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... ... @@ -1,72 +1,0 @@ 1 -Framework 2 -Government obligations necessitate tradeoffs—that means util. Woller 97 3 -Gary Woller BYU Prof., “An Overview by Gary Woller”, A Forum on the Role of Environmental Ethics, June 1997, pg. 10 4 -“Moreover, virtually all public policies entail some redistribution of economic or political resources, such that one group's gains must come at another group's ex- pense. Consequently, public policies in a democracy must be justified to the public, and especially to those who pay the costs of those policies. Such but justification cannot simply be assumed a priori by invoking some higher-order moral principle. Appeals to a priori moral principles, such as environmental preservation, also often fail to acknowledge that public policies inevitably entail trade-offs among competing values. Thus since policymakers cannot justify inherent value conflicts to the public in any philosophical sense, and since public policies inherently imply winners and losers, the policymakers' duty is to the public interest requires them to demonstrate that the redistributive effects and value trade-offs implied by their polices are somehow to the overall advantage of society. At the same time, deontologically based ethical systems have severe practical limitations as a basis for public policy. At best, Also, a priori moral principles provide only general guidance to ethical dilemmas in public affairs and do not themselves suggest appropriate public policies, and at worst, they create a regimen of regulatory unreasonableness while failing to adequately address the problem or actually making it worse.” 5 -Thus, the standard is maximizing expected well being. 6 -Prefer: 7 -1. No act/omission for governments—constraint based theories collapse to util. 8 -Sunstein and Vermule 05 (Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermuele, “Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? The Relevance of Life-Life Tradeoffs,” Chicago Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper No. 85 (March 2005), p. 17.) In our view, both the argument from causation and the argument from intention go wrong by overlooking the distinctive features of government as a moral agent. Whatever the general status of the act-omission distinction as a matter of moral philosophy,38 the distinction is least impressive when applied to government.39 The most fundamental point is that unlike individuals, governments always and necessarily face a choice between or among possible policies for regulating third parties. The distinction between acts and omissions may not be intelligible in this context, and even if it is, the distinction does not make a morally relevant difference. Most generally, government is in the business of creating permissions and prohibitions. When it explicitly or implicitly authorizes private action, it is not omitting to do anything, or refusing to act.40 Moreover, the distinction between authorized and unauthorized private action—for example, private killing—becomes obscure when the government formally forbids private action, but chooses a set of policy instruments that do not adequately or fully discourage it. 9 -2. Empiricism- only the real world can serve as the basis for ethical reasoning. Schwartz: The empirical support for the fundamental principle of empiricism is diffuse but salient. Our common empirical experience and experimental psychology offer evidence that humans do not have any capacity to garner knowledge except by empirical sources. The fact is that we believe that there is no source of knowledge, information, or evidence apart from observation, empirical scientific investigations, and our sensory experience of the world, and we believe this on the basis of our empirical a posteriori experiences and our general empirical view of how things work. For example, we believe on empirical evidence that humans are continuous with the rest of nature and that we rely like other animals on our senses to tell us how things are. If humans are more successful than other animals, it is not because we possess special non-experiential ways of knowing, but because we are better at cooperating, collating, and inferring. In particular we do not have any capacity for substantive a priori knowledge. There is no known mechanism by which such knowledge would be made possible. This is an empirical claim. 10 -This requires util to adjudicate- all judgments are determined based on consequences of pleasure and pain. Nagel: I I shall defend the unsurprising claim that sensory pleasure is good and pain bad, no matter whose they are. The point of the exercise is to see how the pressures of objectification operate in a simple case. Physical pleasure and pain do not usually depend on activities or desires which themselves raise questions of justification and value. They are just is a sensory experiences in relation to which we are fairly passive, but toward which we feel involuntary desire or aversion. Almost everyone takes the avoidance of his own pain and the promotion of his own pleasure as subjective reasons for action in a fairly simple way; they are not back up by any further reasons. On the other hand if someone pursues pain or avoids pleasure, either it as a means to some end or it is backed up by dark reasons like guilt or sexual masochism. What sort of general value, if any, ought to be assigned to pleasure and pain when we consider these facts from an objective standpoint? What kind of judgment can we reasonably make about these things when we view them in abstraction from who we are? We can begin by asking why there is no plausibility in the zero position, that pleasure and pain have no value of any kind that can be objectively recognized. That would mean that I have no reason to take aspirin for a severe headache, however I may in fact be motivated; and that looking at it from outside, you couldn't even say that someone had a reason not to put his hand on a hot stove, just because of the pain. Try looking at it from the outside and see whether you can manage to withhold that judgment. If the idea of objective practical reason makes any sense at all, so that there is some judgment to withhold, it does not seem possible. If the general arguments against the reality of objective reasons are no good, then it is at least possible that I have a reason, and not just an inclination, to refrain from putting my hand on a hot stove. But given the possibility, it seems meaningless to deny that this is so. Oddly enough, however, we can think of a story that would go with such a denial. It might be suggested that the aversion to pain is a useful phobia—having nothing to do with the intrinsic undesirability of pain itself—which helps us avoid or escape the injuries that are signaled by pain. (The same type of purely instrumental value might be ascribed to sensory pleasure: the pleasures of food, drink, and sex might be regarded as having no value in themselves, though our natural attraction to them assists survival and reproduction.) There would then be nothing wrong with pain in itself, and someone who was never motivated deliberately to do anything just because he knew it would reduce or avoid pain would have nothing the matter with him. He would still have involuntary avoidance reactions, otherwise it would be hard to say that he felt pain at all. And he would be motivated to reduce pain for other reasons—because it was an effective way to avoid the danger being signaled, or because interfered with some physical or mental activity that was important to him. He just wouldn't regard the pain as itself something he had any reason to avoid, even though he hated the feeling just as much as the rest of us. (And of course he wouldn't be able to justify the avoidance of pain in the way that we customarily justify avoiding what we hate without reason—that is, on the ground that even an irrational hatred makes its object very unpleasant!) There is nothing self-contradictory in this proposal, but it seems nevertheless insane. Without some positive reason to think there is nothing in itself good or bad about having an experience you intensely like or dislike, we can't seriously regard the common impression to the contrary as a collective illusion. Such things are at least good or bad for us, if anything is. What seems to be going on here is that we cannot from an objective standpoint withhold a certain kind of endorsement of the most direct and immediate subjective value judgments we make concerning the contents of our own consciousness. We regard ourselves as too close to those things to be mistaken in our immediate, nonideological evaluative impressions. No objective view we can attain could possibly overrule our subjective authority in such cases. There can be no reason to reject the appearances here. 11 - 12 -3. No intent foresight distinction means that means based theories devolve to util: if we’re knowledgeable about the consequence of an action then we calculate that into our intention because we could always decide not to act. This means we will the end that is set, so we must look to ends to adjudicate ethics. 13 - 14 -Inherency 15 -:18 16 -Metsamor’s decommissioning has been delayed- it’s operating until at least 2026. Daly 13 http://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Armenias-Metsamor-NPP-Built-Near-Fault-Line-Gets-10-Year-Life-Extension.html Armenia’s Metsamor NPP, Built Near Fault Line, Gets 10 Year Life Extension By John Daly - Sep 23, 2013, 6:52 PM CDT In a major piece of bad news for Armenia’s neighbors Turkey, Azerbaijan and Georgia, Armenia's energy minister Armen Movsisyan has told journalists that the country’s aging Metsamor NPP, originally scheduled for decommissioning in 2016," will operate until 2026."But not to worry, Armenia's President Serzh Sarkisian earlier this month signed an agreement with Russia’s state nuclear agency Rosatom to assist in renovating the facility, as in 2012 Armenia had postponed the Metsamor’s decommissioning until 2020. So, why the long faces in the Caucasus? 17 -Armenia has plans for new nuclear reactors but they’ve been postponed –they’re stuck with Metsamor for the foreseeable future. Sahakyan 16 Armine (Human rights activist based in Armenia) “Armenia Continues to Gamble on Aging Nuclear Plant in a Quake-Prone Area” Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/armine-sahakyan/armenia-continues-to-gamb_b_9788186.html 18 -Armenia was supposed to have a new nuclear power plant this year that would replace one that National Geographic suggested a few years ago was the most dangerous in the world. The new plant was to have twice the electrical-generating capacity of the current one, allowing Armenia not only to meet its own power needs but to export electricity to neighboring counties. We’re well in to 2016, and not only is the new plant not operational — work on it hasn’t even begun. 19 -Plan 20 -: 21 -:14 22 -Resolved: Armenia should ban the production of nuclear power, accepting the EU proposal for preventing the 2026 renewal of Metsamor. Daly 2 http://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Armenias-Metsamor-NPP-Built-Near-Fault-Line-Gets-10-Year-Life-Extension.html Armenia’s Metsamor NPP, Built Near Fault Line, Gets 10 Year Life Extension By John Daly - Sep 23, 2013, 6:52 PM CDT The European Union has repeatedly called for the plant to be closed down, arguing that it poses a threat to the region, classifying Metsamor’s reactors as the "oldest and least reliable" category of all the 66 Soviet reactors built in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In 2004 the European Union's envoy called Metsamor "a danger to the entire region," but Armenia later turned down the EU's offer of a 200 million euro loan to finance Metsamor's shutdown, 23 -Advantage 1- Meltdowns 24 -1:21 25 -The Metsamor power plant – Armenia’s only form of nuclear power – is incredibly dangerous. It uses old tech, is unreliable, and lies on earthquake territory. 26 -Lavelle et al 11 Marianne Lavelle and Josie Garthwaite (National Geographic News) “Is Armenia's Nuclear Plant the World's Most Dangerous?” National Geographic News April 14th 2011 http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2011/04/110412-most-dangerous-nuclear-plant-armenia/ 27 -In the shadow of Mount Ararat, the beloved and sorrowful national symbol of Armenia, stands a 31-year-old nuclear plant that is no less an emblem of the country's resolve and its woe. The Metsamor power station is one of a mere handful of remaining nuclear reactors of its kind that were built without primary containment structures. All five of these first-generation water-moderated Soviet units are past or near their original retirement ages, but one salient fact sets Armenia's reactor apart from the four in Russia. Metsamor lies on some of Earth's most earthquake-prone terrain. In the wake of Japan's quake-and-tsunami-triggered Fukushima Daiichi crisis, Armenia's government faces renewed questions from those who say the fateful combination of design and location make Metsamor among the most dangerous nuclear plants in the world. Seven years ago, the European Union's envoy was quoted as calling the facility "a danger to the entire region," but Armenia later turned down the EU's offer of a 200 million euro ($289 million) loan to finance Metsamor's shutdown. The United States government, which has called the plant "aging and dangerous," underwrote a study that urged construction of a new one. Plans to replace Metsamor after 2016—with a new nuclear plant at the same location—are under way. But until then, Armenia has little choice but to keep Metsamor's turbines turning. As Armenians learned in the bone-chilling cold and dark days when the plant was closed down for several years, Metsamor provides more than 40 percent of power for a nation that is isolated from its neighbors and closed off from other sources of energy. "People compare the potential risk with the potential shortage of electricity that might arise if the plant were closed," says Ara Tadevosyan, director of Mediamax, a major Armenian news agency. "Having had this negative experience, people prefer to live with it, and believe that it will not be damaged in an earthquake." A Need for Nuclear The 3 million people of landlocked Armenia are unique in their energy dependence on one aging nuclear power reactor. Regional conflicts that broke out in the dissolution of the Soviet Union left the smallest of its former republics at odds with its neighbors. Azerbaijan to the east and Turkey to the west closed their borders with Armenia, cutting off most routes for oil and natural gas. The blockade, which remains in place to this day, heaped a new economic wound onto an old scar. After the massacre of more than one million Armenians during World War I and subsequent conflict, the Soviets ceded the western part of the historic Armenian homeland to Turkey. The snow-capped peak of Mount Ararat, still revered in Armenia as the resting place of Noah's Ark, emblazoned on trinkets and storefronts throughout the land, is now in Turkey. (Related: "Tough Situations in Difficult Countries") The Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant is just 10 miles (16 kilometers) from the Turkish border—in an area that includes the fertile agricultural region of the Aras River valley. It's only 20 miles (36 kilometers) from the capital of Yerevan, home to one-third of the nation's population. And it is in the midst of a strong seismic zone that stretches in a broad swath from Turkey to the Arabian Sea near India. On December 7, 1988, a 6.8-magnitude earthquake struck, killing 25,000 people and leaving 500,000 homeless. Some 60 miles (100 kilometers) from the epicenter, Metsamor, then with two operating reactors, survived the temblor without damage, according to Armenian officials and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Because the devastating earthquake heightened concerns about the seismic hazard to the facility, the Soviet government shut the nuclear plant down. Tadevosyan said that public attitudes toward Metsamor have been strongly shaped by the nation's experience living without it during the six-and-a-half years that followed. "There were severe power shortages during the winter months," he recalled in a telephone interview from Yerevan. "We had a situation where you had one hour of power a day, and sometimes no power at all for a week. You can imagine—it was as cold in the apartment as it was in the street." A pipeline to import Russian natural gas through neighboring Georgia in the north was built in 1993, but it was regularly interrupted by "sabotage and separatist strife in that country," as the World Bank noted in a 2006 report. In 1995, the government of then-independent Armenia decided to restart the younger of the two reactors. Richard Wilson, nuclear physics professor emeritus at Harvard University, was part of a delegation of outside experts in Armenia at the time. He recalls that the Russians who came from the airport to help reopen the reactor were cheered from the side of the road upon their arrival. When the unit restarted, "It became a source of energy and a source of hope for Armenia," explained Tadevosyan. "It was a symbol that dark times are over: 'We have electricity.' And it is still seen as such today." Fortifying an Old War Horse Armenian officials say modifications made to the reactor over the past 15 years have made it safer. Before Metsamor was reopened, Armenia airlifted more than 500 tons of equipment to the site (most of it from Russia), for upgrades, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group in the United States. In the years since the restart, the IAEA says close to 1,400 safety improvements have been made. Those included "seismic-resistant" storage batteries, reinforcement of the reactor building, electrical cabinets and cooling towers. The United States provided equipment for a seismic-resistant, spray-pond cooling system. Fire safety was viewed as a critical deficiency at the plant, so extensive upgrades were made, including 140 new fire doors. The result, officials say, is a reactor that is much safer than the original unit that went into service at the site on January 10, 1980. When construction began in 1969, Metsamor was a VVER 440, Model 230, an example of one of the earliest pressurized-water nuclear plant designs, developed by the Soviets between 1956 and 1970. It was not the same design as Chernobyl, which used solid graphite instead of water to moderate—or slow down—the fission reaction. (The graphite fire contributed to the world's worst nuclear disaster, and 11 of these early graphite-moderated reactors continue to operate in Russia.) (Related: "How is Japan's Nuclear Disaster Different?") The VVER 440, in contrast, used water both to moderate and to cool the fuel, as in Western designs. (Its initials, in Russian, stand for "water-water-power-reactor.") In fact, the VVER system, with multiple cooling loops, was seen as "more forgiving" than Western plants, according to archived documents from the International Nuclear Safety Program, a former U.S. Department of Energy program aimed at aiding in safety improvements at Soviet plants. VVER 440 units would be able to stand a power loss for a longer period of time than Western plants because of the large coolant volume. After Japan's nuclear crisis erupted, the head of the Armenian State Committee on Nuclear Safety Regulation, Ashot Martirosian, pointed to Metsamor's cooling system as one reason Armenians should rest assured. "Such an emergency situation cannot arise here," he told Radio Free Europe. (Related: "Japan Battles to Avert Nuclear Disaster" and "Pictures—A Rare Look Inside Fukushima Daiichi") Nuclear engineering expert Robert Kalantari, whose Framingham, Massachusetts, firm, Engineering Planning and Management, consults for U.S. and Canadian regulatory authorities, says Metsamor is like any other nuclear plant in operation worldwide. Although its safety features are different, all have to be able to be shut down safely during a so-called "design basis accident," the kind of accident anticipated in its design. He said he is confident that Metsamor could operate safely in such an accident, and that it could cope even with accidents beyond its design basis. "Metsamor is no less safe than any other reactor in operation throughout the world," Kalantari said. "Armenia as an independent country cannot survive without Metsamor, which is a functioning, safe, and reliable source of energy for the country." Lack of Containment But the VVER 440s share one characteristic with Chernobyl that has been a continuing concern to many who live nearby: They have no containment structure. Instead, VVER 440s rely on an "accident localization system," designed to handle small ruptures. In the event of a large rupture, the system would vent directly to the atmosphere. "They cannot cope with large primary circuit breaks," the NEI's 1997 Source Book on Soviet nuclear plants concluded. "As with most Soviet-designed plants, electricity production by the VVER-440 Model V230s came at the expense of safety." Antonia Wenisch of the Austrian Institute of Applied Ecology in Vienna, calls Metsamor "among the most dangerous" nuclear plants still in operation. A rupture "would almost certainly immediately and massively fail the confinement," she said in an email. "From that point, there is an open reactor building, a core with no water in it, and accident progression with no mitigation at all." 28 -Armenian Meltdown would cause massive life loss, kill agriculture, and threaten four other countries. 29 -Sahakyan 2 Armine (Human rights activist based in Armenia) “Armenia Continues to Gamble on Aging Nuclear Plant in a Quake-Prone Area” Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/armine-sahakyan/armenia-continues-to-gamb_b_9788186.html 30 -So Armenia continues to make due with the Metsamor plant. The International Atomic Energy Agency has inspected the facility, and declared it safe. But other experts are skeptical. The big worry is that the plant has no containment building — a steel or concrete shell that would prevent radiation from escaping during an accident. If a rupture developed in the reactor’s skin, radiation would have to be vented into the air to prevent a build-up of pressure that could trigger a meltdown or explosion. The longer a nuclear plant operates, the thinner its reactor skin becomes, experts say — and thinner skins are subject to rupture. A rupture would mean “an open reactor building, a core with no water in it (to cool the reactor) and accident progression with no mitigation at all,” said Antonia Wenisch of the Vienna-based Austrian Institute of Applied Ecology in Vienna. The stakes in Armenia’s nuclear gamble are high. An accident at Metsamor would devastate the capital of Yerevan, only 20 miles away and home to a third of Armenia’s population. It would also render unusable the Aras River Valley, Armenia’s premier agricultural area, where Metasamor is situated. In addition, radiation would envelop Turkey, whose border is only 10 miles from the nuclear facility, and Armenian neighbors Georgia and Iran. 31 -Technological changes and alternate reactors won’t solve – can still melt down and causes increased cancer rates. 32 -Idayatova 16 Anakhanum “Armenia’s Metsamor nuclear plant can cause major radiation accident” Trend News Agencyhttp://en.trend.az/world/turkey/2536379.html 33 -Armenia's Metsamor nuclear power plant is a major threat not only for the entire Caucasus region, but it also poses a danger for the Armenian population, Malik Ayub Sumbal, journalist, expert on geopolitical and international conflicts, told Trend via e-mail May 20. Sumbal, who is also the founder of The Caspian Times news platform, said that the international community must learn a lesson from an accident at the Japanese Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant and prevent another disaster, which may be caused by Armenia's Metsamor nuclear power plant. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster was an energy accident at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, initiated primarily by the tsunami that was triggered by the earthquake on March 11, 2011."The Metsamor nuclear power plant also poses a great threat for Turkey, as it is located just 16 kilometers off its borders," the expert said. "Moreover, the plant can cause cancer and other dangerous diseases among people living on the border with Armenia."Armenia has a nuclear power plant, Metsamor, built in 1970. The power plant was closed after a devastating earthquake in Spitak in 1988. But despite the international protests, the power plant's operation was resumed in 1995. Moreover, a second reactor was launched there. According to the ecologists and scholars all over the region, seismic activity of this area turns operation of the Metsamor nuclear power plant in an extremely dangerous enterprise, even if a new type of reactor is built. 34 -Nuclear accidents cause massive life loss, threaten the globe, and risk extinction. Lendman 11 35 -Stephen Lendman. The People’s Voice: News and Viewpoints. “Nuclear meltdown in Japan,” March 13th, 2011. http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2011/03/13/nuclear-meltdown-in-japan For years, Helen Caldicott warned it's coming. In her 1978 book, "Nuclear Madness," she said: "As a physician, I contend that nuclear technology threatens life on our planet with extinction. If present trends continue, the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink will soon be contaminated with enough radioactive pollutants to pose a potential health hazard far greater than any plague humanity has ever experienced." More below on the inevitable dangers from commercial nuclear power caused a reactor meltdown." Stratfor downplayed its seriousness, adding that such an event "does not necessarily mean a nuclear disaster," that already may have happened – is the ultimate nightmare short of nuclear winter. According to Stratfor, "(A)s long as the reactor core, which is specifically designed to contain high levels of heat, pressure and radiation, remains intact, the melted fuel can be dealt with. If the (core's) breached but the containment facility built around (it) remains intact, the melted fuel can be....entombed within specialized concrete" as at Chernobyl in 1986. In fact, that disaster killed nearly one million people worldwide from nuclear radiation exposure. In their book titled, "Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment," Alexey Yablokov, Vassily nation. One nuclear reactor can pollute half the globe. Chernobyl fallout covers the entire Northern Hemisphere." Stratfor explained that if Fukushima's floor cracked, "it is highly likely that the melting fuel will burn through (its) containment system and enter the ground. This has never happened before," mild by comparison. Potentially, millions of lives will be jeopardized. Japanese officials said Fukushima's reactor container wasn't breached. Stratfor and others said it was, making the potential calamity far worse than reported. Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) said the explosion at Fukushima's Saiichi No. 1 facility could only have been caused by a core meltdown. In fact, 3 or more reactors are affected or at risk. Events are fluid and developing, but remain very serious. The possibility of an extreme catastrophe can't be discounted. 36 - 37 -Advantage 2- Proliferation 38 -1:27 39 -Metasomor can be used to make nuclear weapons 40 -Azer News 9/13/16 S.Korea says Armenia poses nuke threat to entire region, http://www.azernews.az/region/102159.html, ml 41 -The Armenian Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) poses a nuclear threat and the international community must assess that fact, Choe Chong-dae, president of Dae-kwang International Co., said in an article in The Korea Times. Choe Chong-dae, who is also director of the Korean-Swedish Association, said that Hrant Bagratyan, former prime minister of Armenia, stressed that Armenia has created nuclear weaponry. The author said that Bagratyan’s comments raise profound concern. “Armenian former prime minister's comments should not be taken lightly, the author said. “Armenian citizens have played an instrumental role in smuggling nuclear and radioactive nuclear waste materials, as reflected in media reports exposing them.” “Many groups of Armenian citizens associated with the smuggling of radioactive materials were exposed many times in the territories of neighboring countries,” he added. “Furthermore, some Armenian groups even tried to smuggle highly enriched uranium and cesium-137 from Armenia in 2003 and 2010.” The author added that three Armenian citizens who previously worked at Metsamor NPP were arrested in Georgia in April 2016 for attempting to smuggle and illegally sell nuclear materials. “One of the detainees was identified as a former associate of the Armenian secret service,” the author said. “This group planned to sell a quantity of uranium-238 costing $200 million to the Middle East.” “There is great nuclear security risk to the region regarding Metsamor NPP, especially in the context of the occupation of Azerbaijan territory by Armenia,” the article said. “The dubious condition of spent fuel and waste material from Metsamor NPP also raises safety concerns.” The author said that built in 1976, Metsamor NPP is based on technologies from Chernobyl NPP that ceased operations in 1988 due to a nuclear disaster. “The operation of the Metsamor NPP in Armenia and the cases of smuggling of nuclear and radioactive materials from this NPP poses a nuclear threat to the entire region, and it also constitutes a serious threat and danger for the Korean investment in the region,” the article said. The author said that Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev delivered a speech at the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington on March 31-April 1, 2016. “The president’s speech drew great attention from the international community to Metsamor NPP and called on nations to take measures against the threat emanating from this facility,” he added. “We urge that the International Atomic Energy Agency and global community assess and exercise strict control of the systematic cases of smuggling of radioactive materials arranged by Armenia,” the article said. “Threats of the use of nuclear weapons by Armenian officials who are obsessed with revenge against Azerbaijan are unnerving,” the author said. “If Armenia and North Korea continue to pursue their nuclear weapon ambitions and smuggling of nuclear materials, we will all face hastening self-destruction.” 42 - 43 -Armenian nuclearization destabilizes the Caucuses and causes Iran prolif—risk is extremely high now 44 -Petra Posega 5-30-16 Security Studies candidate with a degree in political science. She writes for platforms and magazines on four continents, including Geopolitics of Energy, Addleton and AEI Insights: An International Journal of Asia-Europe Relations, Dangerous Nuclear Security Failures in Russia's Backyard, http://nationalinterest.org/feature/dangerous-nuclear-security-failures-russias-backyard-16392?page=show, ml 45 -Nuclear security is seemingly at the forefront of global attention, but the large framework of international safeguards is increasingly perceived as a toothless tiger. In the contemporary age, where asymmetric threats to security are among the most dangerous, the time is nigh to mitigate the risk of rogue actors having potential access to materials that are necessary to develop nuclear weapons. Nowhere is this urgency more pivotal than in already turbulent areas, such as the South Caucasus. With many geopolitical instabilities, lasting for decades with no completely bulletproof conflict resolution process in place, adding the threat of potential nuclear weapons means creating a house of cards that can cause a complete collapse of regional peace and stability. That is precisely why Armenia’s recently uncovered recurring actions toward the goal of building its own nuclear capacity must be addressed more seriously. They should also attract a bolder response to ensure safety of the region is sustained. According to a report by the Vienna-based nuclear watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Armenia has established a record of illegal trafficking in nuclear and other radioactive materials. There have been several serious incidents spanning from 1999 onward. A large number of reported incidents has occurred on the country’s border with Georgia, leading the IAEA to conclude there is high probability that a so-called Armenian route does in fact exist. There is a further evidence to support this assertion. An unusually high number of Armenians have been caught in nuclear trafficking activities. Additionally, some of the incidents that made their way into the official reports suggest that the main focus of trafficking activities is the smuggling of materials that could be used for nuclear weapons. There were also reports suggesting the trafficking of other radioactive materials that could be used for alternate purposes, such as building a so-called dirty bomb. Since the stakes are always high with nuclear weapons, this threat must not be underrated and dismissed too easily. Only days after the latest illegal activities were uncovered by border control in April 2016, former Armenian Prime Minister Bagratyan shocked the international public with the claim that Armenia indeed has nuclear capabilities and the ability to further develop them. The main reason for Armenia to possess nuclear weapons is to deter neighbors such as Turkey and Azerbaijan. More specifically, to discourage them from resorting to aggressive foreign policy measures, and to mitigate potential threats to Armenian territorial integrity, especially in the disputed regions. Even though Turkey and its intelligence network were quick to dismiss these claims and labeled them as a failed attempt to increase Armenia’s geopolitical importance, as well as to deter its much more militarily capable neighbors, such claims should not be taken lightly, either. Thus, there is no cause for immediate alarm. However, there should be increased interest in the international community to investigate these serious claims. If documented, they would pose a grave threat of destabilization to an already turbulent region. They would also trigger deepening of hostilities and mistrust in the extremely delicate regional peace framework. The prospects and danger of rogue actors potentially acquiring a dirty bomb are rising on the international agenda. The recently detected activities in South Caucasus showed that substantial efforts have been made to smuggle and illegally sell uranium-238, which is highly radioactive. At the beginning of 2016, a different group was trying to smuggle a highly radioactive cesium isotope that usually forms as a waste product in nuclear reactors. What is also worrying is that the majority of the activities are occurring in highly unstable and unmonitored territories of Azerbaijan and Georgia that are under the control of separatists, such as Nagorno-Karabakh and South Ossetia. The mere existence of the Armenian route goes to show that illegal activities can flourish in the region’s security “blind spots.” There is also the Iranian connection. Armenia borders this Middle Eastern country that found itself at the center of global attention until the ratification of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2015. The international agreement supposedly effectively mitigated the risk of Tehran developing its own nuclear capabilities and established a proper international regime to monitor compliance with the provisions that were put in place. However, fears remain over future developments on this issue. The unusually large amount of truck traffic between Armenia and Iran further fuels suspicion on what exactly takes place under the cloak of darkness. Iran is not the only powerful Armenian ally that holds knowledge on all things nuclear. Yerevan has been extremely close with Russia since the breakup of the former Soviet Union, and fully relies on Moscow when it comes to upholding its security, territorial integrity and political autonomy. Russia is, of course, a member of the elite nuclear club, and holds one of the largest stockpiles of nuclear capabilities in the world (outside the United States). This is, of course, a leftover of the Cold War era and fears of the Eastern or the Western devil, depending on which side of the wall the threat was perceived. It is worrying that some of the nuclear material that was trying to find its way into Armenia through South Ossetia has been, at least according to some reports, traced back to Russian nuclear facilities. This is of course no small wonder, since Russia is the official supplier of nuclear fuel for the only nuclear power plant in Armenia—the Metsamor nuclear plant, which supplies roughly 40 percent of the country’s electricity. But the reactor itself demonstrates another facet of the nuclear threats that Armenia poses, namely, nuclear safety threats. The reactor is extremely outdated, and there are no proper safeguards and safety mechanisms installed to ensure adequate monitoring of its operations and recognition of potential faults in the system. The world just marked the thirtieth anniversary of the devastating Chernobyl accident, and it is unsettling to know there is high risk of a similar disaster in an adjacent area. Nuclear safety, like nuclear security, should be taken extremely seriously. Any outdated systems, like the one at the Metsamor nuclear plant, should be either closed down until repaired and adjusted to proper security standards, or else shut down completely if the plant is unable to follow necessary legal provisions. To make future prospects even grimmer, the area where the Metsamor plant is located is said to have very turbulent seismic activity. Thus, not only is the plant dangerous due to outdated security systems and technology, but also due to a naturally occurring phenomenon that is likely to cause significant damage to the plant itself. Armenian officials should protect their own population, and not risk a nuclear holocaust. But instead, they continue to stubbornly expand their grand ambitions and self-entrapment. Reviewing the manifold danger that Armenia represents in nuclear terms, there are no simple answers, although there are a few clear conclusions. The Metsamor power plant should be seen as an imminent and serious threat to millions of people in Asia, Middle East and Europe, and shut down. Additionally, this issue should not be shielded anymore for the sake of pure machtpolitik. Macht prefers secrecy and coercion, and we already well know how that always ends. After Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and the Fukushima disaster, the last thing the world needs is another nuclear catastrophe. Additionally, clear ambitions are present in Armenia to develop and acquire nuclear capabilities. For more than one reason, that is an extremely dangerous endeavor to pursue—not just for the region and adjacent countries, but also for a world that should be evolving towards a nuclear-free future instead. Consequently, we must do all we can to prevent yet another blow to an already shaky Non-Proliferation Treaty. Conclusively, the Caucasus is full of frozen yet unresolved, highly polarizing, toxic and potentially inflammable conflicts. We also have to be aware that the raging flames of instability from Syria and Iraq are not far away. We do not need another nuclear inferno. It is high time to localize the overheated blaze of the Middle East. A good start would be stabilizing the Caucasus in a just, fair and sustainable way. 46 - 47 -Central Asia conflict will escalate to US-Russian nuclear war. 48 -McDermott 11—Roger McDermott, Honorary senior fellow, department of politics and international relations, university of Kent at Canterbury and senior fellow in Eurasian military studies, Jamestown Foundation December 6, 2011, “General Makarov Highlights the “Risk” of Nuclear Conflict,” Eurasia Daily Monitor, http://www.jamestown.org/programs/edm/single/?tx_ttnews5Btt_news5D=38748andtx_ttnews5BbackPid5D=27andcHash=dfb6e8da90b34a10f50382157e9bc117 49 -In the current election season the Russian media has speculated that the Defense Minister AnatoliySerdyukov may be replaced, possibly by Dmitry Rogozin, Russia’s Ambassador to NATO, which masks deeper anxiety about the future direction of the Armed Forces. The latest rumors also partly reflect uncertainty surrounding how the switch in the ruling tandem may reshuffle the pack in the various ministries, as well as concern about managing complex processes in Russian defense planning. On November 17, Russia’s Chief of the General Staff, Army-General Nikolai Makarov, offered widely reported comments on the potential for nuclear conflict erupting close to the country’s borders. His key observation was controversial, based on estimating that thepotential for armed conflict along the entire Russian periphery had grown dramatically over the past twenty years (Profil, December 1; MoskovskiyKomsomolets, November 28; Interfax, November 17). During his speech to the Defense Ministry’s Public Council on the progress and challenges facing the effort to reform and modernize Russia’s conventional Armed Forces, Makarov linked the potential for local or regional conflict to escalate into large-scale warfare “possibly even with nuclear weapons.” Many Russian commentators were bewildered by this seemingly “alarmist” perspective. However, they appear to have misconstrued the general’s intention, since he was actually discussing conflict escalation (Interfax, ITAR-TASS, November 17; MoskovskiyKomsomolets, KrasnayaZvezda, November 18). Makarov’s remarks, particularly in relation to the possible use of nuclear weapons in war, were quickly misinterpreted. Three specific aspects of the context in which Russia’s most senior military officer addressed the issue of a potential risk of nuclear conflict may serve to necessitate wider dialogue about the dangers of escalation. There is little in his actual assertion about the role of nuclear weapons in Russian security policy that would suggest Moscow has revised this; in fact, Makarov stated that this policy is outlined in the 2010 Military Doctrine, though he understandably made no mention of its classified addendum on nuclear issues (Kommersant, November 18). Russian media coverage was largely dismissive of Makarov’s observations, focusing on the idea that he may have represented the country as being surrounded by enemies. According to Kommersant, claiming to have seen the materials used during his presentation, armed confrontation with the West could occur partly based on the “anti-Russian policy” pursued by the Baltic States and Georgia, which may equally undermine Moscow’s future relations with NATO. Military conflict may erupt in Central Asia, caused by instability in Afghanistan or Pakistan; or western intervention against a nuclear Iran or North Korea; energy competition in the Arctic or foreign inspired“color revolutions” similar to the Arab Springand the creation of a European Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) system that could undermine Russia’s strategic nuclear deterrence also featured in this assessment of the strategic environment (Kommersant, November 18). Since the reform of Russia’s conventional Armed Forces began in late 2008, Makarov has consistently promoted adopting network-centric capabilities to facilitate the transformation of the military and develop modern approaches to warfare. Keen to displace traditional Russian approaches to warfare, and harness military assets in a fully integrated network, Makarov possibly more than any senior Russian officer appreciates that the means and methods of modern warfare have changed and are continuing to change (Zavtra, November 23; Interfax, November 17). The contours of this evolving and unpredictable strategic environment, with the distinctions between war and peace often blurred, interface precisely in the general’s expression of concern about nuclear conflict: highlighting the risk of escalation. However, such potential escalation is linked to the reduced time involved in other actors deciding to intervene in a local crisis as well as the presence of network-centric approaches among western militaries and being developed by China and Russia. From Moscow’s perspective, NATO “out of area operations” from Kosovo to Libya blur the traditional red lines in escalation; further complicated if any power wishes to pursue intervention in complex cases such as Syria. Potential escalation resulting from local conflict, following a series of unpredictable second and third order consequences, makes Makarov’s comments seem more understandable; it is not so much a portrayal of Russia surrounded by “enemies,” as a recognition that, with weak conventional Armed Forces, in certain crises Moscow may have few options at its disposal (Interfax, November 17). There is also the added complication of a possibly messy aftermath of the US and NATO drawdown from Afghanistan and signs that the Russian General Staff takes Central Asian security much more seriously in this regard. The General Staff cannot know whether the threat environment in the region may suddenly change. Makarov knows the rather limited conventional military power Russia currently possesses, which may compel early nuclear first use likely involving sub-strategic weapons, in an effort to “de-escalate” an escalating conflict close to Russia’s borders. Moscow no longer primarily fears a theoretical threat of facing large armies on its western or eastern strategic axes; instead the information-era reality is that smaller-scale intervention in areas vital to its strategic interests may bring the country face-to-face with a network-centric adversary capable of rapidly exploiting its conventional weaknesses. As Russia plays catch-up in this technological and revolutionary shift in modern warfare capabilities, the age-old problem confronts the General Staff: the fastest to act is the victor (See EDM, December 1). Consequently, Makarov once again criticized the domestic defense industry for offering the military inferior quality weapons systems. Yet, as speed and harnessing C4ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) become increasingly decisive factors in modern warfare, the risks for conflict escalation demand careful attention—especially when the disparate actors possess varied capabilities. Unlike other nuclear powers, Russia has to consider the proximity of several nuclear actors close to its borders. In the coming decade and beyond, Moscow may pursue dialogue with other nuclear actors on the nature of conflict escalation and de-escalation. However, with a multitude of variables at play ranging from BMD, US Global Strike capabilities, uncertainty surrounding the “reset” and the emergence of an expanded nuclear club, and several potential sources of instability and conflict, any dialogue must consider escalation in its widest possible context. Makarov’s message during his presentation, as far as the nuclear issue is concerned, was therefore a much tougher bone than the old dogs of the Cold War would wish to chew on. 50 -Iran prolif causes nuke war – miscalc and rapid escalation. 51 -Goldberg 12 Jeffrey (Bloomberg View columnist and a national correspondent for the Atlantic.) “How Iran Could Trigger Accidental Armageddon: Jeffrey Goldberg” January 23rd 2012 Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2012-01-24/how-iran-may-trigger-accidental-armageddon-commentary-by-jeffrey-goldberg 52 -Jan. 24 (Bloomberg) ~-~- One of the arguments often made in favor of bombing Iran to cripple its nuclear program is this: The mullahs in Tehran are madmen who believe it is their consecrated duty to destroy the perfidious Zionist entity (which is to say, Israel) and so are building nuclear weapons to launch at Tel Aviv at the first favorable moment. It’s beyond a doubt that the Iranian regime would like to bring about the destruction of Israel. However, the mullahs are also cynics and men determined, more than anything, to maintain their hold on absolute power. Which is why it’s unlikely that they would immediately use their new weapons against Israel. An outright attack on Israel - - a country possessing as many as 200 nuclear weapons and sophisticated delivery systems ~-~- would lead to the obliteration of Tehran, the deaths of millions, and the destruction of Iran’s military and industrial capabilities. The mullahs know this. But here’s the problem: It may not matter. The threat of a deliberate nuclear attack pales in comparison with the chance that a nuclear-armed Iran could accidentally trigger a cataclysmic exchange with Israel. WARP-SPEED ESCALATION The experts who study this depressing issue seem to agree that a Middle East in which Iran has four or five nuclear weapons would be dangerously unstable and prone to warp-speed escalation. Here’s one possible scenario for the not-so-distant future: Hezbollah, Iran’s Lebanese proxy, launches a cross-border attack into Israel, or kills a sizable number of Israeli civilians with conventional rockets. Israel responds by invading southern Lebanon, and promises, as it has in the past, to destroy Hezbollah. Iran, coming to the defense of its proxy, warns Israel to cease hostilities, and leaves open the question of what it will do if Israel refuses to heed its demand. Dennis Ross, who until recently served as President Barack Obama’s Iran point man on the National Security Council, notes Hezbollah’s political importance to Tehran. “The only place to which the Iranian government successfully exported the revolution is to Hezbollah in Lebanon,” Ross told me. “If it looks as if the Israelis are going to destroy Hezbollah, you can see Iran threatening Israel, and they begin to change the readiness of their forces. This could set in motion a chain of events that would be like ‘Guns of August’ on steroids.” Imagine that Israel detects a mobilization of Iran’s rocket force or the sudden movement of mobile missile launchers. Does Israel assume the Iranians are bluffing, or that they are not? And would Israel have time to figure this out? Or imagine the opposite: Might Iran, which will have no second-strike capability for many years ~-~- that is, no reserve of nuclear weapons to respond with in an exchange ~-~- feel compelled to attack Israel first, knowing that it has no second chance? Bruce Blair, the co-founder of the nuclear disarmament group Global Zero and an expert on nuclear strategy, told me that in a sudden crisis Iran and Israel might each abandon traditional peacetime safeguards, making an accidental exchange more likely. “A confrontation that brings the two nuclear-armed states to a boiling point would likely lead them to raise the launch-readiness of their forces ~-~- mating warheads to delivery vehicles and preparing to fire on short notice,” he said. “Missiles put on hair-trigger alert also obviously increase the danger of their launch and release on false warning of attack ~-~- false indications that the other side has initiated an attack.” Then comes the problem of misinterpreted data, Blair said. “Intelligence failures in the midst of a nuclear crisis could readily lead to a false impression that the other side has decided to attack, and induce the other side to launch a preemptive strike.” ‘COGNITIVE BIAS’ Blair notes that in a crisis it isn’t irrational to expect an attack, and this expectation makes it more likely that a leader will read the worst into incomplete intelligence. “This predisposition is a cognitive bias that increases the danger that one side will jump the gun on the basis of incorrect information,” he said. Ross told me that Iran’s relative proximity to Israel and the total absence of ties between the two countries ~-~- the thought of Iran agreeing to maintain a hot line with a country whose existence it doesn’t recognize is far-fetched ~-~- make the situation even more hazardous. “This is not the Cold War,” he said. “In this situation we don’t have any communications channels. Iran and Israel have zero communications. And even in the Cold War we nearly had a nuclear war. We were much closer than we realized.” The answer to this predicament is to deny Iran nuclear weapons, but not through an attack on its nuclear facilities, at least not now. “The liabilities of preemptive attack on Iran’s nuclear program vastly outweigh the benefits,” Blair said. “But certainly Iran’s program must be stopped before it reaches fruition with a nuclear weapons delivery capability.” Ross argues that the Obama administration’s approach ~-~- the imposition of steadily more debilitating sanctions ~-~- may yet work. There’s a chance, albeit slim, that he may be right: New sanctions are just beginning to bite and, combined with an intensified cyberwar and sabotage efforts, they might prove costly enough to deter Tehran. But opponents of military action make a mistake in arguing that a nuclear Iran is a containable problem. It is not. 53 - 54 -Advantage 3- Armenia-Turkey Relations 55 -1:02 56 -Armenia/Turkey Relations are strained- there has been a recent outbreak of anti-Armenia sentiment after German recognition of the Armenian genocide- action needs to be taken now. MacDonald 16 Alex MacDonald, New Footage Implicates Alleged Coup Plotters in Dink Murder, 2016, http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/new-footage-implicates-alleged-coup-plotters-murder-turkish-armenian-activist-791069797 Activists have warned that Armenians in Turkey continue to face suspicion and discrimination. A poll released in 2011 suggested that 73.9 of Turks held negative views about Armenians, just ahead of Jews and Greeks. Some Armenians have expressed fear over a surge in nationalist sentiment in Turkey, which often targets Armenians. “I stopped wearing my necklace that has an ornamental cross on it a few months back. Not because I wanted to but due to fear,” said Turkish-Armenian Jaklin Solakyan, speaking to Middle East Eye in April. “I am really fed up of being denigrated and discriminated against. This is my country, and I am an equal citizen. Why do we need to be constantly targeted because we are minorities?” In particular, the issue of the Armenian genocide is a taboo subject in Turkey, where the government continues to argue that the killings that took place in 1915 did not constitute a genocide and saw an equal number of Turks, Kurds and Armenians killed. Turkish government officials threatened to break off ties with Germany after the parliament voted to recognise the Armenian genocide in early June. 57 -Also means another impact of the aff is Armenia Turkish improve relations would help alleviate conditions of systemic racism in Turkey. 58 -Banning Metsamor is key to maintaining Turkey-Armenia relations. Daily News 14 Turkey wants nuclear plant in Armenia to be shut down. http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkey-wants-nuclear-plant-in-armenia-to-be-shut-down~-~-~-~-~-~-.aspx?pageID=238andnid=63928 59 -The Metsamor nuclear power plant in Armenia is outdated and should be urgently closed down, Turkish Energy Minister Taner Yıldız has said, re-voicing concerns about the safety of the plant. Speaking with reporters during a visit to the Turkish province of Iğdır near Turkey’s eastern border on March 21, Yıldız said Turkey had sent an official appeal to the International Atomic Energy Agency concerning the shutdown of the plant. “The nuclear plant, which was put online in 1980, has had a lifespan of 30 years. This plant has expired and should be immediately closed,” Yıldız said. He stressed Metsamor is just 16 kms away from Turkey’s border, and it was necessary to bring the issue to international attention and obtain support for the plant’s closure. 60 -Armenia-Turkey relations are key to both improving Turkish relations to other countries and improving economic growth in Armenia. Giragosain 09 http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/georgien/06380.pdf Changing Armenia-Turkish Relations February 2009 Richard Giragosian is Director of the Armenian Centre for National and International Studies (ACNIS) in Yerewan. After nearly a decade and a half of tense relations, closed borders and a lack of diplomatic relations, Armenia and Turkey are moving quickly to normalize relations. Following an official invitation extended in July 2008 by Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian, Turkish President Abdullah Gul became the first-ever Turkish head of state to visit Armenia. The September 2008 visit marked the public opening of a new process of engagement after months of secret meetings between Armenian and Turkish officials in Switzerland. The changing relationship between Armenia and Turkey can result in a “win-win” situation for both countries. For Armenia, it provides a much-needed foreign policy success and a new economic opportunity. For Turkey a possible rapprochement in Turkish-Armenian relations would do much to improve Turkey’s standing in the eyes of both the European Union and the United States. A border opening and subsequent diplomatic relations would enhance Turkey’s record of domestic reform. Just as crucially, the regional landscape has also changed in the wake of the August 2008 conflict in Georgia, offering a new impetus for opening the Armenian-Turkish border and heralding a new level of Russian support for a breakthrough between Armenia and Turkey. 61 -US-Turkey relations key to create Middle East stability which prevents radical violence. UPI 13 http://www.upi.com/Israel-seeks-to-repair-ties-with-Turkey/38621361997592/?spt=suThe Americans are keen for strategic reasons to have the two non-Arab military powers in the eastern Mediterranean back together to possibly restore a modicum of stability in a region that's swirling with conflict, sectarian hatreds and political turmoil. Obama is to visit Israel in March. Kerry is on his maiden trip as top U.S. diplomat and is to visit Ankara, where he's expected to raise the issue of Turkish-Israeli relations. There appears to be an effort by both sides to patch up a relationship, encouraged by the United States which viewed the Turkey-Israeli alliance as vitally important for regional stability. 62 -Advantage 4- Terrorism 63 -Nuclear waste products and uranium are being stolen from Armenia’s nuclear power plant now. That causes dirty bombs and nuclear terror- also means the dangers surrounding Metsamor are no longer regional. 64 -Murinson 16 Alexander “The other nuclear threat” Washington Times May 3rd 2016 http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/may/3/alexander-murinson-armenias-nuclear-threat/ Conversely, it seems that, rather unexpectedly, the summit reverberated quite loudly in the South Caucasus. Apparently, photo ops offered by the White House to regional leaders and the particularly warm welcome bestowed upon Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev, complete with substantive meetings with Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State John Kerry and congressional leaders, seems to have irritated Moscow. This expression of solidarity, close bilateral relations and strategic partnership between the United States and Azerbaijan exasperated the Kremlin to such an extent that before Mr. Aliyev even had the opportunity to return home, major hostilities broke out between Moscow-controlled and -backed Armenia and sovereign and independent Azerbaijan. Ever the “peacemaker,” Russian President Vladimir Putin helped restore a cease-fire several days later, clearly and visibly seizing the diplomatic initiative and generally making quite the self-serving show of the process and proceedings. Currently, another major concern seems to be arising in the Caucasus. Mere days ago, Georgian authorities reported the arrest of an elderly Georgian man and several Armenian nationals — alarmingly suspected of being current or former members of the Armenian Security Service — who were attempting to smuggle and illegally sell some $200 million worth of nuclear-grade materials. The highly radioactive U-238 can be used to produce a myriad of deadly and destructive apparatuses, not the least of which is a dreaded “dirty bomb.” 65 -The specter of a dirty bomb is of paramount concern for security services and counterterrorism officials worldwide. Internationally, the deep alarm of officials associated with the discovery of U-238 was compounded earlier this year when a group of individuals was discovered attempting to smuggle Cesium-137, a highly radioactive isotope that is a waste product from nuclear reactors. Some of this material entered Georgia through the separatist Russia-annexed enclave of South Ossetia and was traced back to Russian facilities. This adds much credence to constant complaints by Georgia and Azerbaijan related to the fact that their territories under separatist control, such as Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh and South Ossetia, are being used for all manner of illegal smuggling from nuclear material to arms to narcotics. Nagorno-Karabakh and the rest of the Azerbaijani territories occupied by Armenia, in particular, have another peculiarity of having an uncontrolled border with Iran. Not surprisingly, there are frequent reports of numerous Iranian trucks traveling in the area, usually under the cover of darkness and thought by many counterterrorism officials to be transporting illegal arms to and from Iran, the second of Armenia’s closest allies — Russia being Armenia’s closest ally. To substantially add to the threat emanating from Armenian nationals and Armenia is the presence in Armenia of an outdated Chernobyl-type nuclear reactor operating long past its original planned lifetime. This, when taken with the news from Georgia, elevates the nuclear alarm to a new level. Coincidentally (or not), the safety of Armenia’s aged reactor was discussed at the Nuclear Security Summit and notably in the presence of Mr. Obama and other world leaders. Two of the region’s most prominent leaders and both closely aligned with the United States, Azerbaijan’s Mr. Aliyev and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, spoke with apprehension about the reactor’s danger, sounding the alarm of the present and mounting dangers originating in Armenia. Armenian President Serj Sarkissian was quick to dismiss these concerns. However, if Armenia’s reactor is not only a safety threat, but potentially a source of radioactive material for a “dirty” bomb, as suggested by the recent foiled plots, then the problem is no longer limited to the Caucasus region. 66 - 67 -Terrorism causes extinction – defense mechanisms don’t check and a nuclear response is automated. 68 -Barrett et al 13—PhD in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University, Fellow in the RAND Stanton Nuclear Security Fellows Program, and Director of Research at Global Catastrophic Risk Institute—AND Seth Baum, PhD in Geography from Pennsylvania State University, Research Scientist at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, and Executive Director of Global Catastrophic Risk Institute—AND Kelly Hostetler, BS in Political Science from Columbia and Research Assistant at Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (Anthony, 24 June 2013, “Analyzing and Reducing the Risks of Inadvertent Nuclear War Between the United States and Russia,” Science and Global Security: The Technical Basis for Arms Control, Disarmament, and Nonproliferation Initiatives, Volume 21, Issue 2, Taylor and Francis) 69 -War involving significant fractions of the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, which are by far the largest of any nations, could have globally catastrophic effects such as severely reducing food production for years, 1 potentially leading to collapse of modern civilization worldwide, and even the extinction of humanity. 2 Nuclear war between the United States and Russia could occur by various routes, including accidental or unauthorized launch; deliberate first attack by one nation; and inadvertent attack. In an accidental or unauthorized launch or detonation, system safeguards or procedures to maintain control over nuclear weapons fail in such a way that a nuclear weapon or missile launches or explodes without direction from leaders. In a deliberate first attack, the attacking nation decides to attack based on accurate information about the state of affairs. In an inadvertent attack, the attacking nation mistakenly concludes that it is under attack and launches nuclear weapons in what it believes is a counterattack. 3 (Brinkmanship strategies incorporate elements of all of the above, in that they involve intentional manipulation of risks from otherwise accidental or inadvertent launches. 4 ) Over the years, nuclear strategy was aimed primarily at minimizing risks of intentional attack through development of deterrence capabilities, and numerous measures also were taken to reduce probabilities of accidents, unauthorized attack, and inadvertent war. For purposes of deterrence, both U.S. and Soviet/Russian forces have maintained significant capabilities to have some forces survive a first attack by the other side and to launch a subsequent counter-attack. However, concerns about the extreme disruptions that a first attack would cause in the other side's forces and command-and-control capabilities led to both sides’ development of capabilities to detect a first attack and launch a counter-attack before suffering damage from the first attack. 5 Many people believe that with the end of the Cold War and with improved relations between the United States and Russia, the risk of East-West nuclear war was significantly reduced. 6 However, it also has been argued that inadvertent nuclear war between the United States and Russia has continued to present a substantial risk. 7 While the United States and Russia are not actively threatening each other with war, they have remained ready to launch nuclear missiles in response to indications of attack. 8 False indicators of nuclear attack could be caused in several ways. First, a wide range of events have already been mistakenly interpreted as indicators of attack, including weather phenomena, a faulty computer chip, wild animal activity, and control-room training tapes loaded at the wrong time. 9 Second, terrorist groups or other actors might cause attacks on either the United States or Russia that resemble some kind of nuclear attack by the other nation by actions such as exploding a stolen or improvised nuclear bomb, 10 especially if such an event occurs during a crisis between the United States and Russia. 11 A variety of nuclear terrorism scenarios are possible. 12 Al Qaeda has sought to obtain or construct nuclear weapons and to use them against the United States. 13 Other methods could involve attempts to circumvent nuclear weapon launch control safeguards or exploit holes in their security. 14 It has long been argued that the probability of inadvertent nuclear war is significantly higher during U.S.–Russian crisis conditions, 15 with the Cuban Missile Crisis being a prime historical example. It is possible that U.S.–Russian relations will significantly deteriorate in the future, increasing nuclear tensions. There are a variety of ways for a third party to raise tensions between the United States and Russia, making one or both nations more likely to misinterpret events as attacks. 16 70 -Solvency 71 -:14 72 -Renewable Resources specifically in Armenia can solve energy crisis- they can take up half the energy grid by 2020. Vorotnikov 13 Vladislav Vorotnikov, Renewable Resources will help Armenia avoid Energy Crisis. http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/articles/2013/07/renewable-resources-will-help-armenia-avoid-energy-crisis.html Yerevan, Armenia Armenia is set to develop its renewable energy resources in the coming years, announced its deputy minister of energy and natural resources Areg Galstyan. It will set its focus mainly on hydropower plants, but it will put some emphasis on solar energy, as well. However the government is hesitant towards the development of its wind sector. The Armenian government is taking renewables development very seriously as it has little to no traditional fuel reserves. Without the alternative energy, the country could face serious crisis in coming decades. "Armenia is highly dependent on imported gas and other energy sources. Today the share of renewable resources in the total energy structure of the country accounts for 23 percent,” according to the Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources. “We expect that by 2020 this figure should exceed 50 percent.” - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,111 +1,0 @@ 1 -Part 1: Framework 2 - 3 -I affirm and value morality. 4 - 5 -1. Global justice requires a reduction in inequality and a focus on material rights. 6 -Okereke 07 Chukwumerije Okereke (Senior Research Associate at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia). Global Justice and Neoliberal Environmental Governance. Routledge 2007 7 -Notwithstanding these drawbacks, these scholars provide very compelling arguments against mainstream conceptions of justice 8 -AND 9 -satisfy their aspirations for a better life. (WCED 1987: 43). 10 - 11 -2. Structural violence is underrepresented in conventional thinking – you must include it as most important in your impact calculus. 12 -Nixon 11 Rob, Rachel Carson Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, pgs. 2-3 13 -Three primary concerns 14 -AND 15 -but gradually degraded. 16 - 17 -The standard is minimizing structural violence. 18 - 19 -Part 2: Inherency 20 - 21 -Japan has restarted its nuclear facilities, opening the door for more reopenings. 22 - 23 -19 reactors will be operational in Japan by 2018 by standard predictions 24 -WNN 7/28 World Nuclear News, “Japanese institute sees 19 reactor restarts by March 2018,” July 28 2016, http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NP-Japanese-institute-sees-19-reactor-restarts-by-March-2018-2807164.html 25 -Seven Japanese nuclear AND 26 -52 million tonnes CO2. 27 - 28 -Plan Text: The national government of Japan will ban the production of nuclear power. I defend normal means described in solvency advocate. I reserve the right to clarify. 29 -CCNE 13 Citizens’ Commission on Nuclear Energy, Organization Aiming at Fundamental Reform of Nuclear Energy Policy, “Our path to a nuclear-free Japan: an interim report Executive Summary,” October 2013 30 -Given the Fukushima 31 -AND 32 -with the aim 33 -Normal means entails phase out, shifting to climate friendly energy, and alleviating negative economic effects of removing nuclear power 34 -CCNE 13 Citizens’ Commission on Nuclear Energy, Organization Aiming at Fundamental Reform of Nuclear Energy Policy, “Our path to a nuclear-free Japan: an interim report Executive Summary,” October 2013 35 -3.2 Review of nuclear 36 -AND 37 -standards require fundamental reviews. 38 - 39 -Current nuclear safety protocol is insufficient even in the wake of Fukushima – the impact is devastating, and only the plan solves 40 -Lucas 12 Caroline Lucas, MP for Brighton Pavilion and a member of the cross-party parliamentary environment audit committee, “Why we must phase out nuclear power,” The Guardian, February 17, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/feb/17/phase-out-nuclear-power 41 -Fukushima, like Chernobyl 42 -AND 43 -an airplane crash. 44 - 45 -Part 3: Advantages 46 - 47 -Advantage 1: Racism and Classism 48 - 49 -Racial minorities in Japan are consistently the victims of nuclear radiation and are sacrificial lambs when disasters occur 50 -Shrader-Frechette 12 Kristin Shrader-Frechette, O’Neill Family Endowed Professor, Department of Biological Sciences and Department of Philosophy, and also the director of the Center for Environmental Justice and Children’s Health, at the University of Notre Dame, “Nuclear Catastrophe, Disaster-Related Environmental Injustice, and Fukushima, Japan: Prima-Facie Evidence for a Japanese ‘‘Katrina’’” ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE Volume 5, Number 3, 2012 51 -Prima-facie evidence AND 52 -DREI toward buraku. 53 - 54 -The poor are also unjustly victims of radiation structural violence 55 -Shrader-Frechette 12 Kristin Shrader-Frechette, O’Neill Family Endowed Professor, Department of Biological Sciences and Department of Philosophy, and also the director of the Center for Environmental Justice and Children’s Health, at the University of Notre Dame, “Nuclear Catastrophe, Disaster-Related Environmental Injustice, and Fukushima, Japan: Prima-Facie Evidence for a Japanese ‘‘Katrina’’” ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE Volume 5, Number 3, 2012 56 -University scientists, nuclear-industry 57 -AND 58 -become DREI victims. 59 - 60 -Advantage 2: Mental illness 61 - 62 -Meta-review of the literature indicates that PTSD and mental stress rates increased as a result of the Fukushima disaster 63 -Harada et al 15 Nahoko Harada, Division of Nursing, School of Medicine, National Defense Medical College, “Mental health and psychological impacts from the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake Disaster: a systematic literature review,” Disaster and Military MedicineThe Journal of Prehospital, Trauma and Emergency Care, 2015 64 -Our review compiled 65 -AND 66 -,the context of grief. 67 - 68 -Mentally ill face social stigma in Japan 69 -Ando et al 13 Shuntaro Ando, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science, Tokyo, Japan, “Review of mental-health-related stigma in Japan,” Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, September 30, 2013 70 -In Japan, the AND 71 -and (iv) offer direct social contact with people with mental illness. 72 - 73 -The Role of the Judge is to reject ableism 74 -Cherney 11 (James L., Wayne State University, “The Rhetoric of Ableism”, Disability Studies Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 3, http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1665/1606) 75 -If we locate 76 - 77 -awareness and political action. 78 - 79 -“Normality” is the justification for oppression 80 -Baynton 2013 (Douglas C, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History”, The Disability Studies Reader 17 (2013): 33-57.) 81 -The metaphor of the 82 -AND 83 -tandem with disability.4 84 - 85 -Part 4: Underview 86 -Aff gets RVIs 87 - 88 -2. Social injustice is the root of mass-scale violence – it primes society for external violence. 89 - Scheper-Hughes 04 (Scheper-Hughes 4 (Prof of Anthropology @ Cal-Berkely; Prof of Anthropology @ UPenn) (Nancy and Philippe, Introduction: Making Sense of Violence, in Violence in War and Peace, pg. 19-22) 90 -This large and at first sight “messy” Part VII is central to this 91 -AND 92 -including the house gun and gated communities; and reversed feelings of victimization). 93 - 94 -3. Structural Violence outweighs under util : 95 -Winter and Leighton 99 (Deborah DuNann Winter and Dana C. Leighton. Winter: Psychologist that specializes in Social Psych, Counseling Psych, Historical and Contemporary Issues, Peace Psychology. Leighton: PhD graduate student in the Psychology Department at the University of Arkansas. Knowledgable in the fields of social psychology, peace psychology, and ustice and intergroup responses to transgressions of justice) (Peace, conflict, and violence: Peace psychology in the 21st century. Pg 4-5, 1999) 96 - 97 -Finally, to recognize 98 -and 99 -citizens to reduce it. 100 - 101 -4. Withdrawal from the state triggers authoritarian impacts 102 -Boggs 2K Carl Boggs, Professor of Social Sciences at National University in Los Angeles, Adjunct Professor at Antioch University in Los Angeles, “The End of Politics,” 2000 103 -But it is a very deceptive and misleading minimalism. While Oakeshott debunks political mechanisms 104 -AND 105 -run counter to the facile antirationalism of Oakeshott’s Burkean muddling-through theories. 106 - 107 -5. the state’s logic is necessary to solve critical problems 108 -Kapoor 8 Ilan Kapoor, Professor of Critical Development Studies at the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, Toronto, Canada, “The Postcolonial Politics of Development,” 2008 109 -There are perhaps several other social movement campaigns that could be cited as examples of 110 -AND 111 -made it difficult for the state to quash them or deflect their claims. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,74 +1,0 @@ 1 -1AC Kant 2 -I value morality, which must stem from practical reason. 3 -Something qualifies as an action and not a mere event only if it is constituted by practical reason. Rodl Sebastian. Self-Consciousness, Harvard University Press, 2000: 4 -Calculation from desire 5 -AND 6 -the authority of reasons. 7 - 8 - 9 -analytics 10 - 11 -In order to prevent one's own freedom from being violated, agents must submit to a system of reciprocal constraints on their own freedom since the omnilateral will is the only way to ensure that freedom can be universal. 12 -Ripstein Arthur. Force and Freedom: Kant's Legal and Political Philosophy. Harvard University 13 -These difficulties for 14 -AND 15 -adjudication under law. 16 - 17 -Thus, the standard is maintaining the omnilateral will. If the government acts to hinder a violation of outer freedom, that is not an act of coercion, it is just a restoration of the rightful condition. Prefer since agency can only be possible by recognizing the same freedom of others—the process of gaining self-consciousness logically commits agents to recognizing universal rights to independence. Neuhouser, Frederick. Introuction to Foundations of Natural Right by Johann Fitche, 2000 18 -The deduction's second theorem makes 19 -AND 20 -to other rational beings. 21 - 22 -analytics 23 -analytics 24 -analytics 25 - 26 -Contention 1 = Tort Law 27 - 28 -Tort law is key to equal freedom. 29 -Ripstein 4 Arthur "Tort, The Division of Responsibility and the Law of Tort" Fordham Law Review Vol. 72 Issue 5 Article 21 30 -This brings us back to the law of tort. Almost anything I do will 31 -AND 32 -to your ability to set and pursue your own conception of the good. 33 - 34 - 35 -In any legal system of rights, plaintiffs must be allowed to sue defendants. 36 -Weinrib 02 Ernest J. Weinrib "Corrective Justice in a Nutshell" The University of Toronto Law Journal, Vol. 52, No. 4 (Autumn, 2002), pp. 349-356 http://www.jstor.org/stable/825933 37 -In sophisticated systems of private law, the overarching justificatory categories expressive of correlativity are 38 -AND 39 -the same as the reasons that justify the existence of the defendant's duty. 40 - 41 - 42 -Qualified immunity protects officials from civil suits. 43 -Chen 15 Alan K. Chen is the William M. Beaney Memorial Research Chair and professor of law at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, where he teaches courses in constitutional law, federal courts, and public interest law. An experienced civil rights litigator and former ACLU staff attorney, Professor Chen continues to do pro bono work in constitutional rights cases. "Qualified Immunity Liming Access to Justice and Impeding Development of the Law" Human Rights Magazine Home 2015 (Vol. 41) Vol. 41, No. 1 - Lurking in the Shadows: the Supreme Court's Quiet Attack on Civil Rights http://www.americanbar.org/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/2015—vol—41-/vol—41—no—1—-lurking-in-the-shadows—the-supreme-court-s-qui/qualified-immunity-limiting-access-to-justice-and-impeding-devel.html 44 -Savana sued the school personnel 45 -AND 46 -law." Safford, 557 U.S. at 378–79. 47 - 48 - 49 -Contention 2 = Accountability 50 - 51 - 52 -Violations of equal freedom necessitate punishment and accountability for the wrongdoer. 53 -Ripstein 6 Arthur Ripstein (Professor of Law and Philosophy, University of Toronto) "Private Order and Public Justice: Kant and Rawls" U Toronto, Legal Studies Research Paper No. 894431 Virginia Law Review, Vol. 92, No. 7, 2006 April 4th 2006 http://www.law.utoronto.ca/documents/Ripstein/privateorder_publicjustice.pdf JW 54 -Normatively, the law remains supreme even in the face of violation. Kant's technical 55 -AND 56 -alone. Her hindrance to freedom is thus hindered by sealing it off. 57 - 58 - 59 -Qualified immunity makes police accountability impossible. If you kill someone, there should be ramifications. 60 -Chemerinsky 14 Erwin (dean of the School of Law at the University of California, Irvine, is the author of the forthcoming book "The Case Against the Supreme Court.") "How the Supreme Court Protects Bad Cops" The New York Times August 26^^th^^ 2014 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/opinion/how-the-supreme-court-protects-bad-cops.html 61 -When there is not absolute immunity, police officers are still protected by "qualified 62 -AND 63 -how many more riots will it take before the Supreme Court changes course? 64 - 65 - 66 -Even if there are specific cases in which qualified immunity creates just outcomes, the state must first ensure that there are just procedures. 67 -Korsgaard 8 Christine "Taking the Law into Our Own Hands: Kant on the Right to Revolution" The Constitution of Agency: Essays on Practical Reason and Moral Psychology Oxford University Press http://www.klindeman.com/uploads/3/8/2/2/38221431/korsgaard_-_taking_the_law_into_our_own_hands.pdf 68 -This reading, however, does not sit well with the obviously Platonic character of 69 -AND 70 -normatively speaking, we must stand by their actual results. 71 - 72 - 73 -UV 74 -Aff gets rvis - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,38 +1,0 @@ 1 -Whiteness coheres itself within institutions through habitual repetitions – the body creates the space and the space creates the body– the nonrecognication of the whiteness inherent with the space is what allows whiteness to manifest itself in the first place and makes whiteness comfortable because it is invisible. The speech act became an object the moment we started the 1AC – this space is inevitably political to us and marks our bodies as hypervisible. 2 -Ahmed 07 – Ahmed, Sara. "A phenomenology of whiteness." Feminist theory 8.2 (2007): 149-168. 3 -We need to examine not only how bodies become white, or fail to do so, but also how spaces can take on the very ‘qualities’ that are given to such bodies. In a way, we can think about the habitual as a form of inheritance. It is not so much that we inherit habits, although we can do so: rather the habitual can be thought of as a bodily and spatial form of inheritance. As Pierre Bourdieu (1977) shows us, we can link habits to what is unconscious, and routine, or what becomes ‘second nature’.3 To describe whiteness as a habit, as second nature, is to suggest that whiteness is what bodies do, where the body takes the shape of the action. Habits are not ‘exterior’ to bodies, as things that can be ‘put on’ or ‘taken off’. If habits are about what bodies do, in ways that are repeated, then they might also shape what bodies can do. For Merleau-Ponty, the habitual body is a body that acts in the world, where actions bring other things near. As he puts it: my body appears to me as an attitude directed towards a certain existing or possible task. And indeed its spatiality is not, like that of external objects or like that of ‘spatial sensations’, a spatiality of position, but a spatiality of situation. If I stand in front of my desk and lean on it with both hands, only my hands are stressed and the whole of the body trails behind them like the tail of a comet. It is not that I am unaware of the whereabouts of my shoulder or back, but these are simply swallowed up in the position of my hands, and my whole posture can be read so to speak in the pressure they exert on the table. (2002: 114–5, emphasis in original) Here, the directedness of the body towards an action (which we have discovered also means an orientation towards certain kinds of objects) is how the body ‘appears’.4 The body is ‘habitual’ not only in the sense that it performs actions repeatedly, but in the sense that when it performs such actions, it does not command attention, apart from at the ‘surface’ where it ‘encounters’ an external object (such as the hands that lean on the desk or table, which feel the ‘stress’ of the action). In other words, the body is habitual insofar as it ‘trails behind’ in the performing of action, insofar as it does not pose ‘a problem’ or an obstacle to the action, or is not ‘stressed’ by ‘what’ the action encounters. For Merleau-Ponty, the habitual body does not get in the way of an action: it is behind the action. I want to suggest here that whiteness could be understood as ‘the behind’. White bodies are habitual insofar as they ‘trail behind’ actions: they do not get ‘stressed’ in their encounters with objects or others, as their whiteness ‘goes unnoticed’. Whiteness would be what lags behind; white bodies do not have to face their whiteness; they are not orientated ‘towards’ it, and this ‘not’ is what allows whiteness to cohere, as that which bodies are orientated around. When bodies ‘lag behind’, then they extend their reach. It becomes possible to talk about the whiteness of space given the very accumulation of such ‘points’ of extension. Spaces acquire the ‘skin’ of the bodies that inhabit them. What is important to note here is that it is not just bodies that are orientated. Spaces also take shape by being orientated around some bodies, more than others. We can also consider ‘institutions’ as orientation devices, which take the shape of ‘what’ resides within them. After all, institutions provide collective or public spaces. When we describe institutions as ‘being’ white (institutional whiteness), we are pointing to how institutional spaces are shaped by the proximity of some bodies and not others: white bodies gather, and cohere to form the edges of such spaces. When I walk into university meetings that is just what I encounter. Sometimes I get used to it. At one conference we organize, four black feminists arrive. They all happen to walk into the room at the same time. Yes, we do notice such arrivals. The fact that we notice such arrivals tells us more about what is already in place than it does about ‘who’ arrives. Someone says: ‘it is like walking into a sea of whiteness’. This phrase comes up, and it hangs in the air. The speech act becomes an object, which gathers us around. So yes they walk into the room, and I notice that they were not there before, as a retrospective reoccupation of a space that I already inhabited. I look around, and re-encounter the sea of whiteness. As many have argued, whiteness is invisible and unmarked, as the absent centre against which others appear only as deviants, or points of deviation (Dyer, 1997; Frankenberg, 1993). Whiteness is only invisible for those who inhabit it, or those who get so used to its inhabitance that they learn not to see it, even when they are not it (see Ahmed, 2004b). Spaces are orientated ‘around’ whiteness, insofar as whiteness is not seen. We do not face whiteness; it ‘trails behind’ bodies, as what is assumed to be given. The effect of this ‘around whiteness’ is the institutionalization of a certain ‘likeness’, which makes non-white bodies feel uncomfortable, exposed, visible, different, when they take up this space. 4 -Oppressed womxn can’t do shit if they are stuck in the cycle of violence of internalized oppression—We are asked to challenge structures yet they have already rendered us powerless and silent—We need a structure to rupture these forms of psychological violence before we can take action 5 -Osajima – Keith Osajima. Keith Osajima teaches in the School of Education at the University of Redlands, specializing in race and the experiences of Asian American students in higher education. Internalized Oppression and the Culture of Silence: Rethinking the Stereotype of the Quiet Asian-American Student. De Anza College Political Science Department. http://nypolisci.org/files/PDF20FILES/Chapter20IV_209_20internalized20oppression20and20the20culture20of20silence20FEC2.pdf KTCR 6 -So how can we understand the quiet Asian student? How can we understand what some have called “situational non-assertiveness”? In this paper, I would like to suggest an analytic perspective that could provide some insights into quiet behavior of Asian-American students. It is a framework that tries to understand the silence of Asian students in relation to the dynamics of oppression they face as students and as members of a racial minority group. I argue that the silent, often unquestioning behavior of the Asian-American student can best be understood as a manifestation of what Erica Sherover-Marcuse calls “internalized oppression.” Let me begin the discussion with an overview of what I mean by this phrase. For those of us who are familiar with or have been involved in progressive social and political movements, we have become familiar with the forms and mechanisms of oppression in society. We recognize the sexism in media images of women; we know that Gay oppression takes many forms; we are aware that racial oppression accounts for the high dropout rates of black and Hispanic students, the high unemployment rates in minority communities, and recent violence against ethnic minorities. What is not well-known or examined is the impact that these oppressions have on people in the oppressed groups. How do the conditions of inequality and exploitation affect the subjective development of oppressed people? Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator famous for his literacy work with peasants, says that one of the most devastating effects of oppression is that it dehumanizes the oppressed people; that under the objective conditions of oppression people lose their ability to see themselves as individual human beings. Frantz Fanon, a psychologist who wrote extensively on the effects of colonialism on the colonized people of Algeria, elaborates on the dehumanizing effect of oppression when he says: “Because it is a systematic negation of the other person and a furious determination to deny the other person all attributes of humanity, colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly: In reality, who am ‘I’?” And how do the oppressed people generally answer this question? According to Albert Memmi, Tunisian author of The Colonizer and the Colonized, the oppressed internalize an identity that mirrors or echoes the images put forth by the dominant group. People come to accept the myths and stereotypes about their group as part of who they naturally are. This is the phenomenon of internalized oppression. Memmi writes: “Constantly confronted with this image of himself, set forth and imposed in all institutions and in every human contact, how could the colonized help reacting to his portrait? It cannot leave him indifferent and remain a veneer which, like an insult, blows with the wind. He ends up recognizing it as one would a detested nickname which has become a familiar description. The accusation disturbs him and worries him even more because he admires and fears his powerful accuser. ‘Is he not partially right?’ they mutter. ‘Are we not a little guilty after all? Lazy because we have so many idlers? Timid because we let ourselves be oppressed?’ Willfully created and spread by the colonizer, this mythical and degrading portrait ends up by being accepted and lived with to a certain extent by the colonized.” The impact of internalized oppression on the attitudes, feelings, and actions of the oppressed is profound. First, it hinders one’s ability to think and reflect. People have difficulty objectifying and perceiving the structural conditions that shape and reshape their lives. Second, oppressed people come to believe that the source of their problems lies, not in the relations within society, but in themselves, in their own inadequacies and inabilities. At the same time that they feel themselves to be inferior, they see those in the dominant group to be superior. Third, the feelings of inferiority, of uncertainty about one’s identity, lead oppressed people to believe that the solution to their problem is to become like or be accepted by those in the dominant group. As Freire says, “At a certain point in their existential experience the oppressed feel an irresistible attraction toward the oppressor and his way of life. Sharing this way of life becomes an overpowering aspiration. In their alienation, the oppressed want at any cost to resemble the oppressor, to imitate him, to follow him.” On the flip side of this desire to be like the oppressor is a degree of selfhatred, a belief that who they are is not good enough, smart enough, beautiful enough, strong enough. The overall impact of internalized oppression is that the oppressed become resigned to their situation and do not look critically at it. They feel powerless to change it, and fearful of taking the risks to make change. In this way, the status quo is not questioned nor challenged. Freire writes: “As long as the oppressed remain unaware of the causes of their conditions, they fatalistically accept their exploitation. Further, they are apt to react in a passive and alienated manner when confronted with the necessity to struggle for their freedom and self-affirmation.” They live in what Freire calls a “culture of silence,” where the oppressed believe and feel that they do not have a voice in determining the conditions of their world. The important outcome is that internalized oppression makes it difficult for the oppressed to take action to transform their world. It serves to perpetuate oppression, without necessarily resorting to overt forms of violence and force. The oppressed become unwitting participants in their own oppression. 7 -This creates friction – bodies are stopped and interrogated when they do not fit in the orientation of the space. Feminine speech in spaces of white supremacy becomes the incessant nag. This inequality makes debate impossible – unconscious and informal mechanisms of exclusion mean that participants aren’t on an even playing field. Even when minoritarian subjects do speak, they are not heard – addressing this social inequality is a prerequisite for further deliberation. 8 -Fraser 90 Fraser 90 *Edited for ableist rhetoric Nancy, Prof of Political and Social Science at the New School, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” Social Text 25/26, p.63-65 9 -Habermas's account of the bourgeois conception of the public sphere stresses its claim to be open and accessible to all. Indeed, this idea of open access is one of the central meanings of the norm of publicity. Of course, we know, both from the revisionist history and from Habermas's account, that the bourgeois public's claim to full accessibility was not in fact realized. Women of all classes and ethnicities were excluded from official political participation precisely on the basis of ascribed gender status, while plebeian men were formally excluded by property qualifications. Moreover, in many cases, women and men of racialized ethnicities of all classes were excluded on racial grounds. Now, what are we to make of this historical fact of the non-realization in practice of the bourgeois public sphere's ideal of open access? One approach is to conclude that the ideal itself remains unaffected, since it is possible in principle to overcome these exclusions. And, in fact, it was only a matter of time before formal exclusions based on gender, property, and race were eliminated. This is convincing enough as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. The question of open access cannot be reduced without remainder to the presence or absence of formal exclusions. It requires us to look also at the process of discursive interaction within formally inclusive public arenas. Here we should recall that the bourgeois conception of the public sphere requires bracketing inequalities of status. This public sphere was to be an arena in which interlocutors would set aside such characteristics as differences in birth and fortune and speak to one another as if they were social and economic peers. The operative phrase here is "as if." In fact, the social inequalities among the interlocutors were not eliminated, but only bracketed. But were they really effectively bracketed? The revisionist historiography suggests they were not. Rather, discursive interaction within the bourgeois public sphere was governed by protocols of style and decorum that were themselves correlates and markers of status inequality. These functioned informally to marginalize women and members of the plebeian classes and to prevent them from participating as peers. Here we are talking about informal impediments to participatory parity that can persist even after everyone is formally and legally licensed to participate. That these constitute a more serious challenge to the bourgeois conception of the public sphere can be seen from a familiar contemporary example. Feminist research has documented a syndrome that many of us have observed in faculty meetings and other mixed sex deliberative bodies: men tend to interrupt women more than women interrupt men; men also tend to speak more than women, taking more turns and longer turns; and women's interventions are more often ignored or not responded to than men's. In response to the sorts of experiences documented in this research, an important strand of feminist political theory has claimed that deliberation can serve as a mask for domination. Theorists like Jane Mansbridge have argued that "the transformation of 'I' into 'we' brought about through political deliberation can easily mask subtle forms of control. Even the language people use as they reason together usually favors one way of seeing things and discourages others. Subordinate groups sometimes cannot find the right voice or words to express their thoughts, and when they do, they discover they are not heard. They are silenced, encouraged to keep their wants inchoate, and heard to say 'yes' when what they have said is 'no.''""6 Mansbridge rightly notes that many of these feminist insights into ways in which deliberation can serve as a mask for domination extend beyond gender to other kinds of unequal relations, like those based on class or ethnicity. They alert us to the ways in which social inequalities can infect deliberation, even in the absence of any formal exclusions. Here I think we encounter a very serious difficulty with the bourgeois conception of the public sphere. Insofar as the bracketing of social inequalities in deliberation means proceeding as if they don't exist when they do, this does not foster participatory parity. On the contrary, such bracketing usually works to the advantage of dominant groups in society and to the disadvantage of subordinates. In most cases, it would be more appropriate to unbracket inequalities in the sense of explicitly thematizing them-a point that accords with the spirit of Habermas's later "communicative ethics." The misplaced faith in the efficacy of bracketing suggests another flaw in the bourgeois conception. This conception assumes that a public sphere is or can be a space of zero degree culture, so utterly bereft of any specific ethos as to accommodate with perfect neutrality and equal ease interventions expressive of any and every cultural ethos. But this assumption is counterfactual, and not for reasons that are merely accidental. In stratified societies, unequally empowered social groups tend to develop unequally valued cultural styles. The result is the development of powerful informal pressures that marginalize the contributions of members of subordinated groups both in everyday life contexts and in official public spheres.7 Moreover, these pressures are amplified, rather than mitigated, by the peculiar political economy of the bourgeois public sphere. In this public sphere, the media that constitute the material support for the circulation of views are privately owned and operated for profit. Consequently, subordinated social groups usually lack equal access to the material means of equal participation.'" Thus, political economy enforce structurally what culture accomplishes informally. If we take these considerations seriously, then we should be led to entertain serious doubts about a conception of the public sphere that purports to bracket, rather than to eliminate, structural social inequalities. We should question whether it is possible even in principle for interlocutors to deliberate as if they were social peers in specially designated discursive arenas, when these discursive arenas are situated in a larger societal context that is pervaded by structural relations of dominance and subordination. What is at stake here is the autonomy of specifically political institutions vis-,i-vis the surrounding societal context. Now, one salient feature that distinguishes liberalism from some other political-theoretical orientations is that liberalism assumes the autonomy of the political in a very strong form. Liberal political theory assumes that it is possible to organize a democratic form of political life on the basis of socio-economic and socio-sexual structures that generate systemic inequalities. For liberals, then, the problem of democracy becomes the problem of how to insulate political processes from what are considered to be non-political or pre-political processes, those characteristic, for example, of the economy, the family, and informal everyday life. The problem for liberals, thus, is how to strengthen the barriers separating political institutions that are supposed to instantiate relations of equality from economic, cultural, and socio-sexual institutions that are premised on systemic relations of inequality.'9 Yet the weight of circumstance suggests that in order to have a public sphere in which interlocutors can deliberate as peers, it is not sufficient merely to bracket social inequality. Instead, it is a necessary condition for participatory parity that systemic social inequalities be eliminated. This does not mean that everyone must have exactly the same income, but it does require the sort of rough equality that is inconsistent with systemically-generated relations of dominance and subordination. Pace liberalism, then, political democracy requires substantive social equality.20 So far, I have been arguing that the bourgeois conception of the public sphere is inadequate insofar as it supposes that social equality is not a necessary condition for participatory parity in public spheres. What follows from this for the critique of actually existing democracy? One task for critical theory is to render visible the ways in which societal inequality infects formally inclusive existing public spheres and taints discursive interaction within them. 10 - 11 -AND, this creates uneven energy distributions. Institutions deplete the energy of those it wants to exclude – the energy to get up, to keep fighting, to keep existing in spaces. 12 -Ahmed 13 Sara Ahmed "Feeling Depleted" November 17, 2013 Feminist Kill-Joy https://feministkilljoys.com/2013/11/17/feeling-depleted/ 13 -I am currently preparing a new lecture that I will be giving in Vienna next week, “Diversity work as Emotional Work.” I will be drawing on some old material that I published in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional life (2012). It is interesting going back because you arrive with a slightly different lens, and you notice things even in your own interview transcripts that you just hadn’t noticed before. I have so enjoyed it: that reminder that projects are never over, that our materials are as full of life as we are. Or maybe more full of life, because sometimes we can feel depleted. And that is what I am thinking about right now: feeling depleted. It is not that feelings are themselves being depleted (the rather economic model of emotions that is evident for instance in some uses of the concept of “compassion fatigue,” in which is it is assumed that emotions in being used are being used up) but that we can feel depleted. By saying “feeling depleted,” I am talking about a material as well as somatic phenomena: of not having the energy to keep going in the face of what you come up against. Thinking back to my project on diversity work, I realise now how much of the account I offered was of the uneven distribution of energy, of how some bodies become depleted because of institutional requirements and how this depletion “registers” at a bodily level how institutions become stuck. What do I mean by diversity work here? I am drawing on the model I offered in the conclusion of On Being Included. Firstly, diversity work can refer to work that has the explicit aim of transforming an institution; and secondly, diversity work can be what is required, or what we do, when we do not quite inhabit the norms of an institution. These two senses often meet in a body: those who do not quite inhabit the norms of the institution are often those given the task of transforming those norms. Some of us are given diversity as a task – becoming members of equality and diversity committees – because we are perceived as being diversity. When diversity becomes an invitation perhaps what is at stake is not so much who you are but who you are not: not white, not male, not straight, not able-bodied. If you are more than one of these “nots” you might end up on more than one committee! Embodying diversity can thus require additional work; the depletion of the energy of diversity workers is part of the embodied and institutional history of diversity. In an earlier blog “It is tiring, all that whiteness,” I alluded to this phenomena (here). I described the experience of relief of entering a room and not encountering what you usually encounter, all that whiteness: When you inhabit a “sea of brownness” as a person of colour you might realize the effort of your previous inhabitance, as the effort of not noticing what is around you. It is like how you can feel the “weight” of tiredness most acutely as the tiredness leaves you. To become conscious of how things leave you is to become conscious of those things. We might become even more aware of whiteness as wearing, when we leave the spaces of whiteness. When something is wearing, it is not always that you feel worn done. Feeling worn down can be a retrospective realization that you have been or are being worn down. It might be that in order to inhabit certain spaces we have to block recognition of just how wearing they are: when the feeling catches us, it might be at the point when it is just “too much.” You are shattered. Feeling worn down: I think feminist killjoys are familiar with this feeling, that sense of coming up against the same thing, whatever you say or do. We have, I think, in face of this feeling to think about how to protect ourselves (and those around us) from being diminished. Audre Lorde taught us that caring for one self can be “an act of political warfare” as a form of self-preservation not self-indulgence (1988: 131). There are “those of us,” she reminds us, who were “never meant to survive” (1978: 32). The relations we develop to restore, to replete, are world making. With each other we find ways of becoming re-energised in the face of the ongoing reality of what causes our sense of depletion (I am willing to use the language of causality here, causality as contact zone). We can recognize each other, find each other, create spaces of relief, spaces that might be breathing spaces, spaces in which we can be inventive. In Willful Subjects I reflected further on how tiredness (and depletion) can be unevenly distributed. In my discussion of habit and attunement in chapter 2, I drew on William James who quotes from the work of M. Léon Dumont to describe how over time a garment begins to cling more and more to the body that wears it. I think institutions could be thought of as rather like old garments: they acquire the shape of those who tend to wear them, such that they become easier to wear when you have that shape. Privilege could be thought of in these terms: another sense of wearing. Another of Dumont’s examples is the reduction over time of the force required to work a locking mechanism. The more you use a mechanism, the less effort is required; repetition smooths the passage of the key through the hole. James describes this reduction of force or effort as essential to the phenomenon of habituation. I would claim that the lessening of effort is essential to the phenomenon of privilege. If less effort is required to unlock the door for the key that fits the lock, so too less effort is required to pass through an institution for bodies that fit. I think of social privilege as an energy saving device: less effort is required to pass through. For other some bodies so much more effort is required to get through, to stand up; to stay standing. Sometimes you can only stand up by standing firm. Sometimes you can only hold on by becoming stubborn. A social standing can thus be a material standing. Audre Lorde once wrote: “In order to withstand the weather, we had to become stone” (1984: 160). It would be hard to overestimate the power of Lorde’s description. Social forms of oppression can be experienced as weather. They press and pound against the surface of a body; a body can surface or survive by hardening. For some bodies to stand is to withstand. We can be exhausted by the labour of standing. If social privilege is like an energy saving device, no wonder that not to inherit privilege can be so trying. There is a politics to exhaustion. Feeling depleted can be a measure of just what we are up against. Diversity work is emotional work because in part it is work that has to be repeated, again and again. You encounter a brick wall. Even when a new diversity policy is adopted somehow things stay in place; they keep their place. I have many examples of these “wall encounters” that I shared in my book, On Being Included. To those who do not come against it, the wall does not appear: the institution seems open, committed and diverse: as happy as its mission statement, as willing as its equality statement. Things appear fluid. I have said this before: things are fluid if you are going the way things are flowing. We can reflect on the significance of frustration here: it is not only that the wall keeps its place, but those who don’t come against it, don’t notice it. This can be profoundly alienating as an institutional experience. No wonder that when the wall keeps its place, it is you that becomes sore. One more thing: I wrote this blog when I was feeling depleted. And in that fact is another political lesson: sometimes we can feel less depleted by writing about being depleted or even just sharing that sense of being depleted with others. 14 -Thus I affirm the entirety of the resolution. We affirm to open up a space to endorse the feminist kill joy and refuse to be happy or complicit within systems of oppression. We contest hegemonic structures of deliberation that marginalize the oppressed and kill the joy of white comfortability. 15 -Ahmed 10 Sara Ahmed "Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects)" The Scholar and Feminist Online The Barnard Center for Research on Women Summer 2010 16 -Killjoys To be unseated by the table of happiness might be to threaten not simply that table, but what gathers around it, what gathers on it. When you are unseated, you can even get in the way of those who are seated, those who want more than anything to keep their seats. To threaten the loss of the seat can be to kill the joy of the seated. How well we recognise the figure of the feminist killjoy! How she makes sense! Let's take the figure of the feminist killjoy seriously. One feminist project could be to give the killjoy back her voice. Whilst hearing feminists as killjoys might be a form of dismissal, there is an agency that this dismissal rather ironically reveals. We can respond to the accusation with a "yes." The figure of the feminist killjoy makes sense if we place her in the context of feminist critiques of happiness, of how happiness is used to justify social norms as social goods (a social good is what causes happiness, given happiness is understood as what is good). As Simone de Beauvoir described so astutely "it is always easy to describe as happy a situation in which one wishes to place others."4 Not to agree to stay in the place of this wish might be to refuse the happiness that is wished for. To be involved in political activism is thus to be involved in a struggle against happiness. Even if we are struggling for different things, even if we have different worlds we want to create, we might share what we come up against. Our activist archives are thus unhappy archives. Just think of the labor of critique that is behind us: feminist critiques of the figure of "the happy housewife;" Black critiques of the myth of "the happy slave"; queer critiques of the sentimentalisation of heterosexuality as "domestic bliss." The struggle over happiness provides the horizon in which political claims are made. We inherit this horizon. To be willing to go against a social order, which is protected as a moral order, a happiness order is to be willing to cause unhappiness, even if unhappiness is not your cause. To be willing to cause unhappiness might be about how we live an individual life (not to choose "the right path" is readable as giving up the happiness that is presumed to follow that path). Parental responses to coming out, for example, can take the explicit form not of being unhappy about the child being queer but of being unhappy about the child being unhappy.5 Even if you do not want to cause the unhappiness of those you love, a queer life can mean living with that unhappiness. To be willing to cause unhappiness can also be how we immerse ourselves in collective struggle, as we work with and through others who share our points of alienation. Those who are unseated by the tables of happiness can find each other. So, yes, let's take the figure of the feminist killjoy seriously. Does the feminist kill other people's joy by pointing out moments of sexism? Or does she expose the bad feelings that get hidden, displaced, or negated under public signs of joy? Does bad feeling enter the room when somebody expresses anger about things, or could anger be the moment when the bad feelings that circulate through objects get brought to the surface in a certain way? The feminist subject "in the room" hence "brings others down" not only by talking about unhappy topics such as sexism but by exposing how happiness is sustained by erasing the signs of not getting along. Feminists do kill joy in a certain sense: they disturb the very fantasy that happiness can be found in certain places. To kill a fantasy can still kill a feeling. It is not just that feminists might not be happily affected by what is supposed to cause happiness, but our failure to be happy is read as sabotaging the happiness of others. We can consider the relationship between the negativity of the figure of the feminist killjoy and how certain bodies are "encountered" as being negative. Marilyn Frye argues that oppression involves the requirement that you show signs of being happy with the situation in which you find yourself. As she puts it, "it is often a requirement upon oppressed people that we smile and be cheerful. If we comply, we signify our docility and our acquiescence in our situation." To be oppressed requires that you show signs of happiness, as signs of being or having been adjusted. For Frye "anything but the sunniest countenance exposes us to being perceived as mean, bitter, angry or dangerous".6 To be recognized as a feminist is to be assigned to a difficult category and a category of difficulty. You are "already read" as "not easy to get along with" when you name yourself as a feminist. You have to show that you are not difficult through displaying signs of good will and happiness. Frye alludes to such experiences when she describes how: "this means, at the very least, that we may be found to be "difficult" or unpleasant to work with, which is enough to cost one's livelihood."7 We can also witness an investment in feminist unhappiness (the myth that feminists kill joy because they are joy-less). There is a desire to believe that women become feminists because they are unhappy. This desire functions as a defense of happiness against feminist critique. This is not to say that feminists might not be unhappy; becoming a feminist might mean becoming aware of just how much there is to be unhappy about. Feminist consciousness could be understood as consciousness of unhappiness, a consciousness made possible by the refusal to turn away. My point here would be that feminists are read as being unhappy, such that situations of conflict, violence, and power are read as about the unhappiness of feminists, rather than being what feminists are unhappy about. Political struggles can takes place over the causes of unhappiness. We need to give a history to unhappiness. We need to hear in unhappiness more than the negation of the "un." The history of the word "unhappy" might teach us about the unhappiness of the history of happiness. In its earliest uses, unhappy meant to cause misfortunate or trouble. Only later, did it come to mean to feel misfortunate, in the sense of wretched or sad. We can learn from the swiftness of translation from causing unhappiness to being described as unhappy. We must learn. The word "wretched" has its own genealogy, coming from wretch, meaning a stranger, exile, banished person. Wretched in the sense of "vile, despicable person" was developed in Old English and is said to reflect "the sorry state of the outcast." Can we rewrite the history of happiness from the point of view of the wretch? If we listen to those who are cast as wretched, perhaps their wretchedness would no longer belong to them. The sorrow of the stranger might give us a different angle on happiness not because it teaches us what it is like or must be like to be a stranger, but because it might estrange us from the very happiness of the familiar. Phenomenology helps us explore how the familiar is that which is not revealed. A queer phenomenology shows how the familiar is not revealed to those who can inhabit it. For queers and others the familiar is revealed to you, because you do not inhabit it. To be "estranged from" can be what enables a "consciousness of." This is why being a killjoy can be a knowledge project, a world-making project. Feminist Tables A feminist call might be a call to anger, to develop a sense of rage about collective wrongs. And yet, it is important that we do not make feminist emotion into a site of truth: as if it is always clear or self-evident that our anger is right. When anger becomes righteous it can be oppressive; to assume anger makes us right can be a wrong. We know how easily a politics of happiness can be displaced into a politics of anger: the assumption of a right to happiness can convert very swiftly into anger toward others (immigrants, aliens, strangers) who have taken the happiness assumed to be "by right" to be ours. It is precisely that we cannot defend ourselves against such defensive use of emotion that would be my point. Emotions are not always just, even those that seem to acquire their force in or from an experience of injustice. Feminist emotions are mediated and opaque; they are sites of struggle, and we must persist in struggling with them.8 After all, feminist spaces are emotional spaces, in which the experience of solidarity is hardly exhaustive. As feminists we have our own tables. If we are unseated by the family table, it does not necessarily follow that we are seated together. We can place the figure of the feminist killjoy alongside the figure of the angry Black woman, explored so well by Black feminist writers such as Audre Lorde9 and bell hooks10. The angry black woman can be described as a killjoy; she may even kill feminist joy, for example, by pointing out forms of racism within feminist politics. She might not even have to make any such point to kill joy. Listen to the following description from bell hooks: "a group of white feminist activists who do not know one another may be present at a meeting to discuss feminist theory. They may feel bonded on the basis of shared womanhood, but the atmosphere will noticeably change when a woman of color enters the room. The white woman will become tense, no longer relaxed, no longer celebratory."11 It is not just that feelings are "in tension," but that the tension is located somewhere: in being felt by some bodies, it is attributed as caused by another body, who comes to be felt as apart from the group, as getting in the way of its enjoyment and solidarity. The body of color is attributed as the cause of becoming tense, which is also the loss of a shared atmosphere. As a feminist of color you do not even have to say anything to cause tension! The mere proximity of some bodies involves an affective conversion. We learn from this example how histories are condensed in the very intangibility of an atmosphere, or in the tangibility of the bodies that seem to get in the way. Atmospheres might become shared if there is agreement in where we locate the points of tension. A history can be preserved in the very stickiness of a situation. To speak out of anger as a woman of color is then to confirm your position as the cause of tension; your anger is what threatens the social bond. As Audre Lorde describes: "When women of Color speak out of the anger that laces so many of our contacts with white women, we are often told that we are 'creating a mood of helplessness,' 'preventing white women from getting past guilt,' or 'standing in the way of trusting communication and action.'"12 The exposure of violence becomes the origin of violence. The woman of color must let go of her anger for the white woman to move on. The figure of the angry black woman is a fantasy figure that produces its own effects. Reasonable, thoughtful arguments are dismissed as anger (which of course empties anger of its own reason), which makes you angry, such that your response becomes read as the confirmation of evidence that you are not only angry but also unreasonable! To make this point in another way, the anger of feminists of color is attributed. You might be angry about how racism and sexism diminish life choices for women of color. Your anger is a judgment that something is wrong. But then in being heard as angry, your speech is read as motivated by anger. Your anger is read as unattributed, as if you are against x because you are angry rather than being angry because you are against x. You become angry at the injustice of being heard as motivated by anger, which makes it harder to separate yourself from the object of your anger. You become entangled with what you are angry about because you are angry about how they have entangled you in your anger. In becoming angry about that entanglement, you confirm their commitment to your anger as the truth "behind" your speech, which is what blocks your anger, stops it from getting through. You are blocked by not getting through. Some bodies become blockage points, points where smooth communication stops. Consider Ama Ata Aidoo's wonderful prose poem, Our Sister Killjoy, where the narrator Sissie, as a black woman, has to work to sustain the comfort of others. On a plane, a white hostess invites her to sit at the back with "her friends," two black people she does not know. She is about to say that she does not know them, and hesitates. "But to have refused to join them would have created an awkward situation, wouldn't it? Considering too that apart from the air hostess's obviously civilized upbringing, she had been trained to see the comfort of all her passengers."13 Power speaks here in this moment of hesitation. Do you go along with it? What does it mean not to go along with it? To create awkwardness is to be read as being awkward. Maintaining public comfort requires that certain bodies "go along with it." To refuse to go along with it, to refuse the place in which you are placed, is to be seen as causing trouble, as making others uncomfortable. There is a political struggle about how we attribute good and bad feelings, which hesitates around the apparently simple question of who introduces what feelings to whom. Feelings can get stuck to certain bodies in the very way we describe spaces, situations, dramas. And bodies can get stuck depending on the feelings with which they get associated. Getting in the Way A killjoy: the one who gets in the way of other people's happiness. Or just the one who is in the way—you can be in the way of whatever, if you are already perceived as being in the way. Your very arrival into a room is a reminder of histories that "get in the way" of the occupation of that room. How many feminist stories are about rooms, about who occupies them, about making room? When to arrive is to get in the way, what happens, what do you do? The figure of the killjoy could be rethought in terms of the politics of willfulness. I suggested earlier that an activist archive is an unhappiness archive, one shaped by the struggles of those who are willing to struggle against happiness. We might redescribe this struggle in terms of those who are willing to be willful. An unhappiness archive is a willfulness archive. Let's go back: let's listen to what and who is behind us. Alice Walker describes a "womanist" in the following way: "A black feminist or feminist of color... Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior. Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered 'good' for one... Responsible. In charge. Serious."14 Julia Penelope describes lesbianism as willfulness: "The lesbian stands against the world created by the male imagination. What willfulness we possess when we claim our lives!"15 Marilyn Frye's radical feminism uses the adjective willful: "The willful creation of new meaning, new loci of meaning, and new ways of being, together, in the world, seems to be in these mortally dangerous times the best hope we have."16 Willfulness as audacity, willfulness as standing against, willfulness as creativity. We can make sense of how willfulness comes up, if we consider a typical definition of willfulness: "asserting or disposed to assert one's own will against persuasion, instruction, or command; governed by will without regard to reason; determined to take one's own way; obstinately self-willed or perverse" (OED). To be called obstinate or perverse because you are not persuaded by the reason of others? Is this familiar to you? Have you heard this before? When you are charged with willfulness it is as if your being is an insistence on being, a refusal to give way, to give up, to give up your way. Can what we are charged with become a charge in Alice Walker's sense, a way of being in charge? If we are charged with willfulness, we can accept and mobilize this charge. We have to become willful, perhaps, to keep going the way we are going, if the way you are going is perceived to be "the wrong way." We all know the experience of "going the wrong way" in a crowd. Everyone seems to be going the opposite way than the way you are going. No one person has to push or shove for you to feel the collective momentum of the crowd as a pushing and shoving. For you to keep going you have to push harder than any of those individuals who are going the right way. The body "going the wrong way" is the one that is experienced as "in the way" of the will that is acquired as momentum. For some bodies mere persistence, "to continue steadfastly," requires great effort, an effort that might appear to others as stubbornness or obstinacy, as insistence on going against the flow. You have to become insistent to go against the flow; you are judged to be going against the flow because you are insistent. A life paradox: you have to become what you are judged as being. It is crucial that we don't assume that willfulness is simply about lonely individuals going against the tide of the social. At the same time, we can note how the social can be experienced as a force: you can feel a force most directly when you attempt to resist it. It is the experience of "coming up against" that is named by willfulness, which is why a willful politics needs to be a collective politics. The collective here is not assumed as a ground. Rather, willfulness is a collecting together, of those struggling for a different ground for existence. You need to be supported when you are not going the way things are flowing. This is why I think of a feminist queer politics as a politics of tables: tables give support to gatherings, and we need support when we live our lives in ways that are experienced by others as stubborn or obstinate. A flow is an effect of bodies that are going the same way. To go is also to gather. A flow can be an effect of gatherings of all kinds: gatherings of tables, for instance, as kinship objects that support human gatherings. How many times have I had the experience of being left waiting at a table when a straight couple walks into the room and is attended to straight away! For some, you have to become insistent to be the recipient of a social action, you might have to announce your presence, wave your arm, saying: "Here I am!" For others, it is enough just to turn up because you have already been given a place at the table before you take up your place. Willfulness describes the uneven consequences of this differentiation. An attribution of willfulness involves the attribution of negative affect to those bodies that get in the way, those bodes that "go against the flow" in the way they are going. The attribution of willfulness is thus effectively a charge of killing joy. Conversations are also flows; they are saturated. We hear this saturation as atmosphere. To be attributed as willful is to be the one who "ruins the atmosphere." A colleague says to me she just has to open her mouth in meetings to witness eyes rolling as if to say, "oh here she goes." My experience as a feminist daughter in a conventional family taught me a great deal about rolling eyes. You already know this. However you speak, the one who speaks up as a feminist is usually viewed as "causing the argument," as the one who is disturbing the fragility of peace. To be willful is to provide a point of tension. Willfulness is stickiness: it is an accusation that sticks. If to be attributed as willful is to be the cause of the problem, then we can claim that willfulness as a political cause. Queer feminist histories are full of self-declared willful subjects. Think of the Heterodoxy Club that operated in Greenwich Village in the early 20th century, a club for unorthodox women. They described themselves as "this little band of willful women," as Judith Schwarz reveals in her wonderful history of this club.17 A heterodoxy is "not in agreement with accepted beliefs, or holding unorthodox opinions." To be willful is to be willing to announce your disagreement, and to put yourself behind a disagreement. To enact a disagreement might even mean to become disagreeable. Feminism we might say is the creation of some rather disagreeable women. Political histories of striking and of demonstrations are histories of those willing to put their bodies in the way, to turn their bodies into blockage points that stop the flow of human traffic, as well as the wider flow of an economy. When willfulness becomes a style of politics, it means not only being willing not to go with the flow, but also being willing to cause its obstruction. One could think of a hunger strike as the purest form of willfulness: a body whose agency is expressed by being reduced to obstruction, where the obstruction to others is self-obstruction, the obstruction of the passage into the body. Histories of willfulness are histories of those who are willing to put their bodies in the way. Political forms of consciousness can also be thought of as willfulness: not only is it hard to speak about what has receded from view, but you have to be willing to get in the way of that recession. An argument of second-wave feminism (one shared with Marxism and Black politics) that I think is worth holding onto is the argument that political consciousness is achieved: raising consciousness is a crucial aspect of collective political work. Raising consciousness is difficult as consciousness is consciousness of what recedes. If the point of a recession is that it gives some the power to occupy space (occupation is reproduced by the concealment of the signs of occupation), then raising consciousness is a resistance to an occupation. Take the example of racism. It can be willful even to name racism: as if the talk about divisions is what is divisive. Given that racism recedes from social consciousness, it appears as if the ones who "bring it up" are bringing it into existence. We learned that the very talk of racism is experienced as an intrusion from the figure of the angry black woman: as if it is her anger about racism that causes feminist estrangement. To recede is to go back or withdraw. To concede is to give way, to yield. People of color are often asked to concede to the recession of racism: we are asked to "give way" by letting it "go back." Not only that: more than that. We are often asked to embody a commitment to diversity. We are asked to smile in their brochures. The smile of diversity is a way of not allowing racism to surface; it is a form of political recession. Racism is very difficult to talk about as racism can operate to censor the very evidence of its existence. Those who talk about racism are thus heard as creating rather than describing a problem. The stakes are indeed very high: to talk about racism is to occupy a space that is saturated with tension. History is saturation. One of the findings of a research project I was involved with on diversity was that because racism saturates everyday and institutional spaces, people of color often make strategic decisions not to use the language of racism.18 If you already pose a problem, or appear "out of place" in the institutions of whiteness, there can be "good reasons" not to exercise what is heard as a threatening vocabulary.19 Not speaking about racism can be a way of inhabiting the spaces of racism. You minimize the threat you already are by softening your language and appearance, by keeping as much distance as you can from the figure of the angry person of color. Of course, as we know, just to walk into a room can be to lose that distance, because that figure gets there before you do. When you use the very language of racism you are heard as "going on about it," as "not letting it go." It is as if talking about racism is what keeps it going. Racism thus often enters contemporary forms of representation as a representation of a past experience. Take the film Bend it Like Beckham (2002, dir. Gurinder Chada): the film is very much premised on the freedom to be happy, as the freedom of the daughter, Jesminder, to do whatever makes her happy (in her case playing football—her idea of happiness is what puts her in proximity to a national idea of happiness). Her father's memory of racism gets in the way of her happiness. Consider two speeches he makes in the film, the first one takes place early on, and the latter at the end: When I was a teenager in Nairobi, I was the best fast bowler in our school. Our team even won the East African cup. But when I came to this country, nothing. And these bloody gora in the club house made fun of my turban and sent me off packing... She will only end up disappointed like me. When those bloody English cricket players threw me out of their club like a dog, I never complained. On the contrary, I vowed that I would never play again. Who suffered? Me. But I don't want Jess to suffer. I don't want her to make the same mistakes her father made, accepting life, accepting situations. I want her to fight. And I want her to win. In the first speech, the father says she should not play in order not to suffer like him. In the second, he says she should play in order not to suffer like him. The desire implicit in both speech acts is the avoidance of the daughter's suffering, which is expressed in terms of the desire that she does not repeat his own. The second speech suggests that the refusal to play a national game is the "truth" behind the migrant's suffering: you suffer because you do not play the game, where not playing is read as self-exclusion. To let Jess be happy he lets her go. By implication, not only is he letting her go, he is also letting go of his own suffering, the unhappiness caused by accepting racism, as the "point" of his exclusion. I would suggest that the father is represented in the first speech as melancholic: as refusing to let go of his suffering, as incorporating the very object of own loss. His refusal to let Jess go is readable as a symptom of melancholia: as a stubborn attachment to his own injury.20 As he says: "who suffered? Me." Bad feeling thus originates with the migrant who won't let go of racism as a script that explains suffering. The melancholic migrant holds onto the unhappy objects of difference, such as the turban, or at least the memory of being teased about the turban, as that which ties it to a history of racism. It is as if you should let go of the pain of racism by letting go of racism as a way of remembering that pain. I would even say that racism becomes readable as what the melancholic migrant is attached to, as an attachment to injury that allows migrants to justify their refusal to participate in the national game ("the gora in their club house"). Even to recall an experience of racism, or to describe an experience as racism, can be to get in the way of the happiness of others. Consciousness of racism becomes understood as a kind of false consciousness, as consciousness of that which is no longer. Racism is framed as a memory that if it were kept alive would just leave us exhausted. The task of citizenship becomes one of conversion: if racism is preserved only in our memory and consciousness, then racism would "go away" if only we too would declare it gone. The narrative implicit here is not that we "invent racism," but that we preserve its power to govern social life by not getting over it. The moral task is thus "to get over it," as if when you are over it, it is gone. Conclusion: A Killjoy Manifesto Audre Lorde teaches us how quickly the freedom to be happy is translated into the freedom to look away from what compromises your happiness.21 The history of feminist critiques of happiness could be translated into a manifesto: Don't look over it: don't get over it. Not to get over it is a form of disloyalty. Willfulness is a kind of disloyalty: think of Adrienne Rich's call for us to be disloyal to civilization. We are not over it, if it has not gone. We are not loyal, if it is wrong.22 Willfulness could be rethought as a style of politics: a refusal to look away from what has already been looked over. The ones who point out that racism, sexism, and heterosexism are actual are charged with willfulness; they refuse to allow these realities to be passed over. Even talking about injustices, violence, power, and subordination in a world that uses "happy diversity" as a technology of social description can mean becoming the obstacle, as the ones who "get in the way" of the happiness of others. Your talk is heard as laboring over sore points, as if you are holding onto something—an individual or collective memory, a sense of a history as unfinished—because you are sore. People often say that political struggle against racism is like banging your head against a brick wall. The wall keeps its place so it is you that gets sore. We might need to stay as sore as our points. Of course that's not all we say or we do. We can recognise not only that we are not the cause of the unhappiness that has been attributed to us, but also the effects of being attributed as the cause. We can talk about being willful subjects, feminist killjoys, angry black women; we can claim those figures back; we can talk about those conversations we have had at dinner tables or in seminars or meetings. We can laugh in recognition of the familiarity of inhabiting that place, even if we do not inhabit the same place (and we do not). There can be joy in killing joy. Kill joy, we can and we do. Be willful, we will and we are. 17 - 18 -Impacts 19 -A) Pyschological Trauma: the 1AC criticizes the form of psychological violence – alienation and isolation within debate deplete the energy of minoritized bodies who are held up as symbols of diversity when they do well and experience microaggressions when they don’t. The burden is constantly on those bodies to make the debate space more accessible. Psychological violence comes first because it is a prerequisite to resolving any impact – when bodies are experience psychological violence they are unable to keep fighting and create change to resolve other material violence. 20 -B) Exclusions: A killjoy kills the joy of sexist and racist institutions and refuses the modes of happiness that are forced upon them – calling out sexism at debate tournaments kills the joy of the white male debaters; the Zapatista movement congregated around a Brown Metisza identity and used that to kill the joy of white supremacy; it is an internal rejection of the paradigm of complicity in happiness – reclaiming the idea that women or people of color constantly need to be happy in systems of oppression. 21 -This contextualizes three net benefits: 22 -analytics 23 -Intersectional female rage is a pre-requisite to a successful movement against patriarchy – otherwise, civil society will co-opt and divide the struggle, forcing the movement underground behind closed doors which keep the conversation in the domestic sphere. 24 -Lesage 1985 – Julia. Professor at University of Oregon. Women's Rage from Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg (Champaign IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988) from Jump Cut, No. 31 (1985). 25 -Feminism by itself is not the motor of change. Class, anti-imperialist, and antiracist struggles demand our participation. Yet how, specifically, does women's consciousness change? How do women move into action? How does change occur? What political strategies should feminists pursue? How, in our political work, can we constantly challenge sexual inequality when the very social construction of gender oppresses women? In 1981 I visited Nicaragua with the goal of finding out how and why change occurred there so quickly in women's lives. "The revolution has given us everything," I was told. "Before the revolution we were totally devalued. We weren't supposed to have a vision beyond home and children." In fact, many Nicaraguan women first achieved a fully human identity within the revolution. Now they are its most enthusiastic supporters. For example, they form over 50 percent of the popular militias, the mainstay of Nicaragua's defense against United States-sponsored invasions from Honduras and Costa Rica. In the block committees, they have virtually eliminated wife and child abuse. Yet in Nicaragua we still see maids, the double standard sexually, dissatisfaction in marriage, and inadequate childcare. Furthermore, all the women I talked to defined their participation in the revolution in terms of an extremely idealized notion of motherhood and could not understand the choice not to reproduce. I bring up this example of Nicaragua because Nicaraguan women are very conscious of the power of their own revolutionary example. They know they have been influenced by the Vietnamese and Cuban revolutions and are very much shaping how Salvadoran women militants are looking at women's role in the Salvadoran revolution. Because of the urgency and violence of the situation, unity between men and women was and is necessary for their survival, but the women also want to combat, in an organized and self-conscious way, specific aspects of male supremacy in the workplace, politics, and daily life. Both here and in Nicaragua, women's daily conversation is about the politics of daily life. They talk to each other often, complaining about men and about managing the domestic sphere. Women's talk also encompasses complaints about poor and unstable work conditions, and about the onerous double day. However, here in the United States that conversation usually circulates pessimistically, if supportively, around the same themes and may even serve to reconfirm women's stasis within these unpleasant situations. Here such conversation offers little sense of social change; yet in our recent political history, feminists have used this pre-existing social form~-~-women's conversation in the domestic sphere~-~-to create consciousness-raising groups. But to what degree is consciousness raising sufficient to change women's behavior, including our self-conception and our own colonized minds? We do not live in a revolutionary situation in the United States. There is no leftist political organization here providing leadership and a cohesive strategy, and in particular the struggle against women's oppression is not genuinely integrated into leftist activity and theory. Within such a context, women need to work on another, intermediate level, both to shape our revolutionary consciousness and to empower us to act on our own strategic demands. That is, we need to promote self-conscious, collectively supported, and politically clear articulations of our anger and rage. Furthermore, we must understand the different structures behind different women's rage. Black women rage against poverty and racism at the same time that they rage against sexism. Lesbians rage against heterosexual privilege, including their denial of civil rights. Nicaraguan women rage against invasions and the aggressive intentions of the United States. If, in our political work, we know this anger and the structures that generate it, we can more genuinely encounter each other and more extensively acknowledge each other's needs, class position, and specific form of oppression. If we do not understand the unique social conditions shaping our sisters' rage, we run the risk of divisiveness, of fragmenting our potential solidarity. Such mutual understanding of the different structures behind different women's anger is the precondition of our finding a way to work together toward common goals 26 -Our affirmative approach as a foundational criticism is necessary to resolve the structural antagonisms that formulate law – even the most progressive left legal reforms recreate those problems and attempt to disentangle the complexities of gender issues - Our aff is a prerequisite 27 -Brown and Halley 02 Wendy Brown and Janet Halley, 2002 (Left Legalism/Left Critique, Wendy Brown is First Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also affiliated with the Department of Rhetoric, and where she is a core faculty member in the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory. Janet Halley is the Royall Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. p. 18-25) 28 -Left legalistic projects, entwined as they are with the regulatory tugs of liberalism and legalism, are going to produce unintended consequences. We want a critical theoretical engagement with left legalism in part because we want to apprehend these side effects. To see and to evaluate them, we need to step back from our legalism, to open up the space for politics that can put legalism under a viewfinder, and to examine both politics and legalism with the attitude of critique. Legalism's Political Outside Is there such a thing as nonlegalistic political practice, a politics even a few degrees outside legalism, especially if legalism is not defined simply in reference to the state and law, but no less institutionally codified practices and effects? So saturated by legalism is contemporary political life that it is often difficult to imagine alternative ways of deliberating about and pursuing justice. Yet the legal realist point that law is politics by other means should not commit us to its converse: that all endeavors to shape and order collective Iife are legalistic. Legalism not only carries a politics (and liberal legalism carries a very specific politics) but also incessantly translates wide-ranging political questions into more narrowly framed legal questions. Thus politics conceived and practiced legalistically bears a certain hostility to discursively open-ended, multigenre, and polyvocal political conversations about how we should live, what we should value and what we should prohibit, and what is possible in collective life. The preemptive conversion of political questions into legal questions can displace open-ended discursive contestation: adversarial and yes/no structures can quash exploration; expert and specialized languages can preclude democratic participation; a pretense that deontological grounds can and must always be found masks the historical embeddedness of many political questions; the covertness of norms and political power within legal spaces repeatedly divests political questions of their most crucial concerns. When the available range of legal remedies preempts exploration of the deep constitutive causes of an injury (think hate speech and the racial order that makes it sting), when the question of which rights pertain overrides attention to what occasions the urgently felt need for the right (think abortion and the way reproductive work is organized, valued and unremunerated in male-dominant orders), we sacrifice our chance to be deliberative, inventive political beings who create our collective life form. Legalism that draws its parameters of justice from liberalism standards of fairness when we might need a public argument about what constitutes fairness; its formulas for equality when we may need to reconsider all the powers that must be negotiated in the making of an egalitarian order; its definitions of liberty at the price of an exploratory argument about the constituent elements of freedom. As we incessantly refer our political life to the law, we not only sacrifice opportunities to take our inherited political condition into our own hands, we sacrifice as well the chance to address at a more fundamental or at least far-reaching level various troubling conditions which appear to require redress. Consider: What if some of the disturbing aspects of contemporary sex harassment doctrine, in which redress of gender subordination has been increasingly usurped by greater sexual regulation, can be traced to a certain failure on the part of second-wave feminism actually to effect a significant transformation in the social construction of women and men, a project that was once deeply constitutive of that political and cultural enterprise? And what if the tendency toward ever more intensive legal regulation of gender and sexuality is a compensatory response to that failure, a response that effectively gives up on the project of transforming gender in favor of protecting a historically subordinated group from some of the most severe effects of that subordination, even as it tacitly defines women through those effects? If feminism once aimed to make women the sexual equals of men, this aim entails the complex social, psychological, and political project of making gender differently, and not simply the legal one of protecting (historically and culturally produced) vulnerable women from (historically and culturally produced) rapacious men. Indeed, the legal project, in its instantiation of sexuality as subordinating, especially of women, may be substantially at odds with the political project of fashioning women as men's substantive equals, that is, as people who cannot be "reduced to their gender" through an unwanted sexualizing gesture or word. This is not to argue that there is some pure left political space independent of legalism, nor that left political projects implicated in legalism inevitably sacrifice their aims and values. Rather, it is to assert the possibility of political life and political projects not fully saturated by legalistic constraints and aims. It is to recover radically democratic political aims from legalism's grip in order to cultivate collective political and cultural deliberation about governing values and practices. We remember a mode of activism among anti-pornography feminists that was more political than legalistic. Women walked into porn shops and trashed the pornography, shamed the customers, and mock-shamed themselves. They also led tours through the porn districts, offering feminist interpretations of pornographic representations and marketing of women, interpretations which others could and sometimes did argue with. The anti-porn activists worked in the name of feminism, and though all feminists did not condone the stance toward porn and the depiction of women that this activism represented, our dissension itself was not monolithic or fully codified. This mode of anti-porn activism thus provoked argument and reflection among and across feminists and nonfeminists alike. This political mode presupposed an interlocutory relationship between those who valued pornography and those who condemned it, indeed between porn and its consumers or audiences. In that interlocutory relationship, many women encountered and studied pornography for the first time. As this occurred, women found themselves having all kinds of responses to porn that could not simply be classified as for or against: some were distressed by it but grasped their distress as an index of the sexual shame their gender construction entailed; others were drawn to it and flatly delighted to be let into a sexual order previously designated for men; others were more ambivalent, liking the idea of porn or liking bits of it but troubled or turned off by the misogynistic (or racist or colonial) strains in it (some were confusingly turned on by these very same strains); still others were inspired to try to make good porn for women. What was the political cache of this rich array of responses? It produced a wave old new feminist work on sexuality: new questions, new theories, new domains of research, new practices, new arguments, new positions in every sense of the word. Hence followed as well new possibilities of alliances with gay men as well as new forms of alliance across a presumed heterosexual-homosexual divide, the possibility of queer thought, and the invention of new sexual subjectivities and identities through a proliferation of cultural discourses of and cultural struggles over sexuality. "Feminism" so constituted was a field of widely divergent values, beliefs, and practices, all of which had to contest with one another over the question of "the good" for women. Compare this marvelously fertile political contestation and intellectual exploration with the social and ideological concomitants of anti-pornography activists' turn to the state. Anti-pornography activism took a legalistic turn with the invention of a tort claim for damages arising from the injury to women's sexual status supposedly inflicted by pornography (rights legalism) and the deployment of zoning ordinances to shut down the public space devoted to sex commerce (governance legalism). Wherever feminists took this turn, the politics of sexuality in feminism and feminist communities, and the form of feminist internal critique, changed dramatically. Defining porn narrowly (and badly) as "the graphic sexual subordination of women," the legalists promulgated local ordinances establishing porn as a violation of women's civil rights. This move brought into play local governments and judges as authoritative decision makers. And the arguments that could then be addressed to those decision makers were as flat and impoverished as the arguments characteristic of the political struggle were multidimensional and rich: to participate in the legalistic moment, feminists had to declare themselves for or against porn, and even for or against sex, as they took a position on the ordinances.4 The debate about porn became framed by the terms of free speech, censorship, and privacy rights. In short, it became consolidated by a narrow rights framework: Should your right not to be violated/offended trump my right to consume what I want? Does Larry Flynt's free speech silence Catharine MacKinnon's? In this consolidation, all the complexities of sexual representation, of the imbrication of sexuality and gender, of the relation of fantasy to reality, and above all, of the extraordinary and detailed range in the sexual construction and desires of women and men were eclipsed. The adversarial structure of rights legalism as deployed by all the parties meant that the stakes were now "winner takes all." In that context on, or differentiation of positions along a continuum. Hence the debates produced a new form of internal silencing of each side's constituents; solidarity and a united front became mandatory. Above all, neither side could afford to break with liberalism (a notoriously impoverished discourse on the subject of sexuality) in its arguments: the terms of the new debate were set not only by established definitions of equality, civil rights, and free speech, but by sexuality, and representation. And this debate, desiccated because it adopted rather than contested the terms of liberal legalism, was the form in which the feminist question about pornography hit the mainstream. To be sure, the porn wars in their political mode had their brutal and punitive dimensions; open-ended political contestation in unbounded spaces and unregulated by settled rules of engagement can be an arena for raw aggressions and un-self-knowing posturing of the most grandiose sort. Thus, in the political struggle, women accused each other of false consciousness, mocked each other's sexual desires, set themselves up as sexually righteous, and denounced each other viciously for their positions in these battles. But the political mode had several virtues that the legalistic mode distinctively lacked: it was open-ended in the questioning and conversations it incited; it was accessible to a wide variety of participants (and was probably the most interracial, cross-class, and intersexual political moment second-wave feminism had); and it occurred in a range of different idioms, from analytic position papers to poetry to biography. Perhaps most important, because the arguments were about sex, gender, and representation rather than free speech, censorship, and civil rights, the political mode incited a substantial body of rich new political, cultural, and psychological inquiry and political understandings that were both valuable in themselves and gave new life to the social movements that bred them. 29 -Oppression in debate is perpetuated by the decisions community members make on a weekly basis. We look to real world implications in order to access debate’s liberatory potential. Thus, the role of the ballot is to vote for the best resistance strategy for the oppressed. 30 -Smith 13, Elijah. A Conversation in Ruins: Race and Black Participation in Lincoln Douglas Debate 31 -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. 32 -Freedom of speech requires emancipation from social oppression – The aff challenge traditional notions of free speech from a negative individual right to an opportunity to subvert disempowerment. Instead of viewing freedom of speech as a negative individual right, we should understand it as the right to speak up. 33 -Hornsby 95 Jennifer Hornsby "Disempowered Speech" University of Arkansas Press Philosophical Topics, Vol. 23, No. 2, Feminist Perspectives on Language, Knowledge, and Reality (FALL 1995), 34 -Free speech, or at any rate U.S. First Amendment doctrine, has come under attack from many quarters in recent years.31 A conception of speech as a negative liberty may be seen as the butt of some of the attacks. There is a familiar argument against the idea that it is always proper to promote negative liberties. The familiar argument sets liberalism's egalitar- ian (left) wing against its libertarian (right) wing. The egalitarian claims that the consequence of defending negative liberties in an unjust society is to sup- port an indefensible status quo. Since the relatively powerful have opportunities to bring pressures to bear against the powerless (opportunities which the powerless lack), the protection of everyone's negative liberties, which is a matter of letting everyone get on with it, as it were, is enabling for some but not for others and is thus bound to reinforce the unequal status quo.32 Such an argument is ordinarily presented in an economic context, where it may be aimed at showing that free market arrangements in an unequal soci- ety ensure injustices: Those who have the good fortune to be in a position actually to exercise their freedom in the market can promote their own wealth at the expense of those whose so-called rights are unexercisable. A parallel line of thought appears to be at work when it is said that we should not sup- pose that, qua speakers, everyone is equal. Proponents of free speech have meant us to think that "the discovery and spread of political truth"33 and the treating of everyone with "equal respect"34 are served by protecting every- one's speech equally. But in fact people do not start out as equal parties in some great debate; upholding free speech works to the advantage of those whose speech least needs protection. The conclusion of this argument about free speech comes in a more rad- ical version. In this version, so-called free speech is merely a rallying cry for those who can bring their own verbal behavior under its head (and thus, in the U.S.A., by the power of their rhetoric, under a constitutional head). This radical version goes much further than the application to free speech of the familiar argument against the promotion of negative liberties. Whereas The egalitarian about matters economic, who questions free markets, does not dispute the value of (at least some of) what is traded in markets, the radical conclusion in the case of free speech disputes that there is anything of value here at all, save for what powerful interest groups might deem "free speech." 'Free speech' stands for whatever activities are engaged in as "free speech" by those who succeed in defining the term; everyone else meanwhile loses out from the protection of those activities. No conception of free speech is available to anyone, according to this account, except for a conception of something that might be at the service of her own political agenda (or of her friends'). Well, such wholesale skepticism about free speech is not the inevitable result of hostility to accounts of free speech as an individual right.35 Indeed, if we are led to think about free speech by thinking about disempowered speech, we shall want to keep such skepticism at bay. We can agree with the skeptic that free speech is not properly circumscribed by those who conceive it as a negative liberty: An understanding of disempowered speech reveals the inadequacy of that conception. And we can agree with the skeptic that there is no neutral vantage point outside of political debate from which speech can be deemed free: Political thinking is introduced with the very idea of a group whose speech might count as disempowered. But our arguments can be brought against a tradition of free speech debate and need not be pitted against the whole idea of free speech.36 They cannot be arguments against the whole idea; for it is presumably by reference to an ideal of free speech that we consider people unequal in their speech, and it is by reference to such an ideal that we should find it regrettable if the speech of any group were disempowered. I have tried to show that there is space to be occupied, on questions of free speech, between those who are content to allow the notion of free speech to continue to be the property of the courts and those who urge us to banish the notion. It is another task to fill in such space, but a task, again, to which a social account of language use will be indispensable. 35 - 36 -AND – our Affective emotional analysis is key to disrupting humanism which is the root cause of material violence – our creation of spaces of solidarity deconstruct the individualistic subjecthood which reject the docility of the institution of white womanhood. 37 -Braidotti 06 Rosi; Utrecht University and Birkbeck College; Affirmation versus VuInerabiIity: On Contemporary Ethical Debates; 2006; https://www.pdcnet.org/C12573E5003D645A/file/12987BF52DF1C537852574800056A6F8/$FILE/symposium_2006_0010_0001_0245_0264.pdf; 38 -At the core of this ethical project is a positive vision of the subject as a radically immanent, intensive body, that is, an assemblage of forces or flows, intensities, and passions that solidify in space and consolidate in time, within the singular configuration commonly known as an "individual" self. This intensive and dynamic entity is rather a portion of forces that is stable enough to sustain and undergo constant though non-destructive fluxes of transformation. It is the body's degrees and levels of affectivity that determine the modes of differentiation. Joyful or positive passions and the transcendence of reactive affects are the desirable mode. The emphasis on "existence" implies a commitment to duration and conversely a rejection of self-destruction. Positivity is buHt into this program through the idea of thresholds of sustainability. Thus, an ethically empowering option increases one's potentia and creates joyful energy in the process. The conditions that can encourage such a quest are not only historical; they concern processes of transformation or self-fashioning in the direction of affirming positivity. Because all subjects share in this common nature, there is a common ground on which to negotiate the interests and the eventual conflicts. It is important to see that this fundamentally positive vision of the ethicaI subject does not deny conflicts, tension, or even violent disagreements between different subjects. The legacy of Hegel's critique of Spinoza is still looming large here, notably the criticism that a Spinozist approach lacks a theory of negativity, which may adequately account for the complex logistics of interaction with others. It is simply not the case that the positivity of desire cancels or denies the tensions of conflicting interests. It merely displaces the grounds on which the negotiations take place. The Kantian imperative of not doing to others what you would not want done to you is not rejected as much as enlarged. In terms of the ethics of conatus, in fact, the harm that you do to others is immediately reflected in the harm you do to yourself, in terms of loss of potentia, positivity, self-awareness, and inner freedom. Moreover, the "others" in question are non-anthropomorphic and include planetary forces. This move away from the Kantian vision of an ethics that obliges people, and especially women, natives, and others to act morally in the name of a transcendent standard or universal rule is not a simple one. I defend it as a forceful answer to the complexities of our historical situation; it is a move towards radical immanence against all Platonizing and classical humanistic denials of embodiment, mater, and the flesh. What is at risk, however, in nomadic ethics is the notion of containment of the other. This is expressed by a number of moral thinkers in the Continental tradition, such as Jessica Benjamin (1988) in her radicalization of Irigaray's horizontal transcendence, Lyotard in the "differend" (1983) and his notion of the "unattuned," and Butler (2004) in her emphasis on "precarious life." They stress that moral reasoning 10- cates the constitution of subjectivity in the interrelation to others, which is a form of exposure, availability, and vulnerability. This recognition entails the necessity of containing the other, the suffering and the enjoyment of others in the expression of the intensity of our affective streams. An embodied and connecting containment as a moral category could emerge from this, over and against the hierarchical forms of containment implied by Kantian forms of universal morality. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,33 +1,0 @@ 1 -Debate is a university – these spaces silences our voices and invests in the most privileged bodies, we must carve out a space within this institution and radically shape it to rupture the violence that the space perpetuates through maintenance of oppressive structures and the disruption of white supremacy. 2 -Nguyen 14 Nicole Nguyen and R. Tina Catania The Feminist Wire August 5 2014 "On Feeling Depleted: Naming, Confronting, and Surviving Oppression in the Academy" thefeministwire.com/2014/08/feeling-depleted-naming-confronting-surviving-oppression-academy/ 3 -We write because we cannot remain silent. And the “we” that we envision is more than our own impulses. It is a collective we that cannot be and will not be silent in the face of oppression. As Audre Lorde writes, “Your silence will not protect you.” The silence7 of individuals who are “waiting to get a job” or “waiting to get tenure” or “keeping their heads down and doing their own thing” does not protect them from microaggressions, from oppression, from depletion.8 What it does do is continue to reify and entrench the oppressive nature of the academy; it disciplines us to stay silent, to reinforce oppression, and to participate in its reproduction. Thus, we urge every-body, but especially those in positions of power (i.e., tenure-track and tenured faculty) to name oppression. To name sexism. To name ableism. To name racism. To be cognizant of how these -isms intersect to violently oppress and privilege particular bodies and identities. We must name instances, call attention to the ways that the academy’s daily practices are multiply oppressive. And we should do so whether we experience them through someone like Stuart, a prototypical, privileged, white male, or through anyone else whether white feminists, able-bodied people of color, or male “allies.” These violences, from whomever they come and through whatever structures make such encounters possible, must be named. They must be resisted. And they must be transformed. We recognize that, as Sara Ahmed warns, “exposing a problem is to become a problem.”9 Yet, we refuse to be disciplined. We refuse to have our words, actions, and experiences foreclosed for fear of being read as the “problem,” always “stirring up trouble.” Fuck the fear that the discipline, field, department, administration, university, society tries to instill in us so that we do not speak up, so that we do not name our oppressions. We recognize the academic institution and its practices for what they are: inherently oppressive. We recognize that many have no desire to critique the academy because they do not want to jeopardize their privilege within it. We recognize that critiques of academia are necessarily limited by those who make them when they are invested in maintaining its structure, a structure that works for them. We seek to radically reshape and remake the institution in more equitable ways. True solidarity cannot pay lip service to feminist, de-colonial, anti-racist projects while maintaining individual investments in a system that works for only the most privileged bodies. Marginalized individuals cannot but participate in the oppression of other marginalized people if they are invested in academia’s current structure. Increased “representation” merely reifies the system rather than expands the possibilities for solidarity, for change. We see our colleagues, our cohorts, our faculty, our peers, and even ourselves as colluding in these oppressions when they (we) ignore them, when they ignore us, when they remain silent at their occurrence, when they are oblivious to their daily repetition. When your colleague does not plan an accessible, inclusive event from the beginning, they actively reproduce ableism and create exclusionary spaces. And our naming that problem, and therefore your collusion in ableist oppression, makes us the problem, rather than you or the institution. When the violent actions of white, male students not only go unpunished, but undiscussed and unrecognized by faculty, you actively participate in our racialized and gendered oppression. Within a deeply inequitable institution, we strive to navigate a space for ourselves, for understanding. We understand that we are a part of the academy and that our actions can also work to sustain it. Yet we strive for a different academy. We seek to transform the institution. For us, this includes naming the violences of those like Stuart and rejecting the common call to discipline ourselves into not writing or voicing radical critiques of the academy. So we begin here, with a naming of sorts. We write to name what we should not name. Yet writing also serves as a way to carve out alternative spaces. Spaces that contribute to our survivability and to our resistance against these structural and everyday forms of oppression. These spaces are where we “recognize each other, find each other, create spaces of relief, spaces that might be breathing spaces, spaces in which we can be inventive.”10 We write together to claim our intersectional identities and recognize that for us, the academy must include the stories of our bodies, our exclusions, our resistances, our politics, our activism. We write to document our exhaustion in surviving, resisting, and reshaping this deeply violent institution even as we, as graduate students, occupy particularly precarious positions. Given these oppressions in the academy, this is a call for different, transnational, cross-border, and accessible forms of solidarity. We write, ultimately, as an invitation to those other depleted-yet-vibrant bodies, bodies who imagine another kind of academy. An academy that is collaborative, feminist, and inclusive. It is an invitation to strategize, to survive, to heal 4 -Whiteness coheres itself within institutions through habitual repetitions – the body creates the space and the space creates the body– the nonrecognication of the whiteness inherent with the space is what allows whiteness to manifest itself in the first place and makes whiteness comfortable because it is invisible. The speech act became an object the moment we started the 1AC – this space is inevitably political to us and marks our bodies as hypervisible. 5 -Ahmed 07 – Ahmed, Sara. "A phenomenology of whiteness." Feminist theory 8.2 (2007): 149-168. 6 -We need to examine not only how bodies become white, or fail to do so, but also how spaces can take on the very ‘qualities’ that are given to such bodies. In a way, we can think about the habitual as a form of inheritance. It is not so much that we inherit habits, although we can do so: rather the habitual can be thought of as a bodily and spatial form of inheritance. As Pierre Bourdieu (1977) shows us, we can link habits to what is unconscious, and routine, or what becomes ‘second nature’.3 To describe whiteness as a habit, as second nature, is to suggest that whiteness is what bodies do, where the body takes the shape of the action. Habits are not ‘exterior’ to bodies, as things that can be ‘put on’ or ‘taken off’. If habits are about what bodies do, in ways that are repeated, then they might also shape what bodies can do. For Merleau-Ponty, the habitual body is a body that acts in the world, where actions bring other things near. As he puts it: my body appears to me as an attitude directed towards a certain existing or possible task. And indeed its spatiality is not, like that of external objects or like that of ‘spatial sensations’, a spatiality of position, but a spatiality of situation. If I stand in front of my desk and lean on it with both hands, only my hands are stressed and the whole of the body trails behind them like the tail of a comet. It is not that I am unaware of the whereabouts of my shoulder or back, but these are simply swallowed up in the position of my hands, and my whole posture can be read so to speak in the pressure they exert on the table. (2002: 114–5, emphasis in original) Here, the directedness of the body towards an action (which we have discovered also means an orientation towards certain kinds of objects) is how the body ‘appears’.4 The body is ‘habitual’ not only in the sense that it performs actions repeatedly, but in the sense that when it performs such actions, it does not command attention, apart from at the ‘surface’ where it ‘encounters’ an external object (such as the hands that lean on the desk or table, which feel the ‘stress’ of the action). In other words, the body is habitual insofar as it ‘trails behind’ in the performing of action, insofar as it does not pose ‘a problem’ or an obstacle to the action, or is not ‘stressed’ by ‘what’ the action encounters. For Merleau-Ponty, the habitual body does not get in the way of an action: it is behind the action. I want to suggest here that whiteness could be understood as ‘the behind’. White bodies are habitual insofar as they ‘trail behind’ actions: they do not get ‘stressed’ in their encounters with objects or others, as their whiteness ‘goes unnoticed’. Whiteness would be what lags behind; white bodies do not have to face their whiteness; they are not orientated ‘towards’ it, and this ‘not’ is what allows whiteness to cohere, as that which bodies are orientated around. When bodies ‘lag behind’, then they extend their reach. It becomes possible to talk about the whiteness of space given the very accumulation of such ‘points’ of extension. Spaces acquire the ‘skin’ of the bodies that inhabit them. What is important to note here is that it is not just bodies that are orientated. Spaces also take shape by being orientated around some bodies, more than others. We can also consider ‘institutions’ as orientation devices, which take the shape of ‘what’ resides within them. After all, institutions provide collective or public spaces. When we describe institutions as ‘being’ white (institutional whiteness), we are pointing to how institutional spaces are shaped by the proximity of some bodies and not others: white bodies gather, and cohere to form the edges of such spaces. When I walk into university meetings that is just what I encounter. Sometimes I get used to it. At one conference we organize, four black feminists arrive. They all happen to walk into the room at the same time. Yes, we do notice such arrivals. The fact that we notice such arrivals tells us more about what is already in place than it does about ‘who’ arrives. Someone says: ‘it is like walking into a sea of whiteness’. This phrase comes up, and it hangs in the air. The speech act becomes an object, which gathers us around. So yes they walk into the room, and I notice that they were not there before, as a retrospective reoccupation of a space that I already inhabited. I look around, and re-encounter the sea of whiteness. As many have argued, whiteness is invisible and unmarked, as the absent centre against which others appear only as deviants, or points of deviation (Dyer, 1997; Frankenberg, 1993). Whiteness is only invisible for those who inhabit it, or those who get so used to its inhabitance that they learn not to see it, even when they are not it (see Ahmed, 2004b). Spaces are orientated ‘around’ whiteness, insofar as whiteness is not seen. We do not face whiteness; it ‘trails behind’ bodies, as what is assumed to be given. The effect of this ‘around whiteness’ is the institutionalization of a certain ‘likeness’, which makes non-white bodies feel uncomfortable, exposed, visible, different, when they take up this space. 7 -Stories of diversity and equality are propped up to criminalize our language and deem it as signs of ingratitude – this theorizes that our forms of protest against white supremacy as nagging and unnecessary. Filtration of speech ensures that stories of diversity are promoted and our protest of racism go unheard - free speech does not exist outside of that of which falls within the confines of white coherency. Attempts to access the space of the institution are always terminated and cut off – the 1AC is a disruption of white supremacy – a flipping of the script that destroys the system that marks our bodies are immobile. 8 -Ahmed 07 – Ahmed, Sara. "A phenomenology of whiteness." Feminist theory 8.2 (2007): 149-168. 9 -When our appointments and promotion are taken up as signs of organizational commitment to equality and diversity, we are in trouble. Any success is read as a sign of an overcoming of institutional whiteness. ‘Look, you’re here!’, ‘Look, look!’ Our talk about racism is read as a form of stubbornness, paranoia, or even melancholia, as if we are holding onto something (whiteness) that our arrival shows has already gone. Our talk about whiteness is read as a sign of ingratitude, of failing to be grateful for the hospitality we have received by virtue of our arrival. It is this very structural position of being the guest, or the stranger, the one who receives hospitality, which keeps us in certain places, even when you move up.7 So, if you ‘move up’, then you come to embody the social promise of diversity, which gives you a certain place. It is the very use of black bodies as signs of diversity that confirms such whiteness, premised on a conversion of having to being: as if by having us, the organization can ‘be’ diverse. Diversity in this world becomes then a happy sign, a sign that racism has been overcome. In a research project into diversity work,8 I encounter what I call ‘an institutional desire for good practice’. This desire takes the form of an expectation that publicly funded research on race, diversity and equality should be useful, and should provide techniques for achieving equality and challenging institutional racism. In actual terms, this involves a desire to hear ‘happy stories of diversity’ rather than unhappy stories of racism. We write a report about how good practice and anti-racist tool kits are being used as technologies of concealment, displacing racism from public view. Anti-racism even becomes a new form of organizational pride. The response to our final report: too much focus on racism, we need more evidence of good practice. The response to your work is symptomatic of what you critique. They don’t even notice the irony. You have been funded to ‘show’ their commitment to diversity and are expected to return their investment by giving evidence of its worth. Within academic fields, I would argue, we can also witness this desire for happy stories of diversity, although the desire takes different form. When I give papers on whiteness I am always asked about resistance, as a sign of how things can be otherwise. Some of these questions take the form of ‘what can white people do?’ The sheer solipsism of this response must be challenged. We can recall Adrienne Rich’s description of white solipsism: ‘to speak, imagine and think as if whiteness described the world’ (1979: 299). To respond to accounts of institutional whiteness with the question ‘what can white people do?’ is not only to return to the place of the white subject, but it is also to locate agency in this place. It is also tore-position the white subject as somewhere other than implicated in the critique. Other questions do not re-centre on the agency of white bodies, but just on the need for some kind of understanding of power that shows that things don’t always hold; that shows the cracks, the movement, the instabilities and that appreciates how much things have changed, even whilst recognizing that there is much left to do. So one response to my considering of whiteness has been ‘is there any sense that resistance is possible in this account?’ And, ‘if whiteness is a bad habit, what might it be replaced with?’ You become obliged to give evidence of where things can be undone; to locate the point of undoing, somewhere or another, even if that location is not in the world, but in the very mode of your critique. What does it mean if we assume that critiques have to leave room for resistance, as room-making devices? This desire to make room is understandable – if the work of critique does not show that its object can be undone, or promise to undo its object, then what is the point of that critique? But this desire can also become an object for us to investigate. The desire for signs of resistance can also be a form for resistance to hearing about racism. If we want to know how things can be different too quickly, then we might not hear anything at all. The desire for resistance is not the same as the desire for good practice. And yet, both desires can involve a defence against hearing about racism as an ongoing and unfinished history that we have yet to describe fully. We still need to describe how it is that the world of whiteness coheres as a world, even as we tend to the ‘stresses’ in this coherence, and the uneven distribution of such stress. A phenomenology of whiteness helps us to notice institutional habits; it brings what is behind, what does not get seen as the background to social action, to the surface in a certain way. It does not teach us how to change those habits and that is partly the point. In not being promising, in refusing to promise anything, such an approach to whiteness can allow us to keep open the force of the critique. It is by showing how we are stuck, by attending to what is habitual and routine in ‘the what’ of the world, that we can keep open the possibility of habit changes, without using that possibility to displace our attention to the present, and without simply wishing for new tricks. 10 - Oppressed groups can’t do shit if they are stuck in the cycle of violence of internalized oppression—We are asked to challenge structures yet they have already rendered us powerless and silent—We need a structure to rupture these forms of psychological violence before we can take action 11 -Osajima – Keith Osajima. Keith Osajima teaches in the School of Education at the University of Redlands, specializing in race and the experiences of Asian American students in higher education. Internalized Oppression and the Culture of Silence: Rethinking the Stereotype of the Quiet Asian-American Student. De Anza College Political Science Department. http://nypolisci.org/files/PDF20FILES/Chapter20IV_209_20internalized20oppression20and20the20culture20of20silence20FEC2.pdf 12 -So how can we understand the quiet Asian student? How can we understand what some have called “situational non-assertiveness”? In this paper, I would like to suggest an analytic perspective that could provide some insights into quiet behavior of Asian-American students. It is a framework that tries to understand the silence of Asian students in relation to the dynamics of oppression they face as students and as members of a racial minority group. I argue that the silent, often unquestioning behavior of the Asian-American student can best be understood as a manifestation of what Erica Sherover-Marcuse calls “internalized oppression.” Let me begin the discussion with an overview of what I mean by this phrase. For those of us who are familiar with or have been involved in progressive social and political movements, we have become familiar with the forms and mechanisms of oppression in society. We recognize the sexism in media images of women; we know that Gay oppression takes many forms; we are aware that racial oppression accounts for the high dropout rates of black and Hispanic students, the high unemployment rates in minority communities, and recent violence against ethnic minorities. What is not well-known or examined is the impact that these oppressions have on people in the oppressed groups. How do the conditions of inequality and exploitation affect the subjective development of oppressed people? Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator famous for his literacy work with peasants, says that one of the most devastating effects of oppression is that it dehumanizes the oppressed people; that under the objective conditions of oppression people lose their ability to see themselves as individual human beings. Frantz Fanon, a psychologist who wrote extensively on the effects of colonialism on the colonized people of Algeria, elaborates on the dehumanizing effect of oppression when he says: “Because it is a systematic negation of the other person and a furious determination to deny the other person all attributes of humanity, colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly: In reality, who am ‘I’?” And how do the oppressed people generally answer this question? According to Albert Memmi, Tunisian author of The Colonizer and the Colonized, the oppressed internalize an identity that mirrors or echoes the images put forth by the dominant group. People come to accept the myths and stereotypes about their group as part of who they naturally are. This is the phenomenon of internalized oppression. Memmi writes: “Constantly confronted with this image of himself, set forth and imposed in all institutions and in every human contact, how could the colonized help reacting to his portrait? It cannot leave him indifferent and remain a veneer which, like an insult, blows with the wind. He ends up recognizing it as one would a detested nickname which has become a familiar description. The accusation disturbs him and worries him even more because he admires and fears his powerful accuser. ‘Is he not partially right?’ they mutter. ‘Are we not a little guilty after all? Lazy because we have so many idlers? Timid because we let ourselves be oppressed?’ Willfully created and spread by the colonizer, this mythical and degrading portrait ends up by being accepted and lived with to a certain extent by the colonized.” The impact of internalized oppression on the attitudes, feelings, and actions of the oppressed is profound. First, it hinders one’s ability to think and reflect. People have difficulty objectifying and perceiving the structural conditions that shape and reshape their lives. Second, oppressed people come to believe that the source of their problems lies, not in the relations within society, but in themselves, in their own inadequacies and inabilities. At the same time that they feel themselves to be inferior, they see those in the dominant group to be superior. Third, the feelings of inferiority, of uncertainty about one’s identity, lead oppressed people to believe that the solution to their problem is to become like or be accepted by those in the dominant group. As Freire says, “At a certain point in their existential experience the oppressed feel an irresistible attraction toward the oppressor and his way of life. Sharing this way of life becomes an overpowering aspiration. In their alienation, the oppressed want at any cost to resemble the oppressor, to imitate him, to follow him.” On the flip side of this desire to be like the oppressor is a degree of selfhatred, a belief that who they are is not good enough, smart enough, beautiful enough, strong enough. The overall impact of internalized oppression is that the oppressed become resigned to their situation and do not look critically at it. They feel powerless to change it, and fearful of taking the risks to make change. In this way, the status quo is not questioned nor challenged. Freire writes: “As long as the oppressed remain unaware of the causes of their conditions, they fatalistically accept their exploitation. Further, they are apt to react in a passive and alienated manner when confronted with the necessity to struggle for their freedom and self-affirmation.” They live in what Freire calls a “culture of silence,” where the oppressed believe and feel that they do not have a voice in determining the conditions of their world. The important outcome is that internalized oppression makes it difficult for the oppressed to take action to transform their world. It serves to perpetuate oppression, without necessarily resorting to overt forms of violence and force. The oppressed become unwitting participants in their own oppression. 13 -Thus our 1AC asks what the fuck free speech is for Model Minorities when we are told to sit down and raise our hands: we advocate for rage as a methodology of rupturing the anti-minority university~-~- we create counterpublics that approach this debate about free speech from our embodied experience. 14 - 15 -Rage is a catalyst for change. Raging against the structures of white supremacy are key to bringing it down and empowering liberation movements. Rage is a productive substation for the shame that Latinxs feels and a product of our dissatisfaction with the squo. Rage is incomprehensible to white supremacy – anger disrupts the squo and is something inherently uncontrollable by white supremacy. Any other methodology fails. The understanding of the rage that Latinxs feel is necessary for change. 16 -Chandra 14 – Ravi Chandra, M.D. is a psychiatrist, poet and writer in San Francisco. Asian American Anger - It's a Thing!: #dvchallenge Pacific Heart Books, 2014 17 -The power of righteous rage and indignation is undeniable. Is it not moving us closer to solving the problems of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination, persecution and bondage? Isn’t social media part of a sea change in the life and strivings of humanity, reinforcing and advancing our highest values? Certainly. Dictators, oppressors and one-party states have reason to fear rapid communication and dissemination of ideas, and even more so, the easy spread of anger against them. Social media pushes creatively against control. Censors may impose some limits, but people find ways to skirt those prison bars. The network, the loosely organized or completely unorganized online “flash mob”, is taking aim at hierarchical power structures across the globe. If people power is a forbidden fruit, then social media seems like a blossoming orchard of possibilities. It is a genie that can’t be put back in the bottle, a necessary torch to combat the darkness of ignorance and tyranny. Perhaps, even, a spur to enlightenment, as our newfound connection can inspire us to rise above greed and hatred, and towards compassion and wisdom. Our collective compassion and wisdom certainly will determine our fate. Anger is part of our struggle to make sure that there is an end to all forms of the gulag. In case of emergency, break silence. Anger is a vital component and provocateur of our egos – and must be heard, met and resolved in our advance towards a healthier, more inclusive society. Anger disrupts the status quo – and the modern mantra of technological change is “disruption”. Anger spreading through social media may be the ultimate disruptive force in our global tweet-à-tweet. Facebook and Twitter are conveyance mechanisms for our angry prayers and insistent demands. We become the “hearer-of-all-cries”, the bodhisattva responsive to the suffering of all, the bodhisattva who delays enlightenment to help others become free. When we feel and observe anger, we recognize suffering. We are reminded of the First Noble Truth – “Life entails suffering”. Something deep within us is compelled. We become restless until we find the cure for what ails, the remedy for the wails and woes of a world in distress. Anger comes to us readily on smartphone screens and social media apps, reminding us of the frustrations of our friends and the world we share. No princess can sleep happily with a troublesome Facebook post, an irksome tweet-pea, under her mattress. They are reminders of the journey, more immediate and personal than a newspaper, because they are being served up by someone you know. They can be a litmus test of our spirit and resolve. If enlightenment, or even community, is our goal, then we must learn to listen to the angers of others, and understand our own. 18 - 19 -Rage is looking for the questions before we can begin to find the answers. Rage makes visible the problems we find in ourselves and our community, meaning it’s a prior question to any discussion. 20 -Chandra 14 – Ravi Chandra, M.D. is a psychiatrist, poet and writer in San Francisco. Asian American Anger - It's a Thing!: #dvchallenge Pacific Heart Books, 2014 21 -So is anger good or bad? That question is probably not as important as getting curious about the anger itself: understanding where it’s coming from, and what to do with it. It’s an important signal that something’s awry. Perhaps its energy can be turned to constructive purpose. Certainly, “stuffing it” or bottling it up inside, can lead to worse problems – like depression. We must touch the flame of anger, but then explore more deeply to understand the fuel of rage. There are no easy answers here. We may rather be right – and angry – than related, but related we must be. Through all our views of anger, we can create a mosaic to help guide our relationship to ourselves, the world, and each other. Where did this anger come from? Where did it lead? If I wasn’t feeling anger, what would I be feeling? What is underneath my anger? How do I want to heal this suffering? Anger is not the answer; it is a question. “Who am I?” “Who would I like to be?” As possessing as it is, anger is not our whole story; but on social media, it can seem like our only note. A shrill and possibly dangerous one, at that. 22 -Our counter-public focuses on the multiplicity of identities and problems that are commonly shared by latinx and black populations. This subaltern space has the ability to transform our understanding of what counts as a concern and provides minority populations with value to life. 23 -Pae and McCarty ‘12 (K. Christine is assistant professor of religion at Denison University, Granville, Ohio. She holds a doctoral degree in Christian social ethics from Union Theological Seminary in New York City and James W. is director of the Ethics and Servant Leadership program at Oxford College of Emory University and a PhD student in religion (ethics and society) at Emory University “The Hybridized Public Sphere: Asian American Christian Ethics, Social Justice, and Public Discourse,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics Volume 32, Number 1, d/l: muse) p. 104-17 24 -To critically understand the hybrid concept of Jesus/Christ in light of Asian Americans’ social locations, political struggle, and identity is not sufficient to create just racial relations. We also need to offer practical ideas for meaningful public discourse. Kwok, for instance, suggests a “diasporic imagination” that questions “the construction of the center and the periphery, the negotiation of multiple loyalties and identities, the relationship between the ‘home’ and the ‘world,’ the political and theoretical diasporized subject.”69 Various racialethnic minorities, as diasporized subjects, find their stories in those of others and together interweave the stories of oppressions and liberations. Diasporic imagination creates an alternative space where multiple groups can interact with each other and build up solidarity based on shared political goals. This alternative space is similar to what Nancy Fraser has named a “subaltern counterpublic.”70 Fraser has convincingly argued that because multiple forms of inequality exist in American society we cannot talk about “the public sphere” in any monolithic way.71 Instead, we should recognize the presence of multiple spheres of public discourse and the different ways in which they interact with and influence one another.72 The Hybridized Public Sphere • 105 Explicitly or implicitly excluded from “formal” or “strong” publics and conversations that influence and help determine political life in a democratic society, oppressed and marginalized people and groups can still participate in the discursive life of that society. They can form and participate in “weak” public spheres that, while lacking any institutional authority to implement desired changes, can influence public opinion and contribute in a significant way to democratic discursive practices about justice and the common good.73 Often, this participation occurs by bringing the unique concerns of the counterpublic into the wider public consciousness and transforming the understanding of what counts as a concern of the public and as vital to the realization of the common good. This contribution is more likely to happen when the discursive conversation of one counterpublic influences the conversation of another. The creation of and participation in counterpublics, then, does two things of interest to us here: first, they provide the discursive space for common identity formation through participation in democratic practices that provide some modicum of justice; second, because persons in a democratic society such as the United States have multiple commitments and identities, they make it possible for the pressing issues and concerns of one community to influence the discursive practices of other communities through forms of conversational “crosspollination.”74 This is not dissimilar to Iris Marion Young’s account of “deliberative democracy.” According to Young, when social groups join democratic discussion as those groups, they bring two important contributions to public life: first, they expand the amount of “social knowledge” available for the public to draw upon, and second, they require citizens to appeal to justice so that public discourse moves beyond merely competing individual and group interests.75 In other words, when marginalized and oppressed social groups join the public discourse of a democratic society, they challenge prevailing assumptions, specifically liberal ones, about the nature of life and the relative presence of justice in that society. By telling their stories and sharing their experiences, they force a society to reexamine its notions of justice to include such dissonant narratives. One important historical example of the possibilities present in the creation and existence of such counterpublics is the experience of many African American Christians throughout the history of the United States. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has demonstrated the ways in which black Baptist women organized and quite effectively used a subaltern counterpublic of their own creation to mobilize social change.76 This mobilization was not a one-time occurrence; blacks in the United States have repeatedly created spaces where people excluded from formal spaces of public discourse have participated in democratic practices that have influenced the wider societal discourse and resulted—admittedly, often after a long and arduous process—in significant 106 • 25 -Debate is disempowering and silencing~-~- we are just empty receptacles waiting to receive white trash, we are obedient model minorities who conform to models of education that structurally exclude the embodied position: Thus the ROTB is to endorse the debater who best maintains counterpublic spaces of resistance. 26 -Osajima – Keith Osajima. Keith Osajima teaches in the School of Education at the University of Redlands, specializing in race and the experiences of Asian American students in higher education. Internalized Oppression and the Culture of Silence: Rethinking the Stereotype of the Quiet Asian-American Student. De Anza College Political Science Department. http://nypolisci.org/files/PDF20FILES/Chapter20IV_209_20internalized20oppression20and20the20culture20of20silence20FEC2.pdf 27 -How can the general discussion on internalized oppression be applied to the experiences of AsianAmerican students? I think it is useful to view the behavior of Asian American students as manifestations of two ways that they have experienced and internalized oppression as students and as members of a racial minority group. First, as students in this society, Asian-Americans participate in an educational system that is often structured in an oppressive manner; a system that does not consistently encourage the development of people’s natural intelligence, and joy for learning, but instead forces students to comply to a form of instruction that is severely limiting and disempowering. Again, Freire provides a useful analytical framework. He argues that much of formal schooling follows the “banking system” of instruction. In this mode, teachers are seen as the legitimate holders of knowledge. It is their role and their power to disseminate that knowledge, mainly through lectures, and “deposit” it into the empty receptacle—the student. Students are primarily passive recipients. Their role is to listen, and to replay the information in the form that it was given. In this mode, students are rarely encouraged to think, question, analyze, or synthesize. One of the ways that the structures of this banking system are held in place is through clearly-defined images of what it means to be a “good student.” A good student is quiet, obedient, unquestioning, prompt, and attentive. They do well on tests designed by the teacher. They can give the right answer. In return for this behavior, “good” students are rewarded with good grades, praise from teachers, honor rolls, and college entrance. A “bad student”, who is loud, rebellious, defies and questions authority, skips class or comes in late, and doesn’t do the homework, is stigmatized and isolated from the rest. For many of us, these messages are so strong that they become a natural, internalized indicator of our self-worth. We come to believe that our abilities and our intelligence are best measured by our grades, or by the opinions and praise we receive from our teachers. This creates a tremendous pull to adhere to the image of a “good” student. At the same time those rewards become a means to control students, for in the process we lose sight of the fact that we are smart enough to think and figure many things out ourselves, and we also lose sight of our critical, reflective abilities that allow us to question the ways that schooling may be oppressive. I think for Asian students, the pull to be “good” students becomes even stronger when we place that student oppression in the context of the way Asians have responded to racial oppression in this country. For many Asian-Americans, silence and education lies at the heart of how we have dealt with racial oppression. As Colin Watanabe and Ben Tong argued in the early 1970’s, Asian-Americans often adopted a passive, quiet, conforming behavior as a means to survive racial hostilities. It was deemed safer not to rock the boat than to call attention to oneself and risk oppression. Many of us learned these lessons from our parents as we were growing up, internalized them, and came to believe that we too might be in danger if we speak out, or call attention to ourselves. Thus, even when the situation may not be threatening, the internalized oppression often makes us feel that we need to be quiet in order to be safe. On another front, AsianAmericans have long identified education as a strategy to deal with racial discrimination. Education has been seen as a way to gain social and economic mobility and to fend off racism. The result has been a tremendous pressure on Asian students to do well in school, which in many respects has been realized. This success, in turn, has been institutionalized as another stereotype in the media’s portrayal of Asians as the model minority. It is here that student and racial oppression merge and reinforce each other. On the one hand, Asian students believe that education is the key to overcoming racial oppression. Many of us are also told that being quiet, conforming, and invisible is a good way to avoid being the target of racism. We take these internalized messages to school where they meld neatly into the way that students have been oppressed. Recall that being quiet and conforming is encouraged and rewarded in schools, for it is a central facet of the banking system of education. Thus, we have a situation where the oppressive features of the educational system work to reinforce the ways that Asians have dealt with racial oppression. Young AsianAmericans often internalize these images and come to believe that their identity and self-image hinge upon being the successful quiet student. It is understandable, then, why they often carry these feelings, perspectives, and actions into every classroom situation, and have difficulty breaking with familiar patterns and feelings to answer questions in our classes. 28 -Theory Underview 29 -Aff gets RVIs 30 -a. Our aff justifies RVIs—this space is our space of rage, and theory debates are a silencing of our protest against police brutality because it goes against your rules of debate—if you have the freedom to police me you can’t get away with qualified immunity. If what you did was irresponsible and oppressive, it’s a reason to vote you down. 31 -Framework is how they mark our bodies as irrational because we operate outside their productive limits. This is the violent attempt to invisibilize whiteness by determining the mechanisms by which we engage with the resolution. That denies accountability and re asserts colonial violence on brown bodies 32 -Kincheloe ‘99 – {Joe L; Research chair at Faculty of Education at McGill University; “The Struggle to Define and Reinvent Whiteness: A Pedagogical Analysis”; College Literature 26 (Fall 1999): 162-; 1999; http://www.virginia.edu/woodson/courses/aas10220(spring2001)/articles/kincheloe.html) 33 -While no one knows exactly what constitutes whiteness, we can historicize the concept and offer some general statements about the dynamics it signifies. Even this process is difficult, as whiteness as a socio-historical construct is constantly shifting in light of new circumstances and changing interactions with various manifestations of power. With these qualifications in mind we believe that a dominant impulse of whiteness took shape around the European Enlightenment’s notion of rationality with its privileged construction of a transcendental white, male, rational subject who operated at the recesses of power while concurrently giving every indication that he escaped the confines of time and space. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,97 +1,0 @@ 1 -AC 2 -Framework 3 -First, necessary enablers are the only way to structure action- If I have an obligation to X, and doing Y is necessary to do X, I have an obligation to do Y. 4 -Sinnott-Armstrong. Walter, "An argument for consequentialism." Philosophical Perspectives (1992): 399-421. Page 400 5 -“Since general substitutability works for other kinds of reasons for action, we would need a strong argument to deny that it holds also for moral reasons. If moral reasons obeyed different principles, it would be hard to understand why moral reasons are also called ‘reasons’ and how moral reasons interact with other reasons when they apply to the same action. Nonetheless, this extension has been denied, so we have to look at moral reasons carefully. I have a moral reason to feed my child tonight, both because I promised my wife to do so, and also because of my special relation to my child along with the fact that she will go hungry if I don’t feed her. I can’t feed my child tonight without going home soon, and going home soon will enable me to feed her tonight. Therefore, there is a moral reason for me to go home soon. It need not be imprudent or ugly or sacrilegious or illegal for me not to feed her, but the requirements of morality give me a moral reason to feed her. This argument assumes a special case of substitutability: (MS) If there is a moral reason for A to do X, and if A cannot do X without doing Y, and if doing Y will enable A to do X, then there is a moral reason for A to do Y. I will call this ‘the principle of moral substitutability’, or just ‘moral substitutability’. This principle is confirmed by moral reasons with negative structures. I have a moral reason to help a friend this afternoon. I cannot do so if I play golf this afternoon. Not playing golf this afternoon will enable me to help my friend. So I have a moral reason not to play golf this afternoon. Similarly, I have a moral reason not to endanger other drivers (beyond acceptable limits). I can’t drink too much before I drive without endangering other drivers. Not drinking too much will enable me to avoid endangering other drivers. Therefore, I have a moral reason not to drink too much before I drive. The validity of such varied arguments confirms moral substitutability.” 6 -And, this structure of action necessitates consequentialism or NEC. 7 -Sinnott-Armstrong 2. Walter, "An argument for consequentialism." Philosophical Perspectives (1992): 399-421. Page 400 8 - “All of this leads to necessary enabler consequentialism or NEC. NEC claims that all moral reasons for acts are provided by facts that the acts are necessary enablers for preventing harm or promoting good. All moral reasons on this theory are consequential reasons, but there are tow kinds. Some moral reasons are prevention reasons, because they are facts that an act is a necessary enabler for preventing harm or loss. For example, if giving Alice food is necessary and enables me to prevent her from starving, then that fact is a moral reason to give her food. In this case, I would not cause her death even if I let her starve, but other moral prevention reasons are reasons to avoid causing harm. For example, if turning my car to the left is necessary and enablers me to avoid killing Bobby, that is a moral reason to turn my car to the left. The other kind of moral reason is a promotion reason. This kind of reason occurs when doing something is necessary and enables me to promote (or maximize) some good. For example, I have a moral reason to throw a surprise party for Susan if this is necessary and enables me to make her happy. Because of substitutability, these moral reasons for actions also yield moral reasons against contrary actions. There are then also moral reasons not to do what will cause harm or ensure a failure to prevent harm or promote good. What makes these facts moral reasons is that they can make an otherwise immoral act moral. If I have a moral reason to feed my child, then it might be immoral to give my only food to Alice, who is a stranger. But his would not be immoral if giving Alice good is necessary and enables me to prevent Alice from starving, as long as my child will not starve also. Similarly, it is normally immoral to lie to Susan, but a lie can be moral if it is necessary and enables me to keep my party for Susan a surprise, and if this is also necessary and enables me to make her happy. Thus, NEC fits nicely into the above theory of moral reasons. NEC can provide a natural explanation of moral substitutability for both kinds of reasons. I have a prevention moral reason to give someone food when doing so is necessary and enables me to prevent that person from starving. Suppose that buying food is a necessary enabler for giving the person food, and getting in my car is a necessary enabler for buying food. Moral substitutability warrants the conclusion that I have a moral reason to get in my car. And this act of getting in my car does have the property of being a necessary enabler for preventing starvation. Thus, the necessary enabler has the same property that provided the moral reason to give the food in the first place. This explains why substitutability holds for moral prevention reasons. The other kind of moral reason covers necessary enabler for promoting good. In my example above, if a surprise party is a necessary enabler for making Susan happy, and letting people know about the party is a necessary enabler for having a party, then letting people know is a necessary enabler for making Susan happy. The very fact that provides a moral reason to have the party also provides a moral reason to let people know about it. Thus, NEC can explain why moral substitutability holds for every kind of reason that is includes. Similarly explanations work for moral reasons not to do certain acts, and this explanatory power is a reason to favor NEC. Of course, this should come as no surprise. NEC was intentionally structured to that it would explain moral substitutability. But this does not detract from its explanatory force. The point is that moral substitutability remains a mystery unless we restrict our substantive theory to moral reasons that obey moral substitutability by their very nature. The crucial advantage of NEC lies in its unity. Other theories claim that my reason to do what I promised is just that this fulfills my promise or that promise keeping is intrinsically good. However, I did not promise to start the mower, and starting the mower is not intrinsically good. Thus, my reason to start the mower derives from a different property than my reason to keep my promise. In contrast, NEC makes my reasons to keep my promise, to mow the lawn, and to start the mower derive from the very same property: being a necessary enabler of preventing harm or promoting good. This makes NEC's explanation more coherent and better. A critic might complain that NEC just postpones the problem, since NEC will eventually need to explain why certain things are good or bad, and some will be good or bad as means, but others will not. However, if what is good or bad intrinsically are states (such as pleasure and freedom or pain and death) rather than acts, then they are not the kind of thing that can be done, so there cannot be any question of a reason to do them. This makes it possible for all reasons for acts to have the same nature or derive from the same property. NEC will still have to explain why certain states are good or bad, but so will every other moral theory. The difference is that other theories will also have to explain why there are two kinds of reasons for acts and how these reasons are connected. This is what other theories cannot explain. This additional explanatory gap is avoided by the unified nature of reasons in NEC.” (415-417) 9 -Second, psychological evidence proves we don’t identify with our future selves. Continuous personal identity doesn’t exist. 10 -Opar 14 (Alisa Opar is the articles editor at Audubon magazine; cites Hal Hershfield, an assistant professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business; and Emily Pronin, a psychologist at Princeton) “Why We Procrastinate” Nautilus January 2014 11 -The British philosopher Derek Parfit espoused a severely reductionist view of personal identity in his seminal book, Reasons and Persons: It does not exist, at least not in the way we usually consider it. We humans, Parfit argued, are not a consistent identity moving through time, but a chain of successive selves, each tangentially linked to, and yet distinct from, the previous and subsequent ones. The boy who begins to smoke despite knowing that he may suffer from the habit decades later should not be judged harshly: “This boy does not identify with his future self,” Parfit wrote. “His attitude towards this future self is in some ways like his attitude to other people.” Parfit’s view was controversial even among philosophers. But psychologists are beginning to understand that it may accurately describe our attitudes towards our own decision-making: It turns out that we see our future selves as strangers. Though we will inevitably share their fates, the people we will become in a decade, quarter century, or more, are unknown to us. This impedes our ability to make good choices on their—which of course is our own—behalf. That bright, shiny New Year’s resolution? If you feel perfectly justified in breaking it, it may be because it feels like it was a promise someone else made. “It’s kind of a weird notion,” says Hal Hershfield, an assistant professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. “On a psychological and emotional level we really consider that future self as if it’s another person.” Using fMRI, Hershfield and colleagues studied brain activity changes when people imagine their future and consider their present. They homed in on two areas of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex and the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, which are more active when a subject thinks about himself than when he thinks of someone else. They found these same areas were more strongly activated when subjects thought of themselves today, than of themselves in the future. Their future self “felt” like somebody else. In fact, their neural activity when they described themselves in a decade was similar to that when they described Matt Damon or Natalie Portman. And subjects whose brain activity changed the most when they spoke about their future selves were the least likely to favor large long-term financial gains over small immediate ones. Emily Pronin, a psychologist at Princeton, has come to similar conclusions in her research. In a 2008 study, Pronin and her team told college students that they were taking part in an experiment on disgust that required drinking a concoction made of ketchup and soy sauce. The more they, their future selves, or other students consumed, they were told, the greater the benefit to science. Students who were told they’d have to down the distasteful quaff that day committed to consuming two tablespoons. But those that were committing their future selves (the following semester) or other students to participate agreed to guzzle an average of half a cup. We think of our future selves, says Pronin, like we think of others: in the third person. The disconnect between our present and time-shifted selves has real implications for how we make decisions. We might choose to procrastinate, and let some other version of our self deal with problems or chores. Or, as in the case of Parfit’s smoking boy, we can focus on that version of our self that derives pleasure, and ignore the one that pays the price. But if procrastination or irresponsibility can derive from a poor connection to your future self, strengthening this connection may prove to be an effective remedy. This is exactly the tactic that some researchers are taking. Anne Wilson, a psychologist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, has manipulated people’s perception of time by presenting participants with timelines scaled to make an upcoming event, such as a paper due date, seem either very close or far off. “Using a longer timeline makes people feel more connected to their future selves,” says Wilson. That, in turn, spurred students to finish their assignment earlier, saving their end-of-semester self the stress of banging it out at the last minute. We think of our future selves, says Pronin, like we think of others: in the third person. Hershfield has taken a more high-tech approach. Inspired by the use of images to spur charitable donations, he and colleagues took subjects into a virtual reality room and asked them to look into a mirror. The subjects saw either their current self, or a digitally aged image of themselves (see the figure, Digital Old Age). When they exited the room, they were asked how they’d spend $1,000. Those exposed to the aged photo said they’d put twice as much into a retirement account as those who saw themselves unaged. This might be important news for parts of the finance industry. Insurance giant Allianz is funding a pilot project in the midwest in which Hershfield’s team will show state employees their aged faces when they make pension allocations. Merrill Edge, the online discount unit of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, has taken this approach online, with a service called Face Retirement. Each decade-jumping image is accompanied by startling cost-of-living projections and suggestions to invest in your golden years. Hershfield is currently investigating whether morphed images can help people lose weight. Of course, the way we treat our future self is not necessarily negative: Since we think of our future self as someone else, our own decision making reflects how we treat other people. 12 -This proves util – a. If a person isn’t a continuous unit, it doesn’t matter how goods are distributed among people, which supports util since util only maximizes benefits, ignoring distribution across people. b. Other theories assume identity matters. Util’s the only possible theory if identity is irrelevant. 13 -Third, states have no act-omission distinction which means they are responsible for the state of affairs they bring about, so constraint based theories collapse to util. 14 -Sunstein and Vermule 05 (Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermuele, “Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? The Relevance of Life-Life Tradeoffs,” Chicago Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper No. 85 (March 2005), p. 17.) 15 -In our view, both the argument from causation and the argument from intention go wrong by overlooking the distinctive features of government as a moral agent. Whatever the general status of the act-omission distinction as a matter of moral philosophy,38 the distinction is least impressive when applied to government.39 The most fundamental point is that unlike individuals, governments always and necessarily face a choice between or among possible policies for regulating third parties. The distinction between acts and omissions may not be intelligible in this context, and even if it is, the distinction does not make a morally relevant difference. Most generally, government is in the business of creating permissions and prohibitions. When it explicitly or implicitly authorizes private action, it is not omitting to do anything, or refusing to act.40 Moreover, the distinction between authorized and unauthorized private action—for example, private killing—becomes obscure when the government formally forbids private action, but chooses a set of policy instruments that do not adequately or fully discourage it. If there is no act-omission distinction, then government is fully complicit with any harm it allows, so decisions are moral if they minimize harm. All means based and side constraint theories collapse because two violations require aggregation. 16 -Fourth, phenomenal introspection is the only accessible process for normative judgments, and entails happiness is good. 17 -Sinhababu Neil Sinhababu (National University of Singapore). “The epistemic argument for hedonism.” No date. 18 -“Phenomenal introspection, a reliable way of forming true beliefs about our experiences, tells us that pleasure is good and displeasure is bad. Even as our other processes of moral belief formation prove unreliable, it provides reliable access to pleasure's goodness, justifying the positive claims of hedonism. This section clarifies what phenomenal introspection and pleasure are, and explains how phenomenal introspection provides reliable access to pleasure's value. Section 2.2 argues that pleasure's goodness is genuine moral value, rather than value of some other kind. To use phenomenal introspection is to look inward at one's subjective experience, or phenomenology, and determine what it’s it is like. One can use phenomenal introspection reliably while dreaming or hallucinating, as long as one can determine what the dream or hallucination is like. By itself, phenomenal introspection produces no beliefs about things outside experience, or about relations between our experiences and non-experiential things. It cannot by itself produce judgments about the rightness of actions or the goodness of non-experiential things, as these are located outside of experience. Phenomenal introspection can be wrong, but is generally reliable. As experience is rich in detail, one could get some of the details wrong in one's belief. Under adverse conditions when one has false expectations about what one's experiences will be, or when one is in an extreme emotional state, one might make larger errors. Paradigmatically reliable processes like vision share these failings. Vision sometimes produces false beliefs under adverse conditions, or when we are looking at complex things. It is, nevertheless, fairly reliable. The view that phenomenal introspection is unreliable about our phenomenal states is about as radical as skepticism about the reliability of vision. While contemporary psychologists reject introspection into one's motivations and other causal processes as unreliable, phenomenal introspection fares better. Daniel Kahneman, for example, writes that “experienced utility is best measured by moment-based methods that assess the experience of the present.”20 Even those most skeptical about the reliability of phenomenal introspection, like Eric Schwitzgebel, concede that if we can reliably introspect whether we are in serious pain. Then we should be able to introspectively determine what pain is like. I assume the reliability of phenomenal introspection in what follows. One can form a variety of beliefs using phenomenal introspection. For example, one can believe that one is having sound experiences of particular noises and visual experiences of different shades of color. When looking at a lemon and considering the phenomenal states that are yellow experiences, one can form some beliefs about their intrinsic features – for example, that they are bright experiences. And when considering experiences of pleasure, one can make some judgments about their intrinsic features – for example, that they are good experiences. Just as one can look inward at one's experience of lemon yellow and appreciate its brightness, one can look inward at one's experience of pleasure and appreciate its goodness. When I consider a situation of increasing pleasure, I can form the belief that things are better than they were before, in the same way I form the belief that there is more brightness in my visual field as lemon yellow replaces black. And when I suddenly experience pain, I can form the belief that things are worse in my experience than they were before. "Pleasure" here refers to the hedonic tone of experience. Having pleasure consists in one's experience having this hedonic tone. Without descending into metaphor, it is hard to give a further account of what pleasure is like than to say that when one has it, one feels good. As Aaron Smuts writes in defending the view of pleasure as hedonic tone, “to 'feel good' is about as close to an experiential primitive as we get.”” (712) 19 -This justifies util. 20 -Sinhababu 2 Neil Sinhababu (National University of Singapore). “The epistemic argument for hedonism.” No date. 21 - “Even though phenomenal introspection only tells me about my own phenomenal states, I can know that others' pleasure is good. Of course, I cannot phenomenally introspect their pleasures any more than I can phenomenally introspect pleasures that I will experience next year. But if I consider my experiences of lemon yellow and ask what it would be like if others had the same experiences, I must think that they would be having bright experiences. Similarly, if in a pleasant moment I consider what it is it’s like when others have exactly the experience I am I’m having, I must think that they are having good experiences. If they have exactly the same experiences I am having, their experiences will have exactly the same intrinsic properties as mine. This is also how I know that if I have the same experience in the future, it will have the same intrinsic properties. Even though the only pleasure I can introspect is mine now, Thus I should believe that pleasures experienced by others and myself at other times are good, just as I should believe that yellow experienced by others and myself at other times is bright. My argument thus favors the kind of universal hedonism that supports utilitarianism, not egoistic hedonism” 22 -Fifth, util is a lexical pre-requisite to any other framework- 23 -a. Threats to bodily security and life preclude the ability for moral actors to effectively utilize and act upon other moral theories since they are in a constant state of crisis that inhibit the ideal moral conditions which other theories presuppose – so, util comes first and my offense outweighs theirs under their own framework. 24 -b. The only way that we know an action is good or bad is through its results. A violation of a constraint might be bad because it results in treating someone as a means. Talking about how we can only know intent does nothing for you: consequentialists concede this, and speculate about end states based on the aims of the actions. 25 -Thus, the standard is maximizing expected well-being. 26 -Advocacy 27 -I defend the whole resolution – i.e., a world in which public colleges do not restrict any constitutionally protected free speech. 28 - 29 -Advantage – Racism 30 -Advantage one is racism- 31 -The 1AC’s endorsing of free speech eliminates structures of oppression – 32 -a) it allows us to identify racists so that we can persuade them otherwise; this solves the root cause of oppression. 33 -b) It also leads to a bystander effect whereby people in the middle can also be convinced to stay away from that mindset though debate 34 -ACLU 16. American Civil Liberties Union. For almost 100 years, the ACLU has worked to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States., “Hate Speech on Campus”, ACLU, 2016. https://www.aclu.org/other/hate-speech-campus 35 -Where racist, sexist and homophobic speech is concerned, the ACLU believes that more speech ~-~- not less ~-~- is the best revenge. This is particularly true at universities, whose mission is to facilitate learning through open debate and study, and to enlighten. Speech codes are not the way to go on campuses, where all views are entitled to be heard, explored, supported or refuted. Besides, when hate is out in the open, people can see the problem. Then they can organize effectively to counter bad attitudes, possibly change them, and forge solidarity against the forces of intolerance. 36 -Britain empirically proves you can’t eliminate bigotry by banning it so any limitation empirically causes more violence. 37 -Malik 12 Kenan Malik, I am a writer, lecturer and broadcaster. My latest book is The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics, “why hate speech should not be banned”, April 12, 2012, https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/why-hate-speech-should-not-be-banned/ 38 -And in practice, you cannot reduce or eliminate bigotry simply by banning it. You simply let the sentiments fester underground. As Milton once put it, to keep out ‘evil doctrine’ by licensing is ‘like the exploit of that gallant man who thought to pound up the crows by shutting his Park-gate’. Take Britain. In 1965, Britain prohibited incitement to racial hatred as part of its Race Relations Act. The following decade was probably the most racist in British history. It was the decade of ‘Paki-bashing’, when racist thugs would seek out Asians to beat up. It was a decade of firebombings, stabbings, and murders. In the early 1980s, I was organizing street patrols in East London to protect Asian families from racist attacks. Nor were thugs the only problem. Racism was woven into the fabric of public institutions. The police, immigration officials – all were openly racist. In the twenty years between 1969 and 1989, no fewer than thirty-seven blacks and Asians were killed in police custody – almost one every six months. The same number again died in prisons or in hospital custody. When in 1982, cadets at the national police academy were asked to write essays about immigrants, one wrote, ‘Wogs, nignogs and Pakis come into Britain take up our homes, our jobs and our resources and contribute relatively less to our once glorious country. They are, by nature, unintelligent. And can’t at all be educated sufficiently to live in a civilised society of the Western world’. Another wrote that ‘all blacks are pains and should be ejected from society’. So much for incitement laws helping create a more tolerant society. Today, Britain is a very different place. Racism has not disappeared, nor have racist attacks, but the open, vicious, visceral bigotry that disfigured the Britain when I was growing up has largely ebbed away. It has done so not because of laws banning racial hatred but because of broader social changes and because minorities themselves stood up to the bigotry and fought back. Of course, as the British experience shows, hatred exists not just in speech but also has physical consequences. Is it not important, critics of my view ask, to limit the fomenting of hatred to protect the lives of those who may be attacked? In asking this very question, they are revealing the distinction between speech and action. 39 -The aff creates a spillover effect – challenging oppression in everyday discussions is key to shaping larger cultural landscapes. 40 -Malik 2 Kenan Malik, I am a writer, lecturer and broadcaster. My latest book is The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics, “why hate speech should not be banned”, April 12, 2012, https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/why-hate-speech-should-not-be-banned/ 41 -Much of what we call hate speech consists, however, of claims that may be contemptible but yet are accepted by many as morally defensible. Hence I am wary of the argument that some sentiments are so immoral they can simply be condemned without being contested. First, such blanket condemnations are often a cover for the inability or unwillingness politically to challenge obnoxious sentiments. Second, in challenging obnoxious sentiments, we are not simply challenging those who spout such views; we are also challenging the potential audience for such views. Dismissing obnoxious or hateful views as not worthy of response may not be the best way of engaging with such an audience. Whether or not an obnoxious claim requires a reply depends, therefore, not simply on the nature of the claim itself, but also on the potential audience for that claim. 42 -Silencing bigots only re-entrenches their position and galvanizes their opposition to social justice movements 43 -Levinovitz 16 Alan Levinovitz, assistant professor of religion at James Madison University, “How Trigger Warnings Silence Religious Students,” The Atlantic, August 30, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/silencing-religious-students-on-campus/497951/ 44 - There is no doubt that in America, the perspective of white, heterosexual Christian males has enjoyed disproportionate emphasis, particularly in higher education. Trigger warnings, safe spaces, diversity initiatives, and attention to social justice: all of these are essential for pushing back against this lopsided power dynamic. But there is a very real danger that these efforts will become overzealous and render opposing opinions taboo. Instead of dialogues in which everyone is fairly represented, campus conversations about race, gender, and religion will devolve into monologues about the virtues of tolerance and diversity. I have seen it happen, not only at the University of Chicago, my alma mater, but also at the school where I currently teach, James Madison University, where the majority of students are white and Christian. The problem, I’d wager, is fairly widespread, at least at secular universities. Silencing these voices is not a good thing for anyone, especially the advocates of marginalized groups who hope to sway public opinion. Take for example the idea that God opposes homosexuality, a belief that some students still hold. On an ideal campus, these students would feel free to voice their belief. They would then be confronted by opposing arguments, spoken, perhaps, by the very people whose sexual orientation they have asserted is sinful. At least in this kind of environment, these students would have an opportunity to see the weaknesses in their position and potentially change their minds. But if students do not feel free to voice their opinions, they will remain silent, retreating from the classroom to discuss their position on homosexuality with family, friends, and other like-minded individuals. They will believe, correctly in some cases, that advocates of gay rights see them as hateful, intolerant bigots who deserve to be silenced, and which may persuade them to cling with even greater intensity to their convictions. A more charitable interpretation of the University of Chicago letter is that it is meant to inoculate students against allergy to argument. Modern, secular, liberal education is supposed to combine a Socratic ideal of the examined life with a Millian marketplace of ideas. It is boot camp, not a hotel. In theory, this will produce individuals who have cultivated their intellect and embraced new ideas via communal debate—the kind of individuals who make good neighbors and citizens. The communal aspect of the debate is important. It demands patience, open-mindedness, empathy, the courage to question others and be questioned, and above all, attempting to see things as others do. But even though academic debate takes place in a community, it is also combat. Combat can hurt. It is literally offensive. Without offense there is no antagonistic dialogue, no competitive marketplace, and no chance to change your mind. Impious, disrespectful Socrates was executed in Athens for having the temerity to challenge people’s most deeply held beliefs. It would be a shame to execute him again. 45 -Perceived assault on free speech drives voters to the right wing which leads to disasters like the Trump presidency. 46 -Soave 16 Robby Soave, Associate editor at Reason.com, enjoys writing about college news, education policy, criminal justice reform, and television, “Trump Won Because Leftist Political Correctness Inspired a Terrifying Backlash”, Nov. 9, 2016, http://reason.com/blog/2016/11/09/trump-won-because-leftist-political-corr 47 -Trump won because of a cultural issue that flies under the radar and remains stubbornly difficult to define, but is nevertheless hugely important to a great number of Americans: political correctness. More specifically, Trump won because he convinced a great number of Americans that he would destroy political correctness. I have tried to call attention to this issue for years. I have warned that political correctness actually is a problem on college campuses, where the far-left has gained institutional power and used it to punish people for saying or thinking the wrong thing. And ever since Donald Trump became a serious threat to win the GOP presidential primaries, I have warned that a lot of people, both on campus and off it, were furious about political-correctness-run-amok—so furious that they would give power to any man who stood in opposition to it. I have watched this play out on campus after campus. I have watched dissident student groups invite Milo Yiannopoulos to speak—not because they particularly agree with his views, but because he denounces censorship and undermines political correctness. I have watched students cheer his theatrics, his insulting behavior, and his narcissism solely because the enforcers of campus goodthink are outraged by it. It's not about his ideas, or policies. It's not even about him. It's about vengeance for social oppression. Trump has done to America what Yiannopoulos did to campus. This is a view Yiannopoulos shares. When I spoke with him about Trump's success months ago, he told me, "Nobody votes for Trump or likes Trump on the basis of policy positions. That's a misunderstanding of what the Trump phenomenon is." He described Trump as "an icon of irreverent resistance to political correctness." Correctly, I might add. What is political correctness? It's notoriously hard to define. I recently appeared on a panel with CNN's Sally Kohn, who described political correctness as being polite and having good manners. That's fine—it can mean different things to different people. I like manners. I like being polite. That's not what I'm talking about. The segment of the electorate who flocked to Trump because he positioned himself as "an icon of irreverent resistance to political correctness" think it means this: smug, entitled, elitist, privileged leftists jumping down the throats of ordinary folks who aren't up-to-date on the latest requirements of progressive society. Example: A lot of people think there are only two genders—boy and girl. Maybe they're wrong. Maybe they should change that view. Maybe it's insensitive to the trans community. Maybe it even flies in the face of modern social psychology. But people think it. Political correctness is the social force that holds them in contempt for that, or punishes them outright. If you're a leftist reading this, you probably think that's stupid. You probably can't understand why someone would get so bent out of shape about being told their words are hurtful. You probably think it's not a big deal and these people need to get over themselves. Who's the delicate snowflake now, huh? you're probably thinking. I'm telling you: your failure to acknowledge this miscalculation and adjust your approach has delivered the country to Trump. There's a related problem: the boy-who-cried-wolf situation. I was happy to see a few liberals, like Bill Maher, owning up to it. Maher admitted during a recent show that he was wrong to treat George Bush, Mitt Romney, and John McCain like they were apocalyptic threats to the nation: it robbed him of the ability to treat Trump more seriously. The left said McCain was a racist supported by racists, it said Romney was a racist supported by racists, but when an actually racist Republican came along—and racists cheered him—it had lost its ability to credibly make that accusation. This is akin to the political-correctness-run-amok problem: both are examples of the left's horrible over-reach during the Obama years. The leftist drive to enforce a progressive social vision was relentless, and it happened too fast. I don't say this because I'm opposed to that vision—like most members of the under-30 crowd, I have no problem with gender neutral pronouns—I say this because it inspired a backlash that gave us Trump. My liberal critics rolled their eyes when I complained about political correctness. I hope they see things a little more clearly now. The left sorted everyone into identity groups and then told the people in the poorly-educated-white-male identity group that that's the only bad one. It mocked the members of this group mercilessly. It punished them for not being woke enough. It called them racists. It said their video games were sexist. It deployed Lena Dunham to tell them how horrible they were. Lena Dunham! I warned that political-correctness-run-amok and liberal overreach would lead to a counter-revolution if unchecked. That counter-revolution just happened. There is a cost to depriving people of the freedom (in both the legal and social senses) to speak their mind. 48 -Advantage – State Control 49 -Advantage two is state control- 50 -Putting restrictions on free speech creates a dangerous slippery slope. Universities should not be the arbiters of communication. 51 -Fisher 16 Anthony L. Fisher, Dec 13, 2016, “Opposition to “offensive” speech on campuses will ultimately burn dissidents”, http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/12/13/13931524/free-speech-pen-america-campus-censorship 52 -In perhaps the most cogent line of the entire report, the authors write: “Overreaction to problematic speech may impoverish the environment for speech for all.” In the name of social justice, some students are demanding administrators become the arbiters of what speech is legitimate and what isn’t. These students don’t seem to grasp that by granting authority figures the power to adjudicate which speakers have the right to be heard, they will inevitably find their own speech silenced when opponents claim offense, fear, or discomfort. Calls for crackdowns on “offensive” speech inevitably boomerang It’s already happening. Just ask the Palestinian activists whose boycott campaigns against Israel have been deemed hate speech by a number of public universities, and whose future political activities could be endangered by an act of Congress. Just this month, the Senate unanimously passed the "Anti-Semitism Awareness Act,” which directs the Department of Education to use the bill's contents as a guideline when adjudicating complaints of anti-Semitism on campus. Among the speech-chilling components of the bill, the political (and subjective) act of judging Israel by an "unfair double standard" could be considered hate speech. To cite other examples of unintended consequences of the crackdown on “offensive” speech, a black student at the University of Michigan was punished for calling another student “white trash,” and conservative law students at Georgetown claimed they were “traumatized” when an email critical of deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia landed in their inboxes. 53 -Any risk of restriction is just another instance on of the sovereign encroaching on life—the state maintains a monopoly on power and dictates who is and is not political. 54 -Smith 11 Mick, Department of Philosophy and School of Environmental Studies , Queen's University , Kingston, Canada). “Against ecological sovereignty: Agamben, politics and globalization”. 23 Feb 2011. 55 -Schmitt’s Political Theology (2005, p. 5) opens with his famous definition – ‘the sovereign is he who decides on the exception’; that is to say, it is the ultimate mark of sovereign power to be able to suspend the normal rule of law and political order by declaring a ‘state of emergency’ (exception). What is more, since such a suspension is paradigmatically only envisaged under exceptional circumstances (at times of political crisis) the precise conditions of its imposition cannot be pre-determined (and hence codified in law or a procedural politics) but depends precisely upon an extra-legal/procedural decision made by the very power that thereby awards itself a monopoly on political power/action. Agamben, like Schmitt, emphasises how the possibility of this ultimately arbitrary decisionistic assumption of absolute territorial power underlies all claims of state sovereignty, no matter what kind of political constitution such states espouse. Paradoxically, then, the (state of) exception is precisely that situation that (ap)proves the sovereign power’s rule. ‘What the ‘‘ark’’ of power contains at its center is the state of exception – but this is essentially an empty space’ (Agamben 2005, p. 86). The declaration of a state of emergency is both the ultimate political act and simultaneously the abrogation of politics per se. Here, participation in the ‘political realm’ which, from Hannah Arendt’s (1958, p. 198) and Agamben’s (which owes much to Arendt) perspective, ‘rises directly out of acting together, the ‘‘sharing of words and deeds’’’, is denied, by a political decision, to some or all of the population of a given territory, thereby reducing them to a state that Agamben refers to as ‘bare-life’, that is, human existence stripped of its ethico-political possibilities 56 -This opens up space for the worst atrocities imaginable—the state deems the human as non-human, clearing the way for genocide. 57 -Edkins 2000 Department of International Politics, University of Wales). “Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp”. 2000. 58 -The camp is exemplary as a location of a zone of indistinction. Although in general the camp is set up precisely as part of a state of emergency or martial law, under Nazi rule this becomes not so much a state of exception in the sense of an external and provi- sional state of danger as but a means of establishing the Nazi state itself. The camp is "the space opened up when the state of exception begins to becomes the rule."17 In the camp, the distinction between the rule of law and chaos disappears: decisions about life and death are entirely arbitrary, and everything is possible. A zone of indistinction appears between outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit. What happened in the twentieth century in the West, and paradigmatically since the advent of the camp, was that the space of the state of exception transgressed its bound- aries and started to coincide with the normal order. The zone of indistinction expanded from a space of exclusion within the nor- mal order to take over that order entirely. In the concentration camp, inhabitants are stripped of every political status, and the arbitrary power of the camp attendants confronts nothing but what Agamben calls bare life, or homo sacer, a creature who can be killed but not sacrificed.18 This figure, an essential figure in modern politics, is constituted by and constitu- tive of sovereign power. Homo sacer is produced by the sovereign ban and is subject to two exceptions: he is excluded from human law (killing him does not count as homicide) and he is excluded from divine law (killing him is not a ritual killing and does not count as sacrilege). He is set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law. This double exclusion of course also counts as a double inclusion: "homo sacer belongs to God in the form of unsacrificability and is included in the com- munity in the form of being able to be killed."19 This exposes homo sacer to a new kind of human violence such as is found in the camp and constitutes the political as the double exception: the ex- clusion of both the sacred and the profane. 59 -Constitutionally protected speech is key- it was meant to be a counter-majoritarian right to break down institutions. 60 -Redish and Mollen 09 Martin H. Redish, Louis and Harriet Ancel Professor of Law and Public Policy, Northwestern University School of Law, Abby Marie Mollen, B.A. 2001, J.D. 2008, Northwestern University, “UNDERSTANDING POST'S AND MEIKLEJOHN'S MISTAKES: THE CENTRAL ROLE OF ADVERSARY DEMOCRACY IN THE THEORY OF FREE EXPRESSION,” Northwestern University Law Review Vol. 103, No. 3, 2009 61 -According to Mansbridge, "the framers of the American Constitution explicitly espoused a philosophy of adversary democracy built on selfinterest,"'2 which shaped the Constitution in several ways. First, by putting certain individual rights beyond the reach of majoritarian enactments, the Bill of Rights actually enshrines and protects conflict. The Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment, for instance, protect religious diversity and the divergent ideas of the "good life" that result from different religious beliefs. The Free Speech Clause likewise protects the liberty of the individual to speak pursuant to her own will, even though her speech conflicts with the existing order and ideas of the "common good" that the majority accepts. The Constitution's countermajoritarian protections, in other words, reject the ideal of widespread societal consensus. To the contrary, out of respect for individual autonomy, they constitutionalize individual interest and the conflict it may produce. 62 -Free speech is key to preventing mass government violence endless warfare- this is a gateway to any other util impact. 63 -D’Souza 96 Frances, Prof. Anthropology Oxford, http://www.europarl.europa.eu/hearings/19960425/droi/freedom_en.htm?textMode=on 64 -There are undoubted connections between access to information, or rather the lack of it, and war, as indeed there are between poverty, the right to freedom of expression and development. One can argue that democracy aims to increase participation in political and other decision-making at all levels. In this sense democracy empowers people. The poor are denied access to information on decisions which deeply affect their lives, are thus powerless and have no voice; the poor are not able to have influence over their own lives, let alone other aspect of society. Because of this essential powerlessness, the poor are unable to influence the ruling elite in whose interests it may be to initiate conflict and wars in order to consolidate their own power and position. Of the 126 developing countries listed in the 1993 Human Development Report, war was ongoing in 30 countries and severe civil conflict in a further 33 countries. Of the total 63 countries in conflict, 55 are towards the bottom scale of the human development index which is an indicator of poverty. There seems to be no doubt that there is a clear association between poverty and war. It is reasonably safe to assume that the vast majority of people do not ever welcome war. They are normally coerced, more often than not by propaganda, into fear, extreme nationalist sentiments and war by their governments. If the majority of people had a democratic voice they would undoubtedly object to war. But voices are silenced. Thus, the freedom to express one's views and to challenge government decisions and to insist upon political rather than violent solutions, are necessary aspects of democracy which can, and do, avert war. Government sponsored propaganda in Rwanda, as in former Yugoslavia, succeeded because there weren't the means to challenge it. One has therefore to conclude that it is impossible for a particular government to wage war in the absence of a compliant media willing to indulge in government propaganda. This is because the government needs civilians to fight wars for them and also because the media is needed to re-inforce government policies and intentions at every turn. In a totalitarian state where the expression of political views, let alone the possibility of political organis-ation, is strenuously suppressed, one has to ask what other options are open to a genuine political movement intent on introducing justice. All too often the only perceived option is terrorist attack and violence because it is, quite literally, the only method available to communicate the need for change. 65 -Advantage – Innovation 66 -Advantage three is tech innovation- 67 -Restrictions on free speech are rapidly increasing, destroying the educational environment 68 -Slater 16 (Tom Slator – editor of this book (it’s a collection of essays from many different people). He also wrote the introduction from which this was cut. Deputy Editor of Spiked, runs Free Speech University Ratings, and has written for The Times/The Telegraph/Independent, “Unsafe Space: The Crisis of Free Speech on Campus”, pgs. 2 - 3, https://books.google.com/books?hl=enandlr=andid=vdP7CwAAQBAJandoi=fndandpg=PP1anddq=college+speech+restrictions+risingandots=YBNOvRNy1Tandsig=BmpSFkTJts9QsI1YcDAjxmB6dpQ#v=onepageandq=college20speech20restrictions20risingandf=false) 69 -Over the past few years, campus censorship has reached epidemic levels. In 2015, spiked, the magazine I work for, launched the Free Speech University Rankings, the UK’s first free-speech league table. Developed by myself and a team of student researchers, the rankings found that 80 per cent of universities and students’ unions have censored speech, and that the vast majority of campus bans came from student leaders. In the US, things aren’t much better. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s (FIRE) 2015 report found that over 55 per cent of colleges substantially restricted speech. This is a tragedy. Universities should be places for thinking the unthinkable and saying the unsayable. This new intolerance poses a threat not only to students, but to the entire, truth-seeking mission of the academy. Of course, there was no golden age for free speech on campus. Before and since the FSM, free speech has faced new threats and challenges. But there is something distinct and dangerous about the contemporary crisis. In the past, campus censorship was used to silence perceived ideological threats. Today, censorship has come to be seen as a moral obligation – a necessary part of protecting thin-skinned students from the harm of words themselves. Once, universities censored ideas they were worried might catch on. Today, they censor anything that might make students ‘feel uncomfortable’. It is this shift that has made contemporary campus censorship so indiscriminate – and, quite often, unintentionally hilarious. In the past few years, universities have taken to banning pop songs, sombreros and, at one US college, ‘inappropriately directed laughter’. But as tempting as it is to, er, laugh it off, this is deadly serious. Free speech is the means through which we develop as autonomous beings, understand the world around us and work out how best to change it. Universities should be engines of understanding, discovery and enlightenment. But it’s becoming impossible to have a casual conversation on campus, let alone a forthright debate. Spike has been writing and campaigning on this issue for all of its 15 years. And the madness that confronts us only affirms what we free-speech fundamentalists have been saying since the beginning: that if you turn a blind eye to censorship it will only spread and spread. Now that feminists are censored in the same breath as fascists and political correctness has become entrenched, there’s no more time to be complacent. We need to remake the case for free speech on campus. We need to insist that silencing the opposition is both a cop-out and a curse. And we need to reinvigorate a belief in the ideas of truth and progress that under-pin freedom of speech. 70 -This hamstrings innovation ~-~-- universities require free exchange of knowledge as a pre-requisite to education and regulations risk transforming academies into authoritarian structures 71 -ACTA 13 (American Council of Trustees and Alumni – independent non-profit that is focused on maintaining academic freedom and accountability among US colleges. “Free to Teach, Free to Learn: Understanding and Maintaining Academic Freedom in Higher Education”, pgs. 23-25, http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED560924.pdf,) 72 -The primary function of a university is to discover and disseminate knowledge by means of research and teaching. To fulfill this function a free interchange of ideas is necessary not only within its walls but with the world beyond as well. It follows that the university must do everything possible to ensure within it the fullest degree of intellectual freedom. The history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable. To curtail free expression strikes twice at intellectual freedom, for whoever deprives another of the right to state unpopular views necessarily also deprives others of the right to listen to those views. We take a chance, as the First Amendment takes a chance, when we commit ourselves to the idea that the results of free expression are to the general benefit in the long run, however unpleasant they may appear at the time. The validity of such a belief cannot be demonstrated conclusively. It is a belief of recent historical development, even within universities, one embodied in American constitutional doctrine but not widely shared outside the academic world, and denied in theory and in practice by much of the world most of the time. Because few other institutions in our society have the same central function, few assign such high priority to freedom of expression. Few are expected to. Because no other kind of institution combines the discovery and dissemination of basic knowledge with teaching, none confronts quite the same problems as a university. For if a university is a place for knowledge, it is also a special kind of small society. Yet it is not primarily a fellowship, a club, a circle of friends, a replica of the civil society outside it. Without sacrificing its central purpose, it cannot make its primary and dominant value the fostering of friendship, solidarity, harmony, civility, or mutual respect. To be sure, these are important values; other institutions may properly assign them the highest, and not merely a subordinate priority; and a good university will seek and may override its central purpose. We value freedom of expression precisely because it provides a forum for the new, the provocative, the disturbing, and the unorthodox. Free speech is a barrier to the tyranny of authoritarian or even majority opinion as to the rightness or wrongness of particular doctrines or thoughts. If the priority assigned to free expression by the nature of a university is to be maintained in practice, clearly the responsibility for maintaining that priority rests with its members. By voluntarily taking up membership in a university and thereby asserting a claim to its rights and privileges, members also acknowledge the existence of certain obligations upon themselves and their fellows. Above all, every member of the university has an obligation to permit free expression in the university. No member has a right to prevent such expression. Every official of the university, moreover, has a special obligation to foster free expression and to ensure that it is not obstructed. The strength of these obligations, and the willingness to respect and comply with them, probably depend less on the expectation of punishment for violation than they do on the presence of a widely shared belief in the primacy of free expression. Nonetheless, we believe that the positive obligation to protect and respect free expression shared by all members of the university should be enforced by appropriate formal sanctions, because obstruction of such expression threatens the central function of the university. We further believe that such sanctions should be made explicit, so that potential violators will be aware of the consequences of their intended acts. In addition to the university’s primary obligation to protect free expression there are also ethical responsibilities assumed by each member of the university community, along with the right to enjoy free expression. Though these are much more difficult to state clearly, they are of great importance. If freedom of expression is to serve its purpose, and thus the purpose of the university, it should seek to enhance understanding. Shock, hurt, and anger are not consequences to be weighed lightly. No member of the community with a decent respect for others should use, or encourage others to use, slurs and epithets intended to discredit another’s race, ethnic group, religion, or sex. It may sometimes be necessary in a university for civility and mutual respect to be superseded by the need to guarantee free expression. The values superseded are nevertheless important, and every member of the university community should consider them in exercising the fundamental right to free expression. We have considered the opposing argument that behavior which violates these social and ethical considerations should be made subject to formal sanctions, and the argument that such behavior entitles others to prevent speech they might regard as offensive. Our conviction that the central purpose of the university is to foster the free access of knowledge compels us to reject both of these arguments. They rest upon the assumption that speech can be suppressed by anyone who deems it false or offensive. They deny what Justice Holmes termed “freedom for the thought that we hate.” They make the majority, or any willful minority, the arbiters of truth for all. If expression may be prevented, censored or punished, because of its content or because of the motives attributed to those who promote it, then it is no longer free. It will be subordinated to other values that we believe to be of lower priority in a university. The conclusions we draw, then are these: even when some members of the university community fail to meet their social and ethical responsibilities, the paramount obligation of the university is to protect their right to free expression. This obligation can and should be enforced by appropriate formal sanctions. If the university’s overriding commitment to free expression is to be sustained, secondary social and ethical responsibilities must be left to the informal processes of suasion, example, and argument. 73 -Free speech on public colleges is a key internal link to scientific discovery ~-~-- campus speech restrictions allows for worse forms of coercion that skews data and a culture of open debate is key to advancement 74 -Economist 16 (“Under Attack”, “The Inconvenient Truth”, http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21699909-curbs-free-speech-are-growing-tighter-it-time-speak-out-under-attack,) 75 -Intolerance among Western liberals also has wholly unintended consequences. Even despots know that locking up mouthy but non-violent dissidents is disreputable. Nearly all countries have laws that protect freedom of speech. So authoritarians are always looking out for respectable-sounding excuses to trample on it. National security is one. Russia recently sentenced Vadim Tyumentsev, a blogger, to five years in prison for promoting “extremism,” after he criticized Russian policy in Ukraine. “Hate speech” is another. China locks up campaigners for Tibetan independence for “inciting ethnic hatred”; Saudi Arabia flogs blasphemers; Indians can be jailed for up to three years for promoting disharmony “on grounds of religion, race. . .caste. . .or any other ground whatsoever”. The threat to free speech on Western campuses is very different from that faced by atheists in Afghanistan or democrats in China. But when progressive thinkers agree that offensive words should be censored, it helps authoritarian regimes to justify their own much harsher restrictions and intolerant religious groups their violence. When human-rights campaigners object to what is happening under oppressive regimes, despots can point out that liberal democracies such as France and Spain also criminalize those who “glorify” or “defend” terrorism, and that may Western countries make it a crime to insult a religion or to incite racial hatred. One strongman who has enjoyed tweaking the West for hypocrisy is Recep Tayyip Erdogan, president of Turkey. At home, he will tolerate no insults to his person, faith, or policies. Abroad, he demands the same courtesy – and in Germany he has found it. In March a German comedian recited a satirical poem about him “shagging goats and oppressing minorities” (only the more serious charge is true). Mr. Erdogan invoked an old, neglected German law against insulting foreign heads of state. Amazingly, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has let the prosecution proceed. Even more amazingly, nine other European countries still have similar laws, and 13 bar insults against their own head of state. Opinion polls reveal that in many countries support for free speech is lukewarm and conditional. If words are upsetting, people would rather the government or some other authority made the speaker shut up. A group of Islamic countries are lobbying to make insulting religion a crime under international law. They have every reason to expect that they will succeed. So it is worth spelling out why free expression is the bedrock of all liberties. Free speech is the best defense against bad government. Politicians who err (that is, all of them) should be subjected to unfettered criticism. Those who hear it may respond to it; those who silence it may never find out how their policies misfired. As Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate, has pointed out, no democracy with a free press ever endured famine. In all areas of life, free debate sorts good ideas from bad ones. Science cannot develop unless old certainties are queried. Taboos are the enemy of understanding. When China’s government orders economists to offer optimistic forecasts, it guarantees that its own policymaking will be ill-informed. When American social-science faculties hire only left-wing professors, their research deserves to be taken less seriously. The law should recognize the right to free speech as nearly absolute. Exceptions should be rare. Child pornography should be banned, since its production involves harm to children. States need to keep some things secret: free speech does not mean the right to publish nuclear launch codes. But in most areas where campaigners are calling for enforced civility (or worse, deference) they should be resisted. Blasphemy laws are an anachronism. A religion should be open to debate. Laws against hate speech are unworkably subjective and widely abused. Banning words or arguments which one group finds offensive does not lead to social harmony. On the contrary, it gives everyone an incentive to take offence – a fact that opportunistic politicians with ethnic-based support are quick to exploit. Incitement to violence should be banned. However, it should be narrowly defined as instances when the speaker intends to goad those who agrees with him to commit violence, and when his words are likely to have an immediate effect. Shouting “Let’s kill the Jews” to an angry mob outside a synagogue qualifies. Drunkenly posting “I wish all the Jews were dead” on an obscure Facebook page probably does not. Saying something offensive about a group whose members then start a riot certainly does not count. They should have responded with words, or by ignoring the fool who insulted them. In volatile countries, such as Rwanda and Burundi, words that incite violence will differ from those that would do so in a stable democracy. But the principles remain the same. The police should deal with serious and imminent threats, not arrest every bigot with a laptop or a megaphone. (The governments of Rwanda and Burundi, alas, show no such restraint.) Areopagitica online. Facebook, Twitter and other digital giants should, as private organizations, be free to deicide what they allow to be published on their platforms. By the same logic, a private university should be free, as far as the law is concerned, to enforce a speech code on its students. If you don’t like a Christian college’s rules against swearing, pornography and expressing disbelief in God, you can go somewhere else. However, any public college, and any college that aspires to help students grow intellectually, should aim to expose them to challenging ideas. The world outside campus will often offend them; they must learn to fight back using peaceful protests, rhetoric and reason. These are good rules for everyone. Never try to silence views with which you disagree. Answer objectionable speech with more speech. Win the argument without resorting to force. And grow a tougher hide. 76 -Constant innovation in the chemical industry is key to check emerging diseases 77 -NRC 2002, National Research Council Committee on Challenges for Chemical Sciences in the 21st century “National Security and Homeland Defense” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK114822/) 78 -Many drugs are produced by either chemical synthesis or biosynthetic processes. Recent advances in synthetic organic chemistry, catalysis, biotechnology, and combinatorial chemistry have made it possible to synthesize many chemicals that are not found in nature or have heretofore been difficult to produce. Current chemical drugs, such as antibiotics, used to combat infectious diseases are threatened by bacterial abilities to quickly mutate into a drug-resistant form. Concern also exists for purposefully genetically modified organisms used for terrorist attacks. Consequently, there is a need to constantly develop new chemical drugs for fighting infectious diseases caused by new biological agents. As we know more about human genomics, many new drugs, whether small-molecule chemicals or large proteins, can be developed to better target the diseases. Rapid production of small-molecule drugs will require the development of new organic reactions that maximally increase chemical complexity and that are highly selective. Advances in automation and miniaturization will be required to expedite discovery of synthesis sequences for large-scale drug preparation. Discovery of new biotransformations and improvements in separations and reactor design are also required. Developing a scalable high-efficiency separation process for separating and purifying chemical isomers, such as chiral compounds, would be useful for many chemical syntheses. In addition, the development of new drugs is dependent on new technologies for fast screening and testing. Fundamental understanding of biosynthetic pathways in cells, the structure-function relationship of biological molecules, antibody-antigen interactions, signal transduction on the cell surface, and the mechanism of toxicity are important. The ability to generate a mass library of chemical compounds and screen them for their biological activities or functions also remains a challenge to industry. 79 -Absent innovation, new pathogens guarantee extinction ~-~-- decreasing biodiversity means spread between hosts is easier which checks empirics and generic defense 80 -Yule ’13 (et al; Jeffrey V. Yule – Herbert McElveen Professor of Applied and Natural Sciences At the School of Biological Sciences, Louisiana Tech University, Published April 2nd – Humanities 2013, 2, 147–159; doi:10.3390/h2020147) 81 -Since the 1940s, humans in industrialized nations have been relatively sheltered from the threat that infectious disease once posed. Modern antibiotics and antivirals have controlled pathogens that once devastated human populations, but these drugs often remain effective only briefly. Unprecedentedly large, dense human populations characteristic of modern societies coupled with rapid global travel create a situation in which emerging pathogens can move much more efficiently between hosts. Rates of future human mortality from emerging infectious diseases may depend on the levels of biodiversity that remain in unpopulated regions, which suggests that protection from novel infectious disease may be what has been, until recently, an overlooked benefit of biodiversity. We have assumed that humanity’s future will unfold in a way that avoids any of a number of global disasters for Homo sapiens sapiens. An equally reasonable but less optimistic assessment could take exception to that position. A variety of things could go badly wrong for humanity. Global human N may not stabilize at or below where it stands now without being pushed there by some form(s) of crisis that result from humans exceeding global K. As a result, anthropogenic factors from the intentionally harmful (e.g., warfare) to the unintentionally disastrous (e.g., agricultural practices leading to topsoil erosion and desertification) could occur singly or in conjunction with one another, with a variety of natural disasters (e.g., volcanic eruptions, earthquakes), and with disasters that straddle the boundary of natural and anthropogenic, the sorts of scenarios that otherwise could have been avoided or their impacts lessened with more forethought (e.g., outbreaks of infectious disease that move easily through dense human population centers and cannot be readily treated due to pathogen drug resistance). Although we cannot rule out such eventualities, speculation about the future of humanity is inherently more interesting if it proceeds on the assumption that the species will be at least moderately successful beyond the short- to medium-term. However, it may not, and the potential failure of our species has considerable biological implications. 82 - 83 -Underview (Tricks) 84 -No speech can be restricted on the basis of utility since the truth of an opinion is part of its utility—that is, whether it will be useful for people to believe a certain thing is in itself a "matter of opinion" which must be discussed, so util affirms. 85 -Mill 63 John Stuart Mill "Utilitarianism" 1863, http://www.justiceharvard.org/resources/j-s-mill-utilitarianism-1863/ 86 -Questions about ends are, in other words, questions what things are desirable. The utilitarian doctrine is, that happiness is desirable, and the only thing desirable, as an end; all other things being only desirable as means to that end. What ought to be required of this doctrine- what conditions is it requisite that the doctrine should fulfil- to make good its claim to be believed? The only proof capable of being given that an object is visible, is that people actually see it. The only proof that a sound is audible, is that people hear it: and so of the other sources of our experience. In like manner, I apprehend, the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it. If the end which the utilitarian doctrine proposes to itself were not, in theory and in practice, acknowledged to be an end, nothing could ever convince any person that it was so. No reason can be given why the general happiness is desirable, except that each person, so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires his own happiness. This, however, being a fact, we have not only all the proof which the case admits of, but all which it is possible to require, that happiness is a good: that each person’s happiness is a good to that person, and the general happiness, therefore, a good to the aggregate of all persons. Happiness has made out its title as one of the ends of conduct, and consequently one of the criteria of morality. 87 -Underview 88 -1. The state is inevitable- speaking the language of power through policymaking is the only way to create social change in debate. 89 -Coverstone 5 Alan Coverstone (masters in communication from Wake Forest, longtime debate coach) “Acting on Activism: Realizing the Vision of Debate with Pro-social Impact” Paper presented at the National Communication Association Annual Conference November 17th 2005 90 -Powerful personal narratives unconnected to political power are regularly co-opted by those who do learn the language of power. One need look no further than the annual state of the Union Address where personal story after personal story is used to support the political agenda of those in power. The so-called role-playing that public policy contest debates encourage promotes active learning of the vocabulary and levers of power in America. Imagining the ability to use our own arguments to influence government action is one of the great virtues of academic debate. Gerald Graff (2003) analyzed the decline of argumentation in academic discourse and found a source of student antipathy to public argument in an interesting place. I’m up against…their aversion to the role of public spokesperson that formal writing presupposes. It’s as if such students can’t imagine any rewards for being a public actor or even imagining themselves in such a role. This lack of interest in the public sphere may in turn reflect a loss of confidence in the possibility that the arguments we make in public will have an effect on the world. Today’s students’ lack of faith in the power of persuasion reflects the waning of the ideal of civic participation that led educators for centuries to place rhetorical and argumentative training at the center of the school and college curriculum. (Graff, 2003, p. 57) The power to imagine public advocacy that actually makes a difference is one of the great virtues of the traditional notion of fiat that critics deride as mere simulation. Simulation of success in the public realm is far more empowering to students than completely abandoning all notions of personal power in the face of governmental hegemony by teaching students that “nothing they can do in a contest debate can ever make any difference in public policy.” Contest debating is well suited to rewarding public activism if it stops accepting as an article of faith that personal agency is somehow undermined by the so-called role playing in debate. Debate is role-playing whether we imagine government action or imagine individual action. Imagining myself starting a socialist revolution in America is no less of a fantasy than imagining myself making a difference on Capitol Hill. Furthermore, both fantasies influenced my personal and political development virtually ensuring a life of active, pro-social, political participation. Neither fantasy reduced the likelihood that I would spend my life trying to make the difference I imagined. One fantasy actually does make a greater difference: the one that speaks the language of political power. The other fantasy disables action by making one a laughingstock to those who wield the language of power. Fantasy motivates and role-playing trains through visualization. Until we can imagine it, we cannot really do it. Role-playing without question teaches students to be comfortable with the language of power, and that language paves the way for genuine and effective political activism. Debates over the relative efficacy of political strategies for pro-social change must confront governmental power at some point. 91 -2. Singular political strategies don’t exist – methodological pluralism is necessary to avoid endless political violence. 92 -Bleiker 14 – (6/17, Roland, Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland, “International Theory Between Reification and Self-Reflective Critique,” International Studies Review, Volume 16, Issue 2, pages 325–327) 93 -Methodological pluralism lies at the heart of Levine's sustainable critique. He borrows from what Adorno calls a “constellation”: an attempt to juxtapose, rather than integrate, different perspectives. It is in this spirit that Levine advocates multiple methods to understand the same event or phenomena. He writes of the need to validate “multiple and mutually incompatible ways of seeing” (p. 63, see also pp. 101–102). In this model, a scholar oscillates back and forth between different methods and paradigms, trying to understand the event in question from multiple perspectives. No single method can ever adequately represent the event or should gain the upper hand. But each should, in a way, recognize and capture details or perspectives that the others cannot (p. 102). In practical terms, this means combining a range of methods even when—or, rather, precisely when—they are deemed incompatible. They can range from poststructual deconstruction to the tools pioneered and championed by positivist social sciences.The benefit of such a methodological polyphony is not just the opportunity to bring out nuances and new perspectives. Once the false hope of a smooth synthesis has been abandoned, the very incompatibility of the respective perspectives can then be used to identify the reifying tendencies in each of them. For Levine, this is how reification may be “checked at the source” and this is how a “critically reflexive moment might thus be rendered sustainable” (p. 103). It is in this sense that Levine's approach is not really post-foundational but, rather, an attempt to “balance foundationalisms against one another” (p. 14). There are strong parallels here with arguments advanced by assemblage thinking and complexity theory—links that could have been explored in more detail. 94 -3. We need to embrace the state as a heuristic—our argument is not that the state is good but that learning the levers of power is key to confronting it. 95 -Zanotti 14 Dr. Laura Zanotti is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech. Her research and teaching include critical political theory as well as international organizations, UN peacekeeping, democratization and the role of NGOs in post-conflict governance.“Governmentality, Ontology, Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the Global World” – Alternatives: Global, Local, Political – vol 38(4):p. 288-304,. A little unclear if this is late 2013 or early 2014 – The Stated “Version of Record” is Feb 20, 2014, but was originally published online on December 30th, 2013. Obtained via Sage Database. 96 -By questioning substantialist representations of power and subjects, inquiries on the possibilities of political agency are reframed in a way that focuses on power and subjects’ relational character and the contingent processes of their (trans)formation in the context of agonic relations. Options for resistance to governmental scripts are not limited to ‘‘rejection,’’ ‘‘revolution,’’ or ‘‘dispossession’’ to regain a pristine ‘‘freedom from all constraints’’ or an immanent ideal social order. It is found instead in multifarious and contingent struggles that are constituted within the scripts of governmental rationalities and at the same time exceed and transform them. This approach questions oversimplifications of the complexities of liberal political rationalities and of their interactions with non-liberal political players and nurtures a radical skepticism about identifying universally good or bad actors or abstract solutions to political problems. International power interacts in complex ways with diverse political spaces and within these spaces it is appropriated, hybridized, redescribed, hijacked, and tinkered with. Governmentality as a heuristic focuses on performing complex diagnostics of events. It invites historically situated explorations and careful differentiations rather than overarching demonizations of ‘‘power,’’ romanticizations of the ‘‘rebel’’ or the ‘‘the local.’’ More broadly, theoretical formulations that conceive the subject in non-substantialist terms and focus on processes of subjectification, on the ambiguity of power discourses, and on hybridization as the terrain for political transformation, open ways for reconsidering political agency beyond the dichotomy of oppression/rebellion. These alternative formulations also foster an ethics of political engagement, to be continuously taken up through plural and uncertain practices, that demand continuous attention to ‘‘what happens’’ instead of fixations on ‘‘what ought to be.’’ Such ethics of engagement would not await the revolution to come or hope for a pristine ‘‘freedom’’ to be regained. Instead, it would constantly attempt to twist the working of power by playing with whatever cards are available and would require intense processes of reflexivity on the consequences of political choices. To conclude with a famous phrase by Michel Foucault ‘‘my point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to hyper- and pessimistic activism.’ 97 -4. For the neg to prove their alt is exclusive with the aff, it would have to be the counterfactual result of not doing the aff. When evaluating between multiple courses of action, the correct way to compare is not between every single possible action but from the range of actions that an agent would actually do. Mutual exclusivity or a net benefit isn’t a reason to vote neg. There are dozens of actions better than the aff but that doesn’t help us in help us make the specific decision. Instead, the neg must prove their action is good and what would happen if there was no restriction on constitutionally protected free speech. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,50 +1,0 @@ 1 -Non-ideal theory is the most epistemologically sound starting point for moral decisions- other methods foreclose viewpoints. 2 -Mills 05, Charles, 2005, Ideal Theory” as Ideology, 3 -The crucial common … male-dominated philosophical literature. 4 - 5 -Thus the standard is minimizing oppression. 6 - 7 -Prefer 8 - 9 -Debate should deal with the real-world consequences of oppression. 10 -Curry 14, Tommy, The Cost of a Thing: A Kingian Reformulation of a Living Wage Argument in the 21st Century, Victory Briefs, 2014, 11 -Despite the pronouncement ….. contemporary moral parameters. 12 -Inherency 13 -Previously, to disregard qualified immunity, courts first determined if officers violated clearly established constitutional law and then determined if it was reasonable for the officer to act the way they did. Pearson v Callahan in 2009 allowed lower courts to decide the order in which they answered those questions, which has led to lower courts skipping the first question—stats prove. 14 -Walker 15Christopher J. Walker, Assistant Professor of Law, Michael E. Moritz College of Law, The Ohio State University, Aaron L. Nielson, Associate Professor of Law, J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University, “The New Qualified Immunity,” Southern California Law Review, Vol. 89, pp. 1-65, Oct. 19, 2015 JW 15 -On the other hand, …. stagnation theory discussed in Part I.D 16 - 17 -Plantext 18 -Thus the plan text—Resolved: Using White v. Pauly, a case in that is currently in the 10th circuit court of appeals, the Supreme Court of the United States ought to limit qualified immunity for police officers by forcing lower courts to give reason for exercising Pearson constitutional discretion, effectively overturning the precedent set in Pearson v. Callahan. 19 -Walker 2 Christopher J. Walker, Assistant Professor of Law, Michael E. Moritz College of Law, The Ohio State University, Aaron L. Nielson, Associate Professor of Law, J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University, “The New Qualified Immunity,” Southern California Law Review, Vol. 89, pp. 1-65, Oct. 19, 2015 JW 20 -Whereas the core …. for not doing so.”235 21 - 22 -Advantage 1: Decision-Making 23 -A requirement would lead to better judicial rulings-multiple warrants 24 -Walker 3 Christopher J. Walker, Assistant Professor of Law, Michael E. Moritz College of Law, The Ohio State University, Aaron L. Nielson, Associate Professor of Law, J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University, “The New Qualified Immunity,” Southern California Law Review, Vol. 89, pp. 1-65, Oct. 19, 2015 PW 25 -The reasons for reason .. be somewhat mitigated. 26 - 27 -Advantage 2: Judicial Legitimacy 28 -Judicial Legitimacy is low now- the court is in danger. 29 -Posner 15, Eric, The Supreme Court’s Loss of Prestige, 2015, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/view_from_chicago/2015/10/the_supreme_court_is_losing_public_approval_and_prestige.html 30 -The Supreme Court … 70 percent range. 31 - 32 -Providing reasons is the keystone of court legitimacy 33 -Walker 4 Christopher J. Walker, Assistant Professor of Law, Michael E. Moritz College of Law, The Ohio State University, Aaron L. Nielson, Associate Professor of Law, J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University, “The New Qualified Immunity,” Southern California Law Review, Vol. 89, pp. 1-65, Oct. 19, 2015 PW 34 -Not only does reason … the liberal, administrative state.”269 35 - 36 -Judicial Legitimacy is key to the Court’s power 37 -Gibson et al 14, James Gibson, Department of Political Science Professor of African and African American Studies Director, Program on Citizenship and Democratic Values Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy and Michael Nelson, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political Science Graduate Student Associate, Center for Empirical Research in the Law, 2014, http://mjnelson.wustl.edu/papers/AnnualReview.pdf 38 -The Supreme Court … accepted by the Nation (865-866). 39 - 40 -Court power is key to check back the legislator from hugely oppressive laws- Brown v. Board proves. 41 -Somin 16, Ilya, The Supreme Court Is a Check on Big Government, Protection for Minorities, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/07/06/is-the-supreme-court-too-powerful/the-supreme-court-is-a-check-on-big-government-protection-for-minorities 42 -The Supreme Court … of such outrages. 43 - 44 -Most recent empirics of late elim rounds show huge neg side bias 45 -Adler 15 brackets for clarity, Are Judges Just Guessing? A Statistical Analysis of LD Elimination Round Panels by Steven Adler http://nsdupdate.com/2015/03/30/are-judges-just-guessing-a-statistical-analysis-of-ld-elimination-round-panels-by-steven-adler/ 46 -Yet a plausible objection … late elimination rounds: 47 - 48 -The aff deploys the state as a heuristic to learn scenario planning- even if politics is bad, scenario analysis of politics is pedagogically valuable- it enhances creativity, deconstructs biases and teaches advocacy skills 49 -Barma et al 16 – (May 2016, Advance Publication Online on 11/6/15, Naazneen Barma, PhD in Political Science from UC-Berkeley, Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, Brent Durbin, PhD in Political Science from UC-Berkeley, Professor of Government at Smith College, Eric Lorber, JD from UPenn and PhD in Political Science from Duke, Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, Rachel Whitlark, PhD in Political Science from GWU, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Project on Managing the Atom and International Security Program within the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, “‘Imagine a World in Which’: Using Scenarios in Political Science,” International Studies Perspectives 17 (2), pp. 1-19, http://www.naazneenbarma.com/uploads/2/9/6/9/29695681/using_scenarios_in_political_science_isp_2015.pdf) 50 -What Are Scenarios …. in international affairs. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,111 @@ 1 +Part 1: Framework 2 + 3 +I affirm and value morality. 4 + 5 +1. Global justice requires a reduction in inequality and a focus on material rights. 6 +Okereke 07 Chukwumerije Okereke (Senior Research Associate at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia). Global Justice and Neoliberal Environmental Governance. Routledge 2007 7 +Notwithstanding these drawbacks, these scholars provide very compelling arguments against mainstream conceptions of justice 8 +AND 9 +satisfy their aspirations for a better life. (WCED 1987: 43). 10 + 11 +2. Structural violence is underrepresented in conventional thinking – you must include it as most important in your impact calculus. 12 +Nixon 11 Rob, Rachel Carson Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, pgs. 2-3 13 +Three primary concerns 14 +AND 15 +but gradually degraded. 16 + 17 +The standard is minimizing structural violence. 18 + 19 +Part 2: Inherency 20 + 21 +Japan has restarted its nuclear facilities, opening the door for more reopenings. 22 + 23 +19 reactors will be operational in Japan by 2018 by standard predictions 24 +WNN 7/28 World Nuclear News, “Japanese institute sees 19 reactor restarts by March 2018,” July 28 2016, http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NP-Japanese-institute-sees-19-reactor-restarts-by-March-2018-2807164.html 25 +Seven Japanese nuclear AND 26 +52 million tonnes CO2. 27 + 28 +Plan Text: The national government of Japan will ban the production of nuclear power. I defend normal means described in solvency advocate. I reserve the right to clarify. 29 +CCNE 13 Citizens’ Commission on Nuclear Energy, Organization Aiming at Fundamental Reform of Nuclear Energy Policy, “Our path to a nuclear-free Japan: an interim report Executive Summary,” October 2013 30 +Given the Fukushima 31 +AND 32 +with the aim 33 +Normal means entails phase out, shifting to climate friendly energy, and alleviating negative economic effects of removing nuclear power 34 +CCNE 13 Citizens’ Commission on Nuclear Energy, Organization Aiming at Fundamental Reform of Nuclear Energy Policy, “Our path to a nuclear-free Japan: an interim report Executive Summary,” October 2013 35 +3.2 Review of nuclear 36 +AND 37 +standards require fundamental reviews. 38 + 39 +Current nuclear safety protocol is insufficient even in the wake of Fukushima – the impact is devastating, and only the plan solves 40 +Lucas 12 Caroline Lucas, MP for Brighton Pavilion and a member of the cross-party parliamentary environment audit committee, “Why we must phase out nuclear power,” The Guardian, February 17, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/feb/17/phase-out-nuclear-power 41 +Fukushima, like Chernobyl 42 +AND 43 +an airplane crash. 44 + 45 +Part 3: Advantages 46 + 47 +Advantage 1: Racism and Classism 48 + 49 +Racial minorities in Japan are consistently the victims of nuclear radiation and are sacrificial lambs when disasters occur 50 +Shrader-Frechette 12 Kristin Shrader-Frechette, O’Neill Family Endowed Professor, Department of Biological Sciences and Department of Philosophy, and also the director of the Center for Environmental Justice and Children’s Health, at the University of Notre Dame, “Nuclear Catastrophe, Disaster-Related Environmental Injustice, and Fukushima, Japan: Prima-Facie Evidence for a Japanese ‘‘Katrina’’” ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE Volume 5, Number 3, 2012 51 +Prima-facie evidence AND 52 +DREI toward buraku. 53 + 54 +The poor are also unjustly victims of radiation structural violence 55 +Shrader-Frechette 12 Kristin Shrader-Frechette, O’Neill Family Endowed Professor, Department of Biological Sciences and Department of Philosophy, and also the director of the Center for Environmental Justice and Children’s Health, at the University of Notre Dame, “Nuclear Catastrophe, Disaster-Related Environmental Injustice, and Fukushima, Japan: Prima-Facie Evidence for a Japanese ‘‘Katrina’’” ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE Volume 5, Number 3, 2012 56 +University scientists, nuclear-industry 57 +AND 58 +become DREI victims. 59 + 60 +Advantage 2: Mental illness 61 + 62 +Meta-review of the literature indicates that PTSD and mental stress rates increased as a result of the Fukushima disaster 63 +Harada et al 15 Nahoko Harada, Division of Nursing, School of Medicine, National Defense Medical College, “Mental health and psychological impacts from the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake Disaster: a systematic literature review,” Disaster and Military MedicineThe Journal of Prehospital, Trauma and Emergency Care, 2015 64 +Our review compiled 65 +AND 66 +,the context of grief. 67 + 68 +Mentally ill face social stigma in Japan 69 +Ando et al 13 Shuntaro Ando, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science, Tokyo, Japan, “Review of mental-health-related stigma in Japan,” Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, September 30, 2013 70 +In Japan, the AND 71 +and (iv) offer direct social contact with people with mental illness. 72 + 73 +The Role of the Judge is to reject ableism 74 +Cherney 11 (James L., Wayne State University, “The Rhetoric of Ableism”, Disability Studies Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 3, http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1665/1606) 75 +If we locate 76 + 77 +awareness and political action. 78 + 79 +“Normality” is the justification for oppression 80 +Baynton 2013 (Douglas C, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History”, The Disability Studies Reader 17 (2013): 33-57.) 81 +The metaphor of the 82 +AND 83 +tandem with disability.4 84 + 85 +Part 4: Underview 86 +Aff gets RVIs 87 + 88 +2. Social injustice is the root of mass-scale violence – it primes society for external violence. 89 + Scheper-Hughes 04 (Scheper-Hughes 4 (Prof of Anthropology @ Cal-Berkely; Prof of Anthropology @ UPenn) (Nancy and Philippe, Introduction: Making Sense of Violence, in Violence in War and Peace, pg. 19-22) 90 +This large and at first sight “messy” Part VII is central to this 91 +AND 92 +including the house gun and gated communities; and reversed feelings of victimization). 93 + 94 +3. Structural Violence outweighs under util : 95 +Winter and Leighton 99 (Deborah DuNann Winter and Dana C. Leighton. Winter: Psychologist that specializes in Social Psych, Counseling Psych, Historical and Contemporary Issues, Peace Psychology. Leighton: PhD graduate student in the Psychology Department at the University of Arkansas. Knowledgable in the fields of social psychology, peace psychology, and ustice and intergroup responses to transgressions of justice) (Peace, conflict, and violence: Peace psychology in the 21st century. Pg 4-5, 1999) 96 + 97 +Finally, to recognize 98 +and 99 +citizens to reduce it. 100 + 101 +4. Withdrawal from the state triggers authoritarian impacts 102 +Boggs 2K Carl Boggs, Professor of Social Sciences at National University in Los Angeles, Adjunct Professor at Antioch University in Los Angeles, “The End of Politics,” 2000 103 +But it is a very deceptive and misleading minimalism. While Oakeshott debunks political mechanisms 104 +AND 105 +run counter to the facile antirationalism of Oakeshott’s Burkean muddling-through theories. 106 + 107 +5. the state’s logic is necessary to solve critical problems 108 +Kapoor 8 Ilan Kapoor, Professor of Critical Development Studies at the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, Toronto, Canada, “The Postcolonial Politics of Development,” 2008 109 +There are perhaps several other social movement campaigns that could be cited as examples of 110 +AND 111 +made it difficult for the state to quash them or deflect their claims. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,5 @@ 1 +Interp: Debaters must read trigger warnings if reading arguments about IPV or mental illness. To clarify, you must tell the judge and your opponent that you will be reading arguments about IPV or mental illness. 2 + 3 +Interp: If the negative debater asks the affirmative debater before the round to defend implementation of the resolution, then they may not read a criticism with links about the affirmative’s use of the state 4 + 5 +Interp: at least an hour before the round begins, debaters must disclose all broken positions (including ACs, NCs, DAs, CPs and Ks) on the NDCA LD 2016-2017 wiki under their own name, school, and correct side with cites, tags, the first three and the last three words of all cards read. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,74 @@ 1 +1AC Kant 2 +I value morality, which must stem from practical reason. 3 +Something qualifies as an action and not a mere event only if it is constituted by practical reason. Rodl Sebastian. Self-Consciousness, Harvard University Press, 2000: 4 +Calculation from desire 5 +AND 6 +the authority of reasons. 7 + 8 + 9 +analytics 10 + 11 +In order to prevent one's own freedom from being violated, agents must submit to a system of reciprocal constraints on their own freedom since the omnilateral will is the only way to ensure that freedom can be universal. 12 +Ripstein Arthur. Force and Freedom: Kant's Legal and Political Philosophy. Harvard University 13 +These difficulties for 14 +AND 15 +adjudication under law. 16 + 17 +Thus, the standard is maintaining the omnilateral will. If the government acts to hinder a violation of outer freedom, that is not an act of coercion, it is just a restoration of the rightful condition. Prefer since agency can only be possible by recognizing the same freedom of others—the process of gaining self-consciousness logically commits agents to recognizing universal rights to independence. Neuhouser, Frederick. Introuction to Foundations of Natural Right by Johann Fitche, 2000 18 +The deduction's second theorem makes 19 +AND 20 +to other rational beings. 21 + 22 +analytics 23 +analytics 24 +analytics 25 + 26 +Contention 1 = Tort Law 27 + 28 +Tort law is key to equal freedom. 29 +Ripstein 4 Arthur "Tort, The Division of Responsibility and the Law of Tort" Fordham Law Review Vol. 72 Issue 5 Article 21 30 +This brings us back to the law of tort. Almost anything I do will 31 +AND 32 +to your ability to set and pursue your own conception of the good. 33 + 34 + 35 +In any legal system of rights, plaintiffs must be allowed to sue defendants. 36 +Weinrib 02 Ernest J. Weinrib "Corrective Justice in a Nutshell" The University of Toronto Law Journal, Vol. 52, No. 4 (Autumn, 2002), pp. 349-356 http://www.jstor.org/stable/825933 37 +In sophisticated systems of private law, the overarching justificatory categories expressive of correlativity are 38 +AND 39 +the same as the reasons that justify the existence of the defendant's duty. 40 + 41 + 42 +Qualified immunity protects officials from civil suits. 43 +Chen 15 Alan K. Chen is the William M. Beaney Memorial Research Chair and professor of law at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, where he teaches courses in constitutional law, federal courts, and public interest law. An experienced civil rights litigator and former ACLU staff attorney, Professor Chen continues to do pro bono work in constitutional rights cases. "Qualified Immunity Liming Access to Justice and Impeding Development of the Law" Human Rights Magazine Home 2015 (Vol. 41) Vol. 41, No. 1 - Lurking in the Shadows: the Supreme Court's Quiet Attack on Civil Rights http://www.americanbar.org/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/2015—vol—41-/vol—41—no—1—-lurking-in-the-shadows—the-supreme-court-s-qui/qualified-immunity-limiting-access-to-justice-and-impeding-devel.html 44 +Savana sued the school personnel 45 +AND 46 +law." Safford, 557 U.S. at 378–79. 47 + 48 + 49 +Contention 2 = Accountability 50 + 51 + 52 +Violations of equal freedom necessitate punishment and accountability for the wrongdoer. 53 +Ripstein 6 Arthur Ripstein (Professor of Law and Philosophy, University of Toronto) "Private Order and Public Justice: Kant and Rawls" U Toronto, Legal Studies Research Paper No. 894431 Virginia Law Review, Vol. 92, No. 7, 2006 April 4th 2006 http://www.law.utoronto.ca/documents/Ripstein/privateorder_publicjustice.pdf JW 54 +Normatively, the law remains supreme even in the face of violation. Kant's technical 55 +AND 56 +alone. Her hindrance to freedom is thus hindered by sealing it off. 57 + 58 + 59 +Qualified immunity makes police accountability impossible. If you kill someone, there should be ramifications. 60 +Chemerinsky 14 Erwin (dean of the School of Law at the University of California, Irvine, is the author of the forthcoming book "The Case Against the Supreme Court.") "How the Supreme Court Protects Bad Cops" The New York Times August 26^^th^^ 2014 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/opinion/how-the-supreme-court-protects-bad-cops.html 61 +When there is not absolute immunity, police officers are still protected by "qualified 62 +AND 63 +how many more riots will it take before the Supreme Court changes course? 64 + 65 + 66 +Even if there are specific cases in which qualified immunity creates just outcomes, the state must first ensure that there are just procedures. 67 +Korsgaard 8 Christine "Taking the Law into Our Own Hands: Kant on the Right to Revolution" The Constitution of Agency: Essays on Practical Reason and Moral Psychology Oxford University Press http://www.klindeman.com/uploads/3/8/2/2/38221431/korsgaard_-_taking_the_law_into_our_own_hands.pdf 68 +This reading, however, does not sit well with the obviously Platonic character of 69 +AND 70 +normatively speaking, we must stand by their actual results. 71 + 72 + 73 +UV 74 +Aff gets rvis - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,73 @@ 1 +Part 1 is Framework 2 +Debate should deal with questions of real-world consequences—ideal theories ignore the concrete nature of the world and legitimize oppression 3 +Curry 14 Tommy J. Curry, Professor of Philosophy @ Texas AandM, “The Cost of a Thing: A Kingian Reformulation of a Living Wage Argument in the 21st Century,” 2014 4 +Despite the pronouncement of debate as an activity and intellectual exercise pointing to the real world consequences of dialogue, thinking, and (personal) politics when addressing issues of racism, sexism, economic disparity, global conflicts, and death, many of the discussions concerning these ongoing challenges to humanity are fixed to a paradigm which sees the adjudication of material disparities and sociological realities as the conquest of one ideal theory over the other. In “Ideal Theory as Ideology,” Charles Mills outlines the problem contemporary theoretical-performance styles in policy debate and value-weighing in Lincoln-Douglass are confronted with in their attempts to get at the concrete problems in our societies. At the outset, Mills concedes that “ideal theory applies to moral theory as a whole (at least to normative ethics as against metaethics); since ethics deals by definition with normative/prescriptive/evaluative issues, it is set against factual/descriptive issues.” At the most general level, the conceptual chasm between what emerges as actual problems in the world (e.g.: racism, sexism, poverty, disease, etc.) and how we frame such problems theoretically—the assumptions and shared ideologies we depend upon for our problems to be heard and accepted as a worthy “problem” by an audience—this is the most obvious call for an anti-ethical paradigm, since such a paradigm insists on the actual as the basis of what can be considered normatively. Mills, however, describes this chasm as a problem of an ideal-as-descriptive model which argues that for any actual-empirical-observable social phenomenon (P), an ideal of (P) is necessarily a representation of that phenomenon. In the idealization of a social phenomenon (P), one “necessarily has to abstract away from certain features” of (P) that is observed before abstraction occurs. This gap between what is actual (in the world), and what is represented by theories and politics of debaters proposed in rounds threatens any real discussions about the concrete nature of oppression and the racist economic structures which necessitate tangible policies and reorienting changes in our value orientations. 5 + 6 +Thus the standard is mitigating structural violence. Prefer: 7 + 8 +Exclusion based on perceived differences makes ethical theories illegitimate. 9 +Winter and Leighton 99 |Deborah DuNann Winter and Dana C. Leighton. Winter|Psychologist that specializes in Social Psych, Counseling Psych, Historical and Contemporary Issues, Peace Psychology. Leighton: PhD graduate student in the Psychology Department at the University of Arkansas. Knowledgable in the fields of social psychology, peace psychology, and justice and intergroup responses to transgressions of justice “Peace, conflict, and violence: Peace psychology in the 21st century.” Pg 4-5 10 +She argues that our normal perceptual cognitive processes divide people into in-groups and out-groups. Those outside our group lie outside our scope of justice. Injustice that would be instantaneously confronted if it occurred to someone we love or know is barely noticed if it occurs to strangers or those who are invisible or irrelevant. We do not seem to be able to open our minds and our hearts to everyone, so we draw conceptual lines between those who are in and out of our moral circle. Those who fall outside are morally excluded, and become either invisible, or demeaned in some way so that we do not have to acknowledge the injustice they suffer. Moral exclusion is a human failing, but Opotow argues convincingly that it is an outcome of everyday social cognition. To reduce its nefarious effects, we must be vigilant in noticing and listening to oppressed, invisible, outsiders. Inclusionary thinking can be fostered by relationships, communication, and appreciation of diversity. Like Opotow, all the authors in this section point out that structural violence is not inevitable if we become aware of its operation, and build systematic ways to mitigate its effects. Learning about structural violence may be discouraging, overwhelming, or maddening, but these papers encourage us to step beyond guilt and anger, and begin to think about how to reduce structural violence. All the authors in this section note that the same structures (such as global communication and normal social cognition) which feed structural violence, can also be used to empower citizens to reduce it. In the long run, reducing structural violence by reclaiming neighborhoods, demanding social justice and living wages, providing prenatal care, alleviating sexism, and celebrating local cultures, will be our most surefooted path to building lasting peace. 11 +2. Universal ethical obligations fail to account for status quo ante inequalities—acknowledging these is a prerequisite to any form of morality 12 +Llorente 03 Renzo Llorente. “Maurice Cornforth’s Contribution to Marxist Metaethics.” NATURE, SOCIETY, AND THOUGHT Vol. 16, No. 3 (2003) 13 +The problem, argues Cornforth, concerns the contradiction between a demand for, and injunction to, universalizability as the guarantee of fairness and impartiality, on the one hand, and the inherent injustice and unfairness of seeking to universalize moral norms and precepts in class-divided societies. For the insistence on universalizability, save in a situation of rough equality of condition, imposes very different burdens on the agents subject to this demand, and thus proves inherently unfair, a violation of the fundamental moral precept, already formulated by Aristotle, of equality of treatment for equals.10 As Cornforth puts it, “How, in a class-divided society in which the profits of one class are derived from the labour of another, can public policies and social aims be judged by a criterion of universal acceptability?” (228). Or again, putting the same point a bit differently (i.e., in terms of interests): “Until all exploitation of man by man is ended, morality cannot be based on a generalised human standpoint, expressing a common human point of view and interest” (357). We shall return to Cornforth’s remarks on interests shortly. Before doing so, let us first consider Cornforth’s discussion of the consequences attending the attempt to comply with the imperative of universalizability in class-divided societies. As Cornforth shows, two outcomes are possible. On the one hand, insofar as determinate moral principles are established as universally valid and used to regulate social life, the result is the enshrinement of a system of moral rules that is intrinsically unfair and inevitably class-biased. As Cornforth observes, “Where there are class divisions and one class interest is dominant within the given form of association, the corresponding obligations and rights express the dominant class interest, and the corresponding moral code becomes class-biased, not a code of universal but of class-biased morality” (1965, 354).11 In other words, if class divisions preclude the rough equality of condition necessary for the principle of universalizability to function properly (i.e., impartially), then the prevailing moral code will normally comprise duties, obligations, and so on that favor the dominant classes,12 since their interests are sure to take precedence in a situation in which there exist divergent, mutually exclusive interests and they alone possess the economic and political resources to ensure that their interests prevail.13 14 +4:30 15 +3. Education must prioritize equity—this requires minimizing structural antagonism to facilitate open discourse 16 +Trifonas 03 PETER PERICLES TRIFONAS. PEDAGOGIES OF DIFFERENCE: RETHINKING EDUCATION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE/ RoutledgeFalmer. New York, London. 2003. Questia 17 +. Thus, paying attention to how power operates along axes of gender, race, class, and ability (that is, recognizing that social differences are not given, but are accomplished in and through educational settings) is a step toward educational equity. What does the above discussion mean in the educational context? It means that in the interactions of teachers with students in the classroom, or in other contexts, attention needs to be directed toward how dominant and subordinate relations (be they based on race, gender, class, or ability) permeate these contexts and intersect in complicated ways to produce inequality and marginalization. The frequently used and well-meaning phrase, “I treat everyone the same, ” often used by teachers and administrators to indicate their lack of bias in a diverse educational setting, in fact masks unequal power relations. Similarly, educational policies that assume that people are the same or equal may serve to entrench existing inequality precisely because people enter into the educational process with different and unequal experiences. These attempts, well meaning though they may be, tend to render inequality invisible, and thus work against equity in education. In her exploration of white privilege in higher education in the United States, Frances Rains (1998), an aboriginal-Japanese American woman, states emphatically that these benign acts are disempowering for the minority person because they erase his or her racial identity. The denial of racism in this case is in fact a form of racism. Thus, in moving toward equity in education that allows us to address multiple and intersecting axes of difference and inequality, I recommend that we try to think and act “against the grain” in developing educational policies and handling various kinds of pedagogical situations. 5 To work against the grain is to recognize that education is not neutral; it is contested. Mohanty puts it as such: … Education represents both a struggle for meaning and a struggle over power relations. It is a central terrain where power and politics operate out of the lived culture of individuals and groups situated in asymmetrical social and political positions. (Mohanty 1990:184) We need to develop a critical awareness of the power dynamics operative in institutional relations-and of the fact that people participate in institutions as unequal subjects. Working against the grain is to take a proactive approach to understanding and acting upon institutional relations, whether in the classroom, in other interactions with students, or in policy development. Rather than overlooking the embeddedness of gender, race, class, ability, and other forms of inequality that shape our interactions, working against the grain makes explicit the political nature of education and how power operates to privilege, silence, and marginalize individuals who are differently located in the educational process. In her exploration of feminist pedagogy, Linda Briskin (1990) makes a clear distinction between nonsexist and antisexist education critical to our understanding here. She asserts that nonsexism is an approach that attempts to neutralize sexual inequality by pretending that gender can be made irrelevant in the classroom. Thus, for instance, merely asserting that male and female students should have equal time to speak-and indeed giving them equal time-cannot adequately rectify the endemic problem of sexism in the classroom. One of Briskin's students reported that in her political science tutorials that when the male students spoke, everyone paid attention. When a female student spoke, however, the class acted as if no one was speaking (13). Neutrality is an attempt to conceal the unequal distribution of power. An against the grain approach would acknowledge explicitly that we are all gendered, racialized, and differently constructed subjects who do not participate in interactional relations as equals. This goes beyond formulating sexism, racism, abilism, and class privilege in individualist terms and treating them as if they were personal attitudes. Terry Wolverton (1983) discovered the difference between nonracism and antiracism in her consciousness-raising attempt: I had confused the act of trying to appear not to be racist with actively working to eliminate racism. Trying to appear not racist had made me deny my racism, and therefore exclude the possibility of change. (191) Being against the grain means seeing inequality as systemic and interpersonal (rather than individual), and combatting oppression as a collective responsibility, not just as a personal attribute (so that somehow a person can cleanse herself or himself of sexism, racism, abilism, or class bias). It is to pay attention to oppression as an interactional property that can be altered (see Manners 1998). Roger Simon (1993) suggests, in his development of a philosophical basis for teaching against the grain, which shares many commonalities in how I think about an integrative approach to equity in education, that teaching against the grain is fundamentally a moral practice. By this he does not mean that teachers simply fulfill the mandate and guidelines of school authorities. He believes that teachers must expose the partial and imperfect nature of existing knowledge, which is constructed on the basis of asymmetrical power relations (for instance, who has the power to speak and whose voices are suppressed?). It is the responsibility of the teacher or educator to show how dominant forms of knowledge and ways of knowing constrict human capacities. In exposing the power relations integral to the knowledge construction process, the educator, by extension, must treat teaching and learning as a mutual and collaborative act between teachers and students. 18 +Advocacy 19 +I defend the whole resolution—Public Colleges and universities ought not to restrict all constitutionally protected speech. To clarify, the aff will remove all restrictions on constitutionally protected speech in the status quo. 20 + 21 +Advantage 1 is the Alt-Right 22 +The alt-right marks the returning of violent white supremacy 23 +Caldwell 16 (Christopher, senior editor at The Weekly Standard, “What the Alt-Right Really Means,” December 2, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/02/opinion/sunday/what-the-alt-right-really-means.html?_r=0//LADI) 24 +Not even those most depressed about Donald J. Trump’s election and what it might portend could have envisioned the scene that took place just before Thanksgiving in a meeting room a few blocks from the White House. The white nationalist Richard B. Spencer was rallying about 200 kindred spirits. “We are not meant to live in shame and weakness and disgrace,” he said. “We were not meant to beg for moral validation from some of the most despicable creatures to ever populate the planet.” When Mr. Spencer shouted, “Hail, Trump! Hail, our people! Hail, victory!” a scattered half-dozen men stood and raised their arms in Nazi salutes. Mr. Spencer, however you describe him, calls himself a part of the “alt-right” — a new term for an informal and ill-defined collection of internet-based radicals. As such, he poses a complication for the incoming president. Stephen K. Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News, whom Mr. Trump has picked as his chief White House strategist, told an interviewer in July that he considered Breitbart a “platform for the alt-right.” Perhaps we should not make too much of this. Mr. Bannon may have meant something quite different by the term. Last summer “alt-right,” though it carried overtones of extremism, was not an outright synonym for ideologies like Mr. Spencer’s. But in late August, Hillary Clinton devoted a speech to the alt-right, calling it simply a new label for an old kind of white supremacy that Mr. Trump was shamelessly exploiting. Groups such as Mr. Spencer’s, which had indeed rallied behind Mr. Trump, were delighted with the attention. Mr. Spencer called the days after the Clinton speech “maybe the greatest week we ever had.” While he does not consider either Mr. Trump or Mr. Bannon alt-right, Mr. Spencer has expressed hope that the press’s describing them as such will help his own group grow. The alt-right is not a large movement, but the prominence that it is enjoying in the early days of the Trump era may tell us something about the way the country is changing. At least since the end of the Cold War, and certainly since the election of a black president in 2008, America’s shifting identity — political, cultural and racial — has given rise to many questions about who we are as a nation. But one kind of answer was off the table: the suggestion that America’s multicultural present might, in any way, be a comedown from its past had become a taboo. This year a candidate broke it. He promised to “make America great again.” And he won the presidency. Mr. Trump’s success is bound to embolden other dissenters. This could mean a political climate in which reservations about such multiculturalist policies as affirmative action are voiced more strenuously. It could mean a rise in racial conflict and a platform for alarming movements like Mr. Spencer’s. More likely, it is going to bring a hard-to-interpret mix of those things. Mr. Spencer, 38, directs the National Policy Institute, which sponsored the Washington meeting. Despite its name, the institute has little to say about policy, although it has called for a 50-year moratorium on immigration. What it mostly does is seek to unite people around the proposition that, as Mr. Spencer put it, “Race is real, race matters, and race is the foundation of identity.” There are many such groups, varying along a spectrum of couth and intellect. Mr. Spencer, who dropped out of a doctoral program at Duke and worked, briefly, as an editor for The American Conservative, has his own online review, Radix Journal. The eloquent Yale-educated author Jared Taylor, who hosts the American Renaissance website and magazine, was at the conference, too. Kevin MacDonald, a retired psychology professor whose trilogy on Jewish influence is a touchstone for the movement, also came. There were cheers from the crowd at the mention of Andrew Anglin, who runs a neo-Nazi website called The Daily Stormer, but he was not there. Neither was Greg Johnson, whose online review Counter-Currents translates right-wing writings from various European languages. Some of these groups sprouted on the internet. Others have been around since before it existed. There is no obvious catchall word for them. The word “racist” has been stretched to cover an attitude toward biology, a disposition to hate, and a varying set of policy preferences, from stop-and-frisk policing to repatriating illegal immigrants. While everyone in this set of groups is racist in at least one of these senses, many are not racist in others. Not many of the attendees at the Washington gathering favored the term “white supremacist.” The word implies a claim to superiority — something few insisted on. “White nationalist” is closer to the mark; most people in this part of the alt-right think whites either ought to have a nation or constitute one already. But they feel that almost all words tend to misdescribe or stigmatize them. Almost all of them are gung-ho for Mr. Trump. That is a surprise. “I’ve been watching these people for 17 years,” said Heidi Beirich, who follows extremist movements for the Southern Poverty Law Center. “It’s the first time I’ve seen them come out for a candidate.” Mr. Trump disavowed the alt-righters once the excesses of Mr. Spencer’s conference went viral. But as a candidate, Mr. Trump called the government corrupt, assailed the Republican establishment, flouted almost every rule of political etiquette, racial and otherwise, and did so in a way that made the alt-righters trust his instincts. And whether or not he exploited them as shamelessly as Mrs. Clinton alleged, he did little to put the public at ease on the matter — retweeting posts from someone called @WhiteGenocideTM and dawdling before disavowing the endorsement of the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. “I don’t think that Trump is a rabid white nationalist,” the alt-right blogger Millennial Woes said at a speech in Seattle days after the election. “I think that he just wants to restore America to what he knew as a young man, as a child. And I think he probably does know at some level that the way to do it is to get more white people here and fewer brown people.” Mr. Spencer speaks of Mr. Trump’s campaign as a “body without a head” and considers many of his policies “half-baked.” But for him, that is not the point. “Donald Trump is the first step towards identity politics for European-Americans in the United States,” he said. There is no good evidence that Mr. Trump or Mr. Bannon think in terms like these. Not even the former Breitbart editor at large Ben Shapiro, who has become an energetic critic of Mr. Bannon and his agenda, says that Mr. Bannon is himself a racist or an anti-Semite. Mr. Shapiro considers fears that Mr. Bannon will bring white nationalism to the White House “overstated, at the very least.” To be sure, Mr. Bannon holds right-wing views. He believes that a “global Tea Party movement” is underway, one that would fight crony capitalism and defend Western culture against radical Islam. In a 2014 speech he showed an interest in linking up American activists with certain European populist movements, including opponents of both the European Union and same-sex marriage. But while he recognized that some groups, such as France’s National Front, had “baggage, both ethnically and racially,” he expressed confidence that their intolerance “will all be worked through with time.” Until Hillary Clinton’s speech last summer, a similarly broad idea prevailed of what the alt-right was. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s webpage on the movement traces some of its roots to libertarian followers of Ron Paul and traditionalist Christians. Neither were in evidence at the National Policy Institute conference in Washington. The adjective “alt-right” has been attached in the past to those, like the undercover documentarian James O’Keefe (known for his secret recordings of Planned Parenthood encounters), whose conservatism is mainstream, even if their tactics are not. Understood this way, the alt-right did look as if it might be a pillar of Mr. Bannon’s world Tea Party. This was especially so if you worked for one of Mr. Bannon’s enterprises. Last March, Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos, a peroxide-blond gay Trump supporter, critic of feminism and internet “troll” of a particularly aggressive kind, helped write “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” which painted the movement as “born out of the youthful, subversive, underground edges of the internet,” treating the neo-Nazis in its ranks as unrepresentative. But since then, and certainly since the National Policy Institute event, alt-right has come more and more to mean white nationalist. Mr. Yiannopoulos’s exuberant youths look peripheral to the movement, the extremists central. William Johnson of the American Freedom Party even wrote Mr. Spencer a letter accusing him of squandering what might have been a “start-over moniker” — a gentler term that didn’t invite immediate dismissal — for his fellow white nationalists. How big is the movement? There is a “hard core” of thousands or tens of thousands who are “taking us seriously on a daily basis,” Mr. Spencer said. But both members and detractors have an incentive to exaggerate the alt-right’s size. The National Policy Institute, at this point, would have trouble holding a serious street rally, let alone turning into a mass political party. Even so, this more narrowly defined alt-right may be a force. In the internet age, political consciousness can be raised not just through quarterlies, parties and rallies but also through comment boards, console games and music videos. The internet solves the organizing problem of mobs, even as it gives them incentives not to stray from their screens. The adjective “alt-right” does not just denote recycled extremist views — it also reflects the way those views have been pollinated by other internet concerns and updated in the process. For example, the alt-right has an environmentalist component, centered on a neo-pagan group called the Wolves of Vinland. The Norwegian heavy-metal musician Varg Vikernes, after serving 16 years for murder, has an alt-right blog that contains his musings on everything from Norse mythology to the meaning of the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik. There are sci-fi and video-game enthusiasts, too, including many who participated in the “GamerGate” uproar of 2014, which pitted (as the alt-right sees it) feminist game designers trying to emasculate the gaming world against (as the feminists saw it) a bunch of misogynist losers. But most of all there is sex. The alt-right has a lot of young men in it, young men whose ideology can be assumed to confront them with obstacles to meeting people and dating. Sex-cynicism and race-pessimism, of course, often travel in tandem. At the National Policy Institute conference, the writer F. Roger Devlin gave a talk on why young Norwegian women in Groruddalen, outside Oslo, preferred dating Somali and Pakistani gang members to ethnic Norwegian boys-next-door. “The female instinct is to mate with socially dominant men,” he explained, “and it does not matter how such dominance is achieved.” Likewise, the common alt-right slur “cuckservative,” a portmanteau combining cuckold and conservative, is not just a colorful way of saying that establishment conservatives have been unmanly. According to Matthew Tait, a young ex-member of the far-right British National Party, the metaphor has a precise ornithological meaning. Like the reed-warbler hatching eggs that a cuckoo (from which the word “cuckold” comes) has dropped into its nest, cuckservatives are raising the offspring of their foes. One can apply the metaphor equally to progressive ideas or to the children of the foreign-born. Type “reed warbler” into YouTube, and you will find a video with more than a million views, along with a considerable thread of alt-right commentary. The internet liberates us to be our worst selves. Where other movements have orators and activists, the alt-right also has ruthless trolls and “doxers.” The trolls bombard Twitter and email accounts with slur-filled letters and Photoshopped art. Doxing is the releasing of personal information onto the internet. Last month, several alt-right writers, including Mr. Spencer, had their accounts suspended by Twitter. Mr. Spencer says he appreciates the “frenetic energy” of trolling but doesn’t do it himself. The alt-right did not invent these tactics. But during this election the trolling reached a sadistic pitch. Journalists who opposed Mr. Trump received photos of themselves — and in some cases their children — dead, or in gas chambers. Jewish and Jewish-surnamed journalists were particular targets, especially those seen to be thwarting Mr. Trump’s rise: Jonah Goldberg, Julia Ioffe and Ben Shapiro, among others. The Daily Stormer has been particularly aggressive in deploying its “troll army” against those with whom it disagrees. A signature punctuation of the alt-right is to mark Jewish names with “echoes,” or triple parentheses, like 25 + 26 +this 27 + 28 +. One got a strange sensation at the National Policy Institute gathering that everyone in the room was either over 60 or under 40. There was a lot of tomorrow-belongs-to-me optimism, as if the attendees felt the ideas being aired there were on the verge of going mainstream. Whether this had anything to do with Mr. Trump’s victory or the effect of alt-right rebranding was hard for a newcomer to say. As Mr. Spencer spoke, a dapper guy named Ryan looked on. Ryan was a 27-year-old who sported the common “fashy” haircut — close-cropped (like a skinhead) on the sides, free-flowing (like a mullet) on the top. Mr. Spencer was lecturing journalists about how it took courage to embrace a movement that was “quite frankly, heretical.” “For the moment,” Ryan muttered. Mr. Tait, who hopes to start an alt-right movement in England, said: “What you’re seeing now is young people who have never been affiliated to any kind of politics, ever. They don’t remember what it was like before the war or in the 1960s or even in the 1980s. Their motivation isn’t a sense of loss.” That is what is “alt” about the alt-right. These people are not nostalgic. They may not even be conservatives. For them, multiculturalism is not an affront to traditional notions of society, as it would have been in the Reagan era. It is society. The Vanderbilt University political scientist Carol Swain was among the first to describe the contours of this worldview. In her 2002 book, “The New White Nationalism in America,” she noted that young people were quick to identify double standards, and that they sometimes did so in the name of legitimate policy concerns. “I knew that identity would come next,” she recalled. “It had to come. All they had to do was copy what they were hearing. The multiculturalist arguments you hear on every campus — those work for whites, too.” Mr. Spencer, asked in an interview how he would respond to the accusation that his group was practicing identity politics in the manner of blacks and Hispanics, replied: “I’d say: ‘Yuh. You’re right.’ ” Professor Swain’s analysis does not just pertain to radicals. It is a plausible account of what is happening in the American electoral mainstream. The alt-right is small. It may remain so. And yet, while small, it is part of something this election showed to be much bigger: the emergence of white people, who evidently feel their identity is under attack, as a “minority”-style political bloc. 29 +And they’re targeting college students for recruitment. 30 +Harkinson 16 Journalist, Harkinson, J. (2016, December 6). A white nationalist leader now aims to get recruits “while they are young” on college campuses. Retrieved December 27, 2016, from http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/12/richard-spencer-alt-right-college-activism 31 +How much support is there for the loose-knit coalition of white nationalists and other far-right extremists known as the "alt-right"? Despite a spike in media coverage for the movement in the wake of Donald Trump's victory, a recent conference hosted by white nationalist Richard Spencer, who coined the term "alt-right," drew only about 275 attendees in Washington, DC. And after a video from the event went viral, showing audience members giving Nazi salutes to Spencer's cry of "hail Trump," the movement faced a fierce backlash. Although Trump named alt-right hero Stephen Bannon as his chief White House strategist, the president-elect went on to disavow the alt-right—in general terms, at least—in an interview with the New York Times.The movement gained momentum online in 2016 but is no longer just about social media, says Spencer; he sees a need to prove that the alt-right can attract supporters in the real world. And he says the best place to do that is on college campuses, starting with a speech he plans to deliver on Tuesday on the campus of Texas AandM University. "People in college are at this point in their lives where they are actually open to alternative perspectives, for better and for worse," Spencer says. "I think you do need to get them while they are young. I think rewiring the neurons of someone over 50 is effectively impossible." Recruiting on college campuses has long been a goal for "academic racists" such as Jared Taylor and Peter Brimelow, a white nationalist whom Spencer helped bring to Duke University for an event in 2007, when Spencer was a student there. In May, Spencer and other white nationalists set up a "safe space" on the University of California-Berkeley's Sproul Plaza to discuss "how race affects people of European heritage." He claims that he will be giving two more speeches about the alt-right at universities in California. "The left just owns academia through and through," Spencer says, "so I think it is important to go to the belly of the beast and not let them own it." In recent months, Breitbart News pundit Milo Yiannopoulos' "Dangerous Faggot Tour" drew crowds at college campuses around the country. Several colleges canceled scheduled talks by Yiannopoulos because of "security concerns." Yiannopoulos does not label himself "alt-right" but has characterized the movement as a legitimate response to political correctness. He often describes white males as victims of "reverse discrimination" and speaks euphemistically of defending "Western values." A talk that he gave on the alt-right at the University of Houston in September drew cheers and a chant invoking the name of the alt-right mascot Pepe the Frog. "That was a revelation for me," Spencer said about Yiannopoulos' talk. "What we are doing is known to people, it's edgy and dangerous, it's cool and hip. It's that thing our parents don't want us to do. So that was definitely a huge inspiration." University campuses historically have incubated a range of social movements, from Marxism to multiculturalism on the left to right-wing movements such as neoliberalism and fascism, including Nazism in Germany (and in the United States). More recently, several groups sympathetic to the alt-right have cropped up on some college campuses: Identity Evropa describes itself as "a generation of awakened Europeans who have discovered we are part of the great peoples, history, and civilization that flowed from the European continent" and who "oppose those who would defame our history and rich cultural heritage." Founded in February by 30-year-old ex-Marine Nathan Damigo, a junior social science major at California State University-Stanislaus, the group has been active on several California campuses. Its supporters have plastered campuses and downtown areas with posters featuring slogans such as "Let's Become Great Again" and "Serve Your People" superimposed over images or European Renaissance art. Most college professors who teach classes about race and identity "haven't done their homework," says Damigo, who, like Spencer, promotes pseudoscientific theories about cognitive differences between the races. Most of his members, he says, are recent college graduates who discovered racialist ideas on their own and now aim to "mentor" younger students while "waging a culture war" on the ivory tower: "We want to have a constant presence there," he says. "We want to normalize our ideas and get to the point where we can push faculty into incorporating this literature into the lectures and into the educational program." In November, Damigo and more than two dozen Identity Evropa members attended Spencer's conference. As a student at Maryland's Towson University in 2012, Matthew Heimbach founded a "white student union." The group conducted night patrols to look for "black predators," according to Vice, and brought "race realist" Jared Taylor to speak on campus. Another white student union was formed in 2013 by Georgia State University student Patrick Sharp, an active member of the neo-Nazi website Stormfront. The "white student union" model has been promoted by alt-right media outlets; since then, more than 30 white student union pages have popped up on Facebook, though many are believed to be hoaxes. After graduating in 2013, Heimbach and his father-in-law founded the Traditionalist Youth Network, a white nationalist group cloaking itself in "traditionalism" that has allied with neo-Nazi and neo-Confederate groups, according to research from the Southern Poverty Law Center. In June, members of the TYN's affiliated Traditionalist Worker Party joined the group Golden Gate Skinheads for a demonstration in Sacramento that turned violent, sending five people to the hospital with stab wounds. Like other figures affiliated with the alt-right, Heimbach idolizes Russian President Vladimir Putin. "Russia is our biggest inspiration," he recently told the New York Times. "I see President Putin as the leader of the free world." Though the campus group Students for Trump ostensibly focused on electing and supporting Trump, at least one chapter has openly embraced white nationalist rhetoric and causes. The Facebook page of the group's Portland State University chapter posted an infographic called "What Does White Genocide Look Like," "White Lives Matter" memes, and a quote from former Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith about how "colonialism is a wonderful thing." In a counterprotest to a student union demonstration against arming campus police, Students for Trump held up signs reading "Thug Lives Don't Matter." PSU Students who spoke out against Students for Trump were reportedly targeted online by anonymous accounts with racist slurs and death threats, according to ThinkProgress. Campuses have mostly stopped short of banning such groups, opting instead to counter them with protests and educational efforts. Texas AandM University is hosting a counterevent Tuesday called "Aggies United" at its football stadium featuring musicians and activists. "I find the views of the organizer—and the speaker he is apparently sponsoring—abhorrent and profoundly antithetical to everything I believe,” the university's president, Michael Young, said in a letter to the campus community last week. "In my judgment, those views simply have no place in civilized dialogue and conversation." But, Young added, "we have no plans to prohibit the speaker from using the room he has rented. Freedom of speech is a First Amendment right and a core value of this university, no matter how odious the views may be." 32 + 33 +A restriction on free speech energizes the alt right—means they can spread their toxic ideologies even further. 34 +Stevens 16 Social Science Research Director, Stevens, S. (2016, December 5). Free Speech is the Most Effective Antidote to Hate Speech. Retrieved from http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/12/05/free-speech-is-the-most-effective-antidote-to-hate-speech/ 35 + On December 6, Texas AandM University will play host to Richard Spencer, a leader of the “alt-right” movement, and an open white supremacist. Many will likely view Spencer’s presence at Texas A and M as confirmation that Donald Trump’s election to the presidency has allowed fringe political views to enter mainstream discussion. When Spencer, or someone like him, makes a statement like “America was, until this last generation, a white country, designed for ourselves and our posterity. It is our creation and our inheritance, and it belongs to us,” many people may question why we should remain committed to the First Amendment. This post argues why members of an academic community need to remain steadfast in that commitment, even when faced with a figure like Richard Spencer. When hardcore racists and xenophobes remain consigned to obscure message boards and poorly attended events, it’s fairly easy to believe in freedom of speech and expression. But when organized hatred arrives on campus, such defenses can be perceived as granting unacceptable cover to viewpoints that are widely considered despicable and immoral. To many, such viewpoints don’t deserve the protection of the First Amendment. Unfortunately, the impulse to start limiting speech – either with on-the-books campus speech codes or simply through stepped-up social enforcement of speech taboos – is likely to pour gasoline on the fire and make the problem worse. Research suggests that restrictions perceived to threaten or possibly eliminate behavioral freedoms may trigger “psychological reactance”, and increase one’s desire to engage in the restricted behavior. For instance, Worchel and colleagues (1975) assessed desire to hear censored material among students at the University of North Carolina. The experimenter informed participants that they would soon be hearing a tape recording of a speech and that the study was interested in how personal characteristics impact a speaker’s ability to get their message across. Some participants were then informed that because a student group (either the YM-YWCA or the John Birch Society) on campus was opposed to the content of the speech, the experimenter would not be able to play the taped recording. Consistent with reactance theory, participants who were informed they could not hear the content of the speech, reported a stronger desire to do so. This effect occurred regardless of whether the student group was viewed positively (YM-YWCA) or negatively (the John Birch Society). More recently, Silvia (2005)investigated if interpersonal similarity could override the experience of psychological reactance. In two separate studies, psychological reactance occurred when people felt their attitudinal freedom was threatened when interpersonal similarity was low, but not when interpersonal similarity was high. More broadly, while ingroup favoritism may depend more on positive affect towards the ingroup, perceived discrimination by an outgroup increases ingroup identification, and can increase anger, hostility and aggression towards outgroups. If we incorporate these findings into our thinking about whether to censor a speaker, the following chain of events does not seem to be an implausible reaction: Censoring a speaker may increase some people’s desire to hear that speaker’s message, particularly those who perceive the speaker as similar to them in some way. Censoring a speaker may be perceived as threatening to people who perceive the speaker as similar to them. The perception of threat is likely to increase identification with a salient ingroup. Increased ingroup identification in response to threat may result in anger, hostility, and aggression towards outgroups. In other words, censoring and disinviting a speaker such as Richard Spencer may actually make him and his views more popular. Instead of acting as an antidote to hatred, censorship may pour gasoline onto an already simmering fire. Calls to disinvite, and thus censor, Spencer may produce the unintended consequence of promoting his vile, racist views. People like Spencer revel in the power of their words to arouse emotions and strong reactions in their opponents. They interpret attempts to silence and exile their voices as fear of the truth they possess. The alt-right movement confidently hoists the pirate flag of rebellion, but it can only claim to be rebellious if it can point to the “powers that be” trying to shut them down. Meeting hate speech with more speech is hard. It is extremely difficult to engage with people who hold beliefs that call another’s humanity into question. But engagement may be the most effective tool we have. Speech codes and disinvitations may feel good in the moment, but they represent an easy way out. Often, what has been made taboo and socially undesirable comes back stronger than before. We believe a stronger antidote is needed, and that antidote is more speech. To challenge Spencer, this speech can take different forms; and on December 6, some may find it cathartic, empowering and/or exciting to do so. However, we urge that opposition be constructive, not disruptive. Donating to counter causes, such as the Anti-Defamation League, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and the National Organization for Advancement of Colored People’s legal defense fund, that are actively combatting people like Spencer and his ideas is one useful tactic. Indeed, shortly after the announcement that Spencer would be speaking on campus, the psychology department at Texas A and M launched a fundraising campaign to protest Spencer and his racism. Joining this protest and funding groups opposed to Spencer is a form of speech and action that makes Spencer weaker, not strong. Same thing for attending his talk and rebutting his speech during the question and answer period. Speech can be deployed as a scalpel, able to cut through vitriol, rhetoric and mendacity to help counter speech that advocates for harmful ideas and outcomes. 36 + 37 +Empirically proven—Twitter’s ban on alt-right accounts has already contributed to the spread of alt right ideologies. 38 +Ingram 16 Journalist, Ingram, M. (n.d.). Here’s Why Twitter Banning “Alt-Right” Accounts Is a Risky Stategy. Retrieved December 27, 2016, from http://fortune.com/2016/11/16/twitter-ban-alt-right/ 39 +Twitter appears to have blocked the accounts of several right-wing users, including some associated with white-power groups, as part of a move to respond to user frustration with hate speech and harassment. But it threatens to draw Twitter further into a quagmire over what is acceptable speech. According to a number of news reports, users who have been banned include Pax Dickinson—a former Business Insider executive who was let go for making racist comments—as well as Richard Spencer, who runs a so-called "alt-right" organization called the National Policy Institute, which advocates for racial separation. As a matter of policy, Twitter (TWTR, +0.55) doesn't comment on actions taken with respects to specific accounts. But the company has taken a number of steps recently to try and rein in bullying and harassment on the service, including rolling out an expansion of its "mute" feature. Twitter's co-founder and part-time CEO Jack Dorsey said recently that abuse "has no place on Twitter" and he intends to stamp it out. “Abuse is not part of civil discourse. It shuts down conversation and prevents us from understanding each other. Freedom of expression means little if we allow voices to be silenced because of fear of harassment if they speak up.” There has been a steady drumbeat of criticism aimed at Twitter and its failure to take action to stop hate speech on the platform, apart from certain special cases, including an incident in July when black actor and comedian Leslie Jones was targeted by racists. After Jones said she was quitting the service due to the unrelenting harassment, Dorsey reached out to her. Shortly afterwards, Milo Yiannopolous, the technology editor of right-wing site Breitbart News and a proponent of various "alt-right" views—including the need for races to live separately—had his account permanently banned. The problem with this approach, however, is that it can have unpleasant side effects. For example, Milo Yiannopolous has said that being banned was the best thing that ever happened to him. Why? Because it fueled his reputation as a critic of the mainstream, and also because it gave him ammunition to argue that he was being targeted by Twitter for telling the truth. Like all acts of the totalitarian regressive left, this will blow up in their faces, netting me more adoring fans. We’re winning the culture war, and Twitter just shot themselves in the foot. In a similar way, Spencer is already using Twitter's ban as a sign that he has struck a nerve, and as evidence that the service is caving in to left-wing groups and political correctness. "This is corporate Stalinism," he said in an interview with a right-wing site. "There is a great purge going on, and they are purging people based on their views." From a historical point of view, Twitter's problem is that it has always stood for freedom of speech. And over the years, it has gone to considerable lengths to protect the rights of its users to say pretty much whatever they wish, including fighting a French court case that was designed to identify users who posted anti-Semitic and homophobic remarks. But just as Facebook is having to confront criticism about the network's complicity in spreading fake news—news that may have affected the election of Donald Trump as president—Twitter is having to backtrack from its commitment to unrestricted free speech. While Facebook has so far consistently refused to implement tools that block fake news (and some, including technology analyst Ben Thompson of Stratechery, argue that it should not), Twitter is now stuck between a rock and a hard place, trying to determine what is permissible speech and what is not. Perhaps outright racist remarks like those made towards Leslie Jones seem like an obvious candidate for removal. And maybe people can agree that accounts belonging to white-power groups shouldn't be allowed to remain. But where is the line between a political group that advocates outright racism and the kind of remarks Donald Trump has made about Mexicans and Muslims? Or Breitbart News? Critics have argued that Twitter only allows such behavior because it is desperate for engagement and user growth, which is similar to the argument for why Facebook doesn't care about fake news. There is probably some truth to that, given Twitter's financial status.But if the company is going to start removing accounts belonging to anyone who says anything remotely offensive, it is going to be spending all of its time doing that, and by doing so it is probably going to alienate as many users as to which it appeals. Do we really want Twitter to be the one that decides what constitutes appropriate speech, and who is allowed to exercise it? 40 + 41 +Perceived assault on free speech drives voters to the right wing which leads to disasters like the Trump presidency—also means mass racism and structural violence. 42 +Soave 16 Robby Soave, Associate editor at Reason.com, enjoys writing about college news, education policy, criminal justice reform, and television, “Trump Won Because Leftist Political Correctness Inspired a Terrifying Backlash”, Nov. 9, 2016, http://reason.com/blog/2016/11/09/trump-won-because-leftist-political-corr 43 +Trump won because of a cultural issue that flies under the radar and remains stubbornly difficult to define, but is nevertheless hugely important to a great number of Americans: political correctness. More specifically, Trump won because he convinced a great number of Americans that he would destroy political correctness. I have tried to call attention to this issue for years. I have warned that political correctness actually is a problem on college campuses, where the far-left has gained institutional power and used it to punish people for saying or thinking the wrong thing. And ever since Donald Trump became a serious threat to win the GOP presidential primaries, I have warned that a lot of people, both on campus and off it, were furious about political-correctness-run-amok—so furious that they would give power to any man who stood in opposition to it. I have watched this play out on campus after campus. I have watched dissident student groups invite Milo Yiannopoulos to speak—not because they particularly agree with his views, but because he denounces censorship and undermines political correctness. I have watched students cheer his theatrics, his insulting behavior, and his narcissism solely because the enforcers of campus goodthink are outraged by it. It's not about his ideas, or policies. It's not even about him. It's about vengeance for social oppression. Trump has done to America what Yiannopoulos did to campus. This is a view Yiannopoulos shares. When I spoke with him about Trump's success months ago, he told me, "Nobody votes for Trump or likes Trump on the basis of policy positions. That's a misunderstanding of what the Trump phenomenon is." He described Trump as "an icon of irreverent resistance to political correctness." Correctly, I might add. What is political correctness? It's notoriously hard to define. I recently appeared on a panel with CNN's Sally Kohn, who described political correctness as being polite and having good manners. That's fine—it can mean different things to different people. I like manners. I like being polite. That's not what I'm talking about. The segment of the electorate who flocked to Trump because he positioned himself as "an icon of irreverent resistance to political correctness" think it means this: smug, entitled, elitist, privileged leftists jumping down the throats of ordinary folks who aren't up-to-date on the latest requirements of progressive society. Example: A lot of people think there are only two genders—boy and girl. Maybe they're wrong. Maybe they should change that view. Maybe it's insensitive to the trans community. Maybe it even flies in the face of modern social psychology. But people think it. Political correctness is the social force that holds them in contempt for that, or punishes them outright. If you're a leftist reading this, you probably think that's stupid. You probably can't understand why someone would get so bent out of shape about being told their words are hurtful. You probably think it's not a big deal and these people need to get over themselves. Who's the delicate snowflake now, huh? you're probably thinking. I'm telling you: your failure to acknowledge this miscalculation and adjust your approach has delivered the country to Trump. There's a related problem: the boy-who-cried-wolf situation. I was happy to see a few liberals, like Bill Maher, owning up to it. Maher admitted during a recent show that he was wrong to treat George Bush, Mitt Romney, and John McCain like they were apocalyptic threats to the nation: it robbed him of the ability to treat Trump more seriously. The left said McCain was a racist supported by racists, it said Romney was a racist supported by racists, but when an actually racist Republican came along—and racists cheered him—it had lost its ability to credibly make that accusation. This is akin to the political-correctness-run-amok problem: both are examples of the left's horrible over-reach during the Obama years. The leftist drive to enforce a progressive social vision was relentless, and it happened too fast. I don't say this because I'm opposed to that vision—like most members of the under-30 crowd, I have no problem with gender neutral pronouns—I say this because it inspired a backlash that gave us Trump. My liberal critics rolled their eyes when I complained about political correctness. I hope they see things a little more clearly now. The left sorted everyone into identity groups and then told the people in the poorly-educated-white-male identity group that that's the only bad one. It mocked the members of this group mercilessly. It punished them for not being woke enough. It called them racists. It said their video games were sexist. It deployed Lena Dunham to tell them how horrible they were. Lena Dunham! I warned that political-correctness-run-amok and liberal overreach would lead to a counter-revolution if unchecked. That counter-revolution just happened. There is a cost to depriving people of the freedom (in both the legal and social senses) to speak their mind. 44 + 45 +Advantage 2 is Education 46 +Free speech allows students to prepare for the real world by reducing academic insulation 47 +Vivanco 16 (Leonor Vivanco, August 25th, 2016, “U. of C. tells incoming freshmen it does not support 'trigger warnings' or 'safe spaces'” 48 +"It is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive," the report states. "Although the University greatly values civility, and although all members of the University community share in the responsibility for maintaining a climate of mutual respect, concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community." The university is preparing students for the real world and would not be serving them by shielding them from unpleasantness, said Geoffrey Stone, chair of the committee, law professor and past provost at the U. of C. "The right thing to do is empower the students, help them understand how to fight, combat and respond, not to insulate them from things they will have to face later," Stone said. While the university doesn't support, require or encourage trigger warnings, it does not prohibit them, he added. Professors are still free to alert students to certain material if they choose to do so. Jane Kirtley, a media ethics and law professor at the University of Minnesota, called U. of C.'s move "refreshing." She said colleges should resist setting limits on what views and opinions are acceptable to air in open forum and should encourage students to discuss things they find uncomfortable. "If universities are not providing platforms for people to be offensive, then I don't think that they're doing part of their job," Kirtley said. "If listening to Donald Drumpf or Hillary Clinton is going to make your blood pressure go up 400 points, then fine, don't listen to them. But that doesn't mean you can say we can't have Donald Drumpf or Hillary Clinton speaking on campus because it would be offensive to even know they were talking." Another Midwestern institution has followed the University of Chicago's lead. In 2015, the board of trustees at Purdue University in Indiana endorsed the principles articulated in the U. of C. report. "Our commitment to open inquiry is not new, but adopting these principles provides a clear signal of our pledge to live by this commitment and these standards," board Chairman Tom Spurgeon said in a statement at the time. 49 +Real world preparation gives students the tools necessary to fight oppression in the long run. Academic openness is a prerequisite to knowledge. The 1AC outweighs in the long run. 50 +Jacobson 16 (Daniel Jacobson (Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan). “Freedom of Speech under Assault on Campus.” Cato Institute. 30 August 2016 51 +Mill held that an atmosphere of intellectual freedom not only cultivates genius but is also a prerequisite for even commonplace knowledge. For our beliefs to be justified, we must be able to respond to the best arguments against them. Yet people naturally dislike what Mill called adverse discussion—that is, exposure to opposing arguments—and tend to avoid it. Hence, they are led to argue against straw men as much from ignorance as dishonesty. For those reasons and others, Mill defended freedom of speech in uncom- promising terms: “There ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine,” regardless of its falsity, immorality, or even harmfulness.4 Mill’s arguments for free speech anticipated several psychological phenomena that are now widely recognized: epistemic closure, group polarization, and confirmation bias, as well as simple conformism. Epistemic closure is the tendency to restrict one’s sources of information, including other people, to those largely in agreement with one’s views, thereby avoiding adverse discussion. Group polarization describes how like-minded people grow more extreme in their beliefs when unchecked by the presence of dissenters. (Whence Nietzsche: “Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.”5) Confirmation bias is the tendency to focus on evidence that supports what we already believe and to discount contrary evidence. These phenomena are widespread and well documented, and they all tend to undermine the justification of our beliefs. Hence, the toleration of unpopular opinions constitutes a prerequisite for knowledge. Yet such toleration amounts only to its immunity to punishment, not its protection from criticism. 52 + 53 +Lack of opposing viewpoints produce echo-chambers that explode political polarization and sustain existing power structures. 54 +Sunstein 12 (Cass R. Sunstein. Sep 17, 2012. “Breaking up the echo”. New York Times) 55 + 56 +It is well known that when like¬minded people get together, they tend to end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk. The same kind of echo¬chamber effect can happen as people get news from various media. Liberals viewing MSNBC or reading left¬of¬center blogs may well end up embracing liberal talking points even more firmly; Conservative fans of Fox News may well react in similar fashion on the right. The result can be a situation in which is that beliefs do not merely harden but migrate toward the extreme ends of the political spectrum. As current events in the Middle East demonstrate, discussions among like¬minded people can ultimately produce violence. What explains this? The answer is called “biased assimilation,” which means that people assimilate new information selectively in a selective fashion. When people get endorsing information that supports what they initially thought, they give it considerable weight. When they get and dismissing information that undermines their initial beliefs, they tend to dismiss it. In this light, it is understandable that when people begin with opposing initial beliefs on, say, the death penalty, balanced information can heighten their initial disagreement. Those who tend to favor capital punishment credit the information that supports their original view and dismiss the opposing information. The same happens on the other side. As a result, divisions widen. This natural human tendency explains why it’s so hard to dislodge false rumors and factual errors. Corrections can even be self¬defeating, leading people to stronger commitment to their erroneous beliefs. The news here is not encouraging. In the face of entrenched social divisions, there’s a risk that presentations that carefully explore both sides will be counterproductive. And when a group, responding to false information, becomes more strident, efforts to correct the record may make things worse. Can anything be done? There is no simple term for the answer, so let’s make one up: surprising validators. However People tend to dismiss information that would falsify their convictions. But they may reconsider their views if the information comes from a like-minded source they cannot dismiss. People are most likely to find a sourceis credible if they closely identify with it or begin in essential agreement with it. In such cases, their reaction is not, “how predictable and uninformative that someone like that would think something so evil and foolish,” but instead, they say “if someone like that disagrees with me, maybe I had better rethink.” Our initial convictions are more apt to be shaken if it’s not easy to dismiss the source as biased, confused, self¬interested or simply mistaken. This is one reason that seemingly irrelevant characteristics, like appearance, or taste in food and drink, can have a big impact on credibility. Such characteristics can suggest that the validators are in fact surprising — that they are “like” the people to whom they are speaking. It follows that turncoats, real or apparent, can be immensely persuasive. If civil rights leaders oppose affirmative action, or if well¬known climate change skeptics say that they were wrong, people are more likely to change their views. Here, then, is a lesson for all those who provide information. What matters most may be not what is said, but who, exactly, is saying it. 57 + 58 +Advantage 3 is Patriotic Correctness: 59 +Patriotic correctness silences anti-military dissent. Multiple examples and empirical surveys prove. 60 +Wilson 2, John K., Ph.D candidate with dissertation on the history of academic freedom in America and author of three books, early excerpt from Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies which was later published in 2010 61 +Compared to earlier “wartime” situations, academic freedom is far more protected today than at any time in the past. But the danger posed to academic freedom cannot be ignored. Efforts to silence faculty and students, even when they are unsuccessful, can make others around the country more reluctant to speak openly. Only by denouncing all efforts at censorship and vigorously defending the right of freedom on college campuses, can we continue to protect academic freedom. The cliché of our times, constantly repeated but often true, is that 9/11 “changed everything.” One thing that it changed was academic freedom. The controversy over the limits of free speech on college campuses across the nation began immediately. On the morning of September 11, 2001, University of New Mexico history professor Richard Berthold joked with his class, “Anyone who would blow up the Pentagon would have my vote.” Berthold received death threats, keeping him off campus. On September 27, an unidentified person left a message on the provost’s voice-mail saying if Berthold were not “ousted” within 24 hours, Berthold would be ousted by other sources. Berthold was threatened in front of his home by a biker who came at him screaming obscenities, and he received several angry e-mails and letters with messages such as “I’d like to blow you up.” New Mexico state representative William Fuller declared,“Treason is giving aide or comfort to the enemy. Any terrorist who heard Berthold’s comment was comforted.” In the end, Berthold was pressured to retire from his job because of those 11 words he spoke on 9/11.Mohammad Rahat, an Iranian citizen and University of Miami medical technician who turned 22 years old on September 11, 2001, declared in a meeting that day, “Some birthday gift from Osama bin Laden.” Although Rahat said that he meant it “in a sarcastic way,” Rahat was suspended and then fired on September 25, 2001. Paula Musto, vice president of university relations, declared that Rahat’s “comments were deeply disturbing to his co-workers and superiors at the medical school. They were inappropriate and unbecoming for someone working in a research laboratory. He was fired because he made those comments, certainly not because of his ethnic background.” Rahat had received only positive evaluation in 13 months working in the lab. 6 At the University of California at Los Angeles, library assistant Jonnie Hargis was suspended without pay for one week after sending an e-mail response criticizing American policies in Iraq and Israel. Hargis’ union successfully pursued a grievance; Hargis was repaid for his lost income, the incident was stricken from his job record, and the university was forced to clarify its e-mail policies.7On September 13, 2001, two resident assistants in Minnesota complained to the dean of students that undergraduates felt fearful and uneasy because some professors questioned the competence of the Bush Administration. According to the resident assistants,“The recent attacks extend beyond political debate, and for professors to make negative judgments on our government before any action has taken place only fosters a cynical attitude in the classroom.” The administration asked faculty to think hard about what they said. Greg Kneser, dean of students, declared:“There were students who were just scared, and an intellectual discussion of the political ramifications of this was not helpful for them. They were frightened, and they look to their faculty not just for intellectual debate” but as “people they trust.”8 Even hypothetical discussions were suspicious. Portland Community College philosophy professor Stephen Carey challenged students in his critical thinking class to consider an extreme rhetorical proposition that would cause great emotion, like “Bush should be hung, strung up upside down, and left for the buzzards.” One student’s mother, misunderstanding the example, called the FBI and accused Carey of threatening to kill the President, and the Secret Service investigated him.9 When four leftist faculty at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill (UNC) criticized U.S. foreign policy at a teach-in, Scott Rubush of FrontPage magazine, declared, “They’re using state resources to the practical effect of aiding and abetting the Taliban.”The magazine recommended that these faculty be fired. “Tell the good folks at UNC–Chapel Hill what you think of their decision to allow anti-American rallies on their state-supported campus,” FrontPage urged. The administration received hundreds of angry e-mails, and was denounced on the floor of the North Carolina legislature. Several antiwar faculty members received death threats.10 In addition to phys i cal threats and attack s , A rab and Muslim students also faced enormous scru t i ny from the authori t i e s . An October 2001 survey by the Am e ri can Association of Collegiate Registrars and Ad m i s s i ons Officers found thatat least 220 colleges had been contacted by law enforcement in the weeks after 9/11. Police or FBI agents made 99 requests for private “n on - d i re c t o ry ”i n f o rm a t i on ,s u ch as course sch e d u l e s , that under law cannot be released without student con s e n t , a s u b p o e n a , or a pending danger (on ly 12 of the requests had a subpoena, a l t h o u g h the Immigra t i on and Na t u ra l i za t i on Se rvice doesn’t re q u i reconsent for inform a t i on on foreign students). Most requests were for individual students, although 16 requests for student re c o rds were “based on ethnicity. ” Law enforcement re c e i ve d the inform a t i on from 159 sch o o l s , and on ly eight denied any re q u e s t s . I n response to the violence and persecution against Muslim and Arab students, some colleges did try to restrict offensive speech in ways that resulted in threats to academic fre e d om . At Orange Coast Com mu n i ty College (OCC) on September 20, 2001, government professor Ken Hearlson was suspended for 11 weeks after Muslim students accused him of being biased against them and calling them “terrorists.” Hearlson denied the accusation. A tape recording of the class found that the most extreme statements were misheard, although Hearlson did apparently point a finger at Middle Eastern students while he blamed Arab countries for fomenting terrorism.11 In a case at Johns Hopkins University, Charles H. Fairbanks Jr., director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), was demoted (but later reinstated) after a September 14 panel discussion on terrorism in which he criticized Iraq, Pakistan, and Palestinians.12 I n response to the violence and persecution against Muslim and Arab students, some colleges did try to restrict offensive speech in ways that resulted in threats to academic fre e d om . At Orange Coast Com mu n i ty College (OCC) on September 20, 2001, government professor Ken Hearlson was suspended for 11 weeks after Muslim students accused him of being biased against them and calling them “terrorists.” Hearlson denied the accusation. A tape recording of the class found that the most extreme statements were misheard, although Hearlson did apparently point a finger at Middle Eastern students while he blamed Arab countries for fomenting terrorism.11 In a case at Johns Hopkins University, Charles H. Fairbanks Jr., director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), was demoted (but later reinstated) after a September 14 panel discussion on terrorism in which he criticized Iraq, Pakistan, and Palestinians.12 Anti-military views expressed in an e-mail could put a professor’s job at risk. At Chicago’s St. Xavier University, history professor Peter Kirstein sent this response to an Air Force cadet asking him to help promote an Air Force event: “You are a disgrace to this country and I am furious you would even think I would support you and your aggressive baby killing tactics of collateral damage.” Although Kirstein apologized for his e-mail, many called for his dismissal. On November 15, 2002, St. Xavier president Richard Yanikoski announced that Kirstein would be immediately suspended, receive a reprimand, and undergo a post-tenure review during a Spring 2003 sabbatical.13 Another tenured professor was suspended for responding rudely to an unsolicited e-mail and saying that killing is wrong. While conservatives contended that a few cases of censorship proved that left-wing thought police rule over college campuses, my extensive survey of academic freedom and civil liberties at American universities found the opposite: left-wing critics of the Bush Administration suffered by far the most numerous and most serious violations of their civil liberties. Censorship of conservatives was rare, and almost always overturned in the few cases where it occurred. Patriotic correctness—not political correctness—reigned supreme after 9/11. 62 + 63 +This censorship prevents higher education from being the key institution that can teach students to resist oppression and militarism. 64 +Giroux and Jaschik 07, Henry Giroux and Scott Jaschik, 'The University in Chains', (Interview), 2007, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/07/giroux 65 +Q: How do you think the state of academic freedom has changed since 9/11? A: Criticisms of the university as a stronghold of dissent have a long and inglorious history in the United States, extending from attacks in the 19th century by religious fundamentalists to anti-communist witch-hunts conducted in the 1920s, 1930s, and again in the 1950s, during the infamous era of McCarthyism. Harkening back to the infamous McCarthy era, a newly reinvigorated war is currently being waged by Christian nationalists, reactionary neoconservatives, and corporate fundamentalists against the autonomy and integrity of all those independent institutions that foster social responsibility, critical thought, and critical citizenship. While the attack is being waged on numerous fronts, the universities are where the major skirmishes are taking place. What is unique about this attack on academic freedom are the range and scope of the forces waging an assault on higher education. It is much worse today, because corporations, the national security state, the Pentagon, powerful Christian evangelical groups, non-government agencies, and enormously wealthy right-wing individuals and institutions have created powerful alliances ~-~- the perfect storm so to speak ~-~- that are truly threatening the freedoms and semi-autonomy of American universities. Higher education in the United States is currently being targeted by a diverse number of right-wing forces that have assumed political power and are waging an aggressive and focused campaign against the principles of academic freedom, sacrificing critical pedagogical practice in the name of patriotic correctness and dismantling the ideal of the university as a bastion of independent thought, and uncorrupted inquiry. Ironically, it is through the vocabulary of individual rights, academic freedom, balance, and tolerance that these forces are attempting to slander, even vilify, an allegedly liberal and left-oriented professoriate, to cut already meager federal funding for higher education, to eliminate tenure, and to place control of what is taught and said in classrooms under legislative oversight. There is more at work in the current attack than the rampant anti-intellectualism and paranoid style of American politics outlined in Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, written over 40 years ago. There is also the collective power of radical right-wing organizations, which in their powerful influence on all levels of government in spite of a democratically controlled Congress and most liberal social institutions feel compelled to dismantle the open, questioning cultures of the academy. Underlying recent attacks on the university is an attempt not merely to counter dissent but to destroy it and in doing so to eliminate all of those remaining public spaces, spheres, and institutions that nourish and sustain a culture of questioning so vital to a democratic civil society. Dissent is often equated with treason; the university is portrayed as the weak link in the war on terror by powerful educational agencies; professors who advocate a culture of questioning and critical engagement run the risk of having their names posted on Internet web sites while being labeled as un-American; and various right-wing individuals and politicians increasingly attempt to pass legislation that renders critical analysis a liability and reinforces, with no irony intended, a rabid anti-intellectualism under the call for balance and intellectual diversity. Genuine politics begins to disappear as people methodically lose those freedoms and rights that enable them to speak, act, dissent, and exercise both their individual right to resistance and a shared sense of collective responsibility. While higher education is only one site, it is one of the most crucial institutional and political spaces where democratic subjects can be shaped, democratic relations can be experienced, and anti-democratic forms of power can be identified and critically engaged. It is also one of the few spaces left where young people can think critically about the knowledge they gain, learn values that refuse to reduce the obligations of citizenship to either consumerism or the dictates of the national security state, and develop the language and skills necessary to defend those institutions and social relations that are vital to a substantive democracy. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt insisted, a meaningful conception of politics appears only when concrete spaces exist for people to come together to talk, think critically, and act on their capacities for empathy, judgment, and social responsibility. What the current attack on higher education threatens is a notion of the academy that is faithful to its role as a crucial democratic public sphere, one that offers a space both to resist the “dark times” in which we now live and to embrace the possibility of a future forged in the civic struggles requisite for a viable democracy. 66 + 67 +Empowering academics is uniquely key to disrupting the culture of militarism in universities. The only way the system survives is if academia continues to produce scholarship uncritical of it. 68 +Chatterjee and Maira 14 Piya Chatterjee, Backstrand Chair and Professor of Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Scripps College, Sunaina Maira, Professor of Asian American Studies at UC Davis, “The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent,” University of Minnesota Press, 2014 JW 69 +In a post-9/ 11 world, the U.S. university has become a particularly charged site for debates about nationalism, patriotism, citizenship, and democracy. The “crisis” of academic freedom emerges from events such as the ones we witnessed in Riverside and Davis but also in many other campuses where administrative policing flexes its muscles along with the batons, chemical weapons, and riot gear of police and SWAT teams and where containment and censorship of political critique is enacted through the collusion of the university, partisan off-campus groups and networks, and the state. After 9/ 11, we have witnessed a calamitously repressive series of well-coordinated attacks against scholars who have dared to challenge the national consensus on U.S. wars and overseas occupations. Yet there has been stunningly little scholarly attention paid to this policing of knowledge, especially against academics who have dared to challenge the national consensus on U.S. wars and overseas occupations and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Simultaneously, the growing privatization of the public university, as in California, has demonstrated the ways in which the gates of access to public higher education are increasingly closed and the more subtle ways in which dissident scholarly and pedagogical work (and their institutional locations) is delegitimized and— in particularly telling instances— censored at both public and private institutions. The 9/ 11 attacks and the crises of late capitalism in the global North have intensified the crisis of repression in the United States and also the ongoing restructuring of the academy— as well as resistance to that process— here as well as in the global South. 2 What does it mean, then, to challenge the collusion of the university with militarism and occupation, the privatization of higher education, and economies of knowledge from within the U.S. university? When scholars and students who openly connect U.S. state formation to imperialism, war, and racial violence are disciplined, then how are we to understand freedom , academic and otherwise? How is post-9/ 11 policing and surveillance linked to racial, gendered, and class practices in the neoliberal academy? Has the War on Terror simply deepened a much longer historical pattern of wartime censorship and monitoring of intellectual work or is this something new? This edited volume offers reports from the trenches of a war on scholarly dissent that has raged for two or three decades now and has intensified since 9/ 11, analyzed by some of the very scholars who have been targeted or have directly engaged in these battles. The stakes here are high. These dissenting scholars and the knowledge they produce are constructed by right-wing critics as a threat to U.S. power and global hegemony, as has been the case in earlier moments in U.S. history, particularly during the Cold War. Much discussion of incidents where academics have been denied tenure or publicly attacked for their critique of U.S. foreign or domestic policies, as in earlier moments, has centered on the important question of academic freedom. However, the chapters in this book break new ground by demonstrating that what is really at work in these attacks are the logics of racism, warfare, and nationalism that undergird U.S. imperialism and also the architecture of the U.S. academy. Our argument here is that these logics shape a systemic structure of repression of academic knowledge that counters the imperial, nation-building project. The premise of this book is that the U.S. academy is an “imperial university.” As in all imperial and colonial nations, intellectuals and scholarship play an important role— directly or indirectly, willingly or unwittingly— in legitimizing American exceptionalism and rationalizing U.S. expansionism and repression, domestically and globally. The title of this book, then, is not a rhetorical flourish but offers a concept that is grounded in the particular imperial formation of the United States, one that is in many ways ambiguous and shape-shifting. 3 It is important to note that U.S. imperialism is characterized by deterritorialized, flexible, and covert practices of subjugation and violence and as such does not resemble historical forms of European colonialism that depended on territorial colonialism. 4 As a settler-colonial nation, it has over time developed various strategies of control that include proxy wars, secret interventions, and client regimes aimed at maintaining its political, economic, and military dominance around the globe, as well as cultural interventions and “soft power.” The chapters here help to illuminate and historicize the role of the U.S. university in legitimizing notions of Manifest Destiny and foundational mythologies of settler colonialism and exceptional democracy as well as the attempts by scholars and students to challenge and subvert them. This book demonstrates the ways in which the academy’s role in supporting state policies is crucial, even— and especially—as a presumably liberal institution. Indeed, it is precisely the support of a liberal class that is always critical for the maintenance of “benevolent empire.” 5 As U.S. military and overseas interventions are increasingly framed as humanitarian wars— to save oppressed others and rescue victimized women— it is liberal ideologies of gender, sexuality, religion, pluralism, and democracy that are key to uphold. 6 The university is a key battleground in these culture wars and in producing as well as contesting knowledges about the state of the nation. 70 +Militarism makes people disposable- justifying and creating everyday violence like shootings and drone strikes. Heg Good doesn’t impact turn the aff-military criticism is good because it stops the glorification of the military and violence, which spillsover. 71 +Giroux 16, Henry, Gun Culture and the American Nightmare of Violence, 2016, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/34349-gun-culture-and-the-american-nightmare-of-violence 72 +Gun violence in the United States has produced a culture soaked in blood - a culture that threatens everyone and extends from accidental deaths, suicides and domestic violence to mass shootings. In late December, a woman in St. Cloud, Florida, fatally shot her own daughter after mistaking her for an intruder. Less than a month earlier, on December 2, in San Bernardino, California, was the mass shooting that left 14 people dead and more than 20 wounded. And just two months before that, on October 1, nine people were killed and seven wounded in a mass shooting at a community college in Roseburg, Oregon. Mass shootings have become routine in the United States and speak to a society that relies on violence to feed the coffers of the merchants of death. Given the profits made by arms manufacturers, the defense industry, gun dealers and the lobbyists who represent them in Congress, it comes as no surprise that the culture of violence cannot be abstracted from either the culture of business or the corruption of politics. Violence runs through US society like an electric current offering instant pleasure from all cultural sources, whether it be the nightly news or a television series that glorifies serial killers. At a policy level, violence drives the arms industry and a militaristic foreign policy, and is increasingly the punishing state's major tool to enforce its hyped-up brand of domestic terrorism, especially against Black youth. The United States is utterly wedded to a neoliberal culture in which cruelty is viewed as virtue, while mass incarceration is treated as the chief mechanism to "institutionalize obedience." At the same time, a shark-like mode of competition replaces any viable notion of solidarity, and a sabotaging notion of self-interest pushes society into the false lure of mass consumerism. The increasing number of mass shootings is symptomatic of a society engulfed in racism, fear, militarism, bigotry and massive inequities in wealth and power. Guns and the hypermasculine culture of violence are given more support than young people and life itself. Over 270 mass shootings have taken place in the United States in 2015 alone, proving once again that the economic, political and social conditions that underlie such violence are not being addressed. Sadly, these shootings are not isolated incidents. For example, one child under 12 years old has been killed every other day by a firearm, which amounts to 555 children killed by guns in three years. An even more frightening statistic and example of a shocking moral and political perversity was noted in data provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which states that "2,525 children and teens died by gunfire in the United States in 2014; one child or teen death every 3 hours and 28 minutes, nearly 7 a day, 48 a week." Such figures indicate that too many youth in the United States occupy what might be called war zones in which guns and violence proliferate. In this scenario, guns and the hypermasculine culture of violence are given more support than young people and life itself. The predominance of a relatively unchecked gun culture and a morally perverse and politically obscene culture of violence is particularly evident in the power of the gun lobby and its political advocates to pass laws in eight states to allow students and faculty to carry concealed weapons "into classrooms, dormitories and other buildings" on campuses. In spite of the rash of recent shootings on college campuses, Texas lawmakers, for instance, passed one such "campus carry bill," which will take effect in August 2016. To add insult to injury, they also passed an "open carry bill" that allows registered gun owners to carry their guns openly in public. Such laws not only reflect "the seemingly limitless legislative clout of gun interests," but also a rather irrational return to the violence-laden culture of the "Wild West." As in the past, individuals will be allowed to walk the streets, while openly carrying guns and packing heat as a measure of their love of guns and their reliance upon violence as the best way to address any perceived threat to their security. This return to the deadly practices of the " Wild West" is neither a matter of individual choice nor some far-fetched yet allegedly legitimate appeal to the Second Amendment. On the contrary, mass violence in the United States has to be placed within a broader historical, economic and political context in order to address the totality of the forces that produce it. Focusing merely on mass shootings or the passing of potentially dangerous gun legislation does not get to the root of the systemic forces that produce the United States' love affair with violence and the ideologies and criminogenic institutions that produce it. Imperial policies that promote aggression all across the globe are now matched by increasing levels of lawlessness and state repression, which mutually feed each other. On the home front, civil society is degenerating into a military organization, a space of lawlessness and warlike practices, organized primarily for the production of violence. For instance, as Steve Martinot observes at CounterPunch, the police now use their discourse of command and power to criminalize behavior; in addition, they use military weapons and surveillance tools as if they are preparing for war, and create a culture of fear in which militaristic principles replace legal principles. He writes: This suggests that there is an institutional insecurity that seeks to cover itself through social control ... the cops act out this insecurity by criminalizing individuals in advance. No legal principle need be involved. There is only the militarist principle.... When police shoot a fleeing subject and claim they are acting in self-defense (i.e. threatened), it is not their person but the command and control principle that is threatened. To defend that control through assault or murderous action against a disobedient person implies that the cop's own identity is wholly immersed in its paradigm. There is nothing psychological about this. Self-worth or insecurity is not the issue. There is only the military ethic of power, imposed on civil society through an assumption of impunity. It is the ethos of democracy, of human self-respect, that is the threat. The rise of violence and the gun culture in the United States cannot be separated from a transformation in governance in the United States. Political sovereignty has been replaced by economic sovereignty as corporate power takes over the reins of governance. The more money influences politics, the more corrupt the political culture becomes. Under such circumstances, holding office is largely dependent on having huge amounts of capital at one's disposal, while laws and policies at all levels of government are mostly fashioned by lobbyists representing big business corporations and financial institutions. Moreover, such lobbying, as corrupt and unethical as it may be, is now carried out in the open by the National Rifle Association (NRA) and other individuals, groups and institutions invested in the militarization of US society. This lobbying is then displayed as a badge of honor - a kind of open testimonial to the lobbyists' disrespect for democratic governance. But money in politics is not the only major institutional factor in which everyday and state violence are nourished by a growing militarism. As David Theo Goldberg has argued in his essay "Mission Accomplished: Militarizing Social Logic," the military has also assumed a central role in shaping all aspects of society. Militarization is about more than the use of repressive power; it also represents a powerful social logic that is constitutive of values, modes of rationality and ways of thinking. According to Goldberg, The military is not just a fighting machine.... It serves and socializes. It hands down to the society, as big brother might, its more or less perfected goods, from gunpowder to guns, computing to information management ... In short, while militarily produced instruments might be retooled to other, broader social purpose - the military shapes pretty much the entire range of social production from commodities to culture, social goods to social theory. The militarization and corporatization of social logic permeates US society. The general public in the United States is largely depoliticized through the influence of corporations over schools, higher education and other cultural apparatuses. The deadening of public values, civic consciousness and critical citizenship are also the result of the work of anti-public intellectuals representing right-wing ideological and financial interests, a powerful set of corporate-controlled media agencies that are largely center-right and a market-driven public pedagogy that reduces the obligations of citizenship to the endless consumption and discarding of commodities. Military ideals permeate every aspect of popular culture, policy and social relations. In addition, a pedagogy of historical, social and racial amnesia is constructed and circulated through celebrity and consumer culture. A war culture now shapes every aspect of society as warlike values, a hypermasculinity and an aggressive militarism seep into every major institution in the United States, including schools, the corporate media and local police forces. The criminal legal system has become the default structure for dealing with social problems. More and more people are considered disposable because they offend the sensibilities of the financial elite, who are rapidly consolidating class power. Under such circumstances, violence occupies an honored place. 73 +This outweighs - EntryDate
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