"3 ; b) the body's meaning is fundamentally symbolic (McDowell 2001, 301), and its meaning is congealed through symbolic repetition and iteration that emits certain signs and presupposes certain norms; and, c) the body is a battlefield, one that is fought over again and again across particular historical moments and within particular social spaces. "In other words, the concept of the body provides only the illusion of self-evidence, facticity, 'thereness' for something End Page 216 fundamentally ephemeral, imaginary, something made in the image of particular social groups" (301). On this score, it is not only the "Black body" that defies the ontic fixity projected upon it through the white gaze, and, hence, through the episteme of whiteness, but the white body is also fundamentally symbolic, requiring demystification of its status as norm, the paragon of beauty, order, innocence, purity, restraint, and nobility. 15 15 16 -Chapter 563 of the Missouri Revised Statutes grants a lot of discretion to officers of the law to wield deadly force, to the horror of many observers swooping in to the Ferguson story. The statute authorizes deadly force “in effecting an arrest or in preventing an escape from custody” if the officer “reasonably believes” it is necessary in order to “to effect the arrest and also reasonably believes that the person to be arrested has committed or attempted to commit a felony…or may otherwise endanger life or inflict serious physical injury unless arrested without delay.” But this law is not an outlier, and is fully in sync with Supreme Court jurisprudence. The legal standard authorizing deadly force is something called “objective reasonableness.” This standard originates in the 1985 case of Tennessee v. Garner, which appeared at first to tighten restrictions on the police use of deadly force. The case involved a Memphis cop, Elton Hymon, who shot dead one Edward Garner: 15 years old, black and unarmed. Garner had just burgled a house, grabbing a ring and ten bucks. The US Supreme Court ruled that a police officer, henceforth, could use deadly force only if he “has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.” The ruling required that the use of force be “objectively reasonable.” How this reasonableness should be determined was established in a 1989 case, Graham v. Connor: severity of the crime, whether the suspect is resisting or trying to escape and above all, whether the suspect posed an immediate threat to the safety of officers or others. All this appeared to restrict police violence—even if, in the end, Officer Hymon was never criminally charged for fatally shooting Edward Garner. “Objectively reasonable”—what could be wrong with that? But in actual courtroom practice, “objective reasonableness” has become nearly impossible to tell apart from the subjective snap judgments of panic-fueled police officers. American courts universally defer to the law enforcement officer’s own personal assessment of the threat at the time. 24 +On Case 25 +Bans on nuclear energy empirically leads to a heavier reliance on coal to meet power needs. 17 17 18 -These low standards for “objective” reasonableness only serve to reafy and justify police brutality against the black body. 19 -Madar 3 20 -(Madar, Chase is a civil rights attorney in New York and the author of The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story behind the Wikileaks Whistleblower. “Why it’s Impossible to Indict a Cop.” The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/why-its-impossible-indict-cop/ . 2014) 27 +Follett 16 http://dailycaller.com/2016/06/13/the-end-of-nuclear-power-in-japan-is-bringing-back-coal/ 28 +An analysis published Monday by Bloomberg states that coal power will become the largest source of electricity in Japan due to an effective ban on nuclear power. Nuclear power provided 29 percent of Japan’s total power output before 2011, but will decline to 13.6 percent by 2023 and 1.2 percent by 2040, according to the report. Japan got 24 percent of its electricity from coal in 2010 and the country plans to get more than a third of its power from coal by 2040. Japan previously shut down all of its nuclear reactors in the aftermath of the 2011 magnitude 9.0 earthquake, which triggered the Fukushima disaster. The country has since transitioned away from nuclear power. Prior to the disaster, Japan operated 54 nuclear power plants and the government planned to build enough reactors to provide 50 percent of the country’s electricity power. After the disaster, Japan pledged to effectively abandon nuclear power by the 2030s, replacing it mostly with wind or solar power, causing the price of electricity to rise by 20 percent. The transition to green energy hasn’t gone well and the country likely won’t meet its goals, according to the report. Japan remains a top importer of oil, coal and natural gas and the government estimated that importing fuel costs the country more than $40 billion annually. Japan’s current government sees a revival of nuclear power as critical to supporting economic growth and slowing an exodus of Japanese manufacturing to lower-cost countries, but has faced incredible pushback. 21 21 22 -The Graham analysis essentially prohibits any second-guessing of the officer’s decision to use deadly force: no hindsight is permitted, and wide latitude is granted to the officer’s account of the situation, even if scientific evidence proves it to be mistaken. Such was the case of Berkeley, In Missouri, police officers Robert Piekutowski and Keith Kierzkowski, who in 2000 fatally shot two unarmed, black men, Earl Murray and Ronald Beasley out of fear that the victims’ car was rolling towards them. Forensic investigations established that the car had not in fact lurched towards the officers at the time of the shooting—but this was still not enough for the St. Louis County grand jury to indict the two cops of anything. Not surprisingly then, legal experts find that “there is built-in leeway for police, and the very breadth of this leeway is why criminal charges against police are so rare,” says Walter Katz, a police oversight lawyer who served on the Los Angeles County Office of Independent Review until it disbanded in July of this year. According to Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Irvine Law School, recent Supreme Court decisions are not a path towards justice but rather a series of obstacles to holding police accountable for civil rights violations. An officer’s personal threat assessment is often bolstered by the fact that there are between 270 million and 310 million guns in the United States. Take a grand jury’s failure to indict the police officers who fatally shot John Crawford III, the black man holding a BB gun in a Walmart in Beavercreek, Ohio. In a country where shooting sprees are a regular occurrence, where guns are widely available at Walmart and where fake guns that look very similar to real guns are sold in the same store, the police officers’ fears were deemed reasonable enough for the grand jury to find no probable cause of criminal wrongdoing. That is how the Supreme Court police violence jurisprudence works, and it was firmly on the side of officer Sean Williams, just as it has now been found to be on Darren Wilson’s. Given the deference and latitude hardwired into the law, “there is just an underlying assumption that the officer did not engage in criminal activity,” says Katz. The first step to controlling the police is to get rid of the fantasy, once and for all, that the law is on our side. The law is firmly on the side of police who open fire on unarmed civilians. 30 +Empirical evidence is not limited to just japan. Australia and Germany both experienced resurgences of coal power following nuclear phase-outs. Similarly, nuclear power plants in the U.S. that have closed due to environmental pressure are being replaced by coal- not renewable alternatives. This trend is predicted to increase. 31 +Conca 16: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/05/16/natural-gas-is-replacing-nuclear-power-not-renewables/#4d451ba84abb 23 23 24 - Thus, the advocacy:TheUnited States ought to limit qualified immunity for police officers.33 +Across some parts of the country, nuclear power plants have been closing amid political pressure and warped financial markets, even though they contribute the overwhelming majority of their region’s clean power, and are the economic strength of their local economies. As an example, the sad and unnecessary closing of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station at the end of 2014 led to an increase in fossil fuel use, specifically natural gas, that completely filled the gap (see figure). The potential closing of a few more nuclear plants in the region will increase gas use even more. As all energy experts know, renewables will never replace any of nuclear’s clean power lost by the closing of nuclear plants. Renewables are having enough trouble replacing significant amounts of coal or keeping pace with demand, and require taxpayer subsidies to get built. So natural gas is the obvious choice for new electricity generation in all regions of the country. This trend is unlikely to change. Electricity demand in New England is growing 1 annually. Total generating capacity for the region is 31 GW, but over 4 GW is retiring in the next few years, and another 6 GW is at risk of retirement by the early 2020s. As a result, 13 GW of new natural gas is proposed to cover all expected increases in electricity demand for the next decade. America is at a 27-year low in its carbon emissions almost solely because natural gas has been replacing coal. Gains in efficiency and conservation have also helped. But the loss of several nuclear power plants has effectively wiped out the recent progress of renewables on addressing carbon reductions by increasing gas emissions. New York is struggling with this conundrum as it attempts to force the shutdown of some nuclear plants even as it desperately tries to keep others open. 25 25 26 -Limiting qualified immunity allows individuals to use civil litigation to hold police officers accountable. 27 -Wright 28 -In order to truly hold police accountable for bad acts, civilians must be able to bring, and win, civil rights suits themselves — not rely on the Department of Justice, or special prosecutors, or civilian review boards to hold officers accountable. And in order to both bring and win civil rights suits, civilians need a level playing field in court. Right now, they don’t have one. Instead, police officers have recourse to the broad protections of the judicially established doctrine of qualified immunity. Under this doctrine, state actors are protected from suit even if they’ve violated the law by, say, using excessive force, or performing an unwarranted body cavity search — as long as their violation was not one of “clearly established law of which a reasonable officer would be aware.” In other words, if there’s not already a case where a court has held that an officer’s identical or near-identical conduct rose to the level of a constitutional violation, there’s a good chance that even an obviously malfeasant officer will avoid liability — will avoid accountability. To bring about true accountability and change police behavior, this needs to change. And change should begin with an act of Congress rolling back qualified immunity. Removing the “clearly established” element of qualified immunity would be a good start — after all, shouldn’t it be enough to deviate from a basic standard of care, to engage in conduct that a reasonable officer would know is illegal, without having to show that that conduct’s illegality has already been clearly established in the courts? That’s just a start. There are plenty of other reforms that could open up civil rights lawsuits and help ensure police accountability for bad conduct. Two posts (one, two) at Balkinization by City University of New York professor Lynda Dodd provide a good overview. Campaign Zero should consider adding civil rights litigation reform to its platform, our policymakers should consider making civil rights litigation more robust, and, if we want to see justice done, we should push to make it happen. 35 +Prefer this evidence. (1) It provides a predictive analysis based on the most recent patterns of electricity investment and consumption. (2) It examines nuclear phase-outs on small scales which have high predictive value. 29 29 30 -Individual attempts to hold the police accountable is key to solvency 31 -Glasser 97’ 32 -Glasser, Ira, 1997, Fighting Police Abuse: A Community Action Manual, executive director of American Civil Liberties Union 33 -police abuse is a serious problem. It has a long history, and it seems to defy all attempts at eradication. The problem is national: no police department in the country is known to be completely free of misconduct. Yet it must be fought locally: the nation's 19,000 law enforcement agencies are essentially independent. While some federal statutes specify criminal penalties for willful violations of civil rights and conspiracies to violate civil rights, the United States Department of Justice has been insufficiently aggressive in prosecuting cases of police abuse. There are shortcomings, too, in federal law itself, which does not permit "pattern and practice" lawsuits. The battle against police abuse must, therefore, be fought primarily on the local level. THE GOOD NEWS is... the situation is not hopeless. Policing has seen much progress. Some reforms do work, and some types of abuse have been reduced. Today, among both police officials and rank and file officers, it is widely recognized that police brutality hinders good law enforcement. To fight police abuse effectively, you must have realistic expectations. You must not expect too much of any one remedy because no single remedy will cure the problem. A "mix" of reforms is required. And even after citizen action has won reforms, your community must keep the pressure on through monitoring and oversight to ensure that the reforms are actually implemented. Nonetheless, even one person, or a small group of persistent people, can make a big difference. Sometimes outmoded and abusive police practices prevail largely because no one has ever questioned them. In such cases, the simple act of spotlighting a problem can have a powerful effect that leads to reform. Just by raising questions, one person or a few people — who need not be experts — can open up some corner of the all-too-secretive and insular world of policing to public scrutiny. Depending on what is revealed, their inquiries can snowball into a full blown examination by the media, the public and politicians. 34 34 35 -Communities must strive to create accountability to reduce police abuse, even failed cases can be enough to solve the problem 36 -Glasser 97’ (2) 37 -Glasser, Ira, 1997, Fighting Police Abuse: A Community Action Manual, executive director of American Civil Liberties Union 38 -Police business is generally shrouded in secrecy, which conceals outdated policies and departmental inertia, encourages cover-ups and, of course, breeds public suspicion. But remember: Police departments are an arm of government, and the government's business is your business. Police policies, procedures, memoranda, records, reports, tape recordings, etc. should not be withheld from public view unless their release would threaten ongoing investigations, endanger officers or others, or invade someone's personal privacy. Demanding information about police practices is an important part of the struggle to establish police accountability. Indeed, a campaign focused solely on getting information from the police can serve as a vehicle for organizing a community to tackle police abuse. Regarding all of the following categories, one of the tactics your community could employ is to interest a local investigative journalist in seeking information from the police for a series of articles. Once in hand, the information your community has collected or helped to expose is a tool for holding the police accountable for their actions. 38 +AND, reliance on coal energy accelerates global warming. 39 39 40 +Keating 01: 40 40 41 -The role of the judge is to be an educator concerned with including multiple perspectives in the debate round. The judge is in a position to be an inclusive educator, and has an obligation to open up the space for multiple pedagogies, or polyvocal debate. 42 -Koh and Niemi 42 +Coal-fired power plants are among our largest sources of CO2 emissions, which have been linked to climate change. Atmospheric CO2 admits incoming sunlight, but traps the heat radiating from Earth’s surface (the way heat is trapped in a greenhouse, hence the “greenhouse effect”).22 The greenhouse effect is predicted to result in higher temperatures that may affect the global distribution of rainfall and subsequent land use (including agriculture) as well as ecological effects on forests, lowering of lake levels and waterways from increased evaporation rates and rising ocean levels due to melting ice caps.23 An increased reliance on conventional coal technology in electricity production will ensures that CO2 emissions continue to increase.24 43 43 44 -For as long as there has been debate, there has been the debate about what debate is. We are not against a discussion of what constitutes debate. In fact we are absolutely for it. We argue that this is a crucial debate within debates. The question should not be “what is debate?” The proper question is “what can debate do?” The constitutive feature of debate that we are most abstractly interested in is the precise one that is so often banished by debate pundits – the possibilities of what it can do. We do not yet know what debate can do. All are welcome to accept the challenge of forcing debate into a linear and instrumental framework, but be warned it will certainly fail. Debate is a process and a field, not a mechanism. This is the case for polyvocal debate. Our current definition (which is open to redefinition) is that debate should be thought of as a complex assemblage of voices (the debaters, the judge, audiences, coaches, the authors quoted, and so on), and that it is wrong to limit the possible voices or the possible enunciations of those voices. Debate is always about multiple voices – multiple ways of sensing/expressing. Even non-sense and non-expression have their own voices. This is not a paradigm. It is a hypothesis about the system of relations that co-creates debate. The power and potential of polyvocal debate is not located in some far-off future. It is right here right now, and it is also capable of contact with the outsides of one perspective on time and space. To paraphrase June Tyson – Don’t you know? It’s after the end of the world. Within the system of relations composed by polyvocal debate, we always have the ability to ask “should we believe in something in the first place?” as well as “if we believe it, what are its normative implications?” These questions, in whatever form they take, are some of the most primal elements of debate. Restricting the scope of debate to only some of these questions is a serious loss. More absurd is the justification for restriction based on the value of being able to ask and engage with these questions in the first place. It is wrong to assume that chaos and doubt are bad. It is even worse to argue for a progressive fallacy that chaos and doubt can be removed from debate without debate ceasing to be debate at all. Debate is not soccer, or chess, or playing the trumpet. Perhaps it can do similar things to those activities, but if so it is because it does not feature the limits that define soccer or chess or playing the trumpet. They continue Paradigms of debate that stop at the moment of rational justification treat the issue of what world we create for ourselves as an unnecessary step, but this conversation is what must happen in our lives and further what must happen in debate. Polyvocal debate allows for this discussion. We should not just ask “is deontology true” but further “is it good for me to believe in deontology” or util or contractarianism, etc. They continue Debate is foundationally about empathy. Arguments are only persuasive in the ability for their to be foster a shared experience of understanding. Judges vote for arguments that have a particular effect on them – the effect of “being convincing.” Arguments that win send the judge on a path of becoming-convinced. In order for this to happen, the debater must actually get through to the judge on some level, whether intuitively, emotively, via rhetoric, the flow, or explanation. The best debating promotes empathy. Not empathy defined by biased terms – empathy defined by actual contact with actual others, perspectives, and ways of expressing oneself. It is not that young people are in need of moral training or must be told what is right and wrong or that debate should erase and conquer disagreement. Rather, it is that we should strive to learn to live with disagreement. For it is too simple and brute to believe in a monovocal system of thought – that your language is the only Rosetta Stone to translate the world through. Debate must be a place to see how to live with ourselves and live among others. If being the better debater means being the worse person, we should NOT endorse this conception of better debating. 45 - 46 -The role of the ballot is to vote for the best liberation strategy for the oppressed. 47 -Questioning existing structures of oppression is the only way to fix a broken educational system. We should use the resolution as a starting point for debate on how we can reduce an aspect of status quo oppression. That means endorsing the role of the ballot is the right place for solvency. 48 - 49 -Polychroniou, CJ, Neoliberalism and the Politics of Higher Education: An Interview With Henry A. Giroux, Truthout, March 26, 2013, http://truth-out.org/news/item/15237-predatory-capitalism-and-the-attack-on-higher-education-an-interview-with-henry-a-giroux. DR. 50 - 51 -Giroux: Higher education must be understood as a democratic public sphere - a space in which education enables students to develop a keen sense of prophetic justice, claim their moral and political agency, utilize critical analytical skills, and cultivate an ethical sensibility through which they learn to respect the rights of others. Higher education has a responsibility not only to search for the truth regardless of where it may lead, but also to educate students to make authority and power politically and morally accountable while at the same time sustaining a democratic, formative public culture. Higher education may be one of the few public spheres left where knowledge, values and learning offer a glimpse of the promise of education for nurturing public values, critical hope and a substantive democracy. Democracy places civic demands upon its citizens, and such demands point to the necessity of an education that is broad-based, critical, and supportive of meaningful civic values, participation in self-governance, and democratic leadership. Only through such a formative and critical educational culture can students learn how to become individual and social agents, rather than merely disengaged spectators, must be able both to think otherwise and to act upon civic commitments that demand a reordering of basic power arrangements fundamental to promoting the common good and producing a meaningful democracy. 52 - 53 - 54 -Putting ethical theories on a pedestal serves only to abstracify oppression and get out of the discussion. 55 -Matsuda 56 -The multiple consciousness I urge lawyers to attain is not a random ability to see all points of view, but a deliberate choice to see the world from the standpoint of the oppressed. That world is ac- cessible to all of us. We should know it in its con- crete particulars. We should know of our sister carrying buckets of water up five flights of stairs in a welfare hotel, our sister trembling at 3 a.m. in a shelter for battered women, our sisters holding bloodied children in their arms in Cape Town, on the West Bank, and in Nicaragua. The jurisprudence of outsiders teaches that these details and the emotions they evoke are relevant and important as we set out on the road to justice. These details are accessible to all of us, of all genders and colors. We can choose to know the lives of others by reading, studying, listening, and ventur- ing into different places. For lawyers, our pro bono work may be the most effective means of ac- quiring a broader consciousness of oppression. ¶ Abstraction and detachment are ways out of the discomfort of direct confrontation with the ugliness of oppression. Abstraction, criticized by both feminists and scholars of color, is the, method that allows theorists to discuss liberty, property, and rights in the aspirational mode of liberalism with no connection to what those concepts mean in real people's lives. Much in our mainstream intellectual training values abstraction and denigrates nitty-gritty detail. Holding on to a multiple consciousness will allow us to op- erate both within the abstractions of standard jurisprudential discourse, and within the details of our own special knowledge.¶ Whisperings at Yale and elsewhere about how deconstructionist heroes were closet fascists remind me of how important it is to stay close to oppressed communities. High talk about language, meaning, sign, process, and law can mask racist and sexist ugliness if we never stop to ask: "Exactly what are you talking about and what is the implication of what you are saying for my sis- ter who is carrying buckets of water up five flights of stairs in a welfare hotel? What do you propose to do for her today, not in some abstract future you are creating in your mind?" If you have been made to feel, as I have, that such inquiry is theo- retically unsophisticated, and quaintly naive, re- sist! Read what Professor Williams, Professor Scales-Trent, and other feminists and people of color are writing.' The reality and detail of oppression are is a starting point for these writers as they enter into mainstream debates about law and theory. 57 - 58 - 59 -Alternative styles of debate have been especially forgone in the LD community. In round practices create a culture of exclusion that locks minority students out of the debate space by elevating the value of abstraction in the face of real conversation. 60 -Smith 61 -At every tournament you attend this year look around the cafeteria and take note of which students are not sitting amongst you and your peers. Despite being some of the best and the brightest in the nation, many students are alienated from and choose to not participate in an activity I like to think of as homeplace. In addition to the heavy financial burden associated with national competition, the exclusionary atmosphere of a debate tournament discourages black students from participating. Widespread awareness of the same lack of participation in policy debate has led to a growing movement towards alternative styles and methods of engaging the gatekeepers of the policy community, (Reid-Brinkley 08) while little work has been done to address or even acknowledge the same concern in Lincoln Douglas debate. Unfortunately students of color are not only forced to cope with a reality of structural violence outside of debate, but within an activity they may have joined to escape it in the first place. We are facing more than a simple trend towards marginalization occurring in Lincoln Douglas, but a culture of exclusion that locks minority participants out of the ranks of competition. It will be uncomfortable, it will be hard, and it will require continued effort but the necessary step in fixing this problem, like all problems, is the community as a whole admitting that such a problem with many “socially acceptable” choices exists in the first place. Like all systems of social control, the reality of racism in debate is constituted by the singular choices that institutions, coaches, and students make on a weekly basis. I have watched countless rounds where competitors attempt to win by rushing to abstractions to distance the conversation from the material reality that black debaters are forced to deal with every day. One of the students I coached, who has since graduated after leaving debate, had an adult judge write out a ballot that concluded by “hypothetically” defending my student being lynched at the tournament. Another debate concluded with a young man defending that we can kill animals humanely, “just like we did that guy Troy Davis”. Community norms would have competitors do intellectual gymnastics or make up rules to accuse black debaters of breaking to escape hard conversations but as someone who understands that experience, the only constructive strategy is to acknowledge the reality of the oppressed, engage the discussion from the perspective of authors who are black and brown, and then find strategies to deal with the issues at hand. It hurts to see competitive seasons come and go and have high school students and judges spew the same hateful things you expect to hear at a Klan rally. A student should not, when presenting an advocacy that aligns them with the oppressed, have to justify why oppression is bad. Debate is not just a game, but a learning environment with liberatory potential. Even if the form debate gives to a conversation is not the same you would use to discuss race in general conversation with Bayard Rustin or Fannie Lou Hamer, that is not a reason we have to strip that conversation of its connection to a reality that black students cannot escape. 62 - 63 -If we force debaters to adhere to a strict interpretation of what debate is then the interpretation will be decided by the majority group excluding minority debaters. 64 -Warner : 65 -More often than not, talk about privilege in debate is relegated mostly to economic and occasionally gender- or race-based discussions. Refocused recruiting efforts and accomplishments like Urban Debate Leagues and Women’s Caucuses at tournaments are addressing more overt concerns in an effort to create more equal playing fields, yet tremendous inequities remain that require explanation. Over twenty years of various diversity efforts, especially in CEDA, have failed to substantially change the racial, gender, social and economic composition of interscholastic policy debate at its highest levels. The reason is simple: privilege extends much further than just acknowledging overt and obvious disparities. Privilege creeps into more subtle, covert spaces, like the essence of why and how people “play the game,” recognizing that the rules and procedures are created by those carrying that privilege. Snider argues that the greatness of debate as a game is in his belief that it is short on inflexible rules and long on debatable procedures. However, if procedures are functionally not debatable and begin to look more like participation requirements than starting points of discussion, the quality of the game, is “not as successful and well-designed” (Snider, 1987, p. 123). Privilege envelopes both substantive and stylistic procedures, increasing the likelihood that supposedly debatable conventions become rigid norms, preventing achievement of a “more thoughtful” game and creating entrance barriersto successful participation. Here’s how. Snider (1987) says that evaluation of a “winning” procedurals argument occurs through the lenses of determining which procedures best facilitate achieving the goals of the debate activity. Snider offers three such goals: 1) education of the participants; 2) discussion of important issues in the resolution; and 3) creation of a fair contest. He concedes that some may be missing. Of course, interested participants with lesser privilege might select different goals as more important, such as having a voice to discuss the topic through the perspective of their social concerns, even if this perspective doesn’t fit nicely with some of the other goals. More often than not, the creation of a “fair contest” is given an absolute priority relative to other goals and justifies ignoring attempts to achieve other game objectives. At least one implicit goal deserves mention: incorporation of the cultural and social values of the participants. It makes sense that the like-minded values of the largest participating class will dominant procedural and rule development of a game simulation. Cultural and social values may appear to have little or no relationship to the first three goals of debate. But in fact, the cultural and social values will in many ways dictate the meaning of Snider’s goals. What types of education do the participants’ value? Who decides what the important issues are—the participants? The communities most directly related to the topic? Do cultural and social values privilege any notions of “fairness”? Cultural and social background surely impacts each of these areas tremendously. If there are cultural or social disagreements over what constitutes “education,” what “issues” are important, or what is “fair,” then privilege plays a much larger role in game development than has been acknowledged to date. 66 - 67 -You should ignore their seemingly objective arguments concerning fairness in the debate space. Fairness is tangential on an individual’s interpretation of what debate is and this interpretation is always subjective and thus affected by social and cultural backgrounds as we are given very little confines to what we can be. Instead you should view it as a weapon for the majority to stomp on the interest of people not like them. 68 -Olson : 69 - (3) That is, whoever is attempting to define "fairness" or "mutual respect" or any other such principle will necessarily be doing so from a particular context, which includes one's personal system of values. It is impossible to rise above one's context in order to fill in the content of so-called neutral principles. Fairness, for example, will be defined differently by different people, and this abstraction will not be intelligible unless and until it is anchored in a specific standpoint. One person may feel that fairness means admitting someone to college solely of the basis of test scores, whereas another may feel that fairness means also taking into account the fact that a student comes from a context of poverty and disadvantage. No definition of fairness exists independent of the kind of conditions or substance that must be supplied by necessarily interested parties (since all parties are necessarily interested). Once some kind of substance is supplied, however, neutral principles by definition lose their neutrality. That is, the oft-touted virtue of neutral principles is that they are supposedly devoid of substantive commitments; they purportedly afford a space within which "substantive agendas can make their case without prior advantage or disadvantage" (3). Yet, some substance must be supplied in order to make the principle—fairness, in this example—intelligible. Hence, there really is no such thing as a neutral principle; there is no such thing as a principle not already informed by the substantive content of the person appealing to the principle. While questions of fairness are central to intractable policy debates, invoking the principle of fairness will not advance these debates because at a certain level such debates are about "what fairness (or neutrality or impartiality) really is" (3). In effect, a contest over the content of a particular issue is also a contest over two or more contending notions of fairness (or impartiality or whatever principle is being invoked). Even if it were possible to produce a general principle devoid of specific content—a notion of fairness, say, untethered to any specific perspective or ideological orientation—it would be of no use, says Fish, because it would by empty. That is, appealing to it would not point you in any specific direction in relation to other possible directions. Its very emptiness renders it useless as a moral compass. In effect, a neutral principle is a floating signifier, an "unoccupied vessel waiting to be filled by whoever gets to it first or with the most persuasive force" (7). In fact, it is exactly this condition of emptiness, its status as a floating signifier available for people to invest with substance, that makes neutral principles so politically useful—and even potentially dangerous, since they can be employed to further evil (as defined by you) ends just as easily as more positive (as defined by you) goals: It is because they don't have the constraining power claimed for them (they neither rule out nor mandate anything) and yet have the name of constraints (people think that when you invoke fairness you call for something determinate and determinable) that neutral principles can make an argument look as though it has a support higher or deeper than the support provided by its own substantive thrust. Indeed, the vocabulary of neutral principle can be used to disguise substance so that it appears to be the inevitable and nonengineered product of an impersonal logic. (4) In other words, a general principle such as fairness is deployed as a weapon in political, legal, and ethical struggles precisely because it masks the interestedness of those appealing to it and cloaks the fact that the actual policy, law, or proposal being advanced in the name of the principle is embedded in specific historical circumstances and furthers the interests and objectives of one set of individuals over and against the interests and objectives of others. 44 +Climate change disproportionately affects minority communities in poverty. This will only worsen and perpretuate the forms of structural violence these marginalized groups face. 45 +Tinuoye 46 +Other studies also highlight the problem. More than 72 percent of African-Americans live in counties that violate federal air pollution standards, compared to 58 percent of white, according to a 2011 Center for American Progress report. A 2008 study by The Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative also found heat-related deaths among Blacks occur at a 150 to 200 percent greater rate than for non-Hispanic Whites. Dr. Cassandra Johnson, a U.S. Forest Service social scientist, echoes this sentiment. “African-Americans residing in central cities with large amounts of impervious surface areas are more vulnerable to heat-related manifestations of climate change resulting from urban heat islands,” says Johnson. ““Heat islands” concentrate solar energy and “waste heat” from sources like automobile exhaust, cheap heat retaining building materials, fewer trees, to heat downtown areas in particular.” Black Americans and lower income populations are also more socially vulnerable to adapting and adjusting to natural disasters, says Shepherd. They suffer more distress, increased injuries and death and lasting effects like the loss of jobs and infrastructure. In the South, low income African-Americans and Hispanics work directly or indirectly in the agricultural industry, which is particularly sensitive to extreme weather, especially droughts, says Shepherd. - EntryDate
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