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1 -Util
2 -First, psychological evidence proves we don’t identify with our future selves. Continuous personal identity doesn’t exist.
3 -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 AT
4 -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. Where Parfit’s smoking boy endangers the health of his future self with nary a thought, others might act differently. “The thing is, we make sacrifices for people all the time,” says Hershfield. “In relationships, in marriages.” The silver lining of our dissociation from our future self, then, is that it is another reason to practice being good to others. One of them might be you.
5 -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.
6 -Second, government must be practical and cannot concern itself with metaphysical questions – its only role is to protect citizens’ interests
7 -Rhonheimer 05 (Martin, Prof Of Philosophy at The Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome). “THE POLITICAL ETHOS OF CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY AND THE PLACE OF NATURAL LAW IN PUBLIC REASON: RAWLS’S “POLITICAL LIBERALISM” REVISITED” The American Journal of Jurisprudence vol. 50 (2005), pp. 1-70
8 -It is a fundamental feature of political philosophy to be part of practical philosophy. Political philosophy belongs to ethics, which is practical, for it both reflects on practical knowledge and aims at action. Therefore, it is not only normative, but must consider the concrete conditions of realization. The rationale of political institutions and action must be understood as embedded in concrete cultural and, therefore, historical contexts and as meeting with problems that only in these contexts are understandable. A normative political philosophy which would abstract from the conditions of realizability would be trying to establish norms for realizing the “idea of the good” or of “the just” (as Plato, in fact, tried to do in his Republic). Such a purely metaphysical view, however, is doomed to failure. As a theory of political praxis, political philosophy must include in its reflection the concrete historical context, historical experiences and the corresponding knowledge of the proper logic of the political. 14 Briefly: political philosophy is not metaphysics, which contemplates the necessary order of being, but practical philosophy, which deals with partly contingent matters and aims at action. Moreover, unlike moral norms in general—natural law included,—which rule the actions of a person—“my acting” and pursuing the good—, the logic of the political is characterized by acts like framing institutions and establishing legal rules by which not only personal actions but the actions of a multitude of persons are regulated by the coercive force of state power, and by which a part of citizens exercises power over others. Political actions are, thus, both actions of the whole of the body politic and referring to the whole of the community of citizens. 15 Unless we wish to espouse a platonic view according to which some persons are by nature rulers while others are by nature subjects, we will stick to the Aristotelian differentiation between the “domestic” and the “political” kind of rule 16 : unlike domestic rule, which is over people with a common interest and harmoniously striving after the same good despotism and, therefore, according to Aristotle is essentially “despotic,” political rule is exercised over free persons who represent a plurality of interests and pursue, in the common context of the polis, different goods. The exercise of such political rule, therefore, needs justification and is continuously in search of consent among those who are ruled, but who potentially at the same time are also the rulers.
9 -Prefer this account of government legitimacy since it avoids falsely starting from the position of anarchy assumed by other frameworks, which is bad since it doesn’t accurately describe the justification of the state since individuals don’t actually have a choice to enter or not enter a state.
10 -2 impacts
11 -A. Government actions will inevitably lead to trade-offs between citizens since they benefit some and harm others; the only justifiable way to resolve these conflicts is by benefitting the maximum possible number of people since anything else would unequally prioritize one group over another. This also proves side constraint theories are useless for states since they’ll inevitably violate some constraint. Even if util fails, non-consequentialist moral theories prevent any action which is worse than not being able to use util
12 -B. People psychologically prefer util – governments are obligated to use it since it’s more justifiable for citizens
13 -Gino et al 2008 Francesca Gino Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Don Moore Tepper Business School, Carnegie Mellon University, Max H. Bozman Harvard Business School, Harvard University “No harm, no foul: The outcome bias in ethical judgments” http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/08-080.pdf AT
14 -The present studies provide strong evidence of the existence of outcome effects in ethically-relevant contexts, when people are asked to judge the ethicality of others’ behavior. It is worth noting that what we show is not the same as the curse of knowledge or the hindsight bias. The curse of knowledge describes people’s inability to recover an uninformed state of mind (Camerer, Loewenstein, and Weber, 1989). Likewise, the hindsight bias leads people to misremember what they believed before they knew an event’s outcome (e.g., Fischhoff, 1975; Fischhoff and Beyth, 1975). By contrast, we show that that outcomes of decisions lead people to see the decisions themselves in a different light, and that this effect does not depend on misremembering their prior state of mind. In other words, people will see it as entirely appropriate to allow a decision’s outcome to determine their assessment of the decision’s quality.
15 -This answers standard indicts since it proves util is not counter-intuitive or hard to calculate since most people already believe in it.
16 -The standard is maximizing expected wellbeing
17 -1AC – Prolif
18 -Nuclear Power multiplies the risk for nuclear proliferation and nuclear terror – safeguards are uncertain and nuclear power weakens them
19 -Miller and Sagan 9 - Steven E. Miller, Director, International Security Program; Editor-in-Chief, International Security; Co-Principal Investigator, Project on Managing the Atom, Scott Sagan, Former Research Fellow, International Security Program, 1981-1982; Editorial Board Member, Quarterly Journal: International Security ("Nuclear Power Without Nuclear Proliferation?" Journal Article, Daedalus, volume 138, issue 4, pages 7-18, http://belfercenter.hks.harvard.edu/publication/19850/nuclear_power_without_nuclear_proliferation.html) RMT
20 -Today, the Cold War has disappeared but thousands of those weapons have not. In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up. More nations have acquired these weapons. Testing has continued. Black market trade in nuclear secrets and nuclear materials abound. The technology to build a bomb has spread. Terrorists are determined to buy, build or steal one. Our efforts to contain these dangers are centered on a global non-proliferation regime, but as more people and nations break the rules, we could reach the point where the center cannot hold.
21 -—President Barack Obama Prague, April 5, 2009
22 -The global nuclear order is changing. Concerns about climate change, the volatility of oil prices, and the security of energy supplies have contributed to a widespread and still-growing interest in the future use of nuclear power. Thirty states operate one or more nuclear power plants today, and according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), some 50 others have requested technical assistance from the agency to explore the possibility of developing their own nuclear energy programs. It is certainly not possible to predict precisely how fast and how extensively the expansion of nuclear power will occur. But it does seem probable that in the future there will be more nuclear technology spread across more states than ever before. It will be a different world than the one that has existed in the past.
23 -This surge of interest in nuclear energy — labeled by some proponents as "the renaissance in nuclear power" — is, moreover, occurring simultaneously with mounting concern about the health of the nuclear nonproliferation regime, the regulatory framework that constrains and governs the world's civil and military-related nuclear affairs. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and related institutions have been taxed by new worries, such as the growth in global terrorism, and have been painfully tested by protracted crises involving nuclear weapons proliferation in North Korea and potentially in Iran. (Indeed, some observers suspect that growing interest in nuclear power in some countries, especially in the Middle East, is not unrelated to Iran's uranium enrichment program and Tehran's movement closer to a nuclear weapons capability.) Confidence in the NPT regime seems to be eroding even as interest in nuclear power is expanding.
24 -This realization raises crucial questions for the future of global security. Will the growth of nuclear power lead to increased risks of nuclear weapons proliferation and nuclear terrorism? Will the nonproliferation regime be adequate to ensure safety and security in a world more widely and heavily invested in nuclear power? The authors in this two-volume (Fall 2009 and Winter 2010) special issue of Dædalus have one simple and clear answer to these questions: It depends.
25 -On what will it depend? Unfortunately, the answer to that question is not so simple and clear, for the technical, economic, and political factors that will determine whether future generations will have more nuclear power without more nuclear proliferation are both exceedingly complex and interrelated. How rapidly and in which countries will new nuclear power plants be built? Will the future expansion of nuclear energy take place primarily in existing nuclear power states or will there be many new entrants to the field? Which countries will possess the facilities for enriching uranium or reprocessing plutonium, technical capabilities that could be used to produce either nuclear fuel for reactors or the materials for nuclear bombs? How can physical protection of nuclear materials from terrorist organizations best be ensured? How can new entrants into nuclear power generation best maintain safety to prevent accidents? The answers to these questions will be critical determinants of the technological dimension of our nuclear future.
26 -The major political factors influencing the future of nuclear weapons are no less complex and no less important. Will Iran acquire nuclear weapons; will North Korea develop more weapons or disarm in the coming decade; how will neighboring states respond? Will the United States and Russia take significant steps toward nuclear disarmament, and if so, will the other nuclear-weapons states follow suit or stand on the sidelines?
27 -The nuclear future will be strongly influenced, too, by the success or failure of efforts to strengthen the international organizations and the set of agreements that comprise the system developed over time to manage global nuclear affairs. Will new international or regional mechanisms be developed to control the front-end (the production of nuclear reactor fuel) and the back-end (the management of spent fuel containing plutonium) of the nuclear fuel cycle? What political agreements and disagreements are likely to emerge between the nuclear-weapons states (NWS) and the non-nuclear-weapons states (NNWS) at the 2010 NPT Review Conference and beyond? What role will crucial actors among the NNWS — Japan, Iran, Brazil, and Egypt, for example — play in determining the global nuclear future? And most broadly, will the nonproliferation regime be supported and strengthened or will it be questioned and weakened? As IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei has emphasized, "The nonproliferation regime is, in many ways, at a critical juncture," and there is a need for a new "overarching multilateral nuclear framework."1 But there is no guarantee that such a framework will emerge, and there is wide doubt that the arrangements of the past will be adequate to manage our nuclear future effectively.
28 -Prolif overwhelms incentives for civilian use of nuclear reactors
29 -Li and Yim 13- Mang-Sung Yim is in the Department of Nuclear and Quantum Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and Jun Li works at UNC Chapel Hill (“Examining relationship between nuclear proliferation and civilian nuclear power development” Progress in Nuclear Energy Volume 66, July 2013, Pages 108–114http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149197013000504) RMT
30 -This paper attempts to examine the relationship between nuclear weapons proliferation and civilian nuclear power development based on the history of Atoms for Peace Initiative. To investigate the relationship, a database was established by compiling information on a country's civilian nuclear power development and various national capabilities and situational factors. The results of correlation analysis indicated that the initial motivation to develop civilian nuclear power could be mostly dual purpose. However, for a civilian nuclear power program to be ultimately successful, the study finds the role of nuclear nonproliferation very important. The analysis indicated that the presence of nuclear weapons in a country and serious interest in nuclear weapons have a negative effect on the civilian nuclear power program. The study showed the importance of state level commitment to nuclear nonproliferation for the success of civilian nuclear power development. NPT ratification and IAEA safeguards were very important factors in the success of civilian nuclear power development. In addition, for a country's civilian nuclear power development to be successful, the country needs to possess strong economic capability and be well connected to the world economic market through international trade. Mature level of democracy and presence of nuclear technological capabilities were also found to be important for the success of civilian nuclear power program.
31 -Prolif in new states causes nuclear conflict.
32 -Kroenig 14 – Matthew, Associate Professor and International Relations Field Chair at Georgetown University, and Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at The Atlantic Council (“The History of Proliferation Optimism: Does It Have A Future?”, April 2014, http://www.matthewkroenig.com/The20History20of20Proliferation20Optimism_Feb2014.pdf)
33 -The spread of nuclear weapons poses a number of severe threats to international peace and security including: nuclear war, nuclear terrorism, global and regional instability, constrained freedom of action, weakened alliances, and further nuclear proliferation. Each of these threats has received extensive treatment elsewhere and this review is not intended to replicate or even necessarily to improve upon these previous efforts. Rather the goals of this section are more modest: to usefully bring together and recap the many reasons why we should be pessimistic about the likely consequences of nuclear proliferation. Many of these threats will be illuminated with a discussion of a case of much contemporary concern: Iran’s advanced nuclear program. Nuclear War. The greatest threat posed by the spread of nuclear weapons is nuclear war. The more states in possession of nuclear weapons, the greater the probability that somewhere, someday, there will be a catastrophic nuclear war. To date, nuclear weapons have only been used in warfare once. In 1945, the United States used nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing World War II to a close. Many analysts point to the sixty-five-plus-year tradition of nuclear non-use as evidence that nuclear weapons are unusable, but it would be naïve to think that nuclear weapons will never be used again simply because they have not been used for some time. After all, analysts in the 1990s argued that worldwide economic downturns like the great depression were a thing of the past, only to be surprised by the dot-com bubble bursting later in the decade and the Great Recession of the late Naughts.49 This author, for one, would be surprised if nuclear weapons are not used again sometime in his lifetime. Before reaching a state of MAD, new nuclear states go through a transition period in which they lack a secure second-strike capability. In this context, one or both states might believe that it has an incentive to use nuclear weapons first. For example, if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, neither Iran, nor its nuclear-armed rival, Israel, will have a secure, second-strike capability. Even though it is believed to have a large arsenal, given its small size and lack of strategic depth, Israel might not be confident that it could absorb a nuclear strike and respond with a devastating counterstrike. Similarly, Iran might eventually be able to build a large and survivable nuclear arsenal, but, when it first crosses the nuclear threshold, Tehran will have a small and vulnerable nuclear force. In these pre-MAD situations, there are at least three ways that nuclear war could occur. First, the state with the nuclear advantage might believe it has a splendid first strike capability. In a crisis, Israel might, therefore, decide to launch a preventive nuclear strike to disarm Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Indeed, this incentive might be further increased by Israel’s aggressive strategic culture that emphasizes preemptive action. Second, the state with a small and vulnerable nuclear arsenal, in this case Iran, might feel use ‘em or loose ‘em pressures. That is, in a crisis, Iran might decide to strike first rather than risk having its entire nuclear arsenal destroyed. Third, as Thomas Schelling has argued, nuclear war could result due to the reciprocal fear of surprise attack.50 If there are advantages to striking first, one state might start a nuclear war in the belief that war is inevitable and that it would be better to go first than to go second. Fortunately, there is no historic evidence of this dynamic occurring in a nuclear context, but it is still possible. In an Israeli-Iranian crisis, for example, Israel and Iran might both prefer to avoid a nuclear war, but decide to strike first rather than suffer a devastating first attack from an opponent. Even in a world of MAD, however, when both sides have secure, second-strike capabilities, there is still a risk of nuclear war. Rational deterrence theory assumes nuclear-armed states are governed by rational leaders who would not intentionally launch a suicidal nuclear war. This assumption appears to have applied to past and current nuclear powers, but there is no guarantee that it will continue to hold in the future. Iran’s theocratic government, despite its inflammatory rhetoric, has followed a fairly pragmatic foreign policy since 1979, but it contains leaders who hold millenarian religious worldviews and could one day ascend to power. We cannot rule out the possibility that, as nuclear weapons continue to spread, some leader somewhere will choose to launch a nuclear war, knowing full well that it could result in self-destruction. One does not need to resort to irrationality, however, to imagine nuclear war under MAD. Nuclear weapons may deter leaders from intentionally launching full-scale wars, but they do not mean the end of international politics. As was discussed above, nuclear-armed states still have conflicts of interest and leaders still seek to coerce nuclear-armed adversaries. Leaders might, therefore, choose to launch a limited nuclear war.51 This strategy might be especially attractive to states in a position of conventional inferiority that might have an incentive to escalate a crisis quickly. During the Cold War, the United States planned to use nuclear weapons first to stop a Soviet invasion of Western Europe given NATO’s conventional inferiority.52 As Russia’s conventional power has deteriorated since the end of the Cold War, Moscow has come to rely more heavily on nuclear weapons in its military doctrine. Indeed, Russian strategy calls for the use of nuclear weapons early in a conflict (something that most Western strategists would consider to be escalatory) as a way to de-escalate a crisis. Similarly, Pakistan’s military plans for nuclear use in the event of an invasion from conventionally stronger India. And finally, Chinese generals openly talk about the possibility of nuclear use against a U.S. superpower in a possible East Asia contingency. Second, as was also discussed above, leaders can make a “threat that leaves something to chance.”53 They can initiate a nuclear crisis. By playing these risky games of nuclear brinkmanship, states can increases the risk of nuclear war in an attempt to force a less resolved adversary to back down. Historical crises have not resulted in nuclear war, but many of them, including the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, have come close. And scholars have documented historical incidents when accidents nearly led to war.54 When we think about future nuclear crisis dyads, such as Iran and Israel, with fewer sources of stability than existed during the Cold War, we can see that there is a real risk that a future crisis could result in a devastating nuclear exchange. Nuclear Terrorism. The spread of nuclear weapons also increases the risk of nuclear terrorism.55 While September 11th was one of the greatest tragedies in American history, it would have been much worse had Osama Bin Laden possessed nuclear weapons. Bin Laden declared it a “religious duty” for Al Qaeda to acquire nuclear weapons and radical clerics have issued fatwas declaring it permissible to use nuclear weapons in Jihad against the West.56 Unlike states, which can be more easily deterred, there is little doubt that if terrorists acquired nuclear weapons, they would use them. Indeed, in recent years, many U.S. politicians and security analysts have argued that nuclear terrorism poses the greatest threat to U.S. national security.57 Analysts have pointed out the tremendous hurdles that terrorists would have to overcome in order to acquire nuclear weapons.58 Nevertheless, as nuclear weapons spread, the possibility that they will eventually fall into terrorist hands increases. States could intentionally transfer nuclear weapons, or the fissile material required to build them, to terrorist groups. There are good reasons why a state might be reluctant to transfer nuclear weapons to terrorists, but, as nuclear weapons spread, the probability that a leader might someday purposely arm a terrorist group increases. Some fear, for example, that Iran, with its close ties to Hamas and Hezbollah, might be at a heightened risk of transferring nuclear weapons to terrorists. Moreover, even if no state would ever intentionally transfer nuclear capabilities to terrorists, a new nuclear state, with underdeveloped security procedures, might be vulnerable to theft, allowing terrorist groups or corrupt or ideologically-motivated insiders to transfer dangerous material to terrorists. There is evidence, for example, that representatives from Pakistan’s atomic energy establishment met with Al Qaeda members to discuss a possible nuclear deal.59 Finally, a nuclear-armed state could collapse, resulting in a breakdown of law and order and a loose nukes problem. U.S. officials are currently very concerned about what would happen to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons if the government were to fall. As nuclear weapons spread, this problem is only further amplified. Iran is a country with a history of revolutions and a government with a tenuous hold on power. The regime change that Washington has long dreamed about in Tehran could actually become a nightmare if a nuclear-armed Iran suffered a break down in authority, forcing us to worry about the fate of Iran’s nuclear arsenal. Regional Instability: The spread of nuclear weapons also emboldens nuclear powers, contributing to regional instability. States that lack nuclear weapons need to fear direct military attack from other states, but states with nuclear weapons can be confident that they can deter an intentional military attack, giving them an incentive to be more aggressive in the conduct of their foreign policy. In this way, nuclear weapons provide a shield under which states can feel free to engage in lower-level aggression. Indeed, international relations theories about the “stability-instability paradox” maintain that stability at the nuclear level contributes to conventional instability.60 Historically, we have seen that the spread of nuclear weapons has emboldened their possessors and contributed to regional instability. Recent scholarly analyses have demonstrated that, after controlling for other relevant factors, nuclear-weapon states are more likely to engage in conflict than nonnuclear-weapon states and that this aggressiveness is more pronounced in new nuclear states that have less experience with nuclear diplomacy.61 Similarly, research on internal decision-making in Pakistan reveals that Pakistani foreign policymakers may have been emboldened by the acquisition of nuclear weapons, which encouraged them to initiate militarized disputes against India.62
34 -
35 -Weak nuclear states are incentivized to REDUCE checks on nuclear escalation to increase the probability of threats
36 -Powell 15 Robert Powell (Robson Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.), "Nuclear Brinkmanship, Limited War, and Military Power," International Organization, Summer 2015 AZ
37 -These effects highlight in a very simple way some of the incentives a weak state has to “go nuclear” and thereby be able to transform a contest of strength into one of resolve. If a weak state has no nuclear weapons, it cannot threaten to engage in a process that may ultimately end in its launching a nuclear attack against its adversary. In other words, the potential and minimal risks are zero: () = ()=0 for all . Absent any risk of escalation, the stronger state brings all of its power to bear (∗ = ). Nuclear weapons and the latent threat of escalation compel it to bring less power to bear ( e ). More generally, a militarily weak but resolute state that already has nuclear weapons will be advantaged by a doctrine, posture, and force structure in which the potential risk rises rapidly as more power is brought to bear (a large ). We can see these incentives in the evolution of Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine. In order to deter a militarily stronger adversary from threatening its vital interests, Pakistan, like NATO before it, has eschewed a no-first use nuclear doctrine. After becoming an overt nuclear state in 1998, Pakistan moved toward a nuclear posture which envisioned the possibly rapid, “first use of nuclear weapons against conventional attacks.” This in turned required the operationalization of nuclear weapons as “usable warfighting instruments.”57 As former Pakistani General Feroz Khan puts it, “With relatively smaller conventional forces, and lacking adequate technical means, especially in early warning and surveillance, Pakistan relies on a more proactive nuclear defensive policy.”58 Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States made the same point in the spring of 2001. Because of the growing conventional asymmetry with India, “Pakistan will be increasingly forced to rely on strategic capabilities... Risks of escalation through accident and miscalculation cannot be discounted.”59 In brief, Pakistan’s nuclear posture, which Narang describes as “asymmetric escalation,” entails a fundamental trade-off. When compared to a posture of “assured retaliation,” which emphasizes survivable second-strike forces targeted against an adversary’s key strategic centers, asymmetric escalation depends on being able to use or credibly threaten to use nuclear weapons against invading conventional forces. However, the forces needed to implement this “can generate severe command and control pressures that increase the risk of inadvertent use of nuclear weapons.”60 Pakistan’s acceptance of a riskier force posture is in keeping with the incentives highlighted in the model. The potential risk of nuclear escalation if India brings a given amount of power to bear is higher if Pakistan has an asymmetric-escalation doctrine. That is,  is higher as illustrated in the shift from 0 to 1 in Figure 6. As a result, India brings less power to bear (e decreases) and Pakistan is better off ((e) increases).
38 -
39 -1AC – Accidents
40 -
41 -Accidents likely – large releases of radiation are more likely than before
42 -Wheatley et al 16 Spencer Wheatley (ETH Zurich, Department of Management, Technology and Economics, Switzerland), Benjamin Sovacool, Didier Sornette, "Of Disasters and Dragon Kings: A Statistical Analysis of Nuclear Power Incidents and Accidents," Risk Analysis, March 2016 AZ
43 -Regarding event severity, we found that the distribution of cost underwent a significant regime change shortly after the Three Mile Island major accident. Moderate cost events were suppressed, but extreme ones became more frequent, to the extent that the costs are now well described by the extremely heavy tailed Pareto distribution with parameter inline image. We noted in the introduction that the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 led to plant-specific full-scope control room simulators, plant-specific PSA models for finding and eliminating risks, and new sets of emergency operating instructions. The change of regime that we document here may be the concrete embodiment of these changes catalyzed by the TMI accident. We also identify statistically significant runaway disaster (“dragon-king”) regimes in both NAMS and cost, suggesting that extreme events are amplified to values even larger than those explained under the Pareto distribution with inline image. In view of the extreme risks, the need for better bonding and liability instruments associated with nuclear accident and incident property damage becomes clear. For instance, under the conservative assumption that the cost from Fukushima is the maximum possible, annual accident costs are on par with the construction costs of a single nuclear plant, with the expected annual cost being 1.5 billion USD with a standard deviation of 8 billion USD. If we do not limit the maximum possible cost, then the expected cost under the estimated Pareto model is mathematically infinite. Nuclear reactors are thus assets that can become liabilities in a matter of hours, and it is usually taxpayers, or society at large, that “pays” for these accidents rather than nuclear operators or even electricity consumers. This split of incentives improperly aligns those most responsible for an accident (the principals) from those suffering the cost of nuclear accidents (the agents). One policy suggestion is that we start holding plant operators liable for accident costs through an environmental or accident bonding system,65 which should work together with an appropriate economic model to incentivize the operators. Third, looking to the future, our analysis suggests that nuclear power has inherent safety risks that will likely recur. With the current model—which does not quantify improvements from the industry response to Fukushima—in terms of costs, there is a 50 chance that (i) a Fukushima event (or larger) occurs in 62 years, and (ii) a TMI event (or larger) occurs in 15 years. Further, smaller but still expensive (⩾20 MM 2013 USD) incidents will occur with a frequency of about one per year, under the assumption of a roughly constant fleet of nuclear plants. To curb these risks of future events would require sweeping changes to the industry, as perhaps triggered by Fukushima, which include refinements to reactor operator training, human factors engineering, radiation protection, and many other areas of nuclear power plant operations. To be effective, any changes need to minimize the risk of extreme disasters. Unfortunately, given the shortage of data, it is too early to judge if the risk of events has significantly improved post-Fukushima. We can only raise attention to the fact that similar sweeping regime changes after both Chernobyl (leading to a decrease in frequency) and Three Mile Island (leading to a suppression of moderate events) failed to mitigate the very heavy tailed distribution of costs documented here.
44 -
45 -Contamination spreads rapidly – no one is safe
46 -Max - Planck- Gesselschaft 12 –The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science is a formally independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German research institute (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Major Reactor, 5-22-2012, "Severe nuclear reactor accidents likely every 10 to 20 years, European study suggests," ScienceDaily, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120522134942.htm) RMT
47 -25 percent of the radioactive particles are transported further than 2,000 kilometres
48 -Subsequently, the researchers determined the geographic distribution of radioactive gases and particles around a possible accident site using a computer model that describes Earth's atmosphere. The model calculates meteorological conditions and flows, and also accounts for chemical reactions in the atmosphere. The model can compute the global distribution of trace gases, for example, and can also simulate the spreading of radioactive gases and particles. To approximate the radioactive contamination, the researchers calculated how the particles of radioactive caesium-137 (137Cs) disperse in the atmosphere, where they deposit on Earth's surface and in what quantities. The 137Cs isotope is a product of the nuclear fission of uranium. It has a half-life of 30 years and was one of the key elements in the radioactive contamination following the disasters of Chernobyl and Fukushima.
49 -The computer simulations revealed that, on average, only eight percent of the 137Cs particles are expected to deposit within an area of 50 kilometres around the nuclear accident site. Around 50 percent of the particles would be deposited outside a radius of 1,000 kilometres, and around 25 percent would spread even further than 2,000 kilometres. These results underscore that reactor accidents are likely to cause radioactive contamination well beyond national borders.
50 -The results of the dispersion calculations were combined with the likelihood of a nuclear meltdown and the actual density of reactors worldwide to calculate the current risk of radioactive contamination around the world. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), an area with more than 40 kilobecquerels of radioactivity per square meter is defined as contaminated.
51 -The team in Mainz found that in Western Europe, where the density of reactors is particularly high, the contamination by more than 40 kilobecquerels per square meter is expected to occur once in about every 50 years. It appears that citizens in the densely populated southwestern part of Germany run the worldwide highest risk of radioactive contamination, associated with the numerous nuclear power plants situated near the borders between France, Belgium and Germany, and the dominant westerly wind direction.
52 -If a single nuclear meltdown were to occur in Western Europe, around 28 million people on average would be affected by contamination of more than 40 kilobecquerels per square meter. This figure is even higher in southern Asia, due to the dense populations. A major nuclear accident there would affect around 34 million people, while in the eastern USA and in East Asia this would be 14 to 21 million people.
53 -"Germany's exit from the nuclear energy program will reduce the national risk of radioactive contamination. However, an even stronger reduction would result if Germany's neighbours were to switch off their reactors," says Jos Lelieveld. "Not only do we need an in-depth and public analysis of the actual risks of nuclear accidents. In light of our findings I believe an internationally coordinated phasing out of nuclear energy should also be considered ," adds the atmospheric chemist.
54 -It’s the single greatest danger to the environment
55 -Stapleton 9 - Richard M Stapleton Is the author of books such as Lead Is a Silent Hazard, writes for pollution issues (“Disasters: Nuclear Accidents” http://www.pollutionissues.com/Co-Ea/Disasters-Nuclear-Accidents.html) RMT
56 -Of all the environmental disaster events that humans are capable of causing, nuclear disasters have the greatest damage potential. The radiation release associated with a nuclear disaster poses significant acute and chronic risks in the immediate environs and chronic risk over a wide geographic area. Radioactive contamination, which typically becomes airborne, is long-lived, with half-lives guaranteeing contamination for hundreds of years.
57 -Concerns over potential nuclear disasters center on nuclear reactors, typically those used to generate electric power. Other concerns involve the transport of nuclear waste and the temporary storage of spent radioactive fuel at nuclear power plants. The fear that terrorists would target a radiation source or create a "dirty bomb" capable of dispersing radiation over a populated area was added to these concerns following the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.
58 -Radioactive emissions of particular concern include strontium-90 and cesium-137, both having thirty-year-plus half-lives, and iodine-131, having a short half-life of eight days but known to cause thyroid cancer. In addition to being highly radioactive, cesium-137 is mistaken for potassium by living organisms. This means that it is passed on up the food chain and bioaccumulated by that process. Strontium-90 mimics the properties of calcium and is deposited in bones where it may either cause cancer or damage bone marrow cells.
59 -Biodiversity loss risks extinction - ecosystems aren’t resilient or redundant
60 -Vule 13-School of Biological Sciences, Louisiana Tech University (Jeffrey V. Yule *, Robert J. Fournier and Patrick L. Hindmarsh, “Biodiversity, Extinction, and Humanity’s Future: The Ecological and Evolutionary Consequences of Human Population and Resource Use”, 2 April 2013, manities 2013, 2, 147–159) RMT
61 -Ecologists recognize that the particulars of the relationship between biodiversity and community resilience in the face of disturbance (a broad range of phenomena including anything from drought, fire, and volcanic eruption to species introductions or removals) depend on context 16,17. Sometimes disturbed communities return relatively readily to pre-disturbance conditions; sometimes they do not. However, accepting as a general truism that biodiversity is an ecological stabilizer is sensible— roughly equivalent to viewing seatbelt use as a good idea: although seatbelts increase the risk of injury in a small minority of car accidents, their use overwhelmingly reduces risk. As humans continue to modify natural environments, we may be reducing their ability to return to pre-disturbance conditions. The concern is not merely academic. Communities provide the ecosystem services on which both human and nonhuman life depends, including the cycling of carbon dioxide and oxygen by photosynthetic organisms, nitrogen fixation and the filtration of water by microbes, and pollination by insects. If disturbances alter communities to the extent that they can no longer provide these crucial services, extinctions (including, possibly, our own) become more likely. In ecology as in science in general, absolutes are rare. Science deals mainly in probabilities, in large part because it attempts to address the universe’s abundant uncertainties. Species-rich, diverse communities characterized by large numbers of multi-species interactions are not immune to being pushed from one relatively stable state characterized by particular species and interactions to other, quite different states in which formerly abundant species are entirely or nearly entirely absent. Nonetheless, in speciose communities, the removal of any single species is less likely to result in radical change. That said, there are no guarantees that the removal of even a single species from a biodiverse community will not have significant, completely unforeseen consequences.
62 -Indirect interactions can be unexpectedly important to community structure and, historically, have been difficult to observe until some form of disturbance (especially the introduction or elimination of a species) occurs. Experiments have revealed how the presence of predators can increase the diversity of prey species in communities, as when predators of a superior competitor among prey species will allow inferior competing prey species to persist 18. Predators can have even more dramatic effects on communities. The presence or absence of sea otters determines whether inshore areas are characterized by diverse kelp forest communities or an alternative stable state of species poor urchin barrens 19. In the latter case, the absence of otters leaves urchin populations unchecked to overgraze kelp forests, eliminating a habitat feature that supports a wide range of species across a variety of age classes.
63 -Aldo Leopold observed that when trying to determine how a device works by tinkering with it, the first rule of doing the job intelligently is to save all the parts 20. The extinctions that humans have caused certainly represent a significant problem, but there is an additional difficulty with human investigations of and impacts on ecological and evolutionary processes. Often, our tinkering is unintentional and, as a result, recklessly ignores the necessity of caution. Following the logic inherited from Newtonian physics, humans expect single actions to have single effects. Desiring more game species, for instance, humans typically hunt predators (in North America, for instance, extirpating wolves so as to be able to have more deer or elk for themselves). Yet removing or adding predators has far reaching effects. Wolf removal has led to prey overpopulation, plant over browsing, and erosion 21. After wolves were removed from Yellowstone National Park, the K of elk increased. This allowed for a shift in elk feeding patterns that left fewer trees alongside rivers, thus leaving less food for beaver and, consequently, fewer beaver dams and less wetland 22,23. Such a situation represents, in microcosm, the inherent risk of allowing for the erosion of species diversity. In addition to providing habitat for a wide variety of species, wetlands serve as natural water purification systems. Although the Yellowstone region might not need that particular ecosystem service as much as other parts of the world, freshwater resources and wetlands are threatened globally, and the same logic of reduced biodiversity equating to reduced ecosystem services applies.
64 -Humans take actions without considering that when tugging on single threads, they unavoidably affect adjacent areas of the tapestry. While human population and per capita resource use remain high, so does the probability of ongoing biodiversity loss. At the very least, in the future people will have an even more skewed perspective than we do about what constitutes a diverse community. In that regard, future generations will be even more ignorant than we are. Of course, we also experience that shifting baseline perspective on biodiversity and population sizes, failing to recognize how much is missing from the world because we are unaware of what past generations saw 11. But the consequences of diminished biodiversity might be more profound for humans than that. If the disturbance of communities and ecosystems results in species losses that reduce the availability of ecosystem services, human K and, sooner or later, human N will be reduced.
65 -1AC – Plan
66 -Countries ought to prohibit the production of nuclear power by reactors powered by uranium-235.
67 -The plan shifts to thorium-powered reactors – improves energy efficiency and safety and prevents prolif
68 -Halper 13 Mark Halper, "Hans Blix: Shift to thorium, minimize weapons risk," The Alvin Weinberg Foundation, 10/29/2013 AZ
69 -Hans Blix, the disarmament advocate who famously found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq a decade ago, said today that thorium fuel could help reduce the risk of weapons proliferation from nuclear reactors. Addressing the Thorium Energy Conference 2013 here, Blix said that nuclear power operators should move away from their time-honoured practice of using uranium fuel with its links to potential nuclear weapons fabrication via both the uranium enrichment process and uranium’s plutonium waste. “Even though designers and operators are by no means at the end of the uranium road, it is desirable today, I am convinced, that the designers and the others use their skill and imagination to explore and test other avenues as well,” Blix said. “The propeller plane that served us long and still serves us gave way to the jet plane that now dominates,” said the former United Nations chief weapons inspector who also ran the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1981 to 1997. “Diesel engines have migrated from their traditional home in trucks to a growing number of cars and cars with electric engines are now entering the market. Nuclear power should also not be stuck in one box.” Blix rattled off a list of thorium’s advantages, noting that “thorium fuel gives rise to waste that is smaller in volume, less toxic and much less long lived than the wastes that result from uranium fuel.” Another bonus: thorium is three to four times more plentiful than uranium, he noted. “The civilian nuclear community must do what it can to help reduce the risk that more nuclear weapons are made from uranium or plutonium,” Blix said. “Although it is enrichment plants and plutonium producing installations rather than power reactors that are key concerns, this community, this nuclear community, can and should use its considerable brain power to design reactors that can be easily safeguarded and fuel and supply organizations that do not lend themselves to proliferation. I think in these regards the thorium community may have very important contributions to make.” Blix described the obstacles that are in the way of a shift to thorium and other nuclear alternatives as “political” rather than “technical.”
EntryDate
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1 -2016-09-11 01:40:26.0
Judge
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1 -Rashed Islam
Opponent
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1 -Chaminade CC
ParentRound
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1 -0
Round
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -3
Team
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1 -La Canada Zhao Aff
Title
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -SEPOCT - Thorium Aff
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Loyola
Caselist.CitesClass[1]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,41 +1,0 @@
1 -same framework as Thorium aff
2 -
3 -Advantage one is Isis.
4 -ISIS is expanding its influence in Egypt and the Sinai
5 -McFate et al 16 Jessica Lewis McFate (Director of Tradecraft and Innovation at the Institute for the Study of War. She joined ISW after eight years of service on Active Duty as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army. Her military career includes 34 months deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, where she provided intelligence support to tactical, operational, and theater commands. She has twice been awarded the Bronze Star Medal for her impact upon operations. She is the author of The ISIS Defense in Iraq and Syria: Countering an Adaptive Enemy, The Islamic State of Iraq Returns to Diyala, Al-Qaeda in Iraq Resurgent, and Al-Qaeda in Iraq Resurgent, Parts I and II. Ms. McFate’s work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal and she has made frequent appearances on both television and radio programs, including CNN, Al-Jazeera America, BBC, NPR, and Wall Street Journal Live. Ms. McFate holds a B.S. in Strategic and International History and International Relations from West Point and an M.A. in Strategic Intelligence from American Military University), "ISIS FORECAST: RAMADAN 2016," Institute for the Study of War, May 2016 AZ
6 -ISIS will implement its global strategy with simultaneous and linked campaigns across multiple geographic rings. ISW has refined its previous assessment of these geographic campaigns to identify the following four rings: core terrain, including Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and the Sinai Peninsula; regional power centers, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, and Egypt; the remainder of the Muslim world; and the non-Muslim world. ISIS will pursue different strategic objectives in each ring in order to advance its grand strategic objective to expand its caliphate across all Muslim lands while provoking and winning an apocalyptic war against the West. ISIS has suffered numerous losses within Iraq and Syria that it will likely seek to reverse by setting new conditions during Ramadan. ISIS will attempt to exploit an ongoing political crisis in Iraq by targeting demonstrators or other soft targets in a mass casualty event that prompts the mobilization of Iraqi Shi’a and sparks reprisals against Iraqi Sunnis. ISIS will also launch attacks in Homs City, Tartous, and Latakia Provinces in Syria to exploit the current focus of pro-regime elements upon other major cities such as Aleppo and Damascus. ISIS has already demonstrated this capability in early 2016 and will continue to pursue these courses of action in April - May 2016 leading up to Ramadan. ISIS will also seek to generate new conditions in Iraq and Syria by launching attacks within neighboring countries, including Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. ISIS will likely select targets in neighboring states that relieve pressure from the group in Syria while setting conditions for future expansion in those states. Targets that serve this dual purpose include foreign tourists, state security forces, and U.S. military elements in Turkey and Jordan. ISIS has already accelerated its attacks within Turkey and Lebanon since November 2015. Jordanian Special Operations Forces uncovered an operational ISIS presence in Irbid in March 2016, indicating that ISIS is developing the capability to conduct attacks inside Jordan as well. ISIS is similarly organizing campaigns to weaken regional power centers - including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, and Egypt – in order to eliminate its rivals for leadership within the Muslim world. ISIS has pursued an indirect campaign against Iran that focuses upon its proxies in Iraq and Syria. Meanwhile, ISIS is escalating its attacks against security forces in Saudi Arabia with targets including the capital of Riyadh, Shi’a populations of Eastern Saudi Arabia, and potentially the holy city of Mecca, based upon recent arrests. These attacks may serve to boost regional recruitment for ISIS while signaling its long-term intent to seize control of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. ISIS will also likely take advantage of political discontent against Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to further drive disorder in mainland Egypt and delegitimize the rival version of Islamism espoused by the Muslim Brotherhood.
7 -Egypt’s nuclear deal makes it as a target—political instability and civil unrest.
8 -Follett 16 Andrew Follett, energy and environment reporter. “Egypt Gets $25 billion From Russia To Build Nuclear Reactors, Despite Terror Risk.” The Daily Caller News Foundation. May 23, 2016. http://dailycaller.com/2016/05/23/egypt-gets-25-billion-from-russia-to-build-nuclear-reactors-despite-terror-risk/ MSG
9 -Egypt’s president announced Sunday the country will accept a Russian loan of $25 billion in order to build a nuclear power plant, despite recent terrorism and civil unrest in the country.¶ The loan will finance longstanding Egyptian plans to build a new reactor in Dabaa, despite long running terrorism concerns in the region. Egypt’s current president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, signed a nuclear power plant deal with Russia last November, just days after the Kremlin announced a Russian aircraft was downed by an act of terrorism, killing all 224 people on board. The plane was heading from an Egyptian resort city to St. Petersburg in Russia.¶ Groups tied to the Islamic State (ISIS) have made repeated attacks in Egypt, even killing nine people, six of whom were police officers, with a bomb in Cairo in January. Egypt is also politically unstable, and has changed presidents three times since 2011. The country’s former president, Mohamed Morsi, was removed from office by a military coup in 2013 and sentenced to death last May.¶ Egypt has planned to build a nuclear reactor since 1955, but aborted most of its plans after the Chernobyl accident. Egyptian interest in nuclear power was renewed after the country signed nuclear cooperation agreements with Russia in 2004 and 2008, according to the World Nuclear Association. Egypt currently operates two extremely small and old reactors with technical assistance from Russia and Argentina.¶ ¶ Sponsored Content¶ ¶ I Was Voting for Hillary, Until I Read This...¶ LifeDaily¶ ¶ After Losing 100lbs Mama June is Actually Gorgeous¶ Look Damn Good¶ ¶ 25 Unseen Photos Of Bill The Clintons Don't Want You To See¶ Frank151¶ Sponsored Links by¶ The proposed Egyptian reactors would not produce the weapons-grade plutonium necessary for a nuclear bomb, but materials from the planned reactors could be used to create dirty bombs.¶ A dirty bomb combines radioactive material with conventional explosives that could contaminate the local area with high radiation levels for long periods of time and cause mass panic. ISIS has expressed interest in stealing radioactive material for a dirty bomb — though it would be millions of times weaker than an actual nuclear device.¶ Russia has supported the development of nuclear power in other countries with terrorism issues, such as Algeria.¶ Serious issues with terrorist groups in Algeria, like al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) — a group of Islamist militants aimed to overthrow the Algerian government and create an Islamic state — have also not hampered Russia’s desire to build nuclear reactors. AQIM is designated as a terrorist organization by U.S. officials. The group even pledged allegiance to the ISIS in late Feburary.¶
10 -Now is key – Egypt is vulnerable
11 -McFate et al 16 Jessica Lewis McFate (Director of Tradecraft and Innovation at the Institute for the Study of War. She joined ISW after eight years of service on Active Duty as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army. Her military career includes 34 months deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, where she provided intelligence support to tactical, operational, and theater commands. She has twice been awarded the Bronze Star Medal for her impact upon operations. She is the author of The ISIS Defense in Iraq and Syria: Countering an Adaptive Enemy, The Islamic State of Iraq Returns to Diyala, Al-Qaeda in Iraq Resurgent, and Al-Qaeda in Iraq Resurgent, Parts I and II. Ms. McFate’s work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal and she has made frequent appearances on both television and radio programs, including CNN, Al-Jazeera America, BBC, NPR, and Wall Street Journal Live. Ms. McFate holds a B.S. in Strategic and International History and International Relations from West Point and an M.A. in Strategic Intelligence from American Military University), "ISIS FORECAST: RAMADAN 2016," Institute for the Study of War, May 2016 AZ
12 -Meanwhile, the Egyptian government has undertaken recent measures that ISIS may exploit. Egypt gave two islands in the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia in April 2016, sparking large protests by Muslim Brotherhood members and others in Cairo, Giza, and other cities.38 ISIS likely seeks opportunities in Egypt, Jordan and Syria to demonstrate that the Muslim Brotherhood’s approach to Islamism is invalid and ineffective. Muslim Brotherhood protests also provide an outlet for ISIS to tap into radicalizing populations and mount a wider campaign of attacks on the Egyptian mainland. ISIS can exploit Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s propensity to blame the Muslim Brotherhood for ISIS’s attacks. The attack claimed by ISIS against the Russian airliner departing Sinai in October 2015 demonstrates that ISIS is also incorporating covert explosive techniques previously used by al-Qaeda and conducting those attacks against Egypt’s airline industry. This capability may or may not be responsible for the Egyptian airliner downed on May 19, 2016 en route from Paris to Cairo.
13 -Causes a massive nuclear war
14 -Boyle 15 Darren Boyle, German Journalist. DailyMail.co. Isis planning 'nuclear holocaust' to wipe hundreds of millions from face of the earth', claims reporter who embedded with the extremists”. September 29, 2015. MSG
15 -Islamic terrorists Isis want to wipe the west off the face of the earth with a nuclear holocaust according to a journalist who spent ten days with the group while researching a book. ¶ The terror group allowed Jürgen Todenhöfer to embed with the group because he has been a high-profile critic of US policy in the Middle East. ¶ The German journalist claimed the terror group wants to launch a 'nuclear tsunami' against the west and anyone else that opposes their plans for an Islamic caliphate.¶ The 75-year-old former German MP wrote up his findings in a new book 'Inside IS - Ten Days In The Islamic State'.¶ He said that upon his arrival in ISIS controlled territory, that he and his son were forced to hand over their mobile phones to their hosts. ¶ He said he spent several months talking to the terror organisation over Skype before he was allowed to travel into their area. ¶ He told Allan Hall in The Express: 'Of course I'd seen the terrible, brutal beheading videos and it was of course after seeing this in the last few months that caused me the greatest concern in my negotiations to ensure how I can avoid this. Anyway, I made my will before I left.¶ 'People there live in shellholes, in barracks, in bombed-out houses. I slept on the floor, if I was lucky on a plastic mattress. I had a suitcase and a backpack, a sleeping bag.' ¶ Mr Todenhöfer said Isis uses its beheading videos to instill terror into the civilian population in order to make it easier for them to take an area under control.'¶ Mr Todenhöfer warned that ISIS was the most dangerous terror organization he ever witnessed. ¶ 'I don't see anyone who has a real chance to stop them. Only Arabs can stop IS. I came back very pessimistic.' ¶ RELATED ARTICLES¶ Previous¶ 1¶ Next¶ Elderly woman seriously injured after BLACK BEAR breaks into...¶ Corbyn's copy and paste politics: Labour leader's first big...¶ SHARE THIS ARTICLE¶ Share¶ He warned that the terror organisation is far more 'dangerous and organised' than people in the West realises. ¶ He said the West has 'no concept of the threat it faces' from the Islamic State and has underestimated the risk posed by ISIS 'dramatically'.¶ The German reporter spent most of his time in Mosul in northern Iraq, but he also traveled to the ISIS-controlled territories of Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor in Syria. ¶ He added: 'They are extremely brutal. Not just head-cutting. I'm talking about the strategy of religious cleansing. That's their official philosophy. They are talking about 500 million people who have to die.'¶ Scroll down for video ¶ Mr Todenhöfer said Isis, pictured, were the most 'brutal and dangerous' enemy he has ever seen ¶ +3¶ Mr Todenhöfer said Isis, pictured, were the most 'brutal and dangerous' enemy he has ever seen ¶ He claimed the terror group would try and wipe out hundreds of millions of people if they had the chance¶ +3¶ He claimed the terror group would try and wipe out hundreds of millions of people if they had the chance¶ Hollande confirms jet fighters destroyed ISIS training camp¶ He went on to say that ISIS are 'completely sure they will win this fight'.¶ In a stark warning issued in a detailed post on Facebook, the journalist wrote in German: 'The West underestimated the risk posed by IS dramatically.¶ 'The ISIS fighters are much smarter and more dangerous than our leaders believe. In the Islamic State, there is an almost palpable enthusiasm and confidence of victory, which I have not seen in many war zones.'¶ Mr Todenhöfer went on to say that ISIS have plans for mass genocide, with the aim or eradicating all atheists and religions that are not 'people of the book' or who do not subscribe to their particular brand of Islam.¶ 'The IS want to kill... all non-believers and apostates and enslave their women and children. All Shiites, Yazidi, Hindus, atheists and polytheists should be killed,' he wrote.¶ 'Hundreds of millions of people are to be eliminated in the course of this religious 'cleansing'.¶ 'All moderate Muslims who promote democracy, should be killed. Because, from the IS perspective, they promote human laws over the laws of God.¶ 'This also applies to - after a successful conquest - the democratically-minded Muslims in the Western world.'¶ The reporter describes the Islamic State is currently operating as a functioning totalitarian state - one which, he claims, many Sunni residents in Mosul are unopposed to since it is preferable to the oppression they suffered under the previous regime.¶ He told German television that ISIS wants to 'conquer the world'.¶ 'This is the largest religious cleansing strategy that has ever been planned in human history,' the journalist added. ¶ ISIS executes ten men in blue jumpsuits as suspected spies¶ Read more:¶ ISIS plan Islamic nuclear holocaust to wipe hundreds of millions from face of earth | World | News | Daily Express
16 -WMD acquisition feasible – best data – kills the economy.
17 -Robichaud 14 Carl, Specialist in Nuclear Policy at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, 2014, “Preventing nuclear terrorism requires bold action,” http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/homeland-security/201395-preventing-nuclear-terrorism-requires-bold-action/AKG
18 -Nuclear terrorism is one of the most serious threats of the 21st century. Fortunately, the threat is a preventable one: consolidate and lock down weapons-usable materials and you dramatically reduce the risks. At the Nuclear Security Summit this week, President Obama and more than 50 world leaders will gather in The Hague with an opportunity to take a major step forward in doing just that. But taking the next step in this process will require strong leadership and skillful diplomacy. Though they rarely make the headlines, cases of smuggling, theft or loss of nuclear and radiological materials are alarmingly frequent. Over the past few years we’ve seen incidents from Moldova to India, South Africa to Japan. Just a few months ago in Mexico, carjackers unwittingly heisted radiological materials that, in the wrong hands, could have done significant harm. In fact, more than one hundred thefts and other incidents are reported to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) each year. In many of these instances we still do not know where the material came from, who stole it, or where it was headed. Nuclear technology is widespread, used not only in power production but in medicine, mining, and other industries. As a result, dozens of countries possess radiological materials that could be used in a “dirty bomb.” Beyond that, over 25 countries have highly-enriched uranium or plutonium—enough to build more than 20,000 new weapons like the one that destroyed Hiroshima and almost 80,000 like the one that destroyed Nagasaki. In the wrong hands, it wouldn’t take much plutonium or highly enriched uranium to fashion a nuclear device. You could fit a bombs-worth of this material into a lunch box. Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups around the globe have expressed intent to acquire weapons-usable materials. If they succeed there is little doubt they would use such a device. Thus the spread of these materials is a grave threat—not only to the United States but to any country that relies upon the global economy, which would be severely disrupted if an attack ever succeeded. Robert Gates, former U.S. Secretary of Defense, noted that, “Every senior leader, when you’re asked what keeps you awake at night, it’s the thought of a terrorist ending up with a weapon of mass destruction, especially nuclear.”
19 -Thus, the plan: The Arab Republic of Egypt should prohibit the production of nuclear power.
20 -Ross 11 Timothy Ross, "Avoiding Apocalypse: Congress Should Ban Nuclear Power," Environmental Advocacy Seminar UB Law, Fall 2011 AZ
21 -For almost as long as fission-produced nuclear power has existed as a viable energy source, there has been unending debate over whether or not, or to what extent, it should be used as a source of energy. Many see nuclear power as an efficient source of energy that is dependable, cost efficient and clean. That view fails to appreciate the true costs of nuclear power. The risks presented by nuclear power to human health and the environment are unparalleled. Nuclear power is not clean or safe when one considers the byproducts that come of its production or the potential ramifications of a nuclear accident. Nuclear power is also unnecessary to fulfill this nation’s energy needs. There are alternative sources of power, such as wind power or hydroelectric power, that should be used to a fuller extent in generating the nation’s electricity. Congress should 1) ban production, in the United States, of nuclear material for use in fission power plants, 2) prohibit the building of any new nuclear plant, and 3) phase out currently operating nuclear plants. If, at some point, a method is developed for producing fuels or processes that would eliminate instability and radioactive waste, then nuclear power might be acceptable. But so long as the only reliable method of producing nuclear power is through fission, which is unstable and produces radioactive waste, we should not place its convenience before the risks posed to health or environment
22 -Currently, Egypt lacks nuclear power but has entered into agreement with Russia to finance power plants.
23 -Reuters 16 Reuters News Agency. “Russia to Lend Egypt $25 billion to build nuclear power plant.” Thursday May 19, 2016. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-egypt-russia-nuclear-idUSKCN0YA1G5 MSG
24 -Russia will loan Egypt $25 billion to finance building and operating a nuclear power plant in Egypt, the official gazette said on Thursday.¶ ¶ Egypt and Russia signed an agreement on Nov. 19 for Russia to build Egypt's first nuclear power plant in Egypt and to extend Egypt a loan to cover the cost of construction.¶ ¶ It was not clear at the time what the deal was worth, but Egypt's president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said the loan would be paid off over 35 years.¶ ¶ Egypt will pay an interest rate of 3 percent annually, according to the country's official gazette. Installment payments will begin on Oct. 15, 2029.¶ ¶ "The loan will be used by the Egyptian side for a period of 13 years between 2016-2028 ... the Egyptian side will repay loan amounts used over 22 years in 43 installments," the gazette said.¶ ¶ The loan will finance 85 percent of the value of each contract for the work, services and equipment shipping, the gazette said. Egypt will finance the remaining 15 percent.¶ ¶ The plant will be built in Dabaa, a site in the north of the country that Egypt has been considering for a nuclear power plant on and off since the 1980s. It is due to be completed in 20022, and the first of its four reactors is expected to begin producing power in 2024.¶ ¶ Egypt, with a population of 90 million and vast energy requirements, is seeking to diversify its energy sources. As well as a nuclear plant, Sisi has talked of building solar and wind energy facilities in the coming three years to generate around 4,300 megawatts of power.¶ ¶ The country also recently discovered a large reserve of natural gas off the Mediterranean coast.¶ ¶ (Reporting by Asma Alsharif, editing by Larry King)
25 -Advantage two is relations
26 -The Egypt-Russia nuclear deal strengthens Russian influence and displaces the US
27 -Svet and Miller 15 Oleg Svet and Elissa Miller, security sector analyst and program assistant. “The United States Should Prevent an Egyptian Shift to Russia.” Middle East Institute. December 18, 2015. MSG
28 -Roughly five decades since the Soviet foray into the Middle East vis-à-vis the Czech arms deal with Egypt in September 1955, Russia is reasserting its influence in Egypt. The deal marked the beginning of a brief period that saw Moscow serve as the primary military supplier for a number of regional countries that formed an ‘anti-imperialist front’, such as Egypt, Iraq, and Syria. Recent developments in Russo-Egyptian relations are reminiscent of Moscow’s dealings with Cairo during the mid-1950s, with the Russians hopeful of a similar outcome. While these developments do not present an immediate threat to the United States, Washington should not dismiss this ongoing strategic leveraging.¶ While the U.S. alliance with Egypt has largely been steady since the 1979 Camp David Accords, friction in recent years over the ouster of former President Mohammed Morsi and the increasing authoritarian style of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has strained this important relationship. Since 1987, the United States has supplied Egypt with $1.3 billion per year in military aid through Foreign Military Financing (FMF). The removal of Morsi, and a subsequent 18-month suspension of some military equipment, ultimately culminated in a decision to reform FMF to Egypt. Starting in 2018, FMF will be channeled through four categories—counterterrorism, border security, Sinai security and maritime security—and cash-flow financing (CFF), a perquisite that allowed Egypt to sign contracts for military equipment on credit, will come to an end.¶ The stresses in the U.S.-Egypt alliance have not gone unnoticed by Russia. Since assuming power in June 2014, Sisi has improved ties with Russia, making three trips to Moscow compared to none so far to Washington. Trade has been a key area of increased cooperation. During his visit to Egypt in February 2015, Russian President Vladimir Putin hailed “dynamic” bilateral relations, noting an 86 percent increase in trade in 2014. That month, Egypt agreed to establish a free trade zone with Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union. Recently, Cairo said it aims to replace Turkish goods restricted for import to Russia with Egyptian goods. Some analysts say that Egypt’s offer is not feasible, however, it nonetheless demonstrates Sisi’s intent to capitalize on opportunities to expand trade with Moscow. Energy has also been a sector of cooperation. Last month, Russia and Egypt signed an agreement to build Egypt’s first nuclear power plant, which Russian representatives called “a truly new chapter in the history of bilateral relations.”¶ Military cooperation has also increased. In March 2014, Egypt and Russia signed a protocol to expand bilateral military ties. Six months later, Cairo reached a preliminary deal to purchase $3.5 billion of arms from Moscow. Earlier reports cited Russian sources saying deals had been reached to sell Egypt MiG-29 fighter jets, air defense missile complexes, Mi-35 helicopters, coastal anti-ship complexes, light weapons, and ammunition. Cairo has also repeatedly expressed its desire to work closely with Moscow on counterterrorism. In October, Egypt praised Russia’s military intervention in Syria as a major step in the fight against terrorism. Most recently, following Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigus’s November visit to Egypt, Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov said Russia would respond shortly to an arms purchasing request from Cairo. That much of the recent expansion in Egypt-Russia military cooperation occurred while U.S. military assistance to Egypt was suspended should not be overlooked.¶ Robust ties with Egypt offer Russia important strategic advantages, not least of which is enhanced regional influence as the Kremlin enmeshes itself in the Syrian civil war and the global Sunni-Shia rivalry. Ties with Egypt have bolstered Russia’s ability to act as a counterweight to U.S. interests in the region. Alignment on counterterrorism and mutually beneficial trade relations—Egypt serves as market for Russian goods amidst western sanctions and Russia as a source of much-needed investment for Egypt’s economy—provide a strong foundation for Russia’s strategic maneuvering.¶ It remains unclear whether Sisi’s cozying up to Russia reflects a genuine policy shift or a strategic signal of defiance meant to push Washington to increase support for Cairo out of concern that it will move into Russia’s orbit. But the Egyptian outreach to Moscow should not be understated given the current realignment of regional power structures. Discord with the United States comes not only as Russia seeks to expand its foothold in the Middle East, but as Sisi attempts to establish a foreign policy independent of Washington. The Egyptian president appears to be working toward that end, having already garnered substantial international support, both material and rhetorical, from European and Gulf powers. Egyptian-Israeli relations are and have been strong for decades, casting doubt on the need for an American mediator. And Russia is willing to provide military hardware to Cairo absent any democracy conditions, while the United States has demonstrated willingness to suspend weapons deliveries over human rights concerns dismissed by Egypt.¶ In the face of a possible Egyptian rebalancing towards Russia, the United States has three basic policy options. On one extreme, the United States could interpret Egypt’s warming to Russia as provocation by an entitled ally whose repressive behavior, which is contributing to the exacerbation of radical elements, flies in the face of U.S. democratic values. Under this option, the United States would impose strict democratization conditions on aid. However, the United States can ill-afford to threaten its relationship with Egypt in this way at a time of Russian resurgence. Furthermore, such a policy risks unravelling the foundations of Egyptian-Israeli peace.¶ On the other extreme, the United States could provide Egypt with unconditional military aid in an attempt to counter Russian influence. As this policy would overlook any repressive domestic behavior, it could embolden a regime unlikely to reform. Those troubled by this course of action must recognize that Egypt will have to go somewhere for military aid, and Moscow is Cairo’s most attractive alternative. Egypt would certainly be less likely to pursue democratic reform under Russian stewardship. However, while a policy of unconditional support for Egypt may make sense on purely strategic grounds, it would face fierce opposition from those concerned about the regime’s repression. ¶ Several experts have advocated of late for middle of the road approaches that would maintain a strategic relationship with Egypt, but also avoid “coddling” a repressive regime. This third course of action recognizes the threats Cairo faces, notably ISIS, but also seeks to maintain strategic distance from Egypt’s authoritarian measures. The qualitative nature of security assistance could be changed from external defense-type capabilities to equipment and training more appropriate for counterterrorism missions. This would enhance the capability of the Egyptian armed forces to fight ISIS in the Sinai, Libya, and possibly elsewhere in the region. The decision to reform FMF to Egypt starting in 2018 is a positive step in this direction. Recent congressional authorities should also serve as a model for assistance. For example, section 1206 of the National Defense Authorization Act, which provides the authority for training and equipping foreign security forces for counterterrorism operations, focuses on equipment for internal security rather than external defense.¶ A centered approach recognizes that currently, the gravest threat to U.S. and Egyptian shared interests is not the lack of democratic progress, but the onslaught of groups like ISIS. The United States can employ such an approach as it eyes Egyptian and Russian rapprochement. For the time being, Sisi’s outreach to the Kremlin seems to be posturing. However, a balanced approach would allow the United States to maintain a strategic position of power should a hypothesized shift to Moscow materialize.¶ Needs to be cut
29 -Egypt-US relations key to stability – it’s the lynchpin of American power projection, ensures counter-terror coop, moderates the Egyptian military, and keeps the Suez open – key to broader Middle East stability
30 -CFR 2 Council on Foreign Relations. “Strengthening the US-Egyptian Relationship. Council on Foreign Relations. May 2002. MSG
31 -The U.S.-Egyptian relationship is rooted in strategic calculation. It bolsters peace between Egypt and Israel and makes possible broader peace in the region. The U.S.-Egyptian relationship has helped Egypt modernize its military and has added weight to its position as a stabilizing regional force. America's support has also strengthened Egypt's economy. As has been true for the past two decades, a moderate Egypt is the key to peace and stability in the Middle East and a strong U.S.-Egyptian relationship is essential to securing American presence in the region.¶ The U.S.-Egyptian relationship has served the two sides well. Two decades of military cooperation and training have moderated Egypt's military establishment, the most powerful institution in Egypt, and made it a reliable U.S. partner. During the Gulf War, Egypt's support was central to Arab participation in the war against Iraq; Egypt's willingness to keep open its canal in crisis and allow overflight and refueling cannot be taken for granted. These ties remain central to the U.S. ability to project and protect its strategic interests in the world's most volatile region.¶ Washington has lost sight of what the Middle East would look like without a strong U.S.-Egyptian relationship. A nuclear-inclined or -armed Egypt, ambiguous on the issue of terror, uncertain on peace with Israel, and disinclined to negotiate would drastically recast the management of the Middle East.¶ Since September 11, it has become all too clear that U.S.-Egyptian ties are in trouble. Although the Egyptian government has stood firmly with the United States, the U.S. Congress has grown increasingly critical in its support for Egypt. Congress questions the line that Egypt has taken with Israel, its position on terrorism, issues of human rights, and economic and political reform.¶ A similar dissatisfaction with the U.S.-Egyptian relationship exists in Egypt. The events of recent months set loose demonstrations unprecedented in recent decades. The Egyptian public's perception of powerlessness is breeding alienation and intensifying anger. It underscores a key challenge to American statecraft- how to begin recreating a partnership that serves both Egyptian and American interests and helps further peace for the region. The United States needs Arab allies, especially in these challenging times; Egypt is our most important partner.¶ The generation of American statesmen and political leaders who forged the Egyptian-Israeli agreement and was committed to the political relationship between the United States and Egypt in the 1970s has largely passed. As the Mubarak era similarly draws to a close, Washington should work to ensure that the successor regime shares a commitment to the kind of relationship the United States has enjoyed over the past quarter century.¶ At the same time, both sides must recognize that the U.S.-Egyptian relationship has changed and now reflects new political realities, such as Egypt's struggling economic condition and concerns over governance and human rights. This generation of leaders must set new goals for the relationship and recalibrate the dialogue so that it reaches beyond the institutions of government and engages religious leaders, media, intellectuals, and the business establishment on both sides.¶ Foundations of the U.S.-Egypt Relationship¶ Political¶ Egypt is the most powerful moderate, balancing voice in the Arab world.¶ Its position in the region is critical to peace between Arab states and Israel.¶ Egypt's political clout shapes outlooks and guides agendas in the region.¶ Cairo's diplomatic corps has significant influence in regional and multinational bodies. Egypt plays an important role in the United Nations in shaping international consensus on issues important to peace and stability in the region.¶ Egypt's posture on key issues of importance provides cover for Saudi Arabia and other Arab states.¶ Egypt, a vigorous Organization of African Unity actor, has the ability to influence events in Africa.¶ Military¶ U.S.-Egyptian military ties are a key link in the U.S. relationship. They are a central stabilizing factor in the U.S.-Egyptian relationship. More broadly, the U.S.-Egyptian defense relationship sends a signal of domestic moderation and deterrence to the region. The Egyptian military is deeply opposed to Islamic political radicalism.¶ Overflight rights, the sharing of intelligence and military perceptions in the region, transit through the Suez Canal, military supply, etc., demonstrate the important nature of the military relationship, especially during times of war.¶ Egypt hosts Operation Bright Star, the largest military exercise the United States conducts in the world. These maneuvers send a strong signal to the region of the close ties the U.S. shares with Egypt and its ability to quickly deploy American military power during times of crisis.¶ Cultural¶ Egypt's intellectual and academic voice is the strongest in the region.¶ Washington needs the full cooperation of Egypt's government, intellectuals, and religious leaders to counter Islamic radicalism.¶ While no single set of voices defines modern Islam, Egypt's intelligentsia, religious hierarchy, and institutions are central in defining Islamic religious and secular perspectives and diminishing the influence of radical Islamic tendencies. For the past several decades, Egypt has been a battleground between moderate and radical Islamic forces. The role of Egyptian militants in al-Qaeda and other radical movements is considerable.¶ Egypt is the largest exporter of culture in the region, although the Gulf has overtaken Egypt as the hub of modern media in the Middle East.¶ Economic¶ Egypt is the most populous nation in the Arab world and its economy vies with Saudi Arabia in size. Its economy is in trouble and its poor performance is fueling discontent on the street.¶ Egypt hosts significant American investment; the discovery of substantial gas reserves will increase Egypt's role in regional energy markets.¶ Current Perceptions¶ Changing Relations¶ Egypt has been cast as an obstructionist force in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and the U.S.-led war against terrorism. In fact, Egypt has worked quietly and consistently for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement and for an expansion of the Arab world's acceptance of Israel. Frustration, however, is understandable in the United States-the relationship began with the expectation that peace in the region would have been achieved years ago. Egypt has consistently made clear its belief that there must be progress toward Palestinian statehood; where it sees that progress checked, Egypt is outspoken and its criticism has been interpreted in many American circles as obstructionist.¶ Public dialogue does not reflect the close military and government relationships between the two countries. Both the Egyptian and American publics are extremely critical of the relationship and criticism has increased sharply since September 11 and the second Intifada.¶ The United States has unrealistic expectations of the leadership powers of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and of Egypt in the Arab world, in pursuing U.S. interests. There has been a transition in the structure of the Arab and Egyptian political systems. While these systems are essentially top-down structures, they are not command structures.¶ Egypt and Saudi Arabia are an axis of political power in the Middle East; they backstop one another on key political issues. Any U.S. military operation against Iraq would require the understanding, if not the support, of both countries.¶ U.S. Aid to Egypt¶ One of the pillars of the U.S.-Egyptian relationship is the near $2 billion of U.S. economic and military aid given yearly.¶ Many believe that the U.S. investment in Egypt should compel the Egyptian government to accommodate American views on the region, particularly with regard to Egypt's relationship with Israel-or at the very least moderate the harsh rhetoric. Moreover, some in the United States question the benefits of aid to Egypt, pointing to its lagging political and economic reforms and poor human rights record.¶ american assistance has contributed to Egypt's stability and gives the United States considerable influence in key decisions about Egyptian policies. Using military supply or assistance as direct, visible leverage is extremely dangerous, reinforcing the impression on the Egyptian street that its government is subservient to the United States. Such signals weaken the ability of the United States to pursue mutually beneficial initiatives.¶ U.S. aid to Egypt was originally targeted for specific purposes and, in many ways, continues to successfully address significant U.S. political goals: consolidating the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement and strengthening U.S.-Egyptian ties. In reality American aid is a two-edged sword that must be viewed judiciously. It reinforces the American voice in Egyptian councils, but it cannot replace a consensus on political and economic objectives.¶ U.S. military aid to Egypt has created a solidly pro-American military establishment, which is the strongest institution in Egypt and the fundamental basis of the regime. Twenty years of military cooperation is producing an Egyptian military leadership comfortable with American approach and doctrine. U.S. military aid helps ensure that Egypt remains associated with the United States, despite criticism from the Egyptian elite. But like all relationships, this one is not immutable. The Soviet Union learned this harsh lesson in the 1970s.¶ U.S. aid to Egypt was never intended to push Egypt to reform according to America's priorities. U.S. aid has not resulted in the anticipated economic growth and political change in Egypt, nor has it secured peace between Israel and the Palestinians and all Arab states. And it cannot. American lawmakers must recognize the value that U.S. aid has brought to the relationship and accept its limitations, as well as its promise-the influence the United States accrues by having a seat at the Egyptian table.¶ Egypt as Battleground¶ Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the September 11 terrorist attack, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the organizational force behind al-Qaeda, were Egyptian.¶ Islamic radicalism has a history deeply rooted in Egypt and the Egyptian government has been fighting radicalism since the time of Anwar Sadat. In the 1990s, Egypt conducted a hard fought campaign to root out Islamic militants after a series of deadly attacks. There is a direct line from the assassins of Sadat to the radicals that gave birth to the Egyptian components of al-Qaeda.¶ The threat of Islamic radicalism to Egypt's stability is real and continuing. Attacks are primarily aimed at overthrowing the current Egyptian regime and replacing it with an Islamic one. In fact, September 11 attacks were also aimed at Saudi Arabia and Egypt, where Islamic militants have been stymied.¶ The inspiration for al-Qaeda's ideology was Egyptian, and Osama bin Laden was advised heavily by Egyptians. Egypt's fundamentalists gave substance to al-Qaeda's tilt toward anti-Israel, anti-U.S., and anti-Arab regime rhetoric and action. Omar Abdel Rahman, "the blind sheikh," was an early and major force in Islamic radical militancy; the first attack on the World Trade Center was his handiwork.¶ September 11 demonstrated to the Egyptian people and government that their own war against terrorism is part of a larger phenomenon that threatens Egypt and the entire world. Egypt's support and full-hearted cooperation in the U.S.-led war on terrorism demonstrates its commitment to fight against terrorism both inside and outside of its borders. The United States needs to preserve and strengthen that commitment.¶ Even though Egypt's government and elites are bitterly opposed to Islamic radicalism, Egyptian intellectuals and state-sponsored media have contributed to the climate of denigration of Israel and the United States and are partially responsible for the intensity of hostility on the Egyptian street. Whatever short-term advantages are gained in public opinion from attacks against Israel and the United States, they are deeply unsettling to Americans and undermine the foundations on which peace must be built. Moreover, such denigration blurs key moral distinctions especially important in the debate over the future of modern Islam, and contributes to the justification of the use of terror.¶ The media reality in the Arab world, including Egypt, is changing. Independent Arab papers and television have created cross-border competition in the media heretofore unknown. Arab governments have effectively lost some of their ability to control the airwaves and print media, and are struggling to cope with the consequences. The Egyptian government never had perfect control of its media; today the degree of official control over the press and press opinion is diminishing.¶ Egyptian Middle Class¶ There is growing animosity in the secular elite establishment toward the United States focused specifically on U.S. policy toward Israel. This negative dialogue is damaging government relations. Egypt's regime is extremely sensitive to the attitude of its elites.¶ Among the Egyptian middle class, there is respect for the United States, its accomplishments and the role it can play in the Middle East. Regrettably, there is a strong belief that the problems in the U.S.-Egyptian relationship and in American policies in the region are caused by the American-Jewish community and its perceived control over U.S. government institutions and media. This attitude-and the rhetoric that goes with it-distorts perceptions and damages the dialogue. It undercuts Egypt's standing in the United States and must be an issue in any ongoing dialogue-one the United States is frank enough to address.¶ The United States should not expect a tame Egyptian press. It can expect, however, that the media and key intellectual institutions reverse the climate of denigration that has chilled relations. Strong signals of respect and the need for peace must come from the top and are a reasonable objective of U.S. diplomacy. Egypt's intellectuals will not break ranks with perceived orthodoxy and challenge conventional wisdom unless there is a strong signal from the top.¶ The Troubled Economy¶ The deplorable conditions of the Egyptian economy are fueling discontent. Growth is flat; reform has stopped.¶ U.S. assistance cannot bail Egypt out; rather Egypt must make hard decisions and move decisively toward a market-based economy.¶ But Egypt cannot do so alone. Egypt needs the United States as an economic partner and counselor with the International Monetary Fund and in mobilizing international support for debt rescheduling. President Mubarak needs confidence if he is to undertake politically sensitive but much needed reform.¶ Updating the U.S.-Egypt Relationship¶ The United States must set new goals and priorities for the U.S-Egyptian relationship that redefine the U.S. strategic view of the relationship within the context of Egypt's role in the Arab world.¶ The dialogue must recreate a sense of partnership in influencing events in the region.¶ The dialogue should be aimed at Egypt's leaders and also its elite and middle class.¶ Disagreement is best kept on official or private channels and out of the media. The dialogue must be candid and broad, addressing issues of immediate concern-the crisis in the region and Iraq. It can seek common ground in questions of importance to American policy outside the Middle East-Africa, for example.¶ The dialogue must broach sensitive questions-the intellectual debate in Islam, the way Egypt's media addresses the role of the American-Jewish community, Israel, and the United States. These consultations must address Egypt's virtually stagnant economic reform program and put on the table discrete steps that Egypt should take to create a properly functioning market economy. The United States should offer its influence with international financial institutions and the business community to match steps that Egypt takes.
32 -
33 -We’ll isolate two impacts~-~--
34 -1. Unique characteristics makes nuclear war uniquely likely in the Middle East – causes extinction.
35 -Russell 9
36 -James A. Russell (Senior Lecturer of National Security Affairs and Naval Postgraduate School). “Strategic Stability Reconsidered: Prospects for Escalation and Nuclear War in the Middle East”, IFRI (Proliferation Papers, #26, 2009). http://www.ifri.org/downloads/PP26_Russell_2009.pdf.
37 -Strategic stability in the region is thus undermined by various factors: (1) asymmetric interests in the bargaining framework that can introduce unpredictable behavior from actors; (2) the presence of non-state actors that introduce unpredictability into relationships between the antagonists; (3) incompatible assumptions about the structure of the deterrent relationship that makes the bargaining framework strategically unstable; (4) perceptions by Israel and the United States that its window of opportunity for military action is closing, which could prompt a preventive attack; (5) the prospect that Iran’s response to pre-emptive attacks could involve unconventional weapons, which could prompt escalation by Israel and/or the United States; (6) the lack of a communications framework to build trust and cooperation among framework participants. These systemic weaknesses in the coercive bargaining framework all suggest that escalation by any the parties could happen either on purpose or as a result of miscalculation or the pressures of wartime circumstance. Given these factors, it is disturbingly easy to imagine scenarios under which a conflict could quickly escalate in which the regional antagonists would consider the use of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. It would be a mistake to believe the nuclear taboo can somehow magically keep nuclear weapons from being used in the context of an unstable strategic framework. Systemic asymmetries between actors in fact suggest a certain increase in the probability of war – a war in which escalation could happen quickly and from a variety of participants. Once such a war starts, events would likely develop a momentum all their own and decision-making would consequently be shaped in unpredictable ways. The international community must take this possibility seriously, and muster every tool at its disposal to prevent such an outcome, which would be an unprecedented disaster for the peoples of the region, with substantial risk for the entire world.
38 -2. Middle east presence is the lynchpin of global power projection – solves global conflict
39 -Mead 15 Walter Russell Mead Distinguished Scholar, American Strategy and Statesmanship, Hudson Institute August 5th, 2015 Testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services
40 -The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and the Military Balance in the Middle East http://www.hudson.org/research/11493-the-joint-comprehensive-plan-of-action-and-the-military-balance-in-the-middle-east
41 -Some might argue that, given the importance of Middle Eastern oil to the rest of the world, the United States could reduce our involvement in the Middle East with the assurance that other countries would step in to fill the vacuum. Why, some ask, should the United States assume the costs and risks of ensuring the flow of oil to other rich and powerful states around the world? The answers to this question go to the heart of American grand strategy for the last 100 years. As the bloodshed and destruction of warfare has increased, Americans have sought above all else to prevent wars between great powers from breaking out. While all war is destructive and horrifying, wars in which great powers, with their enormous technological and economic capabilities, turn their full strength against one another, have the potential to destroy civilization or human life itself. To make such wars less likely, the United States has worked to create an interdependent global system in which all countries depend so heavily on global flows of trade and investment that no country can contemplate cutting itself off from this system through starting wars. At the same time, the United States has worked to ensure the safe and secure passage of commerce across the world’s oceans, taking questions like energy out of the realm of geopolitical competition. In the Middle East, these policies have meant that since World War Two the United States has acted to prevent any power or combination of powers either inside or outside the region from gaining the ability to blackmail the world by threatening to interrupt the flow of oil to the great markets of Asia and Europe. Whether the danger came from external powers like the Soviet Union (which occupied part of Iran and threatened Turkey in the early years of the Cold War) or from ambitious leaders within the region (like Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait), the United States has acted to ensure the security and political independence of the oil producing states of the region. These policies have helped create the longest era of great power peace in modern times. They have also reduced the cost of America’s military commitments. Because other countries do not feel the need to maintain large forces with an intercontinental capacity to protect their global trade, the United States has been able to maintain a global presence at a far lower cost than would be feasible if the world’s major economic powers were engaged in competitive military build ups. A strong American presence in the Middle East and on the high seas has the effect of suppressing security competition worldwide, enabling America’s most important interests to be secured with much less cost than would otherwise be possible. Should the United States withdraw from this role, the world would likely see increased competition among other powers. China, for example, would see a greater need to protect its oil security, accelerating the build up of its armed forces. Japan and India would both likely see this build up as a threat to their own energy and maritime security and would accelerate build ups of their own. Trust among these powers, already weak, would erode, and the dynamics of a zero-sum competition for security and access to resources would drive them towards greater hostility and more dangerous policies. Under those circumstances, American prosperity and security would be much harder to defend than they are now, and the risks of great power conflict would intensify. America’s Middle East policy is not just about the Middle East; it is about America’s global interest in a peaceful and prosperous world. The starting point for any American strategy in the Middle East today must be the basic approach that has served us well since the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. America’s vital interests require us to look to the safety and the security of the Middle Eastern oil producing states, ensuring that no power, either external or regional, gains the power to interfere with the smooth and stable supply of oil and gas to the great economic and industrial centers of the world.
EntryDate
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1 -2016-09-12 17:29:10.0
Judge
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1 -Steele, Tan, Bistagne
Opponent
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1 -West Ranch JW
ParentRound
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1 -1
Round
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1 -Quarters
Team
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1 -La Canada Zhao Aff
Title
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1 -SEPOCT - Egypt Aff
Tournament
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1 -Loyola
Caselist.CitesClass[2]
Cites
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1 -First, psychological evidence proves we don’t identify with our future selves. Continuous personal identity doesn’t exist.
2 -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 AT
3 -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. Where Parfit’s smoking boy endangers the health of his future self with nary a thought, others might act differently. “The thing is, we make sacrifices for people all the time,” says Hershfield. “In relationships, in marriages.” The silver lining of our dissociation from our future self, then, is that it is another reason to practice being good to others. One of them might be you.
4 -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.
5 -Second, government must be practical and cannot concern itself with metaphysical questions – its only role is to protect citizens’ interests
6 -Rhonheimer 05 (Martin, Prof Of Philosophy at The Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome). “THE POLITICAL ETHOS OF CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY AND THE PLACE OF NATURAL LAW IN PUBLIC REASON: RAWLS’S “POLITICAL LIBERALISM” REVISITED” The American Journal of Jurisprudence vol. 50 (2005), pp. 1-70
7 -It is a fundamental feature of political philosophy to be part of practical philosophy. Political philosophy belongs to ethics, which is practical, for it both reflects on practical knowledge and aims at action. Therefore, it is not only normative, but must consider the concrete conditions of realization. The rationale of political institutions and action must be understood as embedded in concrete cultural and, therefore, historical contexts and as meeting with problems that only in these contexts are understandable. A normative political philosophy which would abstract from the conditions of realizability would be trying to establish norms for realizing the “idea of the good” or of “the just” (as Plato, in fact, tried to do in his Republic). Such a purely metaphysical view, however, is doomed to failure. As a theory of political praxis, political philosophy must include in its reflection the concrete historical context, historical experiences and the corresponding knowledge of the proper logic of the political. 14 Briefly: political philosophy is not metaphysics, which contemplates the necessary order of being, but practical philosophy, which deals with partly contingent matters and aims at action. Moreover, unlike moral norms in general—natural law included,—which rule the actions of a person—“my acting” and pursuing the good—, the logic of the political is characterized by acts like framing institutions and establishing legal rules by which not only personal actions but the actions of a multitude of persons are regulated by the coercive force of state power, and by which a part of citizens exercises power over others. Political actions are, thus, both actions of the whole of the body politic and referring to the whole of the community of citizens. 15 Unless we wish to espouse a platonic view according to which some persons are by nature rulers while others are by nature subjects, we will stick to the Aristotelian differentiation between the “domestic” and the “political” kind of rule 16 : unlike domestic rule, which is over people with a common interest and harmoniously striving after the same good despotism and, therefore, according to Aristotle is essentially “despotic,” political rule is exercised over free persons who represent a plurality of interests and pursue, in the common context of the polis, different goods. The exercise of such political rule, therefore, needs justification and is continuously in search of consent among those who are ruled, but who potentially at the same time are also the rulers.
8 -2 impacts
9 -A. Government actions will inevitably lead to trade-offs between citizens since they benefit some and harm others; the only justifiable way to resolve these conflicts is by benefitting the maximum possible number of people since anything else would unequally prioritize one group over another. This also proves side constraint theories are useless for states since they’ll inevitably violate some constraint. Even if util fails, non-consequentialist moral theories prevent any action which is worse than not being able to use util
10 -B. People psychologically prefer util – governments are obligated to use it since it’s more justifiable for citizens
11 -Gino et al 2008 Francesca Gino Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Don Moore Tepper Business School, Carnegie Mellon University, Max H. Bozman Harvard Business School, Harvard University “No harm, no foul: The outcome bias in ethical judgments” http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/08-080.pdf AT
12 -The present studies provide strong evidence of the existence of outcome effects in ethically-relevant contexts, when people are asked to judge the ethicality of others’ behavior. It is worth noting that what we show is not the same as the curse of knowledge or the hindsight bias. The curse of knowledge describes people’s inability to recover an uninformed state of mind (Camerer, Loewenstein, and Weber, 1989). Likewise, the hindsight bias leads people to misremember what they believed before they knew an event’s outcome (e.g., Fischhoff, 1975; Fischhoff and Beyth, 1975). By contrast, we show that that outcomes of decisions lead people to see the decisions themselves in a different light, and that this effect does not depend on misremembering their prior state of mind. In other words, people will see it as entirely appropriate to allow a decision’s outcome to determine their assessment of the decision’s quality.
13 -This answers standard indicts since it proves util is not counter-intuitive or hard to calculate since most people already believe in it.
14 -Third, states don’t have an act omission distinction.
15 -Sunstein and Vermeule 06 (Cass and Adrian law professors at Harvard, “IS CAPITAL PUNISHMENT MORALLY REQUIRED? ACTS, OMISSIONS, AND LIFE- LIFE TRADEOFFS”, Stanford Law Review, 2006, BE)
16 -In our view, any effort to distinguish between acts and omissions goes wrong by overlooking the distinctive features of government as a moral agent. If correct, this point has broad implications for criminal and civil law. Whatever the general status of the act/omission distinction as a matter of moral philosophy, the distinction is least impressive when applied to government, because the most plausible underlying considerations do not apply to official actors. 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.
17 -Fourth, experience is the only sound justification for ethics
18 -Schwartz - “A Defense of Naïve Empiricism: It is Neither Self-Refuting Nor Dogmatic.” Stephen P. Schwartz. Ithaca College. pp.1-14. No date Cited”
19 -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.
20 -Everyone takes pain as a reason to avoid an action
21 -Nagel - Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere, HUP, 1986: 156-168.
22 -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 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 backed up by any further reasons. On the other hand if someone pursues pain or avoids pleasure it is a means to their end, 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.
23 -The standard is maximizing expected wellbeing
24 -1AC – Plan
25 -
26 -The governments of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey should prohibit the production of nuclear power.
27 -Cottee 5/20/16 Matthew Cottee (research associate for non-proliferation and nuclear policy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies) and Hassan Elbahtimy, "Russia's Nuclear Ambitions in the Middle East," Foreign Affairs AZ
28 -A few years ago, the Middle East’s nuclear energy prospects were in decline. Political instability made long-term investments in civil nuclear infrastructure risky. For one, Egypt was in the last stages of considering reactor bids when the popular uprising began in 2011. These plans were soon shelved by subsequent transitional governments. And the 2011 Fukushima Daichii meltdown in Japan had shaken public confidence across the world in the safety of nuclear power and raised questions about the industry's future. But now, at least in the Middle East, it appears that nuclear power is back in style. In April, Russian state nuclear firm Rosatom announced that it had opened an office in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates. The office will help oversee the company’s many nuclear power projects in Egypt, Iran, Jordan, and Turkey. It is also hoped that Russian regional presence would open up new opportunities for its nuclear industry in the region. Rosatom’s new office comes at just the right time. The Middle East is now home to the greatest number of “nuclear newcomers” in the world, with at least six countries in total actively pursuing nuclear power. For one, in 2011, Iran became the first country in the region to operate a nuclear reactor. Tehran’s long-term plans include an ambitious expansion of its nuclear energy capacity by eight additional power reactors, something generally condoned by the recent nuclear deal. For their parts, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates began to pursue nuclear power in 2010 and 2009, respectively. Both countries are driven by efforts to diversify their energy mix, and also use nuclear energy as a status symbol in the context of their strategic competition with Iran. Saudi Arabia has perhaps the most ambitious nuclear plans, with a goal of building 16 reactors by 2032. The United Arab Emirates’ first reactor is under construction, with an expected completion date in 2017. Egypt has also revived its plans to build a series of nuclear power reactors in Dabaa on the coast of the Mediterranean. It is joined by Turkey and Jordan, which are building nuclear power reactors that are expected to be operational by Russia 2020 and 2025, respectively.
29 -
30 -1AC – Relations S
31 -Russian funding for nuclear power displaces US influence and increases Russian power
32 -Guzansky et al 15 Yoel Guzansky (research fellow at INSS. Before he joined the Institute, he was in charge of strategic issues at the National Security Council in the Israeli Prime Minister's Office, coordinating work on the Iranian nuclear challenge and specializes in issues of Gulf security and Middle East strategic issues), Zvi Magen, Oded Eran, "Russian Nuclear Diplomacy in the Middle East," Insitute for National Security Studies, 12/29/2015 AZ
33 -The main stumbling block in the way of the project is the question of financing. Egypt’s economic situation does not enable it to carry out a venture of this size, and it is doubtful that Saudi Arabia, which economically supports the el-Sisi regime, can finance this ambitious project, given the considerable budgetary pressures it is experiencing due to the drop in oil prices. El-Sisi declared that Egypt would repay the loan by selling the electricity produced by the reactors after they begin operating in 2022. Moscow is supposed to lend Egypt the money needed to build the reactors as part of a comprehensive agreement, which includes the supply of fuel for the reactors, maintenance, training, and repairs. Against this background, and in addition to Russia’s efforts to end the war in Syria, it is imperative to look at the other Russian diplomatic track in the Middle East –plans to build civilian nuclear reactors. Russia is not a new player in the civilian nuclear market in the Middle East, but the desire of Moscow and countries in the region to cooperate in this sphere clearly has become more acute, as reflected in growing Russian involvement in the sale of nuclear know-how and facilities in the region. This mode of action fits in with the overall Russian efforts to rehabilitate and strengthen its ties with countries in the region, following the freeze in relations during the “Arab Spring.” This effort is intended to serve Russia’s array of objectives in the region as well as in the global theater as they pertain to its rivalry with the United States. Russia’s military intervention in Syria is conducted within the framework of a coalition with Assad’s army and Iran and its satellites, as part of its efforts to preempt the West in establishing diplomatic and economic cooperation with Iran. Russia’s actions in Syria are designed to combat Islamic terrorism, especially the Islamic State, in order to reduce the threat of extremist Islamic groups that are attempting to expand their influence within Russia’s territory. Russia’s major objective, however, is within the international sphere, and this includes influencing the future of Syria and taking a leading role in shaping the region. Indeed, Russia is interested in engaging in dialogue with the West, inter alia by obtaining bargaining chips for promoting a comprehensive settlement in the Middle East (Syria first) and Eastern Europe. For Egypt, and not only for her, the Russian nuclear option is attractive because it does not present the demands and restrictions that are attached to the nuclear cooperation with the West. Relations between the United States and several of its traditional allies in the region have soured in the past five years; it appears that these allies are signaling to the American administration that they have other options, including nuclear ones. Egypt’s desire to develop a nuclear program is also linked to its determination to find long-term solutions for growing energy needs, such as building a civilian nuclear capacity like the one Iran is building, following its nuclear agreement with the major powers. Nuclear cooperation with these countries is a vital interest for Russia, which seeks to use this cooperation to overcome its budgetary distress, which has been aggravated by plunging oil prices. Russia also may fear that the nuclear agreement signed between the major powers and Iran is liable to open up Iran for competition with other western players with relevant capabilities and drive Russia out of the Iranian market. Turning to alternative markets could be one of the Russian responses to the new conditions that are liable to emerge in the region with the ratification of the agreement with Iran.
34 -American diplomacy in the Middle East is key to stability – withdrawal ensures fill-in by Russia
35 -- reduction in military presence is inevitable
36 -- influence declining now
37 -- diplomacy = good governance which reduces terrorism
38 -Serwer 16 Daniel Serwer (Ph.D from Princeton University, directs the Conflict Management Program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He is also a Senior Fellow at its Center for Transatlantic Relations and affiliated as a Scholar with the Middle East Institute. His current interests focus on the civilian instruments needed to protect U.S. national security as well as transition and state-building in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Balkans. His book, Righting the Balance: How You Can Help Protect America, was published in November 2013 by Potomac Books), "Recalculating U.S. Policy in the Middle East: Less Military, More Civilian," Middle East Institute, 4/11/2016 AZ
39 -Our interests are shifting largely in ways that reduce the significance of military means and increase the importance of diplomacy and state-building. The big challenge for the next American administration will be constructing, through diplomacy, a regional security architecture that reduces reliance on military instruments and enables the region to avoid a nuclear arms race as well as future proxy wars. Preventing future generations of Muslims from resorting to terrorism will require a far more active civilian effort to counter extremism and build inclusive good governance than we have mounted so far.
40 -People in the Middle East are convinced that the United States is withdrawing from the region. They view America as smarting from less than successful, but colossally expensive interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. They also think the United States has shifted away from countering the rise of Iran, and know that Washington needs Middle East energy resources less than once it did.
41 -They are correct. The United States needs to reduce its military presence in the Middle East to correspond to its reduced and shifting interests. Some small portion of the savings should be devoted to building up civilian diplomatic efforts. The next administration should end the practice of reassuring our regional allies without extracting a price. If they want the United States to remain committed to their region, they need to begin to behave in a way that makes Americans think it worthwhile.
42 -Withdrawal creates the serious risk of a vacuum that American enemies will try to fill. Iran took advantage of American withdrawal from Iraq to expand its influence there. Russia took advantage of American reluctance to develop an alternative to the Assad regime to intervene on his behalf. The Islamic State took advantage of American unwillingness to intercede in Syria. The Middle East has a way of forcing itself back onto the agenda: energy, proliferation, human rights violations, extremism, and refugees. We need not allow a drawdown of military assets to signal American indifference or retreat. We need instead to get our civilian capacities—for diplomacy, state-building, and international assistance and cooperation—to fill the gap. Less military should mean more civilian.
43 -
44 -Preemptive Israeli strikes causes escalating conflicts and huge oil shocks
45 -- sparks another intifada
46 -- NATO retaliation
47 -- Proxy wars in other areas
48 -- Arab-Israel war
49 -Rieger and Schiller 12 Rene Rieger (PhD candidate in Middle East Politics at the University of Exeter (UK), as well as a lecturer in international relations at the University of Munich) and Markus Schiller (aerospace engineer and senior analyst at Schmucker Technologie, Munich, and a former RAND Nuclear Security Fellow, with many years of experience in analyzing missile and space programs of various countries of interest), "Preemptive Strikes against Iran: Prelude to an Avoidable Disaster?" Middle East Policy Council, Winter 2012 AZ
50 -A pre-emptive Israeli strike against Iran has the potential to destabilize pro-Western Arab regimes in the Gulf, despite the fact that several Arab Gulf monarchies have pushed the United States to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapons capability by all means necessary. A strike on Iran would constitute an attack on a Muslim state. It is likely to evoke at least some sympathy for the Iranian regime among some segments of Arab Gulf population, predominantly the Shia. Iran's longstanding anti-Israeli rhetoric and Tehran's shameless use of the plight of the Palestinian people for propaganda purposes bolstered its reputation and influence on the Arab Street even in the traditionally anti-Iran Arab Gulf states.
51 -It can be expected that, following an Israeli attack on Iran, some in the Arab Gulf monarchies would sympathize with the regime in Tehran and confront their governments with calls for some sort of retaliation — at least of a diplomatic nature — against Israel and the United States, actions that would clearly contradict these regimes' interests. The dimension of popular calls for retaliation would increase with the number of Iranian victims. Those in the Arab Gulf monarchies most likely to sympathize with Tehran are the Shia in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, already in conflict with their governments over issues of discrimination.
52 -Further escalation, possibly instigated by Iranian proxies, would potentially weaken the regime and incur economic instability, particularly in the case of Saudi Arabia, where the Shia minority resides predominantly in the oil-rich Eastern Province, representing roughly half of the local population.
53 -Most advocates of a pre-emptive strike play down the possible economic consequences of an attack on Iran. They argue that the regime in Tehran would not be able to effectively disrupt oil and gas exports through the Strait of Hormuz, and that the loss of supplies to the world market would only be temporary and limited. This hypothesis comprises several significant flaws.
54 -First, while Tehran could at best effect a complete disruption of oil and gas exports through the Strait of Hormuz for a short period of time, it could curtail the oil trade in the Gulf significantly over an extended period. It would be impossible to compensate fully for the loss in oil shipments; and the longer the disruption lasted, the more difficult compensation attempts would become.
55 -Second, the dimensions of global spare oil capacity are obscure; in any case, they are very limited and largely reliant on the Strait of Hormuz for export. The world's spare capacity is held almost entirely by Saudi Arabia, though it is highly likely that it is considerably below the officially claimed 2.5 million barrels per day (mbd).
56 -Third, Saudi Arabia and the other oil-producing Gulf states have only limited capacity to redirect their oil exports away from the Strait of Hormuz. Only 1.5 mbd of Saudi oil (including spare production) could be redirected through the East-West pipeline to the Yanbu al-Bahr port on the Red Sea.23 The United Arab Emirates has recently completed the so-called Habshan-Fujairah oil pipeline, which also bypasses the Strait of Hormuz. However, the pipeline's current capacity does not exceed 1 mbd. Compared to the 17 million barrels that pass through the Strait of Hormuz on a daily basis (roughly 20 percent of the world's traded oil), the Gulf countries' compensation capacity is relatively limited.
57 -Fourth, there is the possibility, however remote, that Venezuela, a close ally of the Iranian regime and the fourth-largest oil supplier to the United States (roughly 900,000 bpd), would cut its exports. This would put even more pressure on the international oil market and directly affect the U.S. economy.24
58 -Fifth, to compensate a significant supply shortage provoked by massive curtailment or interruption of trade routes in the Gulf, oil-importing nations could tap their strategic stocks. However, particularly in the early stage of a massive supply crisis, commercial, logistical and political considerations would inhibit countries releasing enough reserve stocks to compensate fully for the shortage.25
59 -Sixth, Iran could commit acts of sabotage against oil installations in the Gulf, also interrupting supply.
60 -Finally, an essential factor in oil pricing is market psychology. Irrespective of actual changes in oil supply, market expectations or fears of supply cuts can have drastic effects on prices. As a significant portion of the global oil supply originates in the Gulf, the oil market is particularly sensitive to developments there. Hence, the mere possibility of a serious disruption of the transit routes in the Gulf following an attack on Iran has the potential to provoke skyrocketing oil prices. The more the conflict then escalates and the longer the crisis lasts, the more enduring would be the effect on the oil prices. In the current global economy a prolonged increase in oil prices would have disastrous consequences.
61 -To attack the Iranian nuclear infrastructure, the Israeli air force would have no feasible alternative to flying through foreign air space. There would be three potential routes, all presenting operational and political risks. The first runs northeast over the Mediterranean Sea along the coastline of Lebanon and Syria, then eastward along the Syrian-Turkish border, and finally through northern Iraq or alongside the Turkish-Iraqi border (northern route). The second runs east through Jordanian airspace or along the Jordanian-Syrian border and then east through Iraqi airspace (central route). The third follows the flight route of the 1981 raid on Iraq's Osirak reactor, entering Saudi Arabia at the tip of the Gulf of Aqaba, then flying northeast through Saudi airspace and eventually east through Iraqi airspace (southern route).
62 -The northern route carries relatively low operational risks as long as the Israeli jets would fly mainly on the Syrian side of the Syrian-Turkish border. However, a violation of Turkish airspace could have significant political consequences. Turkish-Israeli relations have already cooled considerably, particularly since the Gaza Flotilla incident of 2010. Judging from the Erdogan government's recent attitude towards Israel, there is a clear possibility that the Turkish military would attempt to ward off an Israeli intrusion into their airspace. A violation of Turkish airspace would be particularly problematic, moreover as it would constitute aggression against a NATO member.
63 -The central route, too, would involve taking significant risks. Since Jordan would likely not grant Israel overflight rights, an Israeli intrusion into Jordanian airspace would be an act of aggression entailing risks predominantly political in nature (jeopardizing the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty), but potentially also operational (Jordanian attempts to stop the intrusion and provide advance warning to neighboring countries).
64 -Since the early 1980s, Saudi air surveillance has improved so significantly that an Israeli intrusion into Saudi airspace would not go undetected. The Saudi government would be politically bound (both domestically and regionally) to protest with more than rhetoric an Israeli violation of their territorial integrity. Earlier reports suggesting that Saudi Arabia would look the other way while Israel overflew its territory are not credible. Any Saudi military reaction against the Israeli air fleet would cause operational problems for the Israeli mission and provoke a political crisis inimical to both Israeli and Saudi interests.
65 -Nuclear war uniquely likely in the Middle East – overcomes deterrence and causes extinction
66 -Russell 9
67 -James A. Russell (Senior Lecturer of National Security Affairs and Naval Postgraduate School). “Strategic Stability Reconsidered: Prospects for Escalation and Nuclear War in the Middle East”, IFRI (Proliferation Papers, #26, 2009). http://www.ifri.org/downloads/PP26_Russell_2009.pdf.
68 -Strategic stability in the region is thus undermined by various factors: (1) asymmetric interests in the bargaining framework that can introduce unpredictable behavior from actors; (2) the presence of non-state actors that introduce unpredictability into relationships between the antagonists; (3) incompatible assumptions about the structure of the deterrent relationship that makes the bargaining framework strategically unstable; (4) perceptions by Israel and the United States that its window of opportunity for military action is closing, which could prompt a preventive attack; (5) the prospect that Iran’s response to pre-emptive attacks could involve unconventional weapons, which could prompt escalation by Israel and/or the United States; (6) the lack of a communications framework to build trust and cooperation among framework participants. These systemic weaknesses in the coercive bargaining framework all suggest that escalation by any the parties could happen either on purpose or as a result of miscalculation or the pressures of wartime circumstance. Given these factors, it is disturbingly easy to imagine scenarios under which a conflict could quickly escalate in which the regional antagonists would consider the use of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. It would be a mistake to believe the nuclear taboo can somehow magically keep nuclear weapons from being used in the context of an unstable strategic framework. Systemic asymmetries between actors in fact suggest a certain increase in the probability of war – a war in which escalation could happen quickly and from a variety of participants. Once such a war starts, events would likely develop a momentum all their own and decision-making would consequently be shaped in unpredictable ways. The international community must take this possibility seriously, and muster every tool at its disposal to prevent such an outcome, which would be an unprecedented disaster for the peoples of the region, with substantial risk for the entire world.
69 -
70 -Nuclear war causes extinction
71 -Starr 9 (Catastrophic Climatic Consequences of Nuclear Conflict, October 2009, by Steven Starr Steven Starr is a Senior Scientist with Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the Director of the Clinical Laboratory Science Program at the University of Missouri. He has been published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the STAR (Strategic Arms Reduction) website of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.
72 -Despite a two-thirds reduction in global nuclear arsenals since 1986, new scientific research makes it clear that the environmental consequences of nuclear war can still end human history. A series of peer-reviewed studies, performed at several U.S. universities, predict the detonation of even a tiny fraction of the global nuclear arsenal within large urban centers will cause catastrophic disruptions of the global climate and massive destruction of the protective stratospheric ozone layer.
73 -1AC – Prolif
74 -Nuclear deals with Russia form the basis for further cooperation on weapons transfers and nuclear expertise – guarantees prolif
75 -Guzansky et al 15 Yoel Guzansky (research fellow at INSS. Before he joined the Institute, he was in charge of strategic issues at the National Security Council in the Israeli Prime Minister's Office, coordinating work on the Iranian nuclear challenge and specializes in issues of Gulf security and Middle East strategic issues), Zvi Magen, Oded Eran, "Russian Nuclear Diplomacy in the Middle East," Insitute for National Security Studies, 12/29/2015 AZ
76 -Russia is therefore increasing its cooperation in this area not only with Egypt, but also with Iran. According to reports, Iran plans to build two more nuclear reactors in Bushehr with Moscow’s assistance, near the site’s existing reactor, which has been active since 2011. In addition to Iran, Russia has signed various agreements, some to build reactors and others to transfer know-how to US allies in the region. Rosatom, the Russian nuclear corporation, has already begun building four reactors with a capacity of 1,200 megawatts each in Akkuyu, Turkey, with the first reactor slated to hook up to the electricity grid in 2023. The future of this project is uncertain, however, given the crisis that broke out between Russia and Turkey after Turkey took down a Russian plane. Jordan is seeking to build civilian nuclear capacity, due to its growing demand for energy, the country’s lack of oil reserves (90 percent of the energy sources Jordan consumes is imported), and the prolonged disruption in the oil supply from Iraq and gas from Egypt. In March 2015, Jordan signed an agreement with Rosatom for the construction of two reactors, the first of which is scheduled to begin operating in 2024, and the second in 2026. The cost of the transaction is approximately $10 billion. Jordan will own 51 percent of the reactors, and the rest will be under Russian ownership. Jordan, which initially asked Washington for assistance, began negotiating with the Russians after rejecting an American demand that it not operate a nuclear fuel cycle on its territory. When this essay was written, the parties had not yet reached agreement on the particulars for financing the project. Saudi Arabia has also launched a civilian nuclear program, which it claims is designed to meet its growing energy needs; at the present rate of consumption, Saudi Arabia is liable to find itself supplying most of the oil it produces for its own internal needs by the end of the next decade. Saudi Arabia is seeking external aid in order to obtain the same capability that the Iranians and others in the region are developing, or are about to develop. For this purpose, a number of ventures have been founded in the kingdom, and agreements have been signed – the most recent one with Russia. In June 2015, the two countries signed an agreement that Russia will build and support a civilian nuclear program in the kingdom. This is not the first agreement between the parties in the nuclear field, and it is not at all clear whether it will improve the relations between them, given the tension that has prevailed in recent years, mainly because of the conflicting positions of the two in the civil war in Syria and the Russian support for Assad. Saudi sources insist, however, that “Russia will play a key role in the kingdom’s ambitious nuclear venture.” Beyond the nuclear cooperation between Egypt and Russia, Egypt is procuring advanced warplanes from Russia, including the S-300 anti-aircraft defense system. Iran is also expected to arm itself with a system of this type, as well as advanced warplanes and other weapons systems. In addition to its nuclear cooperation with Russia, Saudi Arabia is also liable to expand its procurement of advanced Russian systems. Following Russian military intervention in Syria in a coalition with Iran, Israel recently has been faced with the combined forces of the Syrian army, the Iranian army, and Hizbollah, backed by the Russian military presence in Syria. In testimony that has not received much media coverage, Ed Royce, a US congressman and the chairman of the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs, asserted that the ambassador of the United Arab Emirates to the United States had told him that his country “no longer felt bound” to refrain from enriching uranium, following the nuclear agreement signed with Iran. Indeed, it cannot be ruled out that the Iranian precedent will encourage other countries in the Middle East to develop a nuclear program below the nuclear military threshold. “He told me, ‘Your worst enemy has achieved this right to enrich. It’s a right to enrich now that your friends are going to want, too, and we won’t be the only country,’” Royce, said, elaborating on his testimony in a phone interview with the Associated Press. Israel cannot ignore the procurement of advanced Russian weapons systems by its neighbors, or their accelerated entry into the nuclear field; these plans are liable to serve as a basis for obtaining greater know-how and as a cover for building nuclear weapons capability, certainly if the transfer of know-how includes enrichment capability. For its part, Russia is being careful to maintain positive relations with Israel, which it regards as an important regional player. Israel also regards Russia as a key player in the region, and the two countries are coordinating their moves in order to prevent a clash between their military forces in Syrian territory. At the same time, Israel expects Russia to take its security interests into consideration. The two countries seemingly are willing to engage in dialogue that will address their spheres of interest, but it is doubtful whether Israel will be able to convince Russia in its agreements with the countries in the region seeking nuclear reactors to include restrictive clauses. Furthermore, even if Israel is able to influence Moscow to some extent, it is highly doubtful whether some of these countries, which have hitherto rejected American demands that they accept conditions and restrictions, will accept such demands from Russia.
77 -Spread of nuclear power across the Middle East is primarily motivated by desire to proliferate – no other explanation is sufficient
78 -Vick 15 Karl Vick (reporter), "The Middle East Nuclear Race Is Already Under Way," TIME Magazine, 3/23/2015 AZ
79 -While the U.S. and other world powers work to constrain Iran's nuclear program, five rival nations plan atomic programs One of the most important reasons why the U.S. is trying to conclude a nuclear deal with Iran is to prevent an Iranian bomb from triggering a nuclear race in the Middle East. Yet even as talks continue now in Switzerland, Tehran’s regional rivals have already begun quietly acting on their own atomic ambitions. Nuclear power may be on the wane almost everywhere else in the world, but it’s all the rage in the place with all that oil. Egypt’s announcement last month that it was hiring Russia to build a reactor near Alexandria made it only the latest entrant in an emerging atomic derby. Every other major Sunni power in the region has announced similar plans. And though none appear either as ambitious nor as ambiguous as what’s taken place in Iran — which set out to master the entire atomic-fuel cycle, a red flag for a military program — each announcement lays down a marker in a region that, until recently, was notable as the one place on the planet where governments had made little progress on nuclear power. With the exception of Israel, which has never publicly acknowledged its widely known nuclear arsenal, no Middle Eastern country beyond Iran had a nuclear program — peaceful or otherwise — until the wealthy United Arab Emirates began building a reactor in July 2012 (due for completion in 2017). The list now includes, in addition to Egypt, Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia — the last Iran’s archrival, and which last year revealed plans to build 16 nuclear plants over the next two decades. When the President of South Korea — which has 23 nuclear plants of its own — visited the Kingdom earlier this month, leaders of both countries signed a memo of understanding calling for Seoul to build two of the nuclear plants. The Saudis have made similar arrangements with China, Argentina and France. “It’s not just because nuclear power is seen as a first step toward a nuclear-weapons option,” says Mark Fitzpatrick, a former U.S. State Department nuclear expert who now runs the nonproliferation and disarmament program at London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies. “There is also a prestige factor: keeping up with the neighbors.” Middle Eastern nations may have legitimate reasons to invest in nuclear energy. Jordan, for instance, has almost no oil in liquid form, and almost less water. Saudi Arabia and the UAE possess huge crude reserves, but lose potential export revenue when they burn oil at home to create electricity — huge amounts of which are sucked up by desalination plants. Turkey, despite impressive hydroelectric potential, must import oil and natural gas. But all that has been true for decades. What’s changed in recent years is the nuclear capabilities of Iran — a Shi‘ite Muslim country Sunni leaders have come to regard as major threat. Jordan’s King Abdullah II famously warned of a “Shia crescent” of Iran-aligned countries reaching from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. The Saudis have made it clear that they will acquire a nuclear weapon should Iran get one. “This is not the shortest way to a nuclear weapon, by any means,” says Sharon Squassoni, director of the proliferation-prevention program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. “But if I put myself in their shoes, I’d think it probably makes sense to start down this path to see if we can develop a civilian nuclear program, and if we pick up some capabilities along the way, that’s all right.”‘ Suspicion rises with every new announcement partly because the Middle East is bucking a global trend. Worldwide, the number of nuclear plants has declined since the meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant in 2011. Reactions differed by country. Germany forswore nuclear energy altogether after the disaster, while China pressed ahead, planning more than 100 new reactors. But in most places, the environmental risks and high costs have turned countries off nuclear power. “My beef with nuclear energy is that it’s sort of held up as this very prestigious thing,” Squassoni tells TIME. “We do nuclear deals with our best allies … all this stuff about strategic partnership. And really, it’s this extremely expensive, complicated, slightly dangerous way to boil water. And that’s what you’re doing, right? You’re boiling water to turn those turbines.” The expense alone may prevent some Middle Eastern nations from every actually joining the “nuclear club.” Building an atomic plant costs at least $5 billion, Fitzpatrick notes, and Egypt is desperately poor; Jordan relies heavily on remittances and foreign aid. But the Saudis still have money to burn and, according to former White House official Gary Samore, have consistently rebuffed U.S. imprecations to sign a pledge not to divert any nuclear program toward producing a bomb (a pledge the UAE took). Saudi Arabia has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but then so has Iran, and in the end a race can be run by as few as two: India and Pakistan, bitter neighbors, neither of which are rich, went nuclear in 1974 and 1998, respectively. They’ve gone to war once since, raising anxiety levels around the world.
80 -Middle East prolif causes an enormous nuclear war and increases the risk of nuclear terror – deterrence doesn't check
81 -Krepinevich 13 Andrew Krepinevich (the President of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, which he joined following a 21- year career in the U.S. Army. He has served in the Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment, on the personal staff of three secretaries of defense, the National Defense Panel, the Defense Science Board Task Force on Joint Experimentation, and the Defense Policy Board. He is the author of 7 Deadly Scenarios: A Military Futurist Explores War in the 21st Century and The Army and Vietnam. A West Point graduate, he holds an M.P.A. and a Ph.D. from Harvard University), "Critical Mass: Nuclear Proliferation in the Middle East," Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment, 2013 AZ
82 -Along these lines, it seems highly plausible that a major confrontation between Iran and another regional nuclear power could occur by design, due to miscalculation, or as a result of an Iranian proxy taking aggressive action beyond Tehran’s control—a case of the “tail wagging the dog.” If a conflict ensued and one side appeared on the brink of losing, it could execute a latter-day “shot across the bow” of its adversary, or even engage in a significant but limited use of nuclear weapons to restore its position. Any assessment of the military balance in a proliferated Middle East would need to take such scenarios into account. There were other worrisome scenarios that emerged during the Cold War involving accidental or unauthorized use, and catalytic war described earlier in this assessment. Motion pictures such as Dr. Strangelove, The Bedford Incident, and Failsafe, and books such as On the Beach brought such concerns to the public’s attention following traumatic crises such as the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and the Suez Crisis in 1956. Scenarios in a proliferated Middle East should examine the prospects that all or part of the nuclear arsenal of a new nuclear-armed state could fall under the control of a non-governmental faction in the event of a state failure. Nuclear weapons might be used internally as part of a civil war between factions vying for power, against an external power attempting to back one faction over another, by a radical terrorist element either within the failed state or against targets abroad, or some combination of these. Finally, a proliferated Middle East would be characterized by a geographically tight cluster of nuclear-armed states; a high level of mutual suspicion among these states; the likely absence of effective early warning systems; and the significant potential of cyber weapons to introduce false intelligence into the calculations of state leaders. This combination suggests the region would be a prime candidate for a catalytic nuclear war. A scenario (or perhaps a set of scenarios) should assess the prospects for such a conflict materializing. To sum up, this assessment concludes that a proliferated Middle East will pose significantly greater challenges than did the Cold War in terms of sustaining the U.S. objective of preventing the use of nuclear weapons. The challenge is not simply one of maintaining an “assured destruction” capability for each state; indeed, this Cold War-era metric was of dubious utility then and of no utility in the multipolar regional competition posited here. Rather, a rich menu of scenarios must be examined to inform any U.S. strategy that seeks to maximize the prospects of preserving key national interests in this critical region.
83 -Rosatom reactors in particular are vulnerable to infiltration and theft – corruption and management problems
84 -Ulrich et al 14 Kendra Ulrich (Senior Global Energy Campaigner, Greenpeace Japan), Jehki Harkonen and Brian Blomme, "Rosatom Risks: Exposing the troubled history of Russia’s state nuclear corporation," Greenpeace International, October 2014 AZ
85 -Adequacy of qualified staff In 2006, Rosatom had only approximately 5,000 professional construction workers, well below the number needed to scale up its ambitious programme to build new reactors.100 By 2012, Rosatom managed to considerably expand its construction staff. However, many of these workers were poorly paid migrants from the former Soviet republics. According to a local NGO working at the site of the Leningrad nuclear power plants, the workers were subjected to living conditions akin to slave labour. They lived in unhygienic, cold barracks, were paid very low salaries, and often Rosatom officers confiscated their passports to prevent them from leaving the site.101 Corruption in Rosatom’s activities Rosatom, and its predecessors, have had serious and widespread corruption problems, likely due, at least in part, to the structural lack of transparency and external accountability. Between 2009-2012, Rosatom fired 68 executives and 208 mid-level managers due to corruption charges.102 One recent allegation of corruption relating to the top management at Rosatom was the case of Rosatom’s Deputy Director General, Evgeny Yevstratov. He was responsible for nuclear safety. Yevstratov quit his job at Rosatom in April 2011, and was arrested in July on suspicion of embezzling 50 million roubles (around €1.2mn103).104 In November 2012, Yevstratov was released on bail but the case continued.105 Originally Yevstratov was only accused of collaborating with his staff in claiming that research material was his own rather than copies taken from the internet, and pocketing the money intended for research. Later investigators found that Yevstratov and another high-level Rosatom executive, Mustafa Kashka, the Deputy Director General of the corporation’s subsidiary Atomflot, may have embezzled an additional 60m roubles (around €1.5m106) intended for reprocessing of nuclear waste.107 The court case against Yevstratov is still pending as of June 2014. Besides its own corruption problems, Rosatom has also had serious issues with some of its subsidiaries. For example, in 2010, Transparency International Russia and a Kaliningrad-based NGO, Ecodefense, together conducted a detailed review of 200 orders that had been publicly placed on the Rosatom website. The NGOs found that 83 out of 200, or more than 40, of the orders violated the Russian procurement standards regarding compliance with order placement processes, transparency, and/or use of public money.108 Some of these cases connected with the violation of procurement standards have gained publicity inside Russia. In December 2010, investigative journalists at the Kommersant newspaper reported that Alexei Votyakov, the Director General of the Rosatom waste subsidiary, RosRAO, and his Managing Director, Maxim Belyaev, had purchased nuclear waste containers at a cost of 450m roubles (around €11m109).110 This was estimated to be several times above the normal market price. Rosatom’s own investigation found that the containers were bought without a legally required tender, and in violation of Rosatom’s internal procedures.111 RosRAO’s archives also had letters of acceptance for some undelivered containers. Both men were subsequently fired and prosecuted.112 As of June 2014, there has been no final ruling in this case. Rosatom’s corruption problems have resulted in potentially serious compromises of nuclear safety both domestically and abroad. One of the cases that gained broader international attention involved Sergei Shutov, the Procurement Director of ZIO-Podolsk, a nuclear construction subsidiary of Rosatom. He was charged in December 2011113 with collaborating to steal more than 145m roubles (€3.47m114) with his cohorts by forging supply certificates for reactors at home and abroad for what was low quality, cheaper steel in order to fake compliance with industry standards while keeping the difference in price for himself.115 Like the Votyakov-Belyaev case, this case is also still pending as of June 2014. Shutov’s case was not the only one of its kind. In 2007, workers at the Kalinin nuclear power plant noticed that some of the recently manufactured power switches had the on and off sides marked the wrong way around. A closer examination showed a number of defects in equipment arriving from the Kharkov Electromechanical Plant. When confronted with the problems, it turned out that the Kharkov plant had not manufactured some of the parts. Instead, an intermediary had been forging the certificates and buying cheaper parts from somewhere else to increase profit margins.116 According to an inspection report on the Kalinin nuclear power plant from February 2014, the current procurement procedures failed to prevent the use of low-quality equipment and components and subpar subcontractors.117 The scale of the alleged and proven corruption cases, and the resulting potential financial and safety risks and costs, raise serious questions about whether Rosatom’s institutional framework can support the large nuclear expansion that its executives proclaim. Given these serious problems at this stage of nuclear operation, Rosatom’s ambition to own and operate multiple reactors across vast distances in other countries certainly raises the potential spectre of exacerbated problems. The corporation could be stretched even thinner and may try to fill in the gaps with cheap, unqualified labour as it has done domestically. It is worth restating, this endemic corruption involving falsified documentation and poor quality control relates to parts necessary for the operation of nuclear power plants. The Shutov case is one clear example of that. And, these are just the reports that have been uncovered; others may have gone undetected.
86 -
87 -ISIS is actively seeking nuclear weapons and possesses the technical expertise needed to launch a major attack – they just need the material
88 -Rudischhauser 15 Wolfgang Rudischhauser (currently Director of the WMD Non-proliferation Centre at NATO and has a long background in working on non-proliferation in various diplomatic posts for the German Foreign Ministry,) "Could ISIL go nuclear?" NATO Review Magazine, 2015 AZ
89 -But a further particular risk could become a major threat to Western societies. There is a very real - but not yet fully identified risk - of foreign fighters in ISIL’s ranks using chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear (CBRN) materials as “weapons of terror” against the West. One can easily imagine the number of victims created by panic as well as the economic disruption if the ’Charlie Hebdo’ attacks had centred on “Chatelet les Halles”, the biggest Paris metro station, with an improvised explosive device containing radioactive sources or chemical material instead of using Kalashnikovs. The deadly Tokyo attacks in 1995 using toxic chemical material, (the so called “Sarin attack”), could have killed many more people. Had Aum Shinrikyo used all the Sarin they had actually produced, a large part of Tokyo’s population would have died. Thus the attacks led at the time to a complete rethinking of the threat perception, well before 9/11. Until now, the Tokyo attacks have fortunately remained an exception and most terrorist groups have used “conventional” explosives or weapons, simply because they lacked access to know-how and material. This may soon change. And there is a reason. A new threat scenario A lot has been written recently regarding the rising power of an organisation that calls itself the “Islamic State in the Levant” (ISIL) or “Daesh”. ISIL has attracted at least hundreds if not thousands of foreign fighters from Western countries to join its ranks. What makes ISIL different is exactly that. Hundreds of foreign fighters, some with solid academic and educational backgrounds and intellectual knowledge, have joined the cause and continue to do so every day. Furthermore ISIL’s success is based on an effective media strategy of looking at the utmost possible “news effect” of their attacks. Together with their access to high levels of funding, these three elements bear the real risk of the group turning into practice what up to now has been largely a theoretical possibility: to actually employ weapons of mass destruction or CBRN material in terrorist attacks. We might thus soon enter a stage of CBRN terrorism, never before imaginable. Worrying reports confirm that ISIL has gained (at least temporarily) access to former chemical weapons storage sites in Iraq. They might soon do so in Libya. They allegedly used toxic chemicals in the fighting around Kobane. Even more worrying, there are press reports about nuclear material from Iraqi scientific institutes having been seized by ISIL. This demonstrates that while no full scale plots have been unveiled so far, our governments need to be on alert. Generating improved military and civil prevention and response capabilities should be a high priority and should not fall victim to limited budgets in times of economic crisis. Apart from their ideology, an even more fundamentalist and aggressive version of jihad than Al Qaida’s, four unique features make ISIL different: First, their “possession” (or de facto control) of a huge “territory”, stretching from the Turkish border in Syria to close to Baghdad in Iraq and approaching the Lebanese border. Numerous air strikes by the international “Anti-ISIL coalition”, in which a number of NATO Allies are involved, tried to target ISIL and its strongholds. However, despite coalition and Iraqi Armed Forces successes in forcing ISIL to give up some territory, the group remains able to control and find refuge in large parts of Syria and Iraq, most recently by capturing the city of Ramadi. Second, the reported access to extraordinary levels of funding. ISIL is reputed (much more than Al Qaida ever did) to earn money through “economic” and fundraising activities inside their territories, from supporters abroad and from the collection of ransom money. Most recently, the Ambassador of Iraq to the UN even claimed that ISIL was selling human organs from victims to earn money. They are said to be already involved in human smuggling of migrants from Libya to Europe to create funding. Third, ISIL, in addition to its strong ideological motivation, is building its success on the use of social and other media in a way rarely seen before by other terrorist groups. This helps them gain attention at any cost for their atrocities, such as the decapitation or even the burning alive of hostages. Fourth and most dangerously, the hundreds if not thousands of foreign fighters from the Arab world and Western countries in ISIL’s ranks, some of them with solid knowledge including in chemical, physical and computer sciences, makes ISIL special. A full assessment is still very difficult, as only a limited amount of information on the backgrounds of the fighters is publicly available. Notwithstanding that, it is clear that ISIL attracts growing numbers of young foreigners daily from all levels of society. Clearly reported cases show that ISIL actually has already acquired the knowledge, and in some cases the human expertise, that would allow it to use CBRN materials as “weapons of terror”.
1 +Countries should authorize the World Association of Nuclear Operators and the Institute of Nuclear Power Operators to run nuclear power plants as test facilities for new nuclear technologies when they are scheduled to close.
2 +The counterplan allows the development and testing of new tech that solves meltdowns.
3 +Terry 16 (Jeff Terry, Jeff Terry is a professor of physics at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where his main research focus is on energy systems) Use failing power plants to improve the safety and efficiency of clean energy, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists March 31 2016 AT
4 +Nuclear energy is currently the largest generator of low-carbon electricity in the United States. It could play an important role in mitigating climate change, but fears about safety impede its spread. These fears aren’t always grounded in reality. The US nuclear energy industry is overseen by two industry groups—the World Association of Nuclear Operators and the Institute of Nuclear Power Operators—and multiple government regulators dedicated to passing on lessons learned from nuclear accidents. It is one of the safest industries around in terms of occupational hazards. Severe accidents are rare, and nuclear professionals embrace a strong culture of safety. But is a culture of safety enough? And if it’s not, what can be done to improve? The answer may be found in some of the many US nuclear power plants in danger of closing their doors. The nuclear power industry could take a lesson from the history of car safety. The automobile industry saw a dramatic reduction in fatalities in recent years: From 1995 to 2009, the rate of fatalities per 100 million miles driven fell by 26 percent, with much of the decrease taking place from 2005 onward. What contributed to this large improvement in driver safety over such a short period? Certainly, there were big changes in cultural attitudes toward car safety. From 2006 to 2010, seat belt use by drivers increased from 81 to 85 percent. Calculations by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration suggest a change of this magnitude would save around 800 to 900 lives per year. In fact, though, by 2010, fatalities were down by nearly 10,000 lives per year, as shown in Figure 1. So while the change in safety culture was significant, another factor must have also contributed to improved driver safety. During the 2000s, car manufacturers implemented many technical improvements to increase safety. These measures were aimed at both improving the odds of surviving a crash and avoiding accidents in the first place. Airbag technology and better passenger restraint systems are now the norm in automobiles. Advanced technology such as lane-change warnings and front collision avoidance systems were also deployed during this time. It took both improved safety culture and technological advances to significantly reduce car fatalities. There is a strong culture of safety in the nuclear power industry, but as the auto industry shows, you need technological improvement as well. Terry-auto-industry-graph.jpg That’s where those old power plants come in. It still remains difficult to implement new technology in the nuclear industry. One reason is that US nuclear plants are producing electricity at more than 90 percent of capacity. It is hard to justify experimenting with commercial reactors running so reliably. That makes it hard to test new technology, such as new fuels or claddings designed to improve safety on a commercial scale. A number of US commercial nuclear reactors are either likely to close or have already. The James M. FitzPatrick Nuclear Power Plant in New York is among those on the shutdown list. As it is a significant source of low-carbon electricity for the region, the state is trying to save it, in part by providing $100 million for fuel purchase. For the moment, though, that doesn’t seem to have reversed plant operator Entergy’s decision to close in less than a year. (Entergy has said it is closing for financial reasons, but some of us remain skeptical.) It may be, though, that struggling nuclear facilities offer a way to improve safety across the industry. The sector needs to be able to test new technology. In order to do that, the US Energy Department could take over soon-to-close reactors and run them as commercial-scale test facilities that also continue to produce clean electricity. One useful test, for example, would involve new claddings. Claddings are the materials around the radioactive fuel pellets that prevent the coolant from being contaminated. During the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster, Zircaloy cladding reacted with steam at high temperature, which produced hydrogen that exploded. The industry would like to prevent this kind of thing from happening again. As a test, a plant operator could rotate fuels with new, non-hydrogen-producing claddings into different bundles in the reactor. By monitoring the process, researchers could see how the new claddings performed under normal operating conditions, and use the process to develop and test new sensors. In short, an Energy Department takeover of this kind would enable researchers to test new safety technologies on a commercial scale, while still allowing states to meet their clean energy goals. For the inconvenience of dealing with a test site, electricity for those living with 15 miles of the reactor could be provided for free or at reduced cost, as has been suggested in relation to a proposed public-private nuclear project in South Australia. This would be a novel use of a reactor that would otherwise just be closed and allowed to sit and decay for decades. Outgoing nuclear power plant operators would still be financially responsible for decommissioning, as laid out by US law, but they would benefit from the arrangement: While the Energy Department used the reactor as a testbed, the previous operator’s decommissioning fund would grow, so that by the time of final decommissioning, the original owner would have more funds and newer technology available for the task. In fact, the Energy Department could bring commercial-scale testing to other industries, too. Recent reports put California’s Ivanpah concentrated solar power plant in danger of closing. It would be a tremendous waste to allow the $2.2 billion dollar facility to close without giving researchers the ability to study what problems occurred. The ability to data mine Ivanpah’s weather and production information would be invaluable for improving future facilities. The site could also be used to test methods for preventing bird deaths and mitigating visual impact on pilots. Instead of wasting away in the desert, Ivanpah would be of valuable service to society. The Energy Department should not pass up the opportunity to take over closing facilities as commercial-scale testbeds to improve current energy technology. Having seen how new technology has improved safety in other industries, we need to make sure there is a method for testing new methods and materials in the energy sector as well. Resources like the FitzPatrick nuclear plant and the Ivanpah solar plant are too valuable to let fade away. It is in our best interest to allow researchers to collect data using these facilities. Subjecting that trove of information to new experimental techniques and computational data mining will allow scientists and engineers to make other facilities more efficient and safe. The Energy Department should take a lead role in keeping these no-longer-competitive commercial facilities alive. The data they provide can be used to improve our future.
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1 -2016-09-12 20:24:43.0
1 +2016-09-10 16:30:36.0
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1 -Scoggin, Bistagne, Tan
1 +Adam Bistagne
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1 -Crossroads NS
1 +Harvard Westlake EE
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1 -La Canada Zhao Aff
1 +La Canada Zhao Neg
Title
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1 -SEPOCT - Middle East Aff
1 +SEPOCT - Testing CP
Caselist.CitesClass[3]
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1 -Russian nuclear deals are extensions of power – reactors economically suture host countries to Russian hegemony and displace US influence
2 -Armstrong 15 Ian Armstrong (senior analyst and editor at Global Risk Insights, where he focuses on nuclear policy issues, missile defense), "Russia is creating a global nuclear power empire," Global Risk Insights, 10/29/2015 AZ
3 -Though these economic implications are worth considering, they are far overshadowed by the geopolitical impacts of Russia’s nuclear power expansion strategy. The same local governments that may experience economic upticks as a result of Russian-installed NPPs will also become sutured to the Russian nuclear industry — and therefore the broader Russian government.
4 -To be clear, the influence gained by Russia through each bilateral nuclear agreement should not be understated. For one, the construction timeline for nuclear power plants is typically long-term, ensuring that Russia will have a presence in any country it signs a nuclear contract with for a minimum of several years.
5 -In addition, Moscow has secured special comprehensive contracts with highly strategic countries like Turkey under the premise of “build-own-operate” — a system in which Russia builds, owns, and permanently operates a nuclear power plant.
6 -From this perspective, Russian-built nuclear power plants in foreign countries become more akin to embassies — or even military bases — than simple bilateral infrastructure projects. The long-term or permanent presence that accompanies the exportation of Russian nuclear power will afford President Vladimir Putin a notable influence in countries crucial to regional geopolitics.
7 -Western influence will subsequently be undermined in crucial ally states like Egypt, Turkey, and Algeria. This now-justified Russian presence abroad will also provide Moscow intelligence opportunities that would otherwise be significantly more difficult and risky. Russian nuclear expertise will also be required in some form for maintenance and operational purposes even in countries that do not sign on for the full build-own-operate package.
8 -All of these benefits — significant as stand-alone strategic gains — will be undergirded by the traditional Russian leverage that emerges when nations become dependent on Russia for their energy needs.
9 -At present, it appears that Russia is well-positioned to continue its expansive nuclear power diplomacy in pursuit of a broader sphere of influence. However, competition from other capable nuclear powers may emerge in the medium-term.
1 +The standard is maximizing expected wellbeing.
2 +1. No act omission distinction for states since their implicit approvals of actions still entail moral responsibility
3 +Sunstein 05
4 +Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule. The University of Chicago Law School. “Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? The Relevance of Life‐Life Tradeoffs.” JOHN M. OLIN LAW and ECONOMICS WORKING PAPER NO. 239. The Chicago Working Paper Series. March 2005 AJ
5 +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.
6 +2. Ethical uncertainty means we should prevent existential risk to ensure the future has value regardless of true moral theory. It’s an epistemic prerequisite
7 +Bostrom 11 Nick Bostrom. “Existential Risk Prevention As the Most Important Task for Humanity”, 2011, Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford
8 +These reflections on moral uncertainty suggest an alternative, complementary way of looking at existential risk; they also suggest a new way of thinking about the ideal of sustainability. Let me elaborate.¶ Our present understanding of axiology might well be confused. We may not now know — at least not in concrete detail — what outcomes would count as a big win for humanity; we might not even yet be able to imagine the best ends of our journey. If we are indeed profoundly uncertain about our ultimate aims, then we should recognize that there is a great option value in preserving — and ideally improving — our ability to recognize value and to steer the future accordingly. Ensuring that there will be a future version of humanity with great powers and a propensity to use them wisely is plausibly the best way available to us to increase the probability that the future will contain value.
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1 -2016-09-17 16:57:03.0
1 +2016-09-10 16:30:37.0
Judge
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1 -Sean Fee
1 +Adam Bistagne
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1 -Harvard Westlake WP
1 +Harvard Westlake EE
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1 -La Canada Zhao Aff
1 +La Canada Zhao Neg
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1 -SEPOCT - Middle East Aff - new Relations card
1 +SEPOCT - Util Framework
Tournament
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1 -Greenhill
1 +Loyola
Caselist.CitesClass[4]
Cites
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1 -1AC – Prolif S
2 -Allies in Asia perceive US as withdrawing from the region – declining assurance sparks prolif as a national security guarantee against China and North Korea
3 -Crowley, 16—Politico’s senior foreign affairs correspondent (Michael, “Obama's Asian nuclear nightmare,” http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/obama-nuke-223412, dml)
4 -
5 -Now, after the Iran deal averted what Obama predicted would be a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, Asia suddenly looms large as an atomic danger zone. Seemingly immune to sanctions and isolation, North Korea presses on with its weapons program: Recent satellite imagery suggests that North Korea may be building a new tunnel in preparation for its fifth nuclear test.
6 -Officials in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are losing patience with international efforts to thwart Pyongyang’s program. Some suspect China is all too happy with a status quo that keeps North Korea contained and stable.
7 -And those governments increasingly fret that the U.S., which has protected them for decades under a nuclear umbrella, may become a less reliable ally.
8 -The issue is particularly fraught in Japan, which has a post-World War II policy of pacifism enshrined in its constitution. But last year Japan passed legislation reinterpreting its constitution to allow foreign military operations for the first time since World War II, though only ones that are defensive in nature.
9 -Some officials and analysts say the anti-nuclear taboo is also being revisited, especially as China asserts new territorial claims, including over islands and waters claimed by Japan. At the same time, many Japanese leaders feel that Obama has not challenged Beijing forcefully enough. Trump’s suggestion that Japan and South Korea might need to fend for themselves has only exacerbated the concerns that America can no longer be relied on for protection.
10 -“Careless American rhetoric that calls into question America’s security commitment in general and extended nuclear deterrent in particular fuels Tokyo’s security planners to develop hedging strategies,” said Patrick Cronin, senior director of the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.
11 -“It has often been thought that Japan has a bomb in the basement, and it would just have to assemble the parts to create a bomb,” Cronin added. “The technical challenges might actually be much greater than that, but it is the political hurdles that remain the real barriers to Japan acquiring nuclear weapons.”
12 -Those barriers, while still high, may be eroding.
13 -Shortly after Trump’s comments in March, for instance, the governor of Japan’s Osaka prefecture told reporters that the country should revisit the question of nuclear weapons.
14 -“What do we do if America’s military strength in Japan disappears?” asked the governor, Ichiro Matsui. “Wishful thinking doesn’t get us anywhere.”
15 -Other Japanese conservatives have made the same argument in recent years, including Shintaro Ishihara, who served as Tokyo’s governor until 2012 and said in 2011 that Japan “should absolutely possess nuclear weapons.”
16 -Such talk has been striking to Japan experts in the U.S., who have assumed for decades that the country would remain non-nuclear. “Very few except the extreme fringes used to talk about nuclear weapons” in Japan, said Richard Samuels, director of MIT’s Center for International Studies.
17 -Pro-nuclear weapons sentiment in Japan remains mostly on the far right, to be sure. But the same conversation is brewing in South Korea, where a 2013 poll found that two-thirds of South Koreans support developing nukes in response to its bellicose northern neighbor.
18 -“Seoul can no longer sit idly by as the nuclear talks lead to no results and Washington and Beijing are busy blaming each other for their diplomatic failures,” argued an editorial in Seoul’s conservative Chosun Ilbo newspaper earlier this year.
19 -Such talk “is driven by a deep fear of abandonment” by the U.S., Cronin said.
20 -
21 -Nuclear Power is a prerequisite to prolif and nuclear terror – safeguards are uncertain and nuclear power weakens them
1 +Util
2 +First, psychological evidence proves we don’t identify with our future selves. Continuous personal identity doesn’t exist.
3 +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 AT
4 +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. Where Parfit’s smoking boy endangers the health of his future self with nary a thought, others might act differently. “The thing is, we make sacrifices for people all the time,” says Hershfield. “In relationships, in marriages.” The silver lining of our dissociation from our future self, then, is that it is another reason to practice being good to others. One of them might be you.
5 +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.
6 +Second, government must be practical and cannot concern itself with metaphysical questions – its only role is to protect citizens’ interests
7 +Rhonheimer 05 (Martin, Prof Of Philosophy at The Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome). “THE POLITICAL ETHOS OF CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY AND THE PLACE OF NATURAL LAW IN PUBLIC REASON: RAWLS’S “POLITICAL LIBERALISM” REVISITED” The American Journal of Jurisprudence vol. 50 (2005), pp. 1-70
8 +It is a fundamental feature of political philosophy to be part of practical philosophy. Political philosophy belongs to ethics, which is practical, for it both reflects on practical knowledge and aims at action. Therefore, it is not only normative, but must consider the concrete conditions of realization. The rationale of political institutions and action must be understood as embedded in concrete cultural and, therefore, historical contexts and as meeting with problems that only in these contexts are understandable. A normative political philosophy which would abstract from the conditions of realizability would be trying to establish norms for realizing the “idea of the good” or of “the just” (as Plato, in fact, tried to do in his Republic). Such a purely metaphysical view, however, is doomed to failure. As a theory of political praxis, political philosophy must include in its reflection the concrete historical context, historical experiences and the corresponding knowledge of the proper logic of the political. 14 Briefly: political philosophy is not metaphysics, which contemplates the necessary order of being, but practical philosophy, which deals with partly contingent matters and aims at action. Moreover, unlike moral norms in general—natural law included,—which rule the actions of a person—“my acting” and pursuing the good—, the logic of the political is characterized by acts like framing institutions and establishing legal rules by which not only personal actions but the actions of a multitude of persons are regulated by the coercive force of state power, and by which a part of citizens exercises power over others. Political actions are, thus, both actions of the whole of the body politic and referring to the whole of the community of citizens. 15 Unless we wish to espouse a platonic view according to which some persons are by nature rulers while others are by nature subjects, we will stick to the Aristotelian differentiation between the “domestic” and the “political” kind of rule 16 : unlike domestic rule, which is over people with a common interest and harmoniously striving after the same good despotism and, therefore, according to Aristotle is essentially “despotic,” political rule is exercised over free persons who represent a plurality of interests and pursue, in the common context of the polis, different goods. The exercise of such political rule, therefore, needs justification and is continuously in search of consent among those who are ruled, but who potentially at the same time are also the rulers.
9 +Prefer this account of government legitimacy since it avoids falsely starting from the position of anarchy assumed by other frameworks, which is bad since it doesn’t accurately describe the justification of the state since individuals don’t actually have a choice to enter or not enter a state.
10 +2 impacts
11 +A. Government actions will inevitably lead to trade-offs between citizens since they benefit some and harm others; the only justifiable way to resolve these conflicts is by benefitting the maximum possible number of people since anything else would unequally prioritize one group over another. This also proves side constraint theories are useless for states since they’ll inevitably violate some constraint. Even if util fails, non-consequentialist moral theories prevent any action which is worse than not being able to use util
12 +B. People psychologically prefer util – governments are obligated to use it since it’s more justifiable for citizens
13 +Gino et al 2008 Francesca Gino Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Don Moore Tepper Business School, Carnegie Mellon University, Max H. Bozman Harvard Business School, Harvard University “No harm, no foul: The outcome bias in ethical judgments” http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/08-080.pdf AT
14 +The present studies provide strong evidence of the existence of outcome effects in ethically-relevant contexts, when people are asked to judge the ethicality of others’ behavior. It is worth noting that what we show is not the same as the curse of knowledge or the hindsight bias. The curse of knowledge describes people’s inability to recover an uninformed state of mind (Camerer, Loewenstein, and Weber, 1989). Likewise, the hindsight bias leads people to misremember what they believed before they knew an event’s outcome (e.g., Fischhoff, 1975; Fischhoff and Beyth, 1975). By contrast, we show that that outcomes of decisions lead people to see the decisions themselves in a different light, and that this effect does not depend on misremembering their prior state of mind. In other words, people will see it as entirely appropriate to allow a decision’s outcome to determine their assessment of the decision’s quality.
15 +This answers standard indicts since it proves util is not counter-intuitive or hard to calculate since most people already believe in it.
16 +The standard is maximizing expected wellbeing
17 +1AC – Prolif
18 +Nuclear Power multiplies the risk for nuclear proliferation and nuclear terror – safeguards are uncertain and nuclear power weakens them
22 22  Miller and Sagan 9 - Steven E. Miller, Director, International Security Program; Editor-in-Chief, International Security; Co-Principal Investigator, Project on Managing the Atom, Scott Sagan, Former Research Fellow, International Security Program, 1981-1982; Editorial Board Member, Quarterly Journal: International Security ("Nuclear Power Without Nuclear Proliferation?" Journal Article, Daedalus, volume 138, issue 4, pages 7-18, http://belfercenter.hks.harvard.edu/publication/19850/nuclear_power_without_nuclear_proliferation.html) RMT
23 23  Today, the Cold War has disappeared but thousands of those weapons have not. In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up. More nations have acquired these weapons. Testing has continued. Black market trade in nuclear secrets and nuclear materials abound. The technology to build a bomb has spread. Terrorists are determined to buy, build or steal one. Our efforts to contain these dangers are centered on a global non-proliferation regime, but as more people and nations break the rules, we could reach the point where the center cannot hold.
24 24  —President Barack Obama Prague, April 5, 2009
... ... @@ -28,69 +28,45 @@
28 28  On what will it depend? Unfortunately, the answer to that question is not so simple and clear, for the technical, economic, and political factors that will determine whether future generations will have more nuclear power without more nuclear proliferation are both exceedingly complex and interrelated. How rapidly and in which countries will new nuclear power plants be built? Will the future expansion of nuclear energy take place primarily in existing nuclear power states or will there be many new entrants to the field? Which countries will possess the facilities for enriching uranium or reprocessing plutonium, technical capabilities that could be used to produce either nuclear fuel for reactors or the materials for nuclear bombs? How can physical protection of nuclear materials from terrorist organizations best be ensured? How can new entrants into nuclear power generation best maintain safety to prevent accidents? The answers to these questions will be critical determinants of the technological dimension of our nuclear future.
29 29  The major political factors influencing the future of nuclear weapons are no less complex and no less important. Will Iran acquire nuclear weapons; will North Korea develop more weapons or disarm in the coming decade; how will neighboring states respond? Will the United States and Russia take significant steps toward nuclear disarmament, and if so, will the other nuclear-weapons states follow suit or stand on the sidelines?
30 30  The nuclear future will be strongly influenced, too, by the success or failure of efforts to strengthen the international organizations and the set of agreements that comprise the system developed over time to manage global nuclear affairs. Will new international or regional mechanisms be developed to control the front-end (the production of nuclear reactor fuel) and the back-end (the management of spent fuel containing plutonium) of the nuclear fuel cycle? What political agreements and disagreements are likely to emerge between the nuclear-weapons states (NWS) and the non-nuclear-weapons states (NNWS) at the 2010 NPT Review Conference and beyond? What role will crucial actors among the NNWS — Japan, Iran, Brazil, and Egypt, for example — play in determining the global nuclear future? And most broadly, will the nonproliferation regime be supported and strengthened or will it be questioned and weakened? As IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei has emphasized, "The nonproliferation regime is, in many ways, at a critical juncture," and there is a need for a new "overarching multilateral nuclear framework."1 But there is no guarantee that such a framework will emerge, and there is wide doubt that the arrangements of the past will be adequate to manage our nuclear future effectively.
31 -Asia prolif outweighs—multiple nuclear war scenarios
32 -Kroenig, 16—Associate Professor in the Department of Government and School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and a Senior Fellow in the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at the Atlantic Council (Matthew, “Approaching Critical Mass: Asia’s Multipolar Nuclear Future,” National Bureau of Asian Research Special Report #58, June 2016, dml)
28 +Prolif overwhelms incentives for civilian use of nuclear reactors
29 +Li and Yim 13- Mang-Sung Yim is in the Department of Nuclear and Quantum Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and Jun Li works at UNC Chapel Hill (“Examining relationship between nuclear proliferation and civilian nuclear power development” Progress in Nuclear Energy Volume 66, July 2013, Pages 108–114http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149197013000504) RMT
30 +This paper attempts to examine the relationship between nuclear weapons proliferation and civilian nuclear power development based on the history of Atoms for Peace Initiative. To investigate the relationship, a database was established by compiling information on a country's civilian nuclear power development and various national capabilities and situational factors. The results of correlation analysis indicated that the initial motivation to develop civilian nuclear power could be mostly dual purpose. However, for a civilian nuclear power program to be ultimately successful, the study finds the role of nuclear nonproliferation very important. The analysis indicated that the presence of nuclear weapons in a country and serious interest in nuclear weapons have a negative effect on the civilian nuclear power program. The study showed the importance of state level commitment to nuclear nonproliferation for the success of civilian nuclear power development. NPT ratification and IAEA safeguards were very important factors in the success of civilian nuclear power development. In addition, for a country's civilian nuclear power development to be successful, the country needs to possess strong economic capability and be well connected to the world economic market through international trade. Mature level of democracy and presence of nuclear technological capabilities were also found to be important for the success of civilian nuclear power program.
31 +Prolif in new states causes nuclear conflict.
32 +Kroenig 14 – Matthew, Associate Professor and International Relations Field Chair at Georgetown University, and Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at The Atlantic Council (“The History of Proliferation Optimism: Does It Have A Future?”, April 2014, http://www.matthewkroenig.com/The20History20of20Proliferation20Optimism_Feb2014.pdf)
33 +The spread of nuclear weapons poses a number of severe threats to international peace and security including: nuclear war, nuclear terrorism, global and regional instability, constrained freedom of action, weakened alliances, and further nuclear proliferation. Each of these threats has received extensive treatment elsewhere and this review is not intended to replicate or even necessarily to improve upon these previous efforts. Rather the goals of this section are more modest: to usefully bring together and recap the many reasons why we should be pessimistic about the likely consequences of nuclear proliferation. Many of these threats will be illuminated with a discussion of a case of much contemporary concern: Iran’s advanced nuclear program. Nuclear War. The greatest threat posed by the spread of nuclear weapons is nuclear war. The more states in possession of nuclear weapons, the greater the probability that somewhere, someday, there will be a catastrophic nuclear war. To date, nuclear weapons have only been used in warfare once. In 1945, the United States used nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing World War II to a close. Many analysts point to the sixty-five-plus-year tradition of nuclear non-use as evidence that nuclear weapons are unusable, but it would be naïve to think that nuclear weapons will never be used again simply because they have not been used for some time. After all, analysts in the 1990s argued that worldwide economic downturns like the great depression were a thing of the past, only to be surprised by the dot-com bubble bursting later in the decade and the Great Recession of the late Naughts.49 This author, for one, would be surprised if nuclear weapons are not used again sometime in his lifetime. Before reaching a state of MAD, new nuclear states go through a transition period in which they lack a secure second-strike capability. In this context, one or both states might believe that it has an incentive to use nuclear weapons first. For example, if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, neither Iran, nor its nuclear-armed rival, Israel, will have a secure, second-strike capability. Even though it is believed to have a large arsenal, given its small size and lack of strategic depth, Israel might not be confident that it could absorb a nuclear strike and respond with a devastating counterstrike. Similarly, Iran might eventually be able to build a large and survivable nuclear arsenal, but, when it first crosses the nuclear threshold, Tehran will have a small and vulnerable nuclear force. In these pre-MAD situations, there are at least three ways that nuclear war could occur. First, the state with the nuclear advantage might believe it has a splendid first strike capability. In a crisis, Israel might, therefore, decide to launch a preventive nuclear strike to disarm Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Indeed, this incentive might be further increased by Israel’s aggressive strategic culture that emphasizes preemptive action. Second, the state with a small and vulnerable nuclear arsenal, in this case Iran, might feel use ‘em or loose ‘em pressures. That is, in a crisis, Iran might decide to strike first rather than risk having its entire nuclear arsenal destroyed. Third, as Thomas Schelling has argued, nuclear war could result due to the reciprocal fear of surprise attack.50 If there are advantages to striking first, one state might start a nuclear war in the belief that war is inevitable and that it would be better to go first than to go second. Fortunately, there is no historic evidence of this dynamic occurring in a nuclear context, but it is still possible. In an Israeli-Iranian crisis, for example, Israel and Iran might both prefer to avoid a nuclear war, but decide to strike first rather than suffer a devastating first attack from an opponent. Even in a world of MAD, however, when both sides have secure, second-strike capabilities, there is still a risk of nuclear war. Rational deterrence theory assumes nuclear-armed states are governed by rational leaders who would not intentionally launch a suicidal nuclear war. This assumption appears to have applied to past and current nuclear powers, but there is no guarantee that it will continue to hold in the future. Iran’s theocratic government, despite its inflammatory rhetoric, has followed a fairly pragmatic foreign policy since 1979, but it contains leaders who hold millenarian religious worldviews and could one day ascend to power. We cannot rule out the possibility that, as nuclear weapons continue to spread, some leader somewhere will choose to launch a nuclear war, knowing full well that it could result in self-destruction. One does not need to resort to irrationality, however, to imagine nuclear war under MAD. Nuclear weapons may deter leaders from intentionally launching full-scale wars, but they do not mean the end of international politics. As was discussed above, nuclear-armed states still have conflicts of interest and leaders still seek to coerce nuclear-armed adversaries. Leaders might, therefore, choose to launch a limited nuclear war.51 This strategy might be especially attractive to states in a position of conventional inferiority that might have an incentive to escalate a crisis quickly. During the Cold War, the United States planned to use nuclear weapons first to stop a Soviet invasion of Western Europe given NATO’s conventional inferiority.52 As Russia’s conventional power has deteriorated since the end of the Cold War, Moscow has come to rely more heavily on nuclear weapons in its military doctrine. Indeed, Russian strategy calls for the use of nuclear weapons early in a conflict (something that most Western strategists would consider to be escalatory) as a way to de-escalate a crisis. Similarly, Pakistan’s military plans for nuclear use in the event of an invasion from conventionally stronger India. And finally, Chinese generals openly talk about the possibility of nuclear use against a U.S. superpower in a possible East Asia contingency. Second, as was also discussed above, leaders can make a “threat that leaves something to chance.”53 They can initiate a nuclear crisis. By playing these risky games of nuclear brinkmanship, states can increases the risk of nuclear war in an attempt to force a less resolved adversary to back down. Historical crises have not resulted in nuclear war, but many of them, including the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, have come close. And scholars have documented historical incidents when accidents nearly led to war.54 When we think about future nuclear crisis dyads, such as Iran and Israel, with fewer sources of stability than existed during the Cold War, we can see that there is a real risk that a future crisis could result in a devastating nuclear exchange. Nuclear Terrorism. The spread of nuclear weapons also increases the risk of nuclear terrorism.55 While September 11th was one of the greatest tragedies in American history, it would have been much worse had Osama Bin Laden possessed nuclear weapons. Bin Laden declared it a “religious duty” for Al Qaeda to acquire nuclear weapons and radical clerics have issued fatwas declaring it permissible to use nuclear weapons in Jihad against the West.56 Unlike states, which can be more easily deterred, there is little doubt that if terrorists acquired nuclear weapons, they would use them. Indeed, in recent years, many U.S. politicians and security analysts have argued that nuclear terrorism poses the greatest threat to U.S. national security.57 Analysts have pointed out the tremendous hurdles that terrorists would have to overcome in order to acquire nuclear weapons.58 Nevertheless, as nuclear weapons spread, the possibility that they will eventually fall into terrorist hands increases. States could intentionally transfer nuclear weapons, or the fissile material required to build them, to terrorist groups. There are good reasons why a state might be reluctant to transfer nuclear weapons to terrorists, but, as nuclear weapons spread, the probability that a leader might someday purposely arm a terrorist group increases. Some fear, for example, that Iran, with its close ties to Hamas and Hezbollah, might be at a heightened risk of transferring nuclear weapons to terrorists. Moreover, even if no state would ever intentionally transfer nuclear capabilities to terrorists, a new nuclear state, with underdeveloped security procedures, might be vulnerable to theft, allowing terrorist groups or corrupt or ideologically-motivated insiders to transfer dangerous material to terrorists. There is evidence, for example, that representatives from Pakistan’s atomic energy establishment met with Al Qaeda members to discuss a possible nuclear deal.59 Finally, a nuclear-armed state could collapse, resulting in a breakdown of law and order and a loose nukes problem. U.S. officials are currently very concerned about what would happen to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons if the government were to fall. As nuclear weapons spread, this problem is only further amplified. Iran is a country with a history of revolutions and a government with a tenuous hold on power. The regime change that Washington has long dreamed about in Tehran could actually become a nightmare if a nuclear-armed Iran suffered a break down in authority, forcing us to worry about the fate of Iran’s nuclear arsenal. Regional Instability: The spread of nuclear weapons also emboldens nuclear powers, contributing to regional instability. States that lack nuclear weapons need to fear direct military attack from other states, but states with nuclear weapons can be confident that they can deter an intentional military attack, giving them an incentive to be more aggressive in the conduct of their foreign policy. In this way, nuclear weapons provide a shield under which states can feel free to engage in lower-level aggression. Indeed, international relations theories about the “stability-instability paradox” maintain that stability at the nuclear level contributes to conventional instability.60 Historically, we have seen that the spread of nuclear weapons has emboldened their possessors and contributed to regional instability. Recent scholarly analyses have demonstrated that, after controlling for other relevant factors, nuclear-weapon states are more likely to engage in conflict than nonnuclear-weapon states and that this aggressiveness is more pronounced in new nuclear states that have less experience with nuclear diplomacy.61 Similarly, research on internal decision-making in Pakistan reveals that Pakistani foreign policymakers may have been emboldened by the acquisition of nuclear weapons, which encouraged them to initiate militarized disputes against India.62
33 33  
34 -The most important reason to be concerned about nuclear weapons in Asia, of course, is the threat that nuclear weapons might be used. To be sure, the use of nuclear weapons remains remote, but the probability is not zero and the consequences could be catastrophic. The subject, therefore, deserves careful scrutiny. Nuclear use would overturn a 70-year tradition of nonuse, could result in large-scale death and destruction, and might set a precedent that shapes how nuclear weapons are viewed, proliferated, and postured decades hence. The dangers of escalation may be magnified in a multipolar nuclear order in which small skirmishes present the potential to quickly draw in multiple powers, each with a finger on the nuclear trigger. The following discussion will explore the logic of crisis escalation and strategic stability in a multipolar nuclear order.14
35 -First and foremost, the existence of multipolar nuclear powers means that crises may pit multiple nuclear-armed states against one another. This may be the result of formal planning if a state’s strategy calls for fighting multiple nuclear-armed adversaries simultaneously. A state may choose such a strategy if it believes that a war with one of these states would inevitably mean war with both. Alternatively, in a war between state A and state B, state A may decide to conduct a preventive strike on state C for fear that it would otherwise seek to exploit the aftermath of the war between states A and B. Given U.S. nuclear strategy in the early Cold War, for example, it is likely that a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union would have also resulted in U.S. nuclear attacks against China, even if China had not been a direct participant in the precipitating dispute.
36 -In addition, conflicts of interest between nuclear powers may inadvertently impinge on the interests of other nuclear-armed states, drawing them into conflict. There is always a danger that one nuclear power could take action against a nuclear rival and that this action would unintentionally cross a red line for a third nuclear power, triggering a tripartite nuclear crisis. Linton Brooks and Mira Rapp-Hooper have dubbed this category of phenomena the “security trilemma.”15 For example, if the United States were to engage in a show of force in an effort to signal resolve to Russia, such as the flushing of nuclear submarines, this action could inadvertently trigger a crisis for China.
37 -There is also the issue of “catalytic” war. This may be the first mechanism by which Cold War strategists feared that multiple nuclear players could increase the motivations for a nuclear exchange. They worried that a third nuclear power, such as China, might conduct a nuclear strike on one of the superpowers, leading the wounded superpower to conclude wrongly that the other superpower was responsible and thereby retaliate against an innocent state presumed to be the aggressor. This outcome was seen as potentially attractive to the third state as a way of destroying the superpowers and promoting itself within the global power hierarchy. Fortunately, this scenario never came to pass during the Cold War. With modern intelligence, reconnaissance, and early warning capabilities among the major powers, it is more difficult to imagine such a scenario today, although this risk is still conceivable among less technologically developed states.
38 -In addition to acting directly against one another, nuclear powers could be drawn into smaller conflicts between their allies and brought face to face in peak crises. International relations theorists discuss the concept of “chain ganging” within alliance relationships, the dangers of which are more severe when the possibility of nuclear escalation is present.16 Although this was a potential problem even in a bipolar nuclear order, the more nuclear weapons states present, the greater the likelihood of multiple nuclear powers entering a crisis. A similar logic suggests that the more fingers on the nuclear trigger, the more likely it is that nuclear weapons will be used.
39 -Multipolar nuclear crises are not without historical precedent.17 Several Cold War crises featured the Soviet Union against the United States and its European nuclear-armed allies, Britain and later France. The 1973 Arab-Israeli War involved the United States, the Soviet Union, and a nuclear-armed Israel. The United States has been an interested party in regional nuclear disputes, including the Sino-Soviet border war of 1969 and several crises in the past two decades on the Indian subcontinent. Indeed, many of these crises stand out as among the most dangerous of the nuclear era.
40 -Accidents are likely and go global – outweighs intentional wars
41 -Hayes 15 (Peter, Executive Director for the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability, “Ending Nuclear Threat via a Northeast Asia Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone,” http://nautilus.org/napsnet/napsnet-special-reports/ending-a-nuclear-threat-via-a-northeast-asia-nuclear-weapons-free-zone/)
42 -Deterrence, compellence, and reassurance are credible depending on the resolve and capability of the state projecting nuclear threat, and the ability of the threatened state to respond in kind or asymmetrically, to offset these threats. All three types of effects are almost always present in a nuclear threat made by one party to another; sometimes all three effects may be in play at the same time, either in the intention of the state projecting nuclear threat, or in the perception of the state that is the target of the threat, or in the perceptions of third parties. It is rare for the intentions and perceptions of these two or more affected states to be the same. Therein lies much of the risk of misperception, misunderstanding, and inadvertent escalation to nuclear war. This risk arising from miscalculation is compounded by the accidental risks of nuclear war because of technical or computer malfunctions, misinterpreted signals of an impending attack, problems in communication systems, problems in fail-safe and control systems, and cybernetic organizational feedbacks that could lead to loss-of-control of conventional and nuclear forces. 3. Nuclear Threat in Northeast Asia All states in the Northeast Asia region fall under the shadow of the threat of nuclear war. Sometimes, this threat is intended, manipulated, and calibrated, by a variety of signals—nuclear testing, delivery system testing, visible transiting deployments, forward deployment in host countries, declaratory doctrines, operational doctrines, political statements, propaganda statements, sharing via deliberate open line communications, or even what is not done or said at a particularly tense moment. Nuclear threat is one of the bases of interstate relations between the long-standing NWSs in this region, the United States, China, and Russia, forming a triangle of strategic nuclear deterrence, compellence, and reassurance that operates continuously and generally; and sometimes becomes part of an immediate confrontation. Accordingly, these types of threat are termed general and immediate in western literature.3 Thus, general and strategic nuclear deterrence may be said to operate to ensure that NWSs avoid actions that might suggest that they could involve nuclear weapons and intentions to use them—thereby creating a cautionary behavior that operates all the time.
35 +Weak nuclear states are incentivized to REDUCE checks on nuclear escalation to increase the probability of threats
36 +Powell 15 Robert Powell (Robson Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.), "Nuclear Brinkmanship, Limited War, and Military Power," International Organization, Summer 2015 AZ
37 +These effects highlight in a very simple way some of the incentives a weak state has to “go nuclear” and thereby be able to transform a contest of strength into one of resolve. If a weak state has no nuclear weapons, it cannot threaten to engage in a process that may ultimately end in its launching a nuclear attack against its adversary. In other words, the potential and minimal risks are zero: () = ()=0 for all . Absent any risk of escalation, the stronger state brings all of its power to bear (∗ = ). Nuclear weapons and the latent threat of escalation compel it to bring less power to bear ( e ). More generally, a militarily weak but resolute state that already has nuclear weapons will be advantaged by a doctrine, posture, and force structure in which the potential risk rises rapidly as more power is brought to bear (a large ). We can see these incentives in the evolution of Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine. In order to deter a militarily stronger adversary from threatening its vital interests, Pakistan, like NATO before it, has eschewed a no-first use nuclear doctrine. After becoming an overt nuclear state in 1998, Pakistan moved toward a nuclear posture which envisioned the possibly rapid, “first use of nuclear weapons against conventional attacks.” This in turned required the operationalization of nuclear weapons as “usable warfighting instruments.”57 As former Pakistani General Feroz Khan puts it, “With relatively smaller conventional forces, and lacking adequate technical means, especially in early warning and surveillance, Pakistan relies on a more proactive nuclear defensive policy.”58 Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States made the same point in the spring of 2001. Because of the growing conventional asymmetry with India, “Pakistan will be increasingly forced to rely on strategic capabilities... Risks of escalation through accident and miscalculation cannot be discounted.”59 In brief, Pakistan’s nuclear posture, which Narang describes as “asymmetric escalation,” entails a fundamental trade-off. When compared to a posture of “assured retaliation,” which emphasizes survivable second-strike forces targeted against an adversary’s key strategic centers, asymmetric escalation depends on being able to use or credibly threaten to use nuclear weapons against invading conventional forces. However, the forces needed to implement this “can generate severe command and control pressures that increase the risk of inadvertent use of nuclear weapons.”60 Pakistan’s acceptance of a riskier force posture is in keeping with the incentives highlighted in the model. The potential risk of nuclear escalation if India brings a given amount of power to bear is higher if Pakistan has an asymmetric-escalation doctrine. That is,  is higher as illustrated in the shift from 0 to 1 in Figure 6. As a result, India brings less power to bear (e decreases) and Pakistan is better off ((e) increases).
43 43  
44 -1AC – Heg S
45 -Surge in nuclear energy challenges the NPT
46 -Miller and Sagan 9 - Steven E. Miller, Director, International Security Program; Editor-in-Chief, International Security; Co-Principal Investigator, Project on Managing the Atom, Scott Sagan, Former Research Fellow, International Security Program, 1981-1982; Editorial Board Member, Quarterly Journal: International Security ("Nuclear Power Without Nuclear Proliferation?" Journal Article, Daedalus, volume 138, issue 4, pages 7-18, http://belfercenter.hks.harvard.edu/publication/19850/nuclear_power_without_nuclear_proliferation.html) RMT
47 -This surge of interest in nuclear energy — labeled by some proponents as "the renaissance in nuclear power" — is, moreover, occurring simultaneously with mounting concern about the health of the nuclear nonproliferation regime, the regulatory framework that constrains and governs the world's civil and military-related nuclear affairs. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and related institutions have been taxed by new worries, such as the growth in global terrorism, and have been painfully tested by protracted crises involving nuclear weapons proliferation in North Korea and potentially in Iran. (Indeed, some observers suspect that growing interest in nuclear power in some countries, especially in the Middle East, is not unrelated to Iran's uranium enrichment program and Tehran's movement closer to a nuclear weapons capability.) Confidence in the NPT regime seems to be eroding even as interest in nuclear power is expanding.
48 -This realization raises crucial questions for the future of global security. Will the growth of nuclear power lead to increased risks of nuclear weapons proliferation and nuclear terrorism? Will the nonproliferation regime be adequate to ensure safety and security in a world more widely and heavily invested in nuclear power? The authors in this two-volume (Fall 2009 and Winter 2010) special issue of Dædalus have one simple and clear answer to these questions: It depends.
49 -On what will it depend? Unfortunately, the answer to that question is not so simple and clear, for the technical, economic, and political factors that will determine whether future generations will have more nuclear power without more nuclear proliferation are both exceedingly complex and interrelated. How rapidly and in which countries will new nuclear power plants be built? Will the future expansion of nuclear energy take place primarily in existing nuclear power states or will there be many new entrants to the field? Which countries will possess the facilities for enriching uranium or reprocessing plutonium, technical capabilities that could be used to produce either nuclear fuel for reactors or the materials for nuclear bombs? How can physical protection of nuclear materials from terrorist organizations best be ensured? How can new entrants into nuclear power generation best maintain safety to prevent accidents? The answers to these questions will be critical determinants of the technological dimension of our nuclear future.
50 -Asian prolif causes wildfire proliferation which collapses the NPT and crushes US credibility in Asia
51 -Santoro, senior fellow @ Pacific Forum CSIS, 15
52 -(David, and John K. Warden is a WSD-Handa fellow at the Pacific Forum CSIS “Assuring Japan and South Korea in the Second Nuclear Age,” https://twq.elliott.gwu.edu/sites/twq.elliott.gwu.edu/files/downloads/TWQ_Spring2015_Santoro-Warden.pdf)
53 -Discussions about the requirements for U.S. extended deterrence and assurance are making a comeback. During the Cold War, U.S. analysts focused primarily on Western Europe, but in recent years the challenges of extended deterrence and assurance have been starker in Northeast Asia. Discussing the requirements for U.S. extended deterrence and assurance involves asking how the United States can deter its adversaries and assure its allies. In both cases, the critical factor is perception. According to analysts Clark Murdock and Jessica Yeats, “In the same way that deterrence must be tailored to each actor, situation, and form of warfare, assurance must be tailored to the strategic culture, threat perceptions, values, and specific concerns of each ally.”1 In this paper, we primarily address the requirements of the latter, focusing on U.S. efforts to assure its two Northeast Asian treaty allies: Japan and South Korea. After analyzing the current security environment—specifically the assurance requirements in Northeast Asia in this second, post-Cold War nuclear age—we turn to the initial steps that the United States has taken to strengthen assurance. Finally, we explore the current assurance agenda with Japan and South Korea, highlighting key challenges and opportunities. Dubbed the second nuclear age,2 the current context has been widely discussed for its differences with the Cold War, or the world’s first nuclear age. During this first age, two nuclear superpowers were locked in a competition for global dominance with allies on each side, a handful of which developed small nuclear arsenals. U.S.–Soviet competition was intense, but remained cold in part because Washington and Moscow developed arms-control and crisismanagement mechanisms to regulate their behavior. Stability endured because even though Washington and Moscow did not control all the triggers, they had sufficient authority to keep bloc discipline and avoid becoming entrapped in a nuclear war. The security environment was always extremely dangerous because the possibility of global nuclear annihilation was omnipresent, but per the notorious formula, “a stable balance of terror” endured.3 The end of the Cold War gave rise to hopes—mainly in Western quarters— that nuclear weapons would be relegated to the dustbin of history.4 This belief led the United States, the United Kingdom, and France to downsize their arsenals and assist a financially-strapped Russia to do the same. Meanwhile, several states across Asia—in Western Asia (the Middle East), South Asia, and East Asia—developed nuclear and long-range missile programs.5 China’s efforts to modernize its nuclear and missile forces continued steadily. India and Pakistan pushed forward with their own programs and, after exploding nuclear devices in 1998, became nuclear-armed states. North Korea conducted several rocket tests during the late 1990s and tested its first nuclear device in 2006. Iran, Syria, and others also developed nuclear and missile programs. By the early 21st century, the Cold War order tightly controlled by the United States and the Soviet Union was replaced by a multiplayer arena with several less experienced nuclear decision-making parties and an epicenter in Asia. As a result, today, while there is less risk of global annihilation— both because major-power relations have improved and because important firebreaks against conflict are in place, including robust crisis management mechanisms and enhanced economic interdependence—the potential for war, and even nuclear use, is growing.6 Not surprisingly, these developments have led U.S. allies to seek strengthened assurances that the United States, their main security guarantor, will continue to protect them from coercion and attack. The assurance challenge is particularly difficult because it turns on more than effective deterrence. Deterrence primarily requires the United States to influence an adversary’s calculus at critical moments during a crisis. For allies to be fully assured, however, the United States must, during peacetime, convince them 1) that U.S. extended deterrence will succeed in preventing adversaries from challenging their core interests, and 2) that should deterrence fail, the United States can and will provide for their defense. Hence former British defense minister Denis Healey’s formulation that during the Cold War it took “only five percent credibility of U.S. retaliation to deter the Russians, but ninety-five percent credibility to reassure the Europeans.”7 In the second nuclear age, it is more difficult for the United States to assure its Northeast Asian allies than it was during the Cold War. James Schoff notes that during the Cold War “the U.S. commitment to counter the Soviet threat was largely unquestioned in Tokyo, and the details about how deterrence worked mattered little.”8 Today, the United States must convince allies that it can deter multiple nuclear-armed adversaries, some of whom have less adversarial relations with the United States than the Soviet Union did. Just as important, the United States also faces an equally difficult task of convincing its allies that it could and would respond should extended deterrence fail. North Korea continues to develop long-range missiles and nuclear weapons, and China is modernizing its military and acting increasingly assertively. The United States’ relationship with China is also more complex than its Cold War relationship with the Soviet Union, featuring varying degrees of competition and cooperation. At the same time, the United States has shifted from a 1960s deterrent posture of deploying thousands of nuclear weapons, including 3,000 forward deployed in the Asia–Pacific (1,200 in Okinawa), to one with far fewer deployed nuclear weapons and none forward-deployed in Asia.9 U.S. assurance of allies exists along a spectrum, and Washington must carefully balance its desire to reduce allied anxiety against other interests. There are some allied interests that the United States—rightly—does not deem worthy of risking war. But if the gap between the United States and its allies becomes too large, allies will lose faith in U.S. assurance, which could have disruptive consequences. In the worst case scenario for the United States, Japan or South Korea might choose to bandwagon with U.S. competitors in the region. Another slightly better, but still deeply troublesome, possibility is for Tokyo and Seoul to develop nuclear arsenals of their own, which would likely eviscerate the remaining credibility of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). In either case, a loss of confidence in the United States as a reliable security guarantor in Northeast Asia would send reverberations across the entire U.S. alliance system. Development of nuclear weapons by Japan or South Korea is not a farfetched scenario. Both possess the latent capability to develop weapons programs relatively quickly, and some in South Korea and to a lesser extent Japan have advocated that their countries should go nuclear if the Northeast Asian security environment deteriorates or they lose confidence in the United States as a reliable guarantor.10 In South Korea, there are also signs of public support for nuclearization. After North Korea’s third nuclear test, for example, an Asan Institute poll revealed that 66 percent of people in South Korea wanted nuclear weapons.11
54 -NPT key to heg – global compliance strengthens perception of US primacy
55 -Gibbons 16 Rebecca Davis Gibbons (PhD candidate at Georgetown), "American Hegemony and the Politics of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime" Georgetown Dissertations, 4/15/2016 AZ
56 -This project illustrated how commitment patterns within the nuclear nonproliferation regime differ from other multilateral treaty regimes. In the extant academic literature, domestic political factors are widely reported as the key variables for explaining variation in commitment for many treaty regimes, including those related to human rights, trade, and the environment. In contrast, for the nuclear nonproliferation regime the role of the hegemon is paramount for explaining commitment. The hegemon is the key factor in explaining how this regime works for three interrelated reasons: the regime was established by and continues to be promoted by the hegemon, the hegemon has a greater strategic interest in the regime’s success than all other states, and the regime is global. The first reason why this regime may be different than others is the fact that the hegemon established the regime initially and continues to have deep involvement in its perpetuation. Because of the hegemon’s role within the regime, all other states associate the regime with the hegemon’s leadership. This contrasts with other institutions in which a less powerful state or grouping of states established the treaty or regime. If the institutions are not founded by the hegemon, they are less likely to be perceived as part of the hegemonic global order and the mechanisms of hegemonic leadership are unlikely to apply. Other factors, such as domestic politics or regime type, would likely explain variation in commitment in these cases.
57 -The second reason the hegemon matters to explaining variation in commitment with this regime is because of the difference in interests among the parties involved. The hegemon has a much greater strategic interest than other states in preventing additional nuclear weapons states around the globe and thus prioritizes this issue, as illustrated by the history of the regime. Moreover, the hundreds of federal workers at the U.S. State Department, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Department of the Treasury, Department of Commerce, and across the Intelligence Community, tasked in some way with addressing global proliferation illustrate this commitment to nuclear nonproliferation. Many other states in the international system do not prioritize this issue on a global scale, and certainly not with commensurate resources to that of the United States. These states thus do not immediately seek to join new elements of the regime, and as a result, the hegemon must work to persuade them to commit. If all states cared about global nuclear nonproliferation as much as the hegemon, there would not be such variation in commitment and the hegemon would not need carrots and sticks to garner commitment. Though the majority of states do reap absolute gains (versus relative gains) from the success of the nonproliferation regime, the value of those absolute gains are not equal—they are much greater for the hegemon. In other institutions where states’ gains are more equal, other factors, especially those at the domestic level, are likely to explain variation in commitment.
58 -The final reason why the mechanisms of commitment are different in this regime is because the hegemon seeks a truly global regime. Proliferation anywhere potentially weakens the aspirations of the hegemon. In regional institutions, the hegemon may be completely absent and then other factors would explain variation in states’ commitment. Interests are also less likely to be as divergent in regional institutions as they are in a global regime. For example, many regions around the globe now have Nuclear Weapons Free Zones, negotiated among the states in a particular geographic area. Because these institutions exist at the regional level, states are likely to perceive them as more relevant to their regional security than the global nuclear nonproliferation regime, and mechanisms of commitment will be less likely to stem from the hegemon than regional and domestic influences.
39 +1AC – Accidents
59 59  
60 -More broadly, the non-proliferation regime is the lynchpin of hegemony
61 -Gavin 15 Francis Gavin (first Frank Stanton Chair in Nuclear Security Policy Studies and Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), "Strategies of Inhibition: U.S. Grand Strategy, the Nuclear Revolution, and Nonproliferation," International Security, Summer 2015 AZ
62 -- influence allies and deter enemies
63 -- miscalc  war
64 -- entangles US in unwanted conflicts
65 -- tipping points  nuclear cascade
66 -The objective of the United States' strategies of inhibition was and remains simple: to prevent other states—regardless of their political affiliation or orientation—from developing or acquiring independent nuclear forces, and when this effort fails, to reverse or mitigate the consequences of proliferation. Across different administrations and changing international circumstances, the United States has shown itself willing to pay a very high price to achieve these ends. When it is unable to stop proliferation, it works hard to prevent the proliferator from undertaking policies—weaponization, pursuit of a missile capability, and especially nuclear testing—that would increase the pressure on other states to acquire nuclear weapons. The United States is also more willing to countenance nuclear weapons programs, such as Great Britain's, that become dependent on and are coordinated with U.S. nuclear systems.33
67 -Why has the United States been so interested in preventing states from possessing independent nuclear forces? Many international relations scholars argue that the spread of nuclear weapons can stabilize world politics.34 Nuclear weapons, they contend, have little effectiveness for anything but deterrence.35 These analysts are often perplexed by or critical of U.S. efforts to halt nuclear proliferation, and wonder if policymakers understand how nuclear deterrence works. Even those analysts who do not support nuclear proliferation are puzzled by the high price of strategies the United States has employed to prevent it.
68 -These scholars miss a fundamental point: historically, U.S. policymakers have demonstrated less enthusiasm than the conventional wisdom suggests for the supposedly stabilizing aspects of nuclear weapons for international relations. Of far greater concern has been the worry over how other countries might use nuclear weapons against the United States. The strategies of inhibition were developed to stem the power-equalizing effects of nuclear weapons and have been motivated by the desire of the United States to safeguard its security and preserve its dominant power. As U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk pointed out, “It was almost in the nature of nuclear weapons that if someone had them, he did not want others to have them.”36
69 -There are seven interrelated elements driving the United States' strategies of inhibition. They are motivated by the goal to protect the United States from nuclear attack and/or the desire to maintain U.S. freedom of action to pursue other strategic goals.
70 -First, the United States has feared nuclear weapons being used against it, either through a deliberate nuclear attack or an accidental launch. The higher the number of states that possess nuclear weapons, the greater the risk the United States might be hit. Given the horrific consequences of an attack, American decisionmakers have considered it their responsibility to decrease this danger by limiting proliferation and its consequences. As U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told his Soviet counterpart, Andrei Gromyko, it was “frightening to think of a world where anybody could have a bomb.”37
71 -Second, given the difficulty of identifying where a nuclear attack may have originated, U.S. policymakers worry about the catalytic or “detonator” consequences of proliferation; in other words, they fear that an independent nuclear state might threaten to use or actually employ a nuclear weapon to draw the United States into a conflict in which it did not want to become involved.38 There is evidence that Pakistan, South Africa, Israel, and possibly France pursued nuclear strategies aimed at pulling an otherwise unwilling United States into crises on their behalf.39 A 1962 top-secret study explained this fear: the “Nth country problem” might generate “the danger of major war being ‘catalyzed,’ deliberately or inadvertently, by the possessors of nuclear weapons outside the control of the major alliances.”40
72 -Third, the United States has worried about the emergence of nuclear tipping points or nuclear dominoes, whereby one key state acquiring a nuclear capability might lead four or five other states to do the same.41 After the People's Republic of China tested a nuclear device in 1964, for example, President Lyndon Johnson's Committee on Nuclear Proliferation (also known as the Gilpatric Committee) warned: “The world is fast approaching a point of no return in the prospects of controlling the spread of nuclear weapons.”42 Not only would “proliferation cascades” increase the number of nuclear states in the world, with all the dangers that this could bring; it could also increase tensions and dangers in parts of the world the United States has considered important. Furthermore, it could drive U.S. allies—for example, Japan and South Korea—to target each other in ways inimical to the United States' interests.43
73 -Fourth, U.S. policymakers have fully appreciated the power of nuclear deterrence, but have feared that nuclear weapons could be used to deter the United States and limit its freedom of action, both regionally and in the world at large.44 From the beginning of the nuclear age, the United States recognized the potential for nuclear weapons to become the great equalizer, “weapons of the weak,” allowing states with far inferior conventional, economic, and other forms of power to prevent it from doing what it wants. In the words of the Gilpatric Committee report, “As additional nations obtained nuclear weapons, our diplomatic and military influence would wane, and strong pressures would arise to retreat to isolation to avoid the risk of involvement in nuclear war.”45 And as Michael Horowitz explains, a feeble state “possessing even a single nuclear weapon influences America's strategic calculations and seems to make coercive success harder.”46
74 -Fifth, it is easier to control allies that do not have their own nuclear weapons and that depend on the United States for their security. The United States has bristled at the independent policies that nuclear-armed allies such as France and Israel have pursued, often against its wishes. A Germany, Taiwan, Japan, or South Korea with nuclear weapons might be more likely to challenge the regional or international status quo with threats or the use of force in ways inimical to U.S. interests. President John F. Kennedy, for example, warned that if U.S. allies acquired nuclear weapons, “they would be in a position to be entirely independent and we might be on the outside looking in.”47
75 -Sixth, U.S. policymakers have feared that otherwise weak adversaries might become emboldened to act aggressively if they acquired nuclear weapons.48 And given the nature of nuclear weapons—where the absolute number a state possesses may be less important than its willingness to use them—small nuclear-armed states might even try to coerce the United States during a crisis.49 As Secretary of State Dulles lamented to his Soviet counterpart, “A dictator could use the bombs to blackmail the rest of the world.”50 And in 1962, a government report suggested that “coping with the possessors of a small, extortionate deterrent force will require the mastery of some new political-military techniques.”51 Finally, containing nuclear states is far more expensive than containing nonnuclear states.52
76 -Seventh, although dozens of states could potentially build a nuclear weapon, U.S. policymakers remain concerned that only great powers possess the economic, technological, and bureaucratic capacities to build robust command, control, communications, and intelligence capabilities and to keep their weapons safe and secure.53 This concern matters for two reasons. First, small and weak nuclear states could disintegrate and lose control of their weapons, including to substate actors and terrorists.54 As Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen revealed about Pakistan's nuclear program, “I worry a great deal about those weapons falling into the hands of terrorists and either being proliferated or potentially used. And so, control of those, stability, stable control of those weapons is a key concern.”55 Second, the United States might be forced to politically support—against its other interests—otherwise problematic, weak nuclear states to forestall the dangers their instability might bring. When the Cold War ended, for example, the United States decided not to encourage the breakup of the Soviet Union—the preferred geostrategic choice of the George H.W. Bush administration—because of fears over nuclear security, safety, and proliferation. As President Bush and his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, lamented, administration officials “decided they would prefer to see weapons in the hands of just one entity, which had the stability and experience to secure them.”56
77 -As the greatest power in the international system seeking to maintain its security and pursue its freedom of action in the world, the United States found these challenges intolerable. The strategies of inhibition were natural, if difficult, costly, and often destabilizing, responses. For all of these reasons, the purportedly peace-inducing qualities of nuclear weapons typically took a back seat to American policymakers' fears about the effect of nuclear proliferation on U.S. national interests. The United States worked hard to inhibit the spread of independent nuclear weapons programs and mitigate the consequences of proliferation when it could not be stopped.2
78 -US leadership prevents great power war and existential governance crises
79 -Brooks, Ikenberry, and Wohlforth ’13 (Stephen, Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, John Ikenberry is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University in the Department of Politics and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, William C. Wohlforth is the Daniel Webster Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College “Don’t Come Home America: The Case Against Retrenchment,” International Security, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Winter 2012/13), pp. 7–51)
80 -A core premise of deep engagement is that it prevents the emergence of a far more dangerous global security environment. For one thing, as noted above, the United States’ overseas presence gives it the leverage to restrain partners from taking provocative action. Perhaps more important, its core alliance commitments also deter states with aspirations to regional hegemony from contemplating expansion and make its partners more secure, reducing their incentive to adopt solutions to their security problems that threaten others and thus stoke security dilemmas. The contention that engaged U.S. power dampens the baleful effects of anarchy is consistent with influential variants of realist theory. Indeed, arguably the scariest portrayal of the war-prone world that would emerge absent the “American Pacifier” is provided in the works of John Mearsheimer, who forecasts dangerous multipolar regions replete with security competition, arms races, nuclear proliferation and associated preventive war temptations, regional rivalries, and even runs at regional hegemony and full-scale great power war. 72 How do retrenchment advocates, the bulk of whom are realists, discount this benefit? Their arguments are complicated, but two capture most of the variation: (1) U.S. security guarantees are not necessary to prevent dangerous rivalries and conflict in Eurasia; or (2) prevention of rivalry and conflict in Eurasia is not a U.S. interest. Each response is connected to a different theory or set of theories, which makes sense given that the whole debate hinges on a complex future counterfactual (what would happen to Eurasia’s security setting if the United States truly disengaged?). Although a certain answer is impossible, each of these responses is nonetheless a weaker argument for retrenchment than advocates acknowledge. The first response flows from defensive realism as well as other international relations theories that discount the conflict-generating potential of anarchy under contemporary conditions. 73 Defensive realists maintain that the high expected costs of territorial conquest, defense dominance, and an array of policies and practices that can be used credibly to signal benign intent, mean that Eurasia’s major states could manage regional multipolarity peacefully without the American pacifier. Retrenchment would be a bet on this scholarship, particularly in regions where the kinds of stabilizers that nonrealist theories point to—such as democratic governance or dense institutional linkages—are either absent or weakly present. There are three other major bodies of scholarship, however, that might give decisionmakers pause before making this bet. First is regional expertise. Needless to say, there is no consensus on the net security effects of U.S. withdrawal. Regarding each region, there are optimists and pessimists. Few experts expect a return of intense great power competition in a post-American Europe, but many doubt European governments will pay the political costs of increased EU defense cooperation and the budgetary costs of increasing military outlays. 74 The result might be a Europe that is incapable of securing itself from various threats that could be destabilizing within the region and beyond (e.g., a regional conflict akin to the 1990s Balkan wars), lacks capacity for global security missions in which U.S. leaders might want European participation, and is vulnerable to the influence of outside rising powers. What about the other parts of Eurasia where the United States has a substantial military presence? Regarding the Middle East, the balance begins to swing toward pessimists concerned that states currently backed by Washington— notably Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia—might take actions upon U.S. retrenchment that would intensify security dilemmas. And concerning East Asia, pessimism regarding the region’s prospects without the American pacifier is pronounced. Arguably the principal concern expressed by area experts is that Japan and South Korea are likely to obtain a nuclear capacity and increase their military commitments, which could stoke a destabilizing reaction from China. It is notable that during the Cold War, both South Korea and Taiwan moved to obtain a nuclear weapons capacity and were only constrained from doing so by a still-engaged United States. 75 The second body of scholarship casting doubt on the bet on defensive realism’s sanguine portrayal is all of the research that undermines its conception of state preferences. Defensive realism’s optimism about what would happen if the United States retrenched is very much dependent on its particular—and highly restrictive—assumption about state preferences; once we relax this assumption, then much of its basis for optimism vanishes. Specifically, the prediction of post-American tranquility throughout Eurasia rests on the assumption that security is the only relevant state preference, with security defined narrowly in terms of protection from violent external attacks on the homeland. Under that assumption, the security problem is largely solved as soon as offense and defense are clearly distinguishable, and offense is extremely expensive relative to defense. Burgeoning research across the social and other sciences, however, undermines that core assumption: states have preferences not only for security but also for prestige, status, and other aims, and they engage in trade-offs among the various objectives. 76 In addition, they define security not just in terms of territorial protection but in view of many and varied milieu goals. It follows that even states that are relatively secure may nevertheless engage in highly competitive behavior. Empirical studies show that this is indeed sometimes the case. 77 In sum, a bet on a benign postretrenchment Eurasia is a bet that leaders of major countries will never allow these nonsecurity preferences to influence their strategic choices. To the degree that these bodies of scholarly knowledge have predictive leverage, U.S. retrenchment would result in a significant deterioration in the security environment in at least some of the world’s key regions. We have already mentioned the third, even more alarming body of scholarship. Offensive realism predicts that the withdrawal of the American pacifier will yield either a competitive regional multipolarity complete with associated insecurity, arms racing, crisis instability, nuclear proliferation, and the like, or bids for regional hegemony, which may be beyond the capacity of local great powers to contain (and which in any case would generate intensely competitive behavior, possibly including regional great power war). Hence it is unsurprising that retrenchment advocates are prone to focus on the second argument noted above: that avoiding wars and security dilemmas in the world’s core regions is not a U.S. national interest. Few doubt that the United States could survive the return of insecurity and conflict among Eurasian powers, but at what cost? Much of the work in this area has focused on the economic externalities of a renewed threat of insecurity and war, which we discuss below. Focusing on the pure security ramifications, there are two main reasons why decisionmakers may be rationally reluctant to run the retrenchment experiment. First, overall higher levels of conflict make the world a more dangerous place. Were Eurasia to return to higher levels of interstate military competition, one would see overall higher levels of military spending and innovation and a higher likelihood of competitive regional proxy wars and arming of client states—all of which would be concerning, in part because it would promote a faster diffusion of military power away from the United States. Greater regional insecurity could well feed proliferation cascades, as states such as Egypt, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Saudi Arabia all might choose to create nuclear forces. 78 It is unlikely that proliferation decisions by any of these actors would be the end of the game: they would likely generate pressure locally for more proliferation. Following Kenneth Waltz, many retrenchment advocates are proliferation optimists, assuming that nuclear deterrence solves the security problem. 79 Usually carried out in dyadic terms, the debate over the stability of proliferationchanges as the numbers go up. Proliferation optimism rests on assumptions of rationality and narrow security preferences. In social science, however, such assumptions are inevitably probabilistic. Optimists assume that most states are led by rational leaders, most will overcome organizational problems and resist the temptation to preempt before feared neighbors nuclearize, and most pursue only security and are risk averse. Confidence in such probabilistic assumptions declines if the world were to move from nine to twenty, thirty, or forty nuclear states. In addition, many of the other dangers noted by analysts who are concerned about the destabilizing effects of nuclear proliferation—including the risk of accidents and the prospects that some new nuclear powers will not have truly survivable forces—seem prone to go up as the number of nuclear powers grows. 80 Moreover, the risk of “unforeseen crisis dynamics” that could spin out of control is also higher as the number of nuclear powers increases. Finally, add to these concerns the enhanced danger of nuclear leakage, and a world with overall higher levels of security competition becomes yet more worrisome. The argument that maintaining Eurasian peace is not a U.S. interest faces a second problem. On widely accepted realist assumptions, acknowledging that U.S. engagement preserves peace dramatically narrows the difference between retrenchment and deep engagement. For many supporters of retrenchment, the optimal strategy for a power such as the United States, which has attained regional hegemony and is separated from other great powers by oceans, is offshore balancing: stay over the horizon and “pass the buck” to local powers to do the dangerous work of counterbalancing any local rising power. The United States should commit to onshore balancing only when local balancing is likely to fail and a great power appears to be a credible contender for regional hegemony, as in the cases of Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union in the midtwentieth century. The problem is that China’s rise puts the possibility of its attaining regional hegemony on the table, at least in the medium to long term. As Mearsheimer notes, “The United States will have to play a key role in countering China, because its Asian neighbors are not strong enough to do it by themselves.” 81 Therefore, unless China’s rise stalls, “the United States is likely to act toward China similar to the way it behaved toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War.” 82 It follows that the United States should take no action that would compromise its capacity to move to onshore balancing in the future. It will need to maintain key alliance relationships in Asia as well as the formidably expensive military capacity to intervene there. The implication is to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, reduce the presence in Europe, and pivot to Asia— just what the United States is doing. 83 In sum, the argument that U.S. security commitments are unnecessary for peace is countered by a lot of scholarship, including highly influential realist scholarship. In addition, the argument that Eurasian peace is unnecessary for U.S. security is weakened by the potential for a large number of nasty security consequences as well as the need to retain a latent onshore balancing capacity that dramatically reduces the savings retrenchment might bring. Moreover, switching between offshore and onshore balancing could well be difªcult. Bringing together the thrust of many of the arguments discussed so far underlines the degree to which the case for retrenchment misses the underlying logic of the deep engagement strategy. By supplying reassurance, deterrence, and active management, the United States lowers security competition in the world’s key regions, thereby preventing the emergence of a hothouse atmosphere for growing new military capabilities. Alliance ties dissuade partners from ramping up and also provide leverage to prevent military transfers to potential rivals. On top of all this, the United States’ formidable military machine may deter entry by potential rivals. Current great power military expenditures as a percentage of GDP are at historical lows, and thus far other major powers have shied away from seeking to match top-end U.S. military capabilities. In addition, they have so far been careful to avoid attracting the “focused enmity” of the United States. 84 All of the world’s most modern militaries are U.S. allies (America’s alliance system of more than sixty countries now accounts for some 80 percent of global military spending), and the gap between the U.S. military capability and that of potential rivals is by many measures growing rather than shrinking. 85
41 +Accidents likely – large releases of radiation are more likely than before
42 +Wheatley et al 16 Spencer Wheatley (ETH Zurich, Department of Management, Technology and Economics, Switzerland), Benjamin Sovacool, Didier Sornette, "Of Disasters and Dragon Kings: A Statistical Analysis of Nuclear Power Incidents and Accidents," Risk Analysis, March 2016 AZ
43 +Regarding event severity, we found that the distribution of cost underwent a significant regime change shortly after the Three Mile Island major accident. Moderate cost events were suppressed, but extreme ones became more frequent, to the extent that the costs are now well described by the extremely heavy tailed Pareto distribution with parameter inline image. We noted in the introduction that the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 led to plant-specific full-scope control room simulators, plant-specific PSA models for finding and eliminating risks, and new sets of emergency operating instructions. The change of regime that we document here may be the concrete embodiment of these changes catalyzed by the TMI accident. We also identify statistically significant runaway disaster (“dragon-king”) regimes in both NAMS and cost, suggesting that extreme events are amplified to values even larger than those explained under the Pareto distribution with inline image. In view of the extreme risks, the need for better bonding and liability instruments associated with nuclear accident and incident property damage becomes clear. For instance, under the conservative assumption that the cost from Fukushima is the maximum possible, annual accident costs are on par with the construction costs of a single nuclear plant, with the expected annual cost being 1.5 billion USD with a standard deviation of 8 billion USD. If we do not limit the maximum possible cost, then the expected cost under the estimated Pareto model is mathematically infinite. Nuclear reactors are thus assets that can become liabilities in a matter of hours, and it is usually taxpayers, or society at large, that “pays” for these accidents rather than nuclear operators or even electricity consumers. This split of incentives improperly aligns those most responsible for an accident (the principals) from those suffering the cost of nuclear accidents (the agents). One policy suggestion is that we start holding plant operators liable for accident costs through an environmental or accident bonding system,65 which should work together with an appropriate economic model to incentivize the operators. Third, looking to the future, our analysis suggests that nuclear power has inherent safety risks that will likely recur. With the current model—which does not quantify improvements from the industry response to Fukushima—in terms of costs, there is a 50 chance that (i) a Fukushima event (or larger) occurs in 62 years, and (ii) a TMI event (or larger) occurs in 15 years. Further, smaller but still expensive (⩾20 MM 2013 USD) incidents will occur with a frequency of about one per year, under the assumption of a roughly constant fleet of nuclear plants. To curb these risks of future events would require sweeping changes to the industry, as perhaps triggered by Fukushima, which include refinements to reactor operator training, human factors engineering, radiation protection, and many other areas of nuclear power plant operations. To be effective, any changes need to minimize the risk of extreme disasters. Unfortunately, given the shortage of data, it is too early to judge if the risk of events has significantly improved post-Fukushima. We can only raise attention to the fact that similar sweeping regime changes after both Chernobyl (leading to a decrease in frequency) and Three Mile Island (leading to a suppression of moderate events) failed to mitigate the very heavy tailed distribution of costs documented here.
81 81  
45 +Contamination spreads rapidly – no one is safe
46 +Max - Planck- Gesselschaft 12 –The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science is a formally independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German research institute (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Major Reactor, 5-22-2012, "Severe nuclear reactor accidents likely every 10 to 20 years, European study suggests," ScienceDaily, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120522134942.htm) RMT
47 +25 percent of the radioactive particles are transported further than 2,000 kilometres
48 +Subsequently, the researchers determined the geographic distribution of radioactive gases and particles around a possible accident site using a computer model that describes Earth's atmosphere. The model calculates meteorological conditions and flows, and also accounts for chemical reactions in the atmosphere. The model can compute the global distribution of trace gases, for example, and can also simulate the spreading of radioactive gases and particles. To approximate the radioactive contamination, the researchers calculated how the particles of radioactive caesium-137 (137Cs) disperse in the atmosphere, where they deposit on Earth's surface and in what quantities. The 137Cs isotope is a product of the nuclear fission of uranium. It has a half-life of 30 years and was one of the key elements in the radioactive contamination following the disasters of Chernobyl and Fukushima.
49 +The computer simulations revealed that, on average, only eight percent of the 137Cs particles are expected to deposit within an area of 50 kilometres around the nuclear accident site. Around 50 percent of the particles would be deposited outside a radius of 1,000 kilometres, and around 25 percent would spread even further than 2,000 kilometres. These results underscore that reactor accidents are likely to cause radioactive contamination well beyond national borders.
50 +The results of the dispersion calculations were combined with the likelihood of a nuclear meltdown and the actual density of reactors worldwide to calculate the current risk of radioactive contamination around the world. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), an area with more than 40 kilobecquerels of radioactivity per square meter is defined as contaminated.
51 +The team in Mainz found that in Western Europe, where the density of reactors is particularly high, the contamination by more than 40 kilobecquerels per square meter is expected to occur once in about every 50 years. It appears that citizens in the densely populated southwestern part of Germany run the worldwide highest risk of radioactive contamination, associated with the numerous nuclear power plants situated near the borders between France, Belgium and Germany, and the dominant westerly wind direction.
52 +If a single nuclear meltdown were to occur in Western Europe, around 28 million people on average would be affected by contamination of more than 40 kilobecquerels per square meter. This figure is even higher in southern Asia, due to the dense populations. A major nuclear accident there would affect around 34 million people, while in the eastern USA and in East Asia this would be 14 to 21 million people.
53 +"Germany's exit from the nuclear energy program will reduce the national risk of radioactive contamination. However, an even stronger reduction would result if Germany's neighbours were to switch off their reactors," says Jos Lelieveld. "Not only do we need an in-depth and public analysis of the actual risks of nuclear accidents. In light of our findings I believe an internationally coordinated phasing out of nuclear energy should also be considered ," adds the atmospheric chemist.
54 +It’s the single greatest danger to the environment
55 +Stapleton 9 - Richard M Stapleton Is the author of books such as Lead Is a Silent Hazard, writes for pollution issues (“Disasters: Nuclear Accidents” http://www.pollutionissues.com/Co-Ea/Disasters-Nuclear-Accidents.html) RMT
56 +Of all the environmental disaster events that humans are capable of causing, nuclear disasters have the greatest damage potential. The radiation release associated with a nuclear disaster poses significant acute and chronic risks in the immediate environs and chronic risk over a wide geographic area. Radioactive contamination, which typically becomes airborne, is long-lived, with half-lives guaranteeing contamination for hundreds of years.
57 +Concerns over potential nuclear disasters center on nuclear reactors, typically those used to generate electric power. Other concerns involve the transport of nuclear waste and the temporary storage of spent radioactive fuel at nuclear power plants. The fear that terrorists would target a radiation source or create a "dirty bomb" capable of dispersing radiation over a populated area was added to these concerns following the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.
58 +Radioactive emissions of particular concern include strontium-90 and cesium-137, both having thirty-year-plus half-lives, and iodine-131, having a short half-life of eight days but known to cause thyroid cancer. In addition to being highly radioactive, cesium-137 is mistaken for potassium by living organisms. This means that it is passed on up the food chain and bioaccumulated by that process. Strontium-90 mimics the properties of calcium and is deposited in bones where it may either cause cancer or damage bone marrow cells.
59 +Biodiversity loss risks extinction - ecosystems aren’t resilient or redundant
60 +Vule 13-School of Biological Sciences, Louisiana Tech University (Jeffrey V. Yule *, Robert J. Fournier and Patrick L. Hindmarsh, “Biodiversity, Extinction, and Humanity’s Future: The Ecological and Evolutionary Consequences of Human Population and Resource Use”, 2 April 2013, manities 2013, 2, 147–159) RMT
61 +Ecologists recognize that the particulars of the relationship between biodiversity and community resilience in the face of disturbance (a broad range of phenomena including anything from drought, fire, and volcanic eruption to species introductions or removals) depend on context 16,17. Sometimes disturbed communities return relatively readily to pre-disturbance conditions; sometimes they do not. However, accepting as a general truism that biodiversity is an ecological stabilizer is sensible— roughly equivalent to viewing seatbelt use as a good idea: although seatbelts increase the risk of injury in a small minority of car accidents, their use overwhelmingly reduces risk. As humans continue to modify natural environments, we may be reducing their ability to return to pre-disturbance conditions. The concern is not merely academic. Communities provide the ecosystem services on which both human and nonhuman life depends, including the cycling of carbon dioxide and oxygen by photosynthetic organisms, nitrogen fixation and the filtration of water by microbes, and pollination by insects. If disturbances alter communities to the extent that they can no longer provide these crucial services, extinctions (including, possibly, our own) become more likely. In ecology as in science in general, absolutes are rare. Science deals mainly in probabilities, in large part because it attempts to address the universe’s abundant uncertainties. Species-rich, diverse communities characterized by large numbers of multi-species interactions are not immune to being pushed from one relatively stable state characterized by particular species and interactions to other, quite different states in which formerly abundant species are entirely or nearly entirely absent. Nonetheless, in speciose communities, the removal of any single species is less likely to result in radical change. That said, there are no guarantees that the removal of even a single species from a biodiverse community will not have significant, completely unforeseen consequences.
62 +Indirect interactions can be unexpectedly important to community structure and, historically, have been difficult to observe until some form of disturbance (especially the introduction or elimination of a species) occurs. Experiments have revealed how the presence of predators can increase the diversity of prey species in communities, as when predators of a superior competitor among prey species will allow inferior competing prey species to persist 18. Predators can have even more dramatic effects on communities. The presence or absence of sea otters determines whether inshore areas are characterized by diverse kelp forest communities or an alternative stable state of species poor urchin barrens 19. In the latter case, the absence of otters leaves urchin populations unchecked to overgraze kelp forests, eliminating a habitat feature that supports a wide range of species across a variety of age classes.
63 +Aldo Leopold observed that when trying to determine how a device works by tinkering with it, the first rule of doing the job intelligently is to save all the parts 20. The extinctions that humans have caused certainly represent a significant problem, but there is an additional difficulty with human investigations of and impacts on ecological and evolutionary processes. Often, our tinkering is unintentional and, as a result, recklessly ignores the necessity of caution. Following the logic inherited from Newtonian physics, humans expect single actions to have single effects. Desiring more game species, for instance, humans typically hunt predators (in North America, for instance, extirpating wolves so as to be able to have more deer or elk for themselves). Yet removing or adding predators has far reaching effects. Wolf removal has led to prey overpopulation, plant over browsing, and erosion 21. After wolves were removed from Yellowstone National Park, the K of elk increased. This allowed for a shift in elk feeding patterns that left fewer trees alongside rivers, thus leaving less food for beaver and, consequently, fewer beaver dams and less wetland 22,23. Such a situation represents, in microcosm, the inherent risk of allowing for the erosion of species diversity. In addition to providing habitat for a wide variety of species, wetlands serve as natural water purification systems. Although the Yellowstone region might not need that particular ecosystem service as much as other parts of the world, freshwater resources and wetlands are threatened globally, and the same logic of reduced biodiversity equating to reduced ecosystem services applies.
64 +Humans take actions without considering that when tugging on single threads, they unavoidably affect adjacent areas of the tapestry. While human population and per capita resource use remain high, so does the probability of ongoing biodiversity loss. At the very least, in the future people will have an even more skewed perspective than we do about what constitutes a diverse community. In that regard, future generations will be even more ignorant than we are. Of course, we also experience that shifting baseline perspective on biodiversity and population sizes, failing to recognize how much is missing from the world because we are unaware of what past generations saw 11. But the consequences of diminished biodiversity might be more profound for humans than that. If the disturbance of communities and ecosystems results in species losses that reduce the availability of ecosystem services, human K and, sooner or later, human N will be reduced.
82 82  1AC – Plan
83 -The Republic of Taiwan, the People's Republic of Japan, and the Republic of South Korea should ban the production of nuclear power.
84 -The risk of prolif in Asia is high and growing – states have the capability to weaponize and there are no checks
85 -White 14 Tanya Ogilvie-White (research director at the Centre for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, Australian National University), Nobumasa Akiyama, Chang-Hoon Shin, Shahriman Lockman and Manpreet Sethi, "Why nuclear dangers should galvanise Asian leadership at the Hague Summit," Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 3/20/2014 AZ
86 -Foreign Minister Julie Bishop is heading to the Netherlands for next week’s Nuclear Security Summit. Although Australia has earned a reputation for taking the threat of nuclear and radiological terrorism very seriously and for implementing stringent preventive measures (see, for example here and here), the same is not true of all governments in the Asia-Pacific. In this multi-national op-ed, scholars from across Asia point out that nuclear dangers are growing in our region, that weak links need to be addressed, and that it’s time for Asian leaders to come together and show leadership in the Summit process.
87 -It’s no secret that nuclear dangers are mounting in Asia. Nuclear weapons arsenals are growing, nuclear power programs are expanding, and fissile and radioactive materials—which could be used to target innocents anywhere—are used, stored and transported throughout our region, sometimes in insecure conditions. It’s a discomfiting picture, and contrary to what skeptics would have us believe, it’s not an exaggerated one. We should be putting pressure on our political leaders to accept their responsibility to address our concerns before a nuclear catastrophe occurs.
88 -Next week, an opportunity exists for them to be pro-active in the face of nuclear dangers as leaders from around the world gather in the Netherlands at the world’s third Nuclear Security Summit to discuss and agree on actions that should be taken to reduce nuclear risks across the globe. So, what are these risks?
89 -Let’s travel across the Asian nuclear landscape with our eyes wide open. First stop: Pakistan, a nuclear-armed state with the world’s fastest growing nuclear arsenal and military stockpile of highly enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium (Pu). It’s believed that there are elements who are sympathetic to extremist groups among its military, and a number of terrorist organisations operating from its soil. The risks of nuclear sabotage and theft at Pakistan’s military and civilian sites mustn’t be underestimated.
90 -Heading south to India, the nuclear landscape is marginally better. New Delhi too is in the process of building its credible deterrence and the stockpile of weapons-usable HEU and Pu is growing. India also has an ambitious nuclear power programme with twenty-one nuclear power reactors already operational, more being built, and a new reprocessing facility at Kalpakkam. Physical and material security at the increasing numbers of sites must be of the highest standard, given that threats could emerge from within the country or across the border.
91 -Onward to China, where the nuclear arsenal may be growing more slowly (creeping up from 240 to an estimated 250 nuclear warheads since the 1980s) but where a massive expansion of nuclear energy is underway. Currently, 17 nuclear reactors are operational, more than 25 are under construction, and several more are planned by 2020. Indeed, China has by far the most ambitious nuclear power programme in the world. While countries in Asia have a rationale for expanding nuclear energy to meet their rising electricity needs, the demands that this imposes on nuclear security mustn’t be taken lightly.
92 -Across the border, the Korean peninsula is another nuclear hot spot. North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and reports that it’s continuing to operate its reactors, combined with complete opacity in how the nuclear material and facilities are being secured, and doubts over the state of the regime, raise worrying scenarios. Moreover, although the nuclear landscape in South Korea is currently benign from a weapons point of view, its nuclear energy program is certainly ambitious, raising the same nuclear security concerns as elsewhere.
93 -Our next stop, Japan, is scarred by the events triggered by the earthquake and tsunami three years ago. There aren’t any nuclear weapons here, but Japan is home to a stockpile of weapons-usable plutonium and the largest quantity of civilian HEU in Asia. It’s fair to say that nuclear vulnerabilities abound. Indeed, the Fukushima crisis exposed a culture of complacency in the management of nuclear energy and a misplaced public confidence that’s yet to be re-established.
94 -Countries in Southeast Asia must also be a part of our itinerary since many are contemplating nuclear programs. Currently, public safety concerns are restraining plans for nuclear power, but even so, Vietnam intends to build and operate more than 10 nuclear reactors by 2030. In time, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines may follow a similar path.
95 -The reality for the world, not just for Asia, is that nuclear weapons and nuclear energy will be part of our lives for the foreseeable future, with all the risks that this entails. Of course, civilian applications of nuclear technology have many benefits for humanity, but acknowledging that fact shouldn’t tempt us to downplay the dangers.
96 -Our political leaders need to open their eyes to this and accept responsibility for it. We hope they’ll candidly discuss concrete ways of strengthening capacity to secure nuclear materials across our region. For that, confidence and security building is essential. Despite the difficult political climate, there’s no option but to cooperate, to prevent Asia from becoming an epicentre of another nuclear catastrophe. Each state, whether it’s a nuclear weapon state or not, should make extraordinary efforts to increase national accountability for their nuclear programs according to accepted international benchmarks.
66 +Countries ought to prohibit the production of nuclear power by reactors powered by uranium-235.
67 +The plan shifts to thorium-powered reactors – improves energy efficiency and safety and prevents prolif
68 +Halper 13 Mark Halper, "Hans Blix: Shift to thorium, minimize weapons risk," The Alvin Weinberg Foundation, 10/29/2013 AZ
69 +Hans Blix, the disarmament advocate who famously found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq a decade ago, said today that thorium fuel could help reduce the risk of weapons proliferation from nuclear reactors. Addressing the Thorium Energy Conference 2013 here, Blix said that nuclear power operators should move away from their time-honoured practice of using uranium fuel with its links to potential nuclear weapons fabrication via both the uranium enrichment process and uranium’s plutonium waste. “Even though designers and operators are by no means at the end of the uranium road, it is desirable today, I am convinced, that the designers and the others use their skill and imagination to explore and test other avenues as well,” Blix said. “The propeller plane that served us long and still serves us gave way to the jet plane that now dominates,” said the former United Nations chief weapons inspector who also ran the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1981 to 1997. “Diesel engines have migrated from their traditional home in trucks to a growing number of cars and cars with electric engines are now entering the market. Nuclear power should also not be stuck in one box.” Blix rattled off a list of thorium’s advantages, noting that “thorium fuel gives rise to waste that is smaller in volume, less toxic and much less long lived than the wastes that result from uranium fuel.” Another bonus: thorium is three to four times more plentiful than uranium, he noted. “The civilian nuclear community must do what it can to help reduce the risk that more nuclear weapons are made from uranium or plutonium,” Blix said. “Although it is enrichment plants and plutonium producing installations rather than power reactors that are key concerns, this community, this nuclear community, can and should use its considerable brain power to design reactors that can be easily safeguarded and fuel and supply organizations that do not lend themselves to proliferation. I think in these regards the thorium community may have very important contributions to make.” Blix described the obstacles that are in the way of a shift to thorium and other nuclear alternatives as “political” rather than “technical.”
EntryDate
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1 -2016-09-19 00:23:29.0
1 +2016-09-11 01:20:16.0
Judge
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1 -Castillo, Lonam, Zhou
1 +Rashed Islam
Opponent
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1 -Harrison RP
1 +Chaminade CC
ParentRound
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1 -4
1 +2
Round
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1 -Quarters
1 +3
Team
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1 -La Canada Zhao Aff
1 +La Canada Zhao Neg
Title
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1 -SEPOCT - Asian Allies Aff
1 +SEPOCT - Thorium Aff
Tournament
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1 -Greenhill
1 +Loyola
Caselist.CitesClass[5]
Cites
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1 -Stability theory doesn’t apply to East Asia – lack of confidence building measures, live territorial disputes, underdeveloped security architectures, rising nationalism, and weak command and control undermines deterrence
2 -Ogilvie-White 14 – Tanya, research fellow in the Nonproliferation and Disarmament Programme of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London (funded by the Stanton Nuclear Security Fund) and a senior lecturer in international relations at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, “The Urgent Need for Nuclear Risk Reduction in Asia,” August 2014, http://a-pln.org/sites/default/files/apln-analysis-docs/PB14.pdf
3 -1. Claims that nuclear deterrence is inherently stable are less convincing today than previously. 2 Although decades of confidence-building measures (CBMs) and nuclear arms control negotiations have reduced the chances for deadly miscalculation and surprise in the US– Russia strategic relationship, 3 a similar depth of communication and understanding is missing in the bilateral relationships of most other nuclear-armed adversaries. This is especially troubling in Asia, where a dangerous combination of live territorial disputes, underdeveloped security architectures, political volatility, rising nationalism, nuclear and conventional arms racing, and weak command and control systems, mean that the potential for deterrence breakdown is real and growing.
4 -
5 -
6 -War is at its lowest level in history because of US primacy~-~--best statistical studies prove
7 -John M. Owen 11, Professor of Politics at University of Virginia PhD from Harvard "DON’T DISCOUNT HEGEMONY" Feb 11 www.cato-unbound.org/2011/02/11/john-owen/dont-discount-hegemony/
8 -Andrew Mack and his colleagues at the Human Security Report Project are to be congratulated. Not only do they present a study with a striking conclusion, driven by data, free of theoretical or ideological bias, but they also do something quite unfashionable: they bear good news. Social scientists really are not supposed to do that. Our job is, if not to be Malthusians, then at least to point out disturbing trends, looming catastrophes, and the imbecility and mendacity of policy makers. And then it is to say why, if people listen to us, things will get better. We do this as if our careers depended upon it, and perhaps they do; for if all is going to be well, what need then for us?¶ Our colleagues at Simon Fraser University are brave indeed. That may sound like a setup, but it is not. I shall challenge neither the data nor the general conclusion that violent conflict around the world has been decreasing in fits and starts since the Second World War. When it comes to violent conflict among and within countries, things have been getting better. (The trends have not been linear—Figure 1.1 actually shows that the frequency of interstate wars peaked in the 1980s—but the 65-year movement is clear.) Instead I shall accept that Mack et al. are correct on the macro-trends, and focus on their explanations they advance for these remarkable trends. With apologies to any readers of this forum who recoil from academic debates, this might get mildly theoretical and even more mildly methodological.¶ Concerning international wars, one version of the “nuclear-peace” theory is not in fact laid to rest by the data. It is certainly true that nuclear-armed states have been involved in many wars. They have even been attacked (think of Israel), which falsifies the simple claim of “assured destruction”—that any nuclear country A will deter any kind of attack by any country B because B fears a retaliatory nuclear strike from A.¶ But the most important “nuclear-peace” claim has been about mutually assured destruction, which obtains between two robustly nuclear-armed states. The claim is that (1) rational states having second-strike capabilities—enough deliverable nuclear weaponry to survive a nuclear first strike by an enemy—will have an overwhelming incentive not to attack one another; and (2) we can safely assume that nuclear-armed states are rational. It follows that states with a second-strike capability will not fight one another.¶ Their colossal atomic arsenals neither kept the United States at peace with North Vietnam during the Cold War nor the Soviet Union at peace with Afghanistan. But the argument remains strong that those arsenals did help keep the United States and Soviet Union at peace with each other. Why non-nuclear states are not deterred from fighting nuclear states is an important and open question. But in a time when calls to ban the Bomb are being heard from more and more quarters, we must be clear about precisely what the broad trends toward peace can and cannot tell us. They may tell us nothing about why we have had no World War III, and little about the wisdom of banning the Bomb now.¶ Regarding the downward trend in international war, Professor Mack is friendlier to more palatable theories such as the “democratic peace” (democracies do not fight one another, and the proportion of democracies has increased, hence less war); the interdependence or “commercial peace” (states with extensive economic ties find it irrational to fight one another, and interdependence has increased, hence less war); and the notion that people around the world are more anti-war than their forebears were. Concerning the downward trend in civil wars, he favors theories of economic growth (where commerce is enriching enough people, violence is less appealing—a logic similar to that of the “commercial peace” thesis that applies among nations) and the end of the Cold War (which end reduced superpower support for rival rebel factions in so many Third-World countries).¶ These are all plausible mechanisms for peace. What is more, none of them excludes any other; all could be working toward the same end. That would be somewhat puzzling, however. Is the world just lucky these days? How is it that an array of peace-inducing factors happens to be working coincidentally in our time, when such a magical array was absent in the past? The answer may be that one or more of these mechanisms reinforces some of the others, or perhaps some of them are mutually reinforcing. Some scholars, for example, have been focusing on whether economic growth might support democracy and vice versa, and whether both might support international cooperation, including to end civil wars.¶ We would still need to explain how this charmed circle of causes got started, however. And here let me raise another factor, perhaps even less appealing than the “nuclear peace” thesis, at least outside of the United States. That factor is what international relations scholars call hegemony—specifically American hegemony.¶ A theory that many regard as discredited, but that refuses to go away, is called hegemonic stability theory. The theory emerged in the 1970s in the realm of international political economy. It asserts that for the global economy to remain open—for countries to keep barriers to trade and investment low—one powerful country must take the lead. Depending on the theorist we consult, “taking the lead” entails paying for global public goods (keeping the sea lanes open, providing liquidity to the international economy), coercion (threatening to raise trade barriers or withdraw military protection from countries that cheat on the rules), or both. The theory is skeptical that international cooperation in economic matters can emerge or endure absent a hegemon. The distastefulness of such claims is self-evident: they imply that it is good for everyone the world over if one country has more wealth and power than others. More precisely, they imply that it has been good for the world that the United States has been so predominant.¶ There is no obvious reason why hegemonic stability theory could not apply to other areas of international cooperation, including in security affairs, human rights, international law, peacekeeping (UN or otherwise), and so on. What I want to suggest here—suggest, not test—is that American hegemony might just be a deep cause of the steady decline of political deaths in the world.¶ How could that be? After all, the report states that United States is the third most war-prone country since 1945. Many of the deaths depicted in Figure 10.4 were in wars that involved the United States (the Vietnam War being the leading one). Notwithstanding politicians’ claims to the contrary, a candid look at U.S. foreign policy reveals that the country is as ruthlessly self-interested as any other great power in history.¶ The answer is that U.S. hegemony might just be a deeper cause of the proximate causes outlined by Professor Mack. Consider economic growth and openness to foreign trade and investment, which (so say some theories) render violence irrational. American power and policies may be responsible for these in two related ways. First, at least since the 1940s Washington has prodded other countries to embrace the market capitalism that entails economic openness and produces sustainable economic growth. The United States promotes capitalism for selfish reasons, of course: its own domestic system depends upon growth, which in turn depends upon the efficiency gains from economic interaction with foreign countries, and the more the better. During the Cold War most of its allies accepted some degree of market-driven growth.¶ Second, the U.S.-led western victory in the Cold War damaged the credibility of alternative paths to development—communism and import-substituting industrialization being the two leading ones—and left market capitalism the best model. The end of the Cold War also involved an end to the billions of rubles in Soviet material support for regimes that tried to make these alternative models work. (It also, as Professor Mack notes, eliminated the superpowers’ incentives to feed civil violence in the Third World.) What we call globalization is caused in part by the emergence of the United States as the global hegemon.¶ The same case can be made, with somewhat more difficulty, concerning the spread of democracy. Washington has supported democracy only under certain conditions—the chief one being the absence of a popular anti-American movement in the target state—but those conditions have become much more widespread following the collapse of communism. Thus in the 1980s the Reagan administration—the most anti-communist government America ever had—began to dump America’s old dictator friends, starting in the Philippines. Today Islamists tend to be anti-American, and so the Obama administration is skittish about democracy in Egypt and other authoritarian Muslim countries. But general U.S. material and moral support for liberal democracy remains strong.
1 +Nuclear power is key to Belgian energy – makes half of its electricity and prevents carbon emissions
2 +IEA 16 International Energy Association, "Energy Policies of IEA Countries: 2016 Review Belgium," 2016 AZ
3 +Nuclear power plays a key role in Belgium’s energy supply, constituting about half the electricity generation and 16.6 of total primary energy supply (TPES) in 2014. In 2015, nuclear power generation fell further, to 26 terawatt-hours (TWh), according to FPS (Federal Public Service) Economy. In recent years, electricity generated from nuclear power, and consequently the share of nuclear energy in the generation mix, has significantly decreased because of long-term outages of several nuclear units. Despite that, the share of nuclear power in Belgium remains one of the highest in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Seven units, all pressurised water reactors (PWRs), are currently operating in Belgium for a total net installed capacity of 5 913 megawatts (MW) at the end of 2015. The reactors are located at the sites of Doel, on the Scheldt estuary close to Antwerp, and of Tihange, on the river Meuse between Liège and Namur. Since the last (International Energy Agency (IEA) in-depth review in 2009, total net capacity has increased by about 100 MWe as a result of capacity upgrades at Doel 1, Doel 4 and Tihange 3. All nuclear power plants (NPPs) in Belgium are operated by Electrabel, a 100 subsidiary of Engie since 2003. Electrabel is the sole owner of Doel 1 and 2 units, and owns 50 of Tihange 1 and 89.8 of the other four units. The remaining 50 of Tihange 1 is owned by EDF which controls also the remaining 10.2 share of the other four units (see Table 10.1). Belgium has a long tradition in nuclear research and in civil nuclear power, dating from the early 1960s, and for many years the Belgian industry covered almost all activities in the nuclear fuel cycle. In 1962, the BR3 (Belgian Reactor 3) was the first pilot PWR connected to the grid in Western Europe. Belgium co-operated with France in the construction of the first full-scale PWR in Europe (Chooz A). The development of nuclear power in Belgium started at the end of the 1960s with the decision to build three nuclear units at the two sites of Doel and Tihange. Following the first oil crisis, another four units were ordered and connected to the grid by the end of 1985. The whole Belgian nuclear capacity has been commissioned in a relatively short period of about ten years, from February 1975 to October 1985; the lifetime of the nuclear fleet is therefore quite homogeneous, with an average of 35 years of operation. Over the course of operation, the Belgian nuclear fleet has generated about 1 420 TWh of baseload electricity and contributed significantly to the security of energy supply (see Figure 10.1). Nuclear power has also helped avoid emissions of large quantities of carbon dioxide2 , and had an important role in Belgium’s efforts to reduce air pollution (sulphur dioxide SO2 and oxides of nitrogen NOx).
4 +Nuclear power key to stop emissions in Belgium
5 +Toobin 16 Adam Toobin, "Why Target Belgium? For Terrorists, the Answer Is Complicated and Nuclear" Inverse Magazine, 3/22/2016 AZ
6 +Belgium remains heavily reliant on nuclear power to reach its clean energy goals under the Kyoto and Paris protocols, and support for the programs remains high. Some areas in Belgium even obtain as much as 50 percent of their energy from nuclear power. Despite the current old age of Belgian nuclear power reactors, theountry has no plans for new plants once the current facilities expire.
7 +Belgium is key – it's a lynchpin in international climate change
8 +NCC 10 National Climate Commission of Belgium, "BELGIAN NATIONAL CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION STRATEGY," December 2010 AZ
9 +Since 2008, the Belgian development cooperation has explicitly included the fight against climate change in its policy as a priority. This is due to the fact that the consequences of climate change in many countries in the south are an important source of instability in terms of food security, biodiversity loss, land degradation and desertification, (environmental) migration, public health and tensions that could lead to conflicts. Developing countries, especially the least developed countries, are the first victims of climate change, even though they are less responsible for the causes and have fewer tools to combat climate change or to adapt their societies. In many developing countries, especially African countries, climate change adds additional pressure to difficulties resulting from long existing problems, such as poverty, poor access to education, weak institutions and governance, inadequate infrastructure, low access to technology and information, poor access to health services, problems with income generation and armed conflicts. These structural problems come on top of the threats that originate from the overexploitation of available natural resources, a quickly increasing population, desertification and land degradation. These stress factors make developing countries, especially the least developed countries, more vulnerable for climate change and make adaptation more difficult. The Belgian development cooperation is active in many sectors where the impact of climate change must be taken into account, such as agriculture and rural development, water, energy, infrastructure and health care. Through its bilateral cooperation, by supporting non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the northern and southern hemispheres and by supporting scientific institutions, Belgium is contributing to several programs and projects that all tackle adaptation to climate change in one way or another. In the framework of multilateral cooperation20, Belgium supports amongst others international agricultural research (mainly the centers of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and the European Research for Agriculture/Agricultural Research for Development (ERA/ARD). In 2009 Belgium contributed to the Least Developed Countries Fund to support implementation of the National Adaptation Programs of Action (NAPAs) of these least developed countries. Belgium is planning to increase this support significantly as part of its contribution to the fast start funding package, negotiated in Copenhagen.
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1 -2016-10-10 00:18:12.0
1 +2016-09-11 01:24:27.0
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1 -Nick Rogers
1 +Joseph Barquin
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1 -Harker EM
1 +Lynbrook NS
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1 -La Canada Zhao Aff
1 +La Canada Zhao Neg
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1 -SEPOCT - Asian Allies Aff - new cards
1 +SEPOCT - Warming Updates - Belgium
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1 -Voices
1 +Loyola
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1 -Interpretation: Counterplans may not mandate the entirety of the plan and merely alter the timeframe of implementation
1 +Rapid shutdown of nuclear plants requires huge resources – trades off with funding for waste management –
2 +IEA 16 International Energy Association, "Energy Policies of IEA Countries: 2016 Review Belgium," 2016 AZ
3 +According to the current schedule of nuclear phase-out provided in Table 10.1, the shutdown of all Belgian NPPs is expected to occur in a very short time frame, between 2022 and 2025. A rapid phase-out of the nuclear units, which currently represent around half the electricity generation, would be extremely challenging and would have a significant impact on energy supply, on the level of electricity prices and on the country’s ability to meet its long-term GHG emission targets. It could also have an adverse impact on the financing of regulatory bodies, which is currently ensured by a levy on nuclear installations. It would also have an effect on the funding of the provisions for waste management and decommissioning. A recent OECD study has shown that the LTO of nuclear plants is the lowest-cost option available for power generation (OECD, 2012). Several utilities in OECD member countries have already obtained the licence to operate their nuclear plants beyond 40 years or are in the process of submitting applications to the safety authorities. The nuclear operator has estimated that investments of EUR 600 million are needed for the LTO of Tihange 1, and EUR 700 million for the long-term operation (LTO) of both units 1 and 2 at Doel.
4 +Nuclear power key to revenue generation – taxes
5 +IEA 16 International Energy Association, "Energy Policies of IEA Countries: 2016 Review Belgium," 2016 AZ
6 +In 2008, the government introduced a substantial levy on nuclear power generation. The contribution level has been revised several times; on average, the contribution volume has been more than EUR 200 million per year. Nuclear power generation is subject to several kinds of taxes and levies in more countries, probably because it is a relatively easy source of revenue: the plant operator cannot just shut down operations or move to a more favourable jurisdiction. The absolute level of contribution needs to be carefully considered, however. In general, limiting the utilities’ profits reduces their options for investing capacities in the LTO and/or other much-needed low-carbon capacity, and leads to a greater need for governments to encourage such investments, also financially.
7 +Turns case – increases likelihood of dirty bomb
8 +Rubin and Schreuer 16 ALISSA J. RUBIN and MILAN SCHREUER, Belgium Fears Nuclear Plants Are Vulnerable," NY Times, 3/25/2016 AZ
9 +Asked on Thursday at a London think tank whether there was a danger of the Islamic State’s obtaining a nuclear weapon, the British defense secretary, Michael Fallon, said that “was a new and emerging threat.”
10 +While the prospect that terrorists can obtain enough highly enriched uranium and then turn it into a nuclear fission bomb seems far-fetched to many experts, they say the fabrication of some kind of dirty bomb from radioactive waste or byproducts is more conceivable. There are a variety of other risks involving Belgium’s facilities, including that terrorists somehow shut down the privately operated plants, which provide nearly half of Belgium’s power.
11 +
12 +Revenues are used to fund renewables – no wind or solar without government subsidies
13 +WNA 16 World Nuclear Association, "Nuclear Power in Belgium," March 2016 AZ
14 +In May 2010, CREG estimated the cost of producing electricity from Belgian nuclear power plants as 1.7-2.1 € cents/kWh, including fuel cycle, operating, depreciation, and provisions for decommissioning and waste management. This compared with the forward market price of 6 ¢/kWh and the market price for green energy certificates at 8.8-10.7 ¢/kWh.In June 2013 Electrabel filed an appeal to Belgium's Constitutional Court against the €550 million ($734 million) annual federal tax on nuclear power generation. In 2012 the government passed laws doubling the size of the tax. As the dominant power generator and supplier, Electrabel bears the brunt of the tax – €479 million – while EDF-Luminus, Belgium's second-largest generator, has nuclear offtake rights and pays the remainder. GDF Suez said that raising the tax bill goes against the protocol signed by the company and the federal government in 2009, which set out a special tax of €215-245 million for 2010-14. Since 2010 the tax has doubled and market conditions for utilities have deteriorated.In April 2014 the Court of First Instance in Brussels rejected Electrabel's claim it was entitled to an exceptional tax refund of about one billion euros over profits from its Belgian nuclear plants, which it has been paying 2008 to 2012 as a tax increment. The company appealed, saying the €479 million for 2012 corresponded to its entire nuclear profits, but that appeal was rejected in July 2014, with the court saying that the appeal was “unfounded”. Electrabel’s contribution of €422 million for 2013 was higher than its entire operational activities in Belgium. "This confiscatory fiscal pressure on Electrabel at a time when the company's economic situation has deteriorated resulted in losses for Electrabel in 2013 for the second year in succession." The company lodged an appeal against the 2013 contribution, but in September 2015 the Constitutional Court rejected this and said the tax was "legitimate". In April 2015 CREG updated its 2010 calculations and said that the profit from all of Belgium's nuclear operators – Electrabel, EDF Luminus and EDF Belgium – totalled some €435 million in 2014. CREG reported that "the profits derived from nuclear activities are the difference between revenues and costs. The 'nuclear rent' can then be calculated by subtracting a fair remuneration of the invested capital." Electrabel noted that the nuclear contribution amounted to €479 million in 2014 – some €44 million more than CREG’s calculation of profits. "The nuclear operators are thus paying to the state more than they earn from this nuclear activity," and CREG's latest calculation clearly shows that the 'nuclear contribution' imposed by the government on nuclear operators since 2008 is confiscatory, it said.In July 2015 Electrabel agreed to pay €130 million in 2016 as the federal nuclear power ‘contribution’ or tax, substantially less than previously intended (and less than €479 million in 2014). This is alongside a fee for life extension of Doel 1and2 – see section below. From 2017 a formula will apply, with a minimum of €150 million per year to 2019. In mid-2013 the government approved an energy plan which would subsidise gas-fired generation and offshore wind capacity with taxes from nuclear power. Investors had been deterred from investing in planned 800 MWe of gas-fired plant by the relatively low cost of nuclear power and the grid priority of renewables input.
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1 -2016-10-12 01:50:24.0
1 +2016-09-11 01:24:27.0
Judge
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1 -Scott Phillips
1 +Joseph Barquin
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1 -Brentwood EL
1 +Lynbrook NS
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1 -6
1 +3
Round
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1 +4
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1 -La Canada Zhao Aff
1 +La Canada Zhao Neg
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1 -0 Delay CPs Bad
1 +SEPOCT - Belgium Taxes DA
Tournament
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1 -Voices
1 +Loyola
Caselist.CitesClass[7]
Cites
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1 -Under the facade of promoting free speech, colleges have repressed it through regulation of appropriate "space and time” – this hidden form of censorship forces protest into spaces where it is ineffective.
2 -Mitchell 03 - Don Mitchell, Distinguished Professor of Geography at Syracuse’s Maxwell School: 2003 (“The Liberalization of Free Speech: Or, How Protest in Public Space is Silenced” Stanford Agora Vol. 4 p.4-8 Available at agora.stanford.edu/agora/volume4/articles/mitchell/mitchell.pdf Accessed on 12/11/16)IG
3 -But, of course, the Supreme Court had considered New York’s law before – in the 1920s in the famous Gitlow case.8 Then, the Court upheld the conviction of the radical Benjamin Gitlow after Gitlow had published a tract called The Left-Wing Manifesto, during the height of the Palmer Raids in 1919. Oliver Wendell Holmes (joined by Louis Brandeis) wrote a famous dissent in the Gitlow case, arguing that Gitlow’s pamphlet in no way presented a “clear and present danger” to the state and, therefore, Gitlow’s conviction under New York’s criminal anarchy law should be overtuned.9 The majority in this case, however, upheld Gitlow’s conviction and in the process affirmed both the constitutionality of the New York law, and the State’s right to police some forms of speech. Assuming, first, that the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment covered the liberties outlined in the First Amendment, the Court, second, argued that “the freedom of speech and of the press which is secured by the Constitution, does not confer an absolute right to speak or publish, without responsibility, whatever one may choose….”10 Further, the Court held, “That a State in the exercise of its police power may punish those who abuse this freedom by utterances inimical to the public welfare, tending to corrupt public morals, incite crime, or disturb the peace, is not open to question.”11 Finally, “a State may punish utterances endangering the foundations of organized government and threatening its overthrow by unlawful means.”12
4 -On much of this Holmes did not disagree. His dissent in Gitlow was based in earlier decisions and dissents he had written for the Court in the wake of World War 1.13 These earlier cases,14 established the standards for the right that many now consider the foundation of contemporary American liberty: the right to free speech. Or more accurately, at the end of World War I, the Supreme Court, with Justice Holmes taking the lead, began to develop the language that allowed for the regulation of speech such that it could be protected as an ingredient necessary to the development and the strength of the state. It began to find a way to limit speech, rather than to outlaw it altogether. If the majority in Gitlow had not yet come around to this view, later Courts did, finding in Holmes’s decisions the language necessary to begin the project of liberalizing free speech in the U.S.15 This liberalization was predicated on a seeing at the heart of speech a separation – in space and time – between what is said and the effects of utterances. This is the very basis of Holmes’s “clear and present danger” test.16
5 -Each of the defendants in these cases was convicted for making speeches (or publishing pamphlets) that were deemed to have the possibility of being effective and therefore to portend violence or to undermine the legitimate interests of the state. Each conviction was upheld by the Supreme Court. The irony of free speech jurisprudence in the US, therefore, is that its liberalization is grounded in its repression. This conclusion is doubly obvious, and doubly interesting, when the content of the four convictions is remembered. The prominent socialist Eugene Debs was convicted for merely praising draft resisters for their moral courage.17 Charles Schenck, an official of the Socialist Party in Philadelphia, was convicted for calling the draft a form of involuntary servitude outlawed by the Thirteenth Amendment, and recommending that men petition the government to object to the draft law.18 Frohwerk, the editor of a small circulation German-language newspaper, was convicted for writing that the US had no chance of defeating Germany in the war and thus draftees who refused to enlist could not be faulted.19 And Abrams, along with four fellow Russian radicals, was convicted for throwing leaflets out of a New York window protesting US intervention in Russia following its revolution.20
6 -Holmes first laid out his language concerning “clear and present danger” in the Schenck case.21 “The question in every case,” Holmes intoned, “is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree.”22 He also said a few other things that bear repeating, especially now: “When a nation is at war, many things that might be said in a time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight and no Court could regard them as protected by any Constitutional right.”23 However, Holmes clarified:
7 -We admit that in many places and in ordinary times, the defendants … would have been within their constitutional rights. But the character of the act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done…. The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. It does not even protect a man from an injunction against uttering words that may have all the effect of force.24
8 -So, even when not at war, the government may strongly circumscribe speech.
9 -There are two issues that are crucial here to the construction of a fully liberal theory of free speech. The first is that what makes a difference in the nature of speech is where that speech occurs. There would be nothing wrong, presumably, with falsely shouting fire, even in a time of war, in the middle of the wilderness, or even on a busy street, if there is adequate room to move. The trick for speech regulation, therefore, becomes – and became for the Court – one of spatial regulation. Regulation of location, or place, becomes the surrogate for the regulation of content.25 The second crucial point Holmes makes is to distinguish between the content of speech and the possibility that such speech might have an effect.26 My purpose in the remainder of this essay is to examine the intersection of these two issues to show how contemporary speech laws and policing effectively silence dissident speech in the name of its promotion and regulation. As the Court has moved away from a regime that penalizes what is said – in essence liberalizing free speech – it has simultaneously created a means to severely regulate where things may be said, and it has done so, in my estimation, in a way that more effectively silences speech than did the older regime of censorship and repression.
10 -It could be argued – to put all this another way – that the death of William Epton received the attention it did precisely because the way his speech was policed seems so anachronistic now. It certainly seems a heavy-handed means of silencing opposition. It seems illiberal. A more liberal approach to silencing opposition – to keeping it from being heard – is to let geography, more than censorship, do the silencing. And this is the direction American law is tending. In what follows I will make my argument clear first through a historical geography of First Amendment law and the evolution of the public forum doctrine, and then by looking at three case studies that show how regulating the where of speech effectively silences protest. The implication of my argument is that under the speech regime currently being constructed in the United States, dissident speech can only be effective when it is illegal. And, as I will briefly suggest in the Epilogue, that implication may be profoundly important should (as seems quite likely) the Federal Government overlay this liberal regime with a return to more illiberal and repressive means of handling dissidents in the name of “homeland security.” Perhaps ironically, the further implication is that a boisterous, contentious, “politics of the street” is more necessary now than ever if any effective right to free speech is to be retained.
11 -
12 -Zoning is reminiscent of the McCarthy Era and the faults of COINTELPRO – repression cloaked in the law – and gives authorities the power to construe civil disobedience as domestic terrorism, especially in this post-9/11 era.
13 -Mitchell 03 - Don Mitchell, Distinguished Professor of Geography at Syracuse’s Maxwell School: 2003 (“The Liberalization of Free Speech: Or, How Protest in Public Space is Silenced” Stanford Agora Vol. 4 p.43-45 Available at agora.stanford.edu/agora/volume4/articles/mitchell/mitchell.pdf Accessed on 12/11/16)IG
14 -As the preceding argument has indicated, the liberalization of free speech has not always been progressive. And it has not been progressive in both senses of the term. It has not marched steadily forward, uninterrupted, towards the shining light of freedom, to become ever more liberal, ever more just. Rather, to the degree it has been liberalized, this has occurred in fits and starts, with frequent steps backwards or to the side rather than forward. Like any social history, that is, the history of free speech is not a linear one of ever-expanding enlightenment; like any social history it is a history of ongoing struggle. Nor has it been progressive in the sense of necessarily more just, as a close focus on the geography of speech makes clear. Geographical analysis has shown that what sometimes appears as a progressive reinforcement of a right to speech and assembly is really (or is also) in fact a means towards its suppression.169
15 -Nonetheless, whatever rights have been won, have been won through struggle and often not by following the law, but by breaking it. Civil disobedience, by labor activists and other picketers, by civil rights marchers, by anti-war protesters, and by Free Speech activists (as with the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in the sixties), has forced often illiberal theories of speech and assembly to be reconsidered. But against these struggles has to be set a history of governmental recidivism: the Palmer raids and Red Scare of 1919-1920, the Smith Act of 1940, the McCarthy era, and the antics of COINTELPRO in the 1960s and 1970s, are just a few of the more well-known moments of repression, often cloaked in law and justified as urgent “legitimate state interests” at a time when serious challenges were being made to the “established order” or when other exigent factors induced panic within the government and the public at large. The history of speech and assembly, that is, can be told as an on-going struggle against recurring illiberalism.
16 -We are, most likely, now reentering an illiberal phase, and if I am right that civil disobedience has always been necessary to winning and securing rights to assembly and speech, there is a great deal to be deeply concerned about. For the closing off of space to protest has made civil disobedience all the more necessary right at the moment when new laws make civil disobedience not just illegal, but potentially terroristic. The witch’s brew of Supreme Court spatial regulation of speech and assembly and new antiterrorism laws portends deep trouble for those of us who think we have a duty as well as a right to transform our government when we think it is in the wrong, a duty and a right for which street protest is sometimes the only resource.
17 -Within six weeks of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Congress had passed, and the President signed into law, the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 (USA PATRIOT Act).170 Among its many provisions, the Act defines as domestic terrorism, and therefore covered under the Act, “acts dangerous to human life that are in violation of the criminal laws,” if they “appear to be intended … to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion” and if they “occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.”171 As Nancy Chang argues:
18 -Acts of civil disobedience that take place in the United States necessarily meet three of the five elements in the definition of domestic terrorism: they constitute a “violation of the criminal laws,” they are “intended … to influence the policy of a government,” and they “occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.” Many acts of civil disobedience, including the blocking of streets and points of egress by nonviolent means during a demonstration or sit-in, could be construed as “acts dangerous to human life” that appear to be intended to influence the policy of a government “by intimidation or coercion,” which case they would meet the crimes remaining elements…. As a result, protest activities that previously would most likely have ended with a charge of disorderly conduct under a local ordinance can now lead to federal prosecution and conviction for terrorism.172
19 -As the space for protest has become more and more tightly zoned, the likelihood that laws will be broken in the course of a demonstration – a demonstration seeking to “influence a policy of government” – increases. And, of course, the very reason for engaging in a demonstration is to coerce, even if it is not to directly “intimidate.” One should not be sanguine about the “or” placed between intimidate and coerce. It means just what it says: coercion or intimidation will be enough for prosecution.173 Now even civil disobedience can be construed as an act of terrorism.
20 -The intersection of the new repressive state apparatus being constructed in the wake of September 11 with nearly a century of speech and assembly “liberalization” portends a frightening new era in the history of speech and assembly in America. We may soon come to long for those days when protest in public space was only silenced through the strategic geography of the public forum doctrine.
21 -
22 -This geography implies that speech becomes dangerous and thus illegal as it becomes effective – that necessarily means effective protest become illegal and what’s left is empty.
23 -Mitchell 03 - Don Mitchell, Distinguished Professor of Geography at Syracuse’s Maxwell School: 2003 (“The Liberalization of Free Speech: Or, How Protest in Public Space is Silenced” Stanford Agora Vol. 4 p.9-14 Available at agora.stanford.edu/agora/volume4/articles/mitchell/mitchell.pdf Accessed on 12/11/16)IG
24 -The Gitlow decision, and after it the appeals court decision regarding William Epton,31 referenced Holmes’s words in Schenck, and tried to determine just what constituted a “clear and present danger.” But “the future embraced the Holmes of Abrams rather than the Holmes of Schenck.”32 In his dissent in Abrams, Holmes wrote this:
25 -When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by the free trade in ideas – that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes can safely be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment. Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophesy based upon imperfect knowledge. While that experiment is part of our system I think therefore we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.33
26 -As remarkable and stirring as that passage is, it is also deeply problematic. Its liberal foundation, for example, has no means to recognize differences in power – or even in access to the market, powers that, as we have come to know so well in the current era of media communication, can be absolutely determinant of who can speak and who can be heard.34
27 -As importantly, and as I have explored in detail in other work,35 it is problematic because it puts into place – by implication in Holmes’s own words, but later made explicit in a whole series of cases36 – a distinction between speech and conduct. Even “First Amendment absolutists,” like Justice Hugo Black saw nothing wrong with the regulation of peaceful rallies if their conduct interfered with some other legitimate interest.37 This conduct could be widely interpreted.38 For most of the first half of the twentieth century, conduct that could be prohibited included the mere act of picketing. Courts upheld numerous injunctions against picketing on the basis that the conduct it entailed was necessarily either violent or harassing.39 Indeed, in one famous case in the 1920s, Chief Justice William Taft wrote of picketing, that its very “persistence, importunity, following and dogging” offended public morals and created a dangerous nuisance.40 The problem with picketing, Taft thought, was twofold. First, through its combination of action and speech, it tried to convince people not to enter some establishment; second, it tended to draw a crowd.41 To the degree it did both – that is, to the degree that is successfully communicated its message – it interrupted business and, in Taft’s eyes, undermined the business’s property rights, and therefore could be legitimately enjoined.42 Speech was worth protecting to the degree that is was not effective. Not until the 1940s did the Court begin to recognize that there might be an important speech right worth protecting in addition to the unprotected conduct.43
28 -There is an additional result of Holmes’s declaration about the value of speech in Abrams. Whereas the First Amendment is silent on why speech is to be protected from Congressional interference,44 Holmes makes it clear that the protection of speech serves a particular purpose: improving the state.45 Indeed, he quickly admits that speech likely to harm the state can be outlawed.46 And neither he nor the Court ever moved away from the “clear and present danger” test of Schenck.47 Speech, Holmes argues, is a good insofar as it helps promote and protect the “truth” of the state.48 There is a large amount of room allowed here for criticism of the state, but it can still be quieted by anything that can reasonably construed as a “legitimate state interest” (like protecting the property rights of a company subject to a strike).49 According to the Gitlow Court (if not Holmes, who did not see in Gitlow’s pamphlet enough of a clear and present danger), any speech that “endangers the foundations of organized government and threatens its overthrow by unlawful means” can be banned.50 Note here that speech does not have to advocate the overthrow of government; rather, it can be banned if through its persuasiveness others might seek to overthrow the government.51 On such grounds all manner of manifestos, and many types of street speaking, may be banned. And more broadly, as evidenced in picketing cases like American Steel Foundries, a similar prohibition may be placed on speech that, again through its persuasiveness (e.g. as to the unjustness of some practice or event) rather than through direct exhortation, may incite people to violence. Of course, speech (and its sister right, assembly), must take place somewhere and it must implicate some set of spatial relations, some regime of control over access to places to speak and places to listen.52 Consequently, the limits to speech, or more accurately the means of limiting speech, become increasingly geographic beginning in utopian. 13
29 -1939 in the case Hague v. CIO, when the Supreme Court finally recognized that public spaces like streets and parks were necessary not only to speech itself but to political organizing.53 The problem is not always exactly what is said, but where it is said. At issue in Hague was whether the rights to speech and assembly extends to the use of the streets and other public places for political purposes, and in what ways that use could be regulated. The Court based its decision in a language of common law, arguing that “wherever the title of the streets and parks may rest, they have immemorially been held in trust for use of the public and, time out of mind, have been used for purposes of assembly, communicating thoughts between citizens, and discussing public questions.”54 But whatever the roots for such a claim may be in common law, it hardly stands historical scrutiny in the United States, where the violent repression of street politics has always been as much a feature of urban life as its promotion.55 That makes Hague v. CIO a landmark decision: it states clearly for the first time that “the use of the streets and parks for the communication of views on national questions may be regulated in the interest of all … but it must not, in the guise of regulation, be abridged or denied.”56 At the same time, the Court made it clear that protected speech in public spaces was always to be “exercised in subordination to the general comfort and convenience, and in consonance with peace and good order….”57 The question, then, became one of finding the ways to regulate speech (and associated conduct) such that order – and even “general comfort” – was always maintained.
30 -The answers to that question were spatial. They were based on a regulation of urban geography in the name of both “good order” and “general comfort” and of the rights to speech and assembly. Speech rights needed to be balanced against other interests and desires. But order and comfort, it ought to go without saying, suggest a much lower threshold than does “clear and present danger.” While recognizing in a new way a fundamental right to speech and assembly, that is, the Hague court in fact found a language to severely limit that right, and perhaps even to limit it more effectively than had heretofore been possible. To put this another way (and as I will argue more fully below), the new spatial order of speech and assembly that the Court began constructing in Hague allowed for the full flowering of a truly liberal speech regime: a regime for which we are all, in fact, the poorer.
31 -
32 -Education is increasingly driven by neoliberal forces – student activism is key to retake the political sphere and democratize elite education against market-driven logic
33 -Williams 15 Jo Williams (Lecturer, College of Education at Victoria University), "Remaking education from below: the Chilean student movement as public pedagogy," Australian Journal of Adult Learning, November 2015 AZ
34 -More than ever the crisis of schooling represents, at large, the crisis of democracy itself and any attempt to understand the attack on public schooling and higher education cannot be separated from the wider assault on all forms of public life not driven by the logic of the market (Giroux, 2003:7) “Fin al lucro en educación, nuestros sueños no les pertenecen” (end profit making in education, nobody owns our dreams 1 ) (slogan of the Chilean student movement, inspired by the French student uprisings of May-June 1968) Over the past four decades, as the economic and ideological depravity of neoliberal policy and its market-driven logic (D. W. Hursh and Henderson, 2011) has been brought to bear on every aspect of education, the very concept of ‘public’ has been negated. Characteristics such as user-pays, competition, assaults on teachers, and mass standardised-testing and rankings, are among the features of a schooling, which is now very much seen as a private rather than public good (Giroux, 2003). The question of public education as a democratic force for the radical transformation of a violently unjust society seems rarely if ever asked, and a dangerous co-option and weakening of the language and practice of progressive pedagogy has occurred to the extent that notions of inclusion and success are increasingly limited to narrowly conceived individualist and competitive measures of market advantage. As Giroux notes “the forces of neo-liberalism dissolve public issues into utterly privatised and individualistic concerns (2004:62), and despite ongoing official rhetoric “the only form of citizenship increasingly being offered to young people is consumerism” (2003:7). Neoliberal education sees students and young people as passive consumers, the emphasis of schooling on learning how to be governed rather than how to govern (Giroux, 2003:7). In such a context the space for a public pedagogy, based on challenging the hegemony of neoliberal ideology and aligned with collective resistance, appears limited at best. And yet, every day people, teachers, students and communities do engage in political struggle, enacting pedagogies that seek to unveil rather than continue to mask the political structures and organisation that ensures power remains in the hands of the few, and at the service of the few, at the expense of the rest of us. Giroux characterises public pedagogies as defined by hope, struggle and a politicisation of the education process. He argues for …a politics of resistance that extends beyond the classroom as part of a broader struggle to challenge those forces of neo-liberalism that currently wage war against all collective structures capable of defending vital social institutions as a public good (Giroux, 2003:14). Central to Giroux’s argument is the need for critical educators to look to, value, and engage in and with social movements as they emerge and develop as sites of resistance. To …take sides, speak out, and engage in the hard work of debunking corporate culture’s assault on teaching and learning, orient their teaching for social change, connect learning to public life and link knowledge to the operations of power (Giroux, 2004:77). He argues that “progressive education in an age of rampant neoliberalism requires an expanded notion of the public, pedagogy, solidarity, and democratic struggle” (Giroux, 2003:13), and that moreover, educators need to work against a “politics of certainty” and instead develop and engage in pedagogical practice that problematises the world and fosters a sense of collective resistance and hope (2003:14). A neoliberal vision of the ‘good citizen’ and ‘good student’ presumes passivity, acceptance of the status quo and an individualistic disposition. Critical pedagogues must seek out and embrace opportunities to support and celebrate collective political action, not only because it develops a sense of social and political agency but also because it constitutes a powerful basis for authentic learning and active and critical citizenship in an unjust world (Freire, 1970). The Chilean student movement stands as one such example of challenging and inspiring counter-practice and a reclaiming of pedagogy as political and public. For ten years students have filled Chile’s streets, occupied their schools and universities, and organised conferences, public Remaking education from below: the Chilean student movement as public pedagogy 499 meetings, political stunts, creative actions and protests. Students and young people have been at the centre of the largest and most sustained political action seen in Chile since the democratic movement of the 80s, which eventually forced out the Pinochet dictatorship. Despite global trends in the opposite direction, the Chilean students have fundamentally influenced a nationwide education reform program constituting significant changes to the existing system which has been described as an extreme example of market-driven policy (Valenzuela, Bellei, and Ríos, 2014:220). Most importantly, they have forced and led a nationwide dialogue on the question of education and social justice in Chile and an interrogation of the current, grossly inequitable and elitist model (Falabella, 2008). This article begins by reviewing the experiences of the Chilean student movement to date and offering a brief explanation of the historical development of the education system it seeks to dismantle. It then considers the movement as an example of public pedagogies, concluding with a discussion of how it might inform notions of radical educational practice and a return of the student and pedagogue as authentic and critical subjects.
35 -The Role of the Ballot is to assume the role of an academic fighting neoliberalism to reclaim the academy and higher education. Objectivity is a lie placing an absolute truth where there is none to find except for the statement that neoliberalism is violent and uses normativity as a shield to hide their lies of oppression. Refuse that ethical criteria and embrace higher education’s true calling.
36 -Giroux 13 (Henry, American scholar and cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy in the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, “Public Intellectuals Against the Neoliberal University,” 29 October 2013, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/19654-public-intellectuals-against-the-neoliberal-university)//ghs-VA
37 -Increasingly, as universities are shaped by an audit culture, the call to be objective and impartial, whatever one's intentions, can easily echo what George Orwell called the official truth or the establishment point of view. Lacking a self-consciously democratic political focus, teachers are often reduced, or reduce themselves, to the role of a technician or functionary engaged in formalistic rituals, unconcerned with the disturbing and urgent problems that confront the larger society or the consequences of one's pedagogical practices and research undertakings. Hiding behind appeals to balance and objectivity, too many scholars refuse to recognize that being committed to something does not cancel out what C. Wright Mills once called hard thinking. Teaching needs to be rigorous, self-reflective, and committed not to the dead zone of instrumental rationality but to the practice of freedom, to a critical sensibility capable of advancing the parameters of knowledge, addressing crucial social issues, and connecting private troubles and public issues. In opposition to the instrumental model of teaching, with its conceit of political neutrality and its fetishization of measurement, I argue that academics should combine the mutually interdependent roles of critical educator and active citizen. This requires finding ways to connect the practice of classroom teaching with important social problems and the operation of power in the larger society while providing the conditions for students to view themselves as critical agents capable of making those who exercise authority and power answerable for their actions. Higher education cannot be decoupled from what Jacques Derrida calls a democracy to come, that is, a democracy that must always "be open to the possibility of being contested, of contesting itself, of criticizing and indefinitely improving itself."33 Within this project of possibility and impossibility, critical pedagogy must be understood as a deliberately informed and purposeful political and moral practice, as opposed to one that is either doctrinaire, instrumentalized or both. Moreover, a critical pedagogy should also gain part of its momentum in higher education among students who will go back to the schools, churches, synagogues and workplaces to produce new ideas, concepts and critical ways of understanding the world in which young people and adults live. This is a notion of intellectual practice and responsibility that refuses the professional neutrality and privileged isolation of the academy. It also affirms a broader vision of learning that links knowledge to the power of self-definition and to the capacities of students to expand the scope of democratic freedoms, particularly those that address the crisis of education, politics, and the social as part and parcel of the crisis of democracy itself. In order for critical pedagogy, dialogue and thought to have real effects, they must advocate that all citizens, old and young, are equally entitled, if not equally empowered, to shape the society in which they live. This is a commitment we heard articulated by the brave students who fought tuition hikes and the destruction of civil liberties and social provisions in Quebec and to a lesser degree in the Occupy Wall Street movement. If educators are to function as public intellectuals, they need to listen to young people who are producing a new language in order to talk about inequality and power relations, attempting to create alternative democratic public spaces, rethinking the very nature of politics, and asking serious questions about what democracy is and why it no longer exists in many neoliberal societies. These young people who are protesting the 1 recognize that they have been written out of the discourses of justice, equality and democracy and are not only resisting how neoliberalism has made them expendable, they are arguing for a collective future very different from the one that is on display in the current political and economic systems in which they feel trapped. These brave youth are insisting that the relationship between knowledge and power can be emancipatory, that their histories and experiences matter, and that what they say and do counts in their struggle to unlearn dominating privileges, productively reconstruct their relations with others, and transform, when necessary, the world around them.
38 -
39 -Neolib produces international conflicts and environmental collapse – extinction
40 -Ehrenfeld ‘5 (David, Dept. of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources @ Rutgers University, “The Environmental Limits to Globalization”, Conservation Biology Vol. 19 No. 2 April 2005)
41 -The known effects of globalization on the environment are numerous and highly significant. Many others are undoubtedly unknown. Given these circumstances, the first question that suggests itself is: Will globalization, as we see it now, remain a permanent state of affairs (Rees 2002; Ehrenfeld 2003a)? The principal environmental side effects of globalization—climate change, resource exhaustion (particularly cheap energy), damage to agroecosystems, and the spread of exotic species, including pathogens (plant, animal, and human)—are sufficient to make this economic system unstable and short-lived. The socioeconomic consequences of globalization are likely to do the same. In my book The Arrogance of Humanism (1981), I claimed that our ability to manage global systems, which depends on our being able to predict the results of the things we do, or even to understand the systems we have created, has been greatly exaggerated. Much of our alleged control is science fiction; it doesn’t work because of theoretical limits that we ignore at our peril. We live in a dream world in which reality testing is something we must never, never do, lest we awake. In 1984 Charles Perrow explored the reasons why we have trouble predicting what so many of our own created systems will do, and why they surprise us so unpleasantly while we think we are managing them. In his book Normal Accidents, which does not concern globalization, he listed the critical characteristics of some of today’s complex systems. They are highly interlinked, so a change in one part can affect many others, even those that seem quite distant. Results of some processes feed back on themselves in unexpected ways. The controls of the system often interact with each other unpredictably. We have only indirect ways of finding out what is happening inside the system. And we have an incomplete understanding of some of the system’s processes. His example of such a system is a nuclear power plant, and this, he explained, is why system-wide accidents in nuclear plants cannot be predicted or eliminated by system design. I would argue that globalization is a similar system, also subject to catastrophic accidents, many of them environmental—events that we cannot define until after they have occurred, and perhaps not even then. The comparatively few commentators who have predicted the collapse of globalization have generally given social reasons to support their arguments. These deserve some consideration here, if only because the environmental and social consequences of globalization interact so strongly with each other. In 1998, the British political economist John Gray, giving scant attention to environmental factors, nevertheless came to the conclusion that globalization is unstable and will be short-lived. He said, “There is nothing in today’s global market that buffers it against the social strains arising from highly uneven economic development within and between the world’s diverse societies.” The result, Gray states, is that “The combination of an unceasing stream of new technologies, unfettered market competition and weak or fractured social institutions” has weakened both sovereign states and multinational corporations in their ability to control important events. Note that Gray claims that not only nations but also multinational corporations, which are widely touted as controlling the world, are being weakened by globalization. This idea may come as a surprise, considering the growth of multinationals in the past few decades, but I believe it is true. Neither governments nor giant corporations are even remotely capable of controlling the environmental or social forces released by globalization, without first controlling globalization itself. Two of the social critics of globalization with the most dire predictions about its doom are themselves masters of the process. The late Sir James Goldsmith, billionaire financier, wrote in 1994, It must surely be a mistake to adopt an economic policy which makes you rich if you eliminate your national workforce and transfer production abroad, and which bankrupts you if you continue to employ your own people.... It is the poor in the rich countries who will subsidize the rich in the poor countries. This will have a serious impact on the social cohesion of nations. Another free-trade billionaire, George Soros, said much the same thing in 1995: “The collapse of the global marketplace would be a traumatic event with unimaginable consequences. Yet I find it easier to imagine than the continuation of the present regime.” How much more powerful these statements are if we factor in the environment! As globalization collapses, what will happen to people, biodiversity, and ecosystems? With respect to people, the gift of prophecy is not required to answer this question. What will happen depends on where you are and how you live. Many citizens of the Third World are still comparatively self-sufficient; an unknown number of these will survive the breakdown of globalization and its attendant chaos. In the developed world, there are also people with resources of self-sufficiency and a growing understanding of the nature of our social and environmental problems, which may help them bridge the years of crisis. Some species are adaptable; some are not. For the non- human residents of Earth, not all news will be bad. Who would have predicted that wild turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo), one of the wiliest and most evasive of woodland birds, extinct in New Jersey 50 years ago, would now be found in every county of this the most densely populated state, and even, occasionally, in adjacent Manhattan? Who would have predicted that black bears (Ursus americanus), also virtually extinct in the state in the mid-twentieth century, would now number in the thousands (Ehrenfeld 2001)? Of course these recoveries are unusual—rare bright spots in a darker landscape. Finally, a few ecological systems may survive in a comparatively undamaged state; most will be stressed to the breaking point, directly or indirectly, by many environmental and social factors interacting unpredictably. Lady Luck, as always, will have much to say. In his book The Collapse of Complex Societies, the archaeologist Joseph Tainter (1988) notes that collapse, which has happened to all past empires, inevitably results in human systems of lower complexity and less specialization, less centralized control, lower economic activity, less information flow, lower population levels, less trade, and less redistribution of resources. All of these changes are inimical to globalization. This less-complex, less-globalized condition is probably what human societies will be like when the dust settles. I do not think, however, that we can make such specific predictions about the ultimate state of the environment after globalization, because we have never experienced anything like this exceptionally rapid, global environmental damage before. History and science have little to tell us in this situation. The end of the current economic system and the transition to a postglobalized state is and will be accompanied by a desperate last raid on resources and a chaotic flurry of environmental destruction whose results cannot possibly be told in advance. All one can say is that the surviving species, ecosystems, and resources will be greatly impoverished compared with what we have now, and our descendants will not thank us for having adopted, however briefly, an economic system that consumed their inheritance and damaged their planet so wantonly. Environment is a true bottom line—concern for its condition must trump all purely economic growth strategies if both the developed and developing nations are to survive and prosper. Awareness of the environmental limits that globalized industrial society denies or ignores should not, however, bring us to an extreme position of environmental determinism. Those whose preoccupations with modern civilization’s very real social problems cause them to reject or minimize the environmental constraints discussed here ( Hollander 2003) are guilty of seeing only half the picture. Environmental scientists sometimes fall into the same error. It is tempting to see the salvation of civilization and environment solely in terms of technological improvements in efficiency of energy extraction and use, control of pollution, conservation of water, and regulation of environmentally harmful activities. But such needed developments will not be sufficient—or may not even occur— without corresponding social change, including an end to human population growth and the glorification of consumption, along with the elimination of economic mechanisms that increase the gap between rich and poor. The environmental and social problems inherent in globalization are completely interrelated—any attempt to treat them as separate entities is unlikely to succeed in easing the transition to a postglobalized world. Integrated change that combines environmental awareness, technological innovation, and an altered world view is the only answer to the life-threatening problems exacerbated by globalization (Ehrenfeld 2003b). If such integrated change occurs in time, it will likely happen partly by our own design and partly as an unplanned response to the constraints imposed by social unrest, disease, and the economics of scarcity. With respect to the planned component of change, we are facing, as eloquently described by Rees (2002), “the ultimate challenge to human intelligence and self-awareness, those vital qualities we humans claim as uniquely our own. Homo sapiens will either. . .become fully human or wink out ignominiously, a guttering candle in a violent storm of our own making.” If change does not come quickly, our global civilization will join Tainter’s (1988) list as the latest and most dramatic example of collapsed complex societies. Is there anything that could slow globalization quickly, before it collapses disastrously of its own environmental and social weight? It is still not too late to curtail the use of energy, reinvigorate local and regional communities while restoring a culture of concern for each other, reduce nonessential global trade and especially global finance (Daly and Cobb 1989), do more to control introductions of exotic species (including pathogens), and accelerate the growth of sustainable agriculture. Many of the needed technologies are already in place. It is true that some of the damage to our environment—species extinctions, loss of crop and domestic animal varieties, many exotic species introductions, and some climatic change— will be beyond repair. Nevertheless, the opportunity to help our society move past globalization in an orderly way, while there is time, is worth our most creative and passionate efforts. The citizens of the United States and other nations have to understand that our global economic system has placed both our environment and our society in peril, a peril as great as that posed by any war of the twentieth century. This understanding, and the actions that follow, must come not only from enlightened leadership, but also from grassroots consciousness raising. It is still possible to reclaim the planet from a self-destructive economic system that is bringing us all down together, and this can be a task that bridges the divide between conservatives and liberals. The crisis is here, now. What we have to do has become obvious. Globalization can be scaled back to manageable proportions only in the context of an altered world view that rejects materialism even as it restores a sense of communal obligation. In this way, alone, can we achieve real homeland security, not just in the United States, but also in other nations, whose fates have become so thoroughly entwined with ours within the global environment we share.
42 -
43 -Student protests oppose neoliberalism in higher education, translating theory into praxis
44 -Delgado and Ross 16 Sandra Delgado (doctoral student in curriculum studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada) and E. Wayne Ross (Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada), "Students in Revolt: The Pedagogical Potential of Student Collective Action in the Age of the Corporate University" 2016 (published on Academia.edu) AZ
45 -As students’ collective actions keep gaining more political relevance, student and university movements also establish themselves as spaces of counter-hegemony (Sotiris, 2014). Students are constantly opening new possibilities to displace and resist the commodification of education offered by mainstream educational institutions. As Sotiris (2014) convincingly argues, movements within the university have not only the potential to subvert educational reforms, but in addition, they have become “strategic nodes” for the transformation of the processes and practices in higher education, and most importantly for the constant re-imagination and the recreation of “new forms of subaltern counter-hegemony” (p. 1). The strategic importance of university and college based moments lays precisely in the role that higher education plays in contemporary societies, namely their role in “the development of new technologies, new forms of production and for the articulation of discourses and theories on contemporary issues and their role in the reproduction of state and business personnel.” (p.8) Universities and colleges therefore, have a crucial contribution in “the development of class strategies (both dominant and subaltern), in the production of subjectivities, (and) in the transformation of collective practices” (p.8) The main objective of this paper is to examine how contemporary student movements are disrupting, opposing and displacing entrenched oppressive and dehumanizing reforms, practices and frames in today’s corporate academia. This work is divided in four sections. The first is an introduction to student movements and an overview of how student political action has been approached and researched. The second and third sections take a closer look at the repertoires of contention used by contemporary student movements and propose a framework based on radical praxis that allows us to better understand the pedagogical potential of student disruptive action. The last section contains a series of examples of students’ repertoires or tactics of contention that exemplifies the pedagogical potential of student social and political action. An Overview of Student Movements Generally speaking, students are well positioned as political actors. They have been actively involved in the politics of education since the beginnings of the university, but more broadly, students have played a significant role in defining social, cultural and political environments around the world (Altbach, 1966; Boren, 2001). The contributions and influences of students and student movements to revolutionary efforts and political movements beyond the university context are undeniable. One example is the role that students have played in the leadership and membership of the political left (e.g. students’ role in the Movimiento 26 de Julio - M-26-7 in Cuba during the 50’s and in the formation of The New Left in the United States, among others). Similarly, several political and social movements have either established alliances with student organizations or created their own chapters on campuses to recruit new members, mobilize their agendas in education and foster earlier student’s involvement in politics2 (Altbach, 1966; Lipset, 1969). Students are often considered to be “catalysts” of political and social action or “barometers” of the social unrest and political tension accumulated in society (Barker, 2008). Throughout history student movements have had a diverse and sometimes contradictory range of political commitments. Usually, student organizations and movements find grounding and inspiration in Anarchism and Marxism, however it is also common to see movements leaning towards liberal and conservative approaches. Hence, student political action has not always been aligned with social movements or organizations from the political left. In various moments in history students have joined or been linked to rightist movements, reactionary organizations and conservative parties (Altbach, 1966; Barker, 2008). Students, unlike workers, come from different social classes and seemly different cultural backgrounds. As a particularly diverse social group, students are distinguished for being heterogeneous and pluralists in their values, interests and commitments (Boren, 2001). Such diversity has been a constant challenge for maintaining unity, which has been particularly problematic in cases of national or transnational student organizations (Prusinowska, Kowzan, and Zielińska, 2012; Somma, 2012). To clarify, social classes are defined by the specific relationship that people have with the means of production. In the case of students, they are not a social class by themselves, but a social layer or social group that is identifiable by their common function in society (Stedman, 1969). The main or central aspect that unites student is the transitory social condition of being a student. In other words, students are a social group who have a common function, role in society or social objective, which is “to study” something (Lewis, 2013; Simons and Masschelein, 2009). Student movements can be understood as a form of social movement (LuesherMamashela, 2015). They have an internal organization that varies from traditionally hierarchical structures, organizational schemes based on representative democracy with charismatic leadership, to horizontal forms of decision-making (Altbach, 1966; Lipset, 1969). As many other movements, student movements have standing claims, organize different type of actions, tactics or repertoires of contention, 3 and they advocate for political, social or/and educational agendas, programs or pleas.
46 -Student protest combats racial inequality by sparking national dialogue and movements
47 -Curwen 15 Thomas Curwen, Jason Song and Larry Gordon (reporters), "What's different about the latest wave of college activism," LA Times, 11/18/2015 AZ
48 -Although some of the strategies may seem familiar, it is the speed and the urgency of today's protests that are different. "What is unique about these issues is how social media has changed the way protests take place on college campuses," said Tyrone Howard, associate dean of equity, diversity and inclusion at UCLA. "A protest goes viral in no time flat. With Instagram and Twitter, you're in an immediate news cycle. This was not how it was 20 or 30 years ago." Howard also believes that the effectiveness of the actions at the University of Missouri has encouraged students on other campuses to raise their voices. "A president stepping down is a huge step," he said. "Students elsewhere have to wonder, 'Wow, if that can happen there, why can't we bring out our issues to the forefront as well?'" Shaun R. Harper, executive director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education, agrees. The resignation of two top Missouri administrators, Harper said, showed students and athletes around the country that they have power they may not have realized before. The protests show "we're all together and we have the power to make the change we deserve," said Lindsay Opoku-Acheampong, a senior studying biology at Occidental. "It's affirming," said Dalin Celamy, also a senior at the college. "It lets us know we're not crazy; it's happening to people who are just like you all over the country." Celamy, along with other students, not only watched the unfolding protests across the country, but also looked to earlier protests, including an occupation of an administrative building at Occidental in 1968. Echoes of the 1960s in today's actions are clear, said Robert Cohen, a history professor at New York University and author of "Freedom's Orator," a biography of Mario Savio, who led the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. "The tactical dynamism of these nonviolent protests and the public criticism of them are in important ways reminiscent of the 1960s," Cohen said. "Today's protests, like those in the '60s, are memorable because they have been effective in pushing for change and sparking dialogue as well as polarization." Although the targets of these protests are the blatant and subtle forms of racism and inequity that affect the students' lives, the message of the protests resonates with the recent incidents of intolerance and racial inequity on the streets of America. There is a reason for this, Howard said. Campuses are microcosms of society, he said, and are often comparable in terms of representation and opportunity. "So there is a similar fight for more representation, acceptance and inclusion." The dynamic can create a complicated and sensitive social order for students of color to negotiate. "Latino and African American students are often under the belief if they leave their community and go to colleges, that it will be better," Howard said. "They believe it will be an upgrade over the challenges that they saw in underserved and understaffed schools. But if the colleges and universities are the same as those schools, then there is disappointment and frustration." In addition, Howard said, when these students leave their community to go to a university, they often feel conflicted. "So when injustice comes up," he said, "they are quick to respond because it is what they saw in their community. On some level, it is their chance to let their parents and peers know that they have not forgotten the struggle in the community." On campuses and off, Harper, of the University of Pennsylvania center, finds a rising sense of impatience among African Americans about social change. "As a black person, I think black people are just fed up. It's time out for ignoring these issues," he said. While protests in the 1960s helped create specific safeguards for universities today, such as Title IX, guaranteeing equal access for all students to any educational program or activity receiving federal financial assistance, a gap has widened over the years between students and administrators over perceptions of bias. Institutions often valued for their support of free speech find themselves wrestling with the prospect of limiting free speech, but to focus on what is or isn't politically correct avoids the more important issue, Cohen said: whether campuses are diverse enough or how to reduce racism. Occidental student Raihana Haynes-Venerable has heard criticism that modern students are too sensitive, but she argues that subtle forms of discrimination still have a profound effect. She pointed to women making less than men and fewer minorities getting jobs as examples. "This is the new form of racism," she said.
49 -Thus the plan –
50 -Resolved: Public colleges and universities in the United States ought not restrict constitutionally protected speech to free speech zones.
51 -Free speech zones limit student discourse and should be prohibited
52 -Hudson 16 (David L. Hudson Jr. is a First Amendment expert and law professor who serves as First Amendment Ombudsman for the Newseum Institute’s First Amendment Center. He contributes research and commentary, provides analysis and information to news media. He is an author, co-author or co-editor of more than 40 books, including Let The Students Speak: A History of the Fight for Free Expression in American Schools (Beacon Press, 2011), The Encyclopedia of the First Amendment (CQ Press, 2008) (one of three co-editors), The Rehnquist Court: Understanding Its Impact and Legacy (Praeger, 2006), and The Handy Supreme Court Answer Book (Visible Ink Press, 2008). He has written several books devoted to student-speech issues and others areas of student rights. He writes regularly for the ABA Journal and the American Bar Association’s Preview of United States Supreme Court Cases. He has served as a senior law clerk at the Tennessee Supreme Court, and teaches First Amendment and Professional Responsibility classes at Vanderbilt Law School and various classes at the Nashville School of Law), "How Campus Policies Limit Free Speech," Huffington Post, 6/1/2016 AZ
53 -Restricting where students can have free speech
54 -In addition, many colleges and universities have free speech zones. Under these policies, people can speak at places of higher learning in only certain, specific locations or zones. While there are remnants of these policies from the 1960s, they grew in number in the late 1990s and early 2000s as a way for administrators to deal with controversial expression. These policies may have a seductive appeal for administrators, as they claim to advance the cause of free speech. But, free speech zones often limit speech by relegating expression to just a few locations. For example, some colleges began by having only two or three free speech zones on campus. The idea of zoning speech is not unique to colleges and universities. Government officials have sought to diminish the impact of different types of expression by zoning adult-oriented expression, antiabortion protestors and political demonstrators outside political conventions. In a particularly egregious example, a student at Modesto Junior College in California named Robert Van Tuinen was prohibited from handing out copies of the United States Constitution on September 17, 2013 - the anniversary of the signing of the Constitution. Van Tuinen was informed that he could get permission to distribute the Constitution if he preregistered for time in the “free speech zone.” But later, Van Tuinen was told by an administrator that he would have to wait, possibly until the next month. In the words of First Amendment expert Charles Haynes, “the entire campus should be a free speech zone.” In other words, the default position of school administrators should be to allow speech, not limit it. Zoning speech is troubling, particularly when it reduces the overall amount of speech on campus. And many free speech experts view the idea of a free speech zone as “moronic and oxymoronic.” College or university campuses should be a place where free speech not only survives but thrives.
55 -Public discourse is protected by the First Amendment
56 -Weinstein 11 – James Weinstein, Amelia D. Lewis Professor of Constitutional Law, Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, Arizona State University: 2011(PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY AS THE CENTRAL VALUE OF AMERICAN FREE SPEECH DOCTRINE, Virginia Law Review Vol 97:3 p.3, Available at https://web.law.asu.edu/Portals/31/Weinstein_UVA_May_2011.pdf Accessed on 12/14/16)IG
57 -As Professor Robert Post's pioneering work has demonstrated, this extremely rigorous protection applies primarily within the do- main of "public discourse." Public discourse consists of speech on matters of public concern, or, largely without respect to its subject matter, of expression in settings dedicated or essential to democratic self-governance, such as books, magazines, films, the internet, or in public forums such as the speaker's corner of the park. It is in this realm that the people-the ultimate governors in a democracy-can freely examine and discuss the rules, norms, and conditions that constitute society. Precisely because public discourse in the United States is so strongly protected, however, the realm dedicated to such expression cannot be conceived as covering the entire expanse of human expression. Just as it is imperative in a democracy to have a realm in which any idea, practice, or norm can be questioned as vituperatively as the speaker chooses, there must be other settings in which the government may efficiently carry out the results yielded by the democratic process. Accordingly, in set- tings dedicated to some purpose other than public discourse-such as those dedicated to effectuating government programs in the government workplace," to the administration of justice in the courtroom," or to instruction in public schools the government has far greater leeway to regulate the content of speech.
58 -It is not just the content of the speech that determines whether the expression will be highly protected as public discourse, but also the setting or medium in which the expression occurs." In modern democratic societies, certain modes of communication form "a structural skeleton that is necessary, although not sufficient, for public discourse to serve the constitutional value of democracy”. For this reason, "it is assumed that if a medium is constitutionally protected by the First Amendment, each instance of the medium would also be protected." The importance of the medium in which a given instance of speech occurs to democratic self- governance is, in my view, the best explanation of why the Su- preme Court rigorously protects nudity in film and cable television-media that are in its view part of the "structural skeleton" of public discourse-but not in live performances by erotic dancers on the stage of a "strip club."
59 -Free speech zones and no protest zones infringe on protected speech and shut down impromptu uprising which disarms the most effective form of resistance and forces reform efforts to bend to the will of the established system
60 -Mitchell 03 - Don Mitchell, Distinguished Professor of Geography at Syracuse’s Maxwell School: 2003 (“The Liberalization of Free Speech: Or, How Protest in Public Space is Silenced” Stanford Agora Vol. 4 p.36-37 Available at agora.stanford.edu/agora/volume4/articles/mitchell/mitchell.pdf Accessed on 12/11/16)IG
61 -In the end, a federal judge upheld the city’s position, seeing no illegitimate abridgement of protesters’ rights in the City’s establishment of a no protest zone. The judge stated, plainly enough, that “free speech must sometimes bend to public safety.”150 In this case it had to bend for 50 blocks, and right out of downtown – even though in Madsen, the court had found a 36 foot exclusion zone to be reasonable but both a 300 foot zone in which approaching patrons and workers of clinics, and a 300 foot no-protest zone around residences of clinic workers to be too great a burden on free speech, ordering a much smaller no-protest bubble to be drawn.151 Given this sort of spatial specificity in the Supreme Court’s decision, it seems unlikely that such a large protest exclusion zone could withstand scrutiny.
62 -But there is another issue at work too. The judge in Seattle supported the City’s contention that sanctioned protest was acceptable. The no-protest zone was necessary because of impromptu protests. But, of course, the very effectiveness of the Seattle protests was their (apparent) spontaneity.152 That is what caught the media’s – and the public’s – imagination; and that is what allowed for the massive upsurge of political debate, in the U.S. and around the world, that followed.
63 -Perhaps, tactically, Seattle’s “mistake” was to not establish designated protest and no-protest zones in advance of the meetings. Such a move had been effective in the 1996 Democratic and Republican Conventions (and in earlier ones too). And in subsequent years and events it has become standard practice, as with the 2000 National Conventions, the annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington, and the World Economic Forum meeting in New York in February 2002, where protesters are kept out of certain areas by fences, barricades and a heavy police presence.153 In the case of the 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, it was the protesters who were fenced off, with the City establishing an official “protest zone” in a fenced parking lot a considerable distance from the convention site.154 The rationale, of course, was “security,” a rationale backed by appeals to the authority of the Secret Service. The ACLU, among others, sued the city, eventually winning a decision that invalidated the city’s plans. The city was forced to establish a protest zone closer to the convention center, with the judge chiding the City of Los Angeles for failing to consider the First Amendment when it established the rules for protest and security around the event. “You can’t shut down the 1st Amendment about what might happen,” the judge said. “You can always theorize some awful scenario.”155 This victory should not be considered very large. Its effect, and the effect of other cases like it, has largely reduced the ACLU and other advocates of speech rights to arguing the fine points of geography, pouring over maps to determine just where protest may occur. Protesters are put entirely on the defensive, always seeking to justify why their voices should be heard and their actions seen, always having to make a claim that it is not unreasonable to assert that protest should be allowed in a place where those being protested against can actually hear it, and always having to “bend” their tactics – and their rights – to fit a legal regime that in every case sees protest subordinate to “the general order” (which, of course, really means the “established order”).
1 +The Kingdom of Belgium should continue production of nuclear power
2 +The Kingdom of Belgium should develop and fully integrate information systems that aid in combating terrorism.
3 +Information systems and networks are the only ways to challenge asymmetric war fighting and terrorism
4 +Garreau 05 Joel Garreau, staff writer for the Washington Post, “Intelligence Gathering Is the Best Way to Reduce Terrorism,” Are Efforts to Reduce Terrorism Successful?, published by Lauri Friedman, pg 57-58
5 +Terrorist organizations are human networks, not armies. They rely on trust, relationships, and communication to operate. Military operations and bombing campaigns will be ineffective against such groups because they will not destroy the trust and connections those networks are built upon. Therefore, the most effective way to reduce terrorism is to wage a war of wits. With good intelligence gathering techniques, authorities can learn who the key terrorists are and either eliminate them or tarnish their reputations in the eyes of others in the network. Unraveling the ties that bind terrorists will win the war on terrorism. The essence of this first war of the 21st century is that it’s not like the old ones. That’s why, as $40 billion is voted for the new war on terrorism, 35,000 reservists are called up and two aircraft carrier battle groups hover near Afghanistan,1 some warriors and analysts have questions: In the Information Age, they ask, how do you attack, degrade or destroy a small, shadowy, globally distributed, stateless network of intensely loyal partisans with few fixed assets or addresses? If bombers are not the right hammer for this nail, what is? Bombers worked well in wars in which one Industrial Age military threw steel at another. World War II, for instance, was a matchup of roughly symmetrical forces. This is not true today. That’s why people who think about these things call this new conflict “asymmetric warfare.” The terrorist side is different: different organization, different methods of attack—and of defense. “It takes a tank to fight a tank. It takes a network to fight a network,” says John Arquilla, senior consultant to the international security group Rand and co-author of the forthcoming “Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime and Militancy.” He asks: “How do you attack a trust structure—which is what a network is? You’re not going to do this with Tomahawk missiles or strategic bombardment.” “It’s a whole new playing field. You’re not attacking a nation, but a network,” says Karen Stephenson, who studies everything from corporations to the U.S. Navy as if they were tribes. Trained as a chemist and anthropologist, she now teaches at Harvard and the University of London. “You have to understand what holds those networks in place, what makes them strong and where the leverage points are. They’re not random connections,” she says. Human networks are distinct from electronic ones. They are not the Internet. They are political and emotional connections among people who must trust each other in order to function, like Colombian drug cartels and Spanish Basque separatists and the Irish Republican Army. Not to mention high-seas pirates, smugglers of illegal immigrants, and rogue brokers of weapons of mass destruction. But how to a network? The good news is that in the last decade we have developed a whole new set of weapons to figure that out.
EntryDate
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1 -2016-12-16 19:40:55.0
1 +2016-09-11 01:24:28.0
Judge
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1 -Jyleesa Hampton
1 +Joseph Barquin
Opponent
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1 -Oakwood MW
1 +Lynbrook NS
ParentRound
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1 -7
1 +3
Round
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1 -2
1 +4
Team
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,1 @@
1 -La Canada Zhao Aff
1 +La Canada Zhao Neg
Title
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1 -JANFEB - Neolib Aff
1 +SEPOCT - Nuclear Terror CP
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,1 @@
1 -Blake
1 +Loyola
Caselist.CitesClass[8]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,70 +1,0 @@
1 -Under the facade of promoting free speech, colleges have repressed it through regulation of appropriate "space and time” – this hidden form of censorship forces protest into spaces where it is ineffective.
2 -Mitchell 03 - Don Mitchell, Distinguished Professor of Geography at Syracuse’s Maxwell School: 2003 (“The Liberalization of Free Speech: Or, How Protest in Public Space is Silenced” Stanford Agora Vol. 4 p.4-8 Available at agora.stanford.edu/agora/volume4/articles/mitchell/mitchell.pdf Accessed on 12/11/16)IG
3 -But, of course, the Supreme Court had considered New York’s law before – in the 1920s in the famous Gitlow case.8 Then, the Court upheld the conviction of the radical Benjamin Gitlow after Gitlow had published a tract called The Left-Wing Manifesto, during the height of the Palmer Raids in 1919. Oliver Wendell Holmes (joined by Louis Brandeis) wrote a famous dissent in the Gitlow case, arguing that Gitlow’s pamphlet in no way presented a “clear and present danger” to the state and, therefore, Gitlow’s conviction under New York’s criminal anarchy law should be overtuned.9 The majority in this case, however, upheld Gitlow’s conviction and in the process affirmed both the constitutionality of the New York law, and the State’s right to police some forms of speech. Assuming, first, that the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment covered the liberties outlined in the First Amendment, the Court, second, argued that “the freedom of speech and of the press which is secured by the Constitution, does not confer an absolute right to speak or publish, without responsibility, whatever one may choose….”10 Further, the Court held, “That a State in the exercise of its police power may punish those who abuse this freedom by utterances inimical to the public welfare, tending to corrupt public morals, incite crime, or disturb the peace, is not open to question.”11 Finally, “a State may punish utterances endangering the foundations of organized government and threatening its overthrow by unlawful means.”12
4 -On much of this Holmes did not disagree. His dissent in Gitlow was based in earlier decisions and dissents he had written for the Court in the wake of World War 1.13 These earlier cases,14 established the standards for the right that many now consider the foundation of contemporary American liberty: the right to free speech. Or more accurately, at the end of World War I, the Supreme Court, with Justice Holmes taking the lead, began to develop the language that allowed for the regulation of speech such that it could be protected as an ingredient necessary to the development and the strength of the state. It began to find a way to limit speech, rather than to outlaw it altogether. If the majority in Gitlow had not yet come around to this view, later Courts did, finding in Holmes’s decisions the language necessary to begin the project of liberalizing free speech in the U.S.15 This liberalization was predicated on a seeing at the heart of speech a separation – in space and time – between what is said and the effects of utterances. This is the very basis of Holmes’s “clear and present danger” test.16
5 -Each of the defendants in these cases was convicted for making speeches (or publishing pamphlets) that were deemed to have the possibility of being effective and therefore to portend violence or to undermine the legitimate interests of the state. Each conviction was upheld by the Supreme Court. The irony of free speech jurisprudence in the US, therefore, is that its liberalization is grounded in its repression. This conclusion is doubly obvious, and doubly interesting, when the content of the four convictions is remembered. The prominent socialist Eugene Debs was convicted for merely praising draft resisters for their moral courage.17 Charles Schenck, an official of the Socialist Party in Philadelphia, was convicted for calling the draft a form of involuntary servitude outlawed by the Thirteenth Amendment, and recommending that men petition the government to object to the draft law.18 Frohwerk, the editor of a small circulation German-language newspaper, was convicted for writing that the US had no chance of defeating Germany in the war and thus draftees who refused to enlist could not be faulted.19 And Abrams, along with four fellow Russian radicals, was convicted for throwing leaflets out of a New York window protesting US intervention in Russia following its revolution.20
6 -Holmes first laid out his language concerning “clear and present danger” in the Schenck case.21 “The question in every case,” Holmes intoned, “is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree.”22 He also said a few other things that bear repeating, especially now: “When a nation is at war, many things that might be said in a time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight and no Court could regard them as protected by any Constitutional right.”23 However, Holmes clarified:
7 -We admit that in many places and in ordinary times, the defendants … would have been within their constitutional rights. But the character of the act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done…. The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. It does not even protect a man from an injunction against uttering words that may have all the effect of force.24
8 -So, even when not at war, the government may strongly circumscribe speech.
9 -There are two issues that are crucial here to the construction of a fully liberal theory of free speech. The first is that what makes a difference in the nature of speech is where that speech occurs. There would be nothing wrong, presumably, with falsely shouting fire, even in a time of war, in the middle of the wilderness, or even on a busy street, if there is adequate room to move. The trick for speech regulation, therefore, becomes – and became for the Court – one of spatial regulation. Regulation of location, or place, becomes the surrogate for the regulation of content.25 The second crucial point Holmes makes is to distinguish between the content of speech and the possibility that such speech might have an effect.26 My purpose in the remainder of this essay is to examine the intersection of these two issues to show how contemporary speech laws and policing effectively silence dissident speech in the name of its promotion and regulation. As the Court has moved away from a regime that penalizes what is said – in essence liberalizing free speech – it has simultaneously created a means to severely regulate where things may be said, and it has done so, in my estimation, in a way that more effectively silences speech than did the older regime of censorship and repression.
10 -It could be argued – to put all this another way – that the death of William Epton received the attention it did precisely because the way his speech was policed seems so anachronistic now. It certainly seems a heavy-handed means of silencing opposition. It seems illiberal. A more liberal approach to silencing opposition – to keeping it from being heard – is to let geography, more than censorship, do the silencing. And this is the direction American law is tending. In what follows I will make my argument clear first through a historical geography of First Amendment law and the evolution of the public forum doctrine, and then by looking at three case studies that show how regulating the where of speech effectively silences protest. The implication of my argument is that under the speech regime currently being constructed in the United States, dissident speech can only be effective when it is illegal. And, as I will briefly suggest in the Epilogue, that implication may be profoundly important should (as seems quite likely) the Federal Government overlay this liberal regime with a return to more illiberal and repressive means of handling dissidents in the name of “homeland security.” Perhaps ironically, the further implication is that a boisterous, contentious, “politics of the street” is more necessary now than ever if any effective right to free speech is to be retained.
11 -
12 -Zoning is reminiscent of the McCarthy Era and the faults of COINTELPRO – repression cloaked in the law – and gives authorities the power to construe civil disobedience as domestic terrorism, especially in this post-9/11 era.
13 -Mitchell 03 - Don Mitchell, Distinguished Professor of Geography at Syracuse’s Maxwell School: 2003 (“The Liberalization of Free Speech: Or, How Protest in Public Space is Silenced” Stanford Agora Vol. 4 p.43-45 Available at agora.stanford.edu/agora/volume4/articles/mitchell/mitchell.pdf Accessed on 12/11/16)IG
14 -As the preceding argument has indicated, the liberalization of free speech has not always been progressive. And it has not been progressive in both senses of the term. It has not marched steadily forward, uninterrupted, towards the shining light of freedom, to become ever more liberal, ever more just. Rather, to the degree it has been liberalized, this has occurred in fits and starts, with frequent steps backwards or to the side rather than forward. Like any social history, that is, the history of free speech is not a linear one of ever-expanding enlightenment; like any social history it is a history of ongoing struggle. Nor has it been progressive in the sense of necessarily more just, as a close focus on the geography of speech makes clear. Geographical analysis has shown that what sometimes appears as a progressive reinforcement of a right to speech and assembly is really (or is also) in fact a means towards its suppression.169
15 -Nonetheless, whatever rights have been won, have been won through struggle and often not by following the law, but by breaking it. Civil disobedience, by labor activists and other picketers, by civil rights marchers, by anti-war protesters, and by Free Speech activists (as with the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in the sixties), has forced often illiberal theories of speech and assembly to be reconsidered. But against these struggles has to be set a history of governmental recidivism: the Palmer raids and Red Scare of 1919-1920, the Smith Act of 1940, the McCarthy era, and the antics of COINTELPRO in the 1960s and 1970s, are just a few of the more well-known moments of repression, often cloaked in law and justified as urgent “legitimate state interests” at a time when serious challenges were being made to the “established order” or when other exigent factors induced panic within the government and the public at large. The history of speech and assembly, that is, can be told as an on-going struggle against recurring illiberalism.
16 -We are, most likely, now reentering an illiberal phase, and if I am right that civil disobedience has always been necessary to winning and securing rights to assembly and speech, there is a great deal to be deeply concerned about. For the closing off of space to protest has made civil disobedience all the more necessary right at the moment when new laws make civil disobedience not just illegal, but potentially terroristic. The witch’s brew of Supreme Court spatial regulation of speech and assembly and new antiterrorism laws portends deep trouble for those of us who think we have a duty as well as a right to transform our government when we think it is in the wrong, a duty and a right for which street protest is sometimes the only resource.
17 -Within six weeks of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Congress had passed, and the President signed into law, the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 (USA PATRIOT Act).170 Among its many provisions, the Act defines as domestic terrorism, and therefore covered under the Act, “acts dangerous to human life that are in violation of the criminal laws,” if they “appear to be intended … to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion” and if they “occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.”171 As Nancy Chang argues:
18 -Acts of civil disobedience that take place in the United States necessarily meet three of the five elements in the definition of domestic terrorism: they constitute a “violation of the criminal laws,” they are “intended … to influence the policy of a government,” and they “occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.” Many acts of civil disobedience, including the blocking of streets and points of egress by nonviolent means during a demonstration or sit-in, could be construed as “acts dangerous to human life” that appear to be intended to influence the policy of a government “by intimidation or coercion,” which case they would meet the crimes remaining elements…. As a result, protest activities that previously would most likely have ended with a charge of disorderly conduct under a local ordinance can now lead to federal prosecution and conviction for terrorism.172
19 -As the space for protest has become more and more tightly zoned, the likelihood that laws will be broken in the course of a demonstration – a demonstration seeking to “influence a policy of government” – increases. And, of course, the very reason for engaging in a demonstration is to coerce, even if it is not to directly “intimidate.” One should not be sanguine about the “or” placed between intimidate and coerce. It means just what it says: coercion or intimidation will be enough for prosecution.173 Now even civil disobedience can be construed as an act of terrorism.
20 -The intersection of the new repressive state apparatus being constructed in the wake of September 11 with nearly a century of speech and assembly “liberalization” portends a frightening new era in the history of speech and assembly in America. We may soon come to long for those days when protest in public space was only silenced through the strategic geography of the public forum doctrine.
21 -
22 -This geography implies that speech becomes dangerous and thus illegal as it becomes effective – that necessarily means effective protest become illegal and what’s left is empty.
23 -Mitchell 03 - Don Mitchell, Distinguished Professor of Geography at Syracuse’s Maxwell School: 2003 (“The Liberalization of Free Speech: Or, How Protest in Public Space is Silenced” Stanford Agora Vol. 4 p.9-14 Available at agora.stanford.edu/agora/volume4/articles/mitchell/mitchell.pdf Accessed on 12/11/16)IG
24 -The Gitlow decision, and after it the appeals court decision regarding William Epton,31 referenced Holmes’s words in Schenck, and tried to determine just what constituted a “clear and present danger.” But “the future embraced the Holmes of Abrams rather than the Holmes of Schenck.”32 In his dissent in Abrams, Holmes wrote this:
25 -When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by the free trade in ideas – that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes can safely be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment. Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophesy based upon imperfect knowledge. While that experiment is part of our system I think therefore we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.33
26 -As remarkable and stirring as that passage is, it is also deeply problematic. Its liberal foundation, for example, has no means to recognize differences in power – or even in access to the market, powers that, as we have come to know so well in the current era of media communication, can be absolutely determinant of who can speak and who can be heard.34
27 -As importantly, and as I have explored in detail in other work,35 it is problematic because it puts into place – by implication in Holmes’s own words, but later made explicit in a whole series of cases36 – a distinction between speech and conduct. Even “First Amendment absolutists,” like Justice Hugo Black saw nothing wrong with the regulation of peaceful rallies if their conduct interfered with some other legitimate interest.37 This conduct could be widely interpreted.38 For most of the first half of the twentieth century, conduct that could be prohibited included the mere act of picketing. Courts upheld numerous injunctions against picketing on the basis that the conduct it entailed was necessarily either violent or harassing.39 Indeed, in one famous case in the 1920s, Chief Justice William Taft wrote of picketing, that its very “persistence, importunity, following and dogging” offended public morals and created a dangerous nuisance.40 The problem with picketing, Taft thought, was twofold. First, through its combination of action and speech, it tried to convince people not to enter some establishment; second, it tended to draw a crowd.41 To the degree it did both – that is, to the degree that is successfully communicated its message – it interrupted business and, in Taft’s eyes, undermined the business’s property rights, and therefore could be legitimately enjoined.42 Speech was worth protecting to the degree that is was not effective. Not until the 1940s did the Court begin to recognize that there might be an important speech right worth protecting in addition to the unprotected conduct.43
28 -There is an additional result of Holmes’s declaration about the value of speech in Abrams. Whereas the First Amendment is silent on why speech is to be protected from Congressional interference,44 Holmes makes it clear that the protection of speech serves a particular purpose: improving the state.45 Indeed, he quickly admits that speech likely to harm the state can be outlawed.46 And neither he nor the Court ever moved away from the “clear and present danger” test of Schenck.47 Speech, Holmes argues, is a good insofar as it helps promote and protect the “truth” of the state.48 There is a large amount of room allowed here for criticism of the state, but it can still be quieted by anything that can reasonably construed as a “legitimate state interest” (like protecting the property rights of a company subject to a strike).49 According to the Gitlow Court (if not Holmes, who did not see in Gitlow’s pamphlet enough of a clear and present danger), any speech that “endangers the foundations of organized government and threatens its overthrow by unlawful means” can be banned.50 Note here that speech does not have to advocate the overthrow of government; rather, it can be banned if through its persuasiveness others might seek to overthrow the government.51 On such grounds all manner of manifestos, and many types of street speaking, may be banned. And more broadly, as evidenced in picketing cases like American Steel Foundries, a similar prohibition may be placed on speech that, again through its persuasiveness (e.g. as to the unjustness of some practice or event) rather than through direct exhortation, may incite people to violence. Of course, speech (and its sister right, assembly), must take place somewhere and it must implicate some set of spatial relations, some regime of control over access to places to speak and places to listen.52 Consequently, the limits to speech, or more accurately the means of limiting speech, become increasingly geographic beginning in utopian. 13
29 -1939 in the case Hague v. CIO, when the Supreme Court finally recognized that public spaces like streets and parks were necessary not only to speech itself but to political organizing.53 The problem is not always exactly what is said, but where it is said. At issue in Hague was whether the rights to speech and assembly extends to the use of the streets and other public places for political purposes, and in what ways that use could be regulated. The Court based its decision in a language of common law, arguing that “wherever the title of the streets and parks may rest, they have immemorially been held in trust for use of the public and, time out of mind, have been used for purposes of assembly, communicating thoughts between citizens, and discussing public questions.”54 But whatever the roots for such a claim may be in common law, it hardly stands historical scrutiny in the United States, where the violent repression of street politics has always been as much a feature of urban life as its promotion.55 That makes Hague v. CIO a landmark decision: it states clearly for the first time that “the use of the streets and parks for the communication of views on national questions may be regulated in the interest of all … but it must not, in the guise of regulation, be abridged or denied.”56 At the same time, the Court made it clear that protected speech in public spaces was always to be “exercised in subordination to the general comfort and convenience, and in consonance with peace and good order….”57 The question, then, became one of finding the ways to regulate speech (and associated conduct) such that order – and even “general comfort” – was always maintained.
30 -The answers to that question were spatial. They were based on a regulation of urban geography in the name of both “good order” and “general comfort” and of the rights to speech and assembly. Speech rights needed to be balanced against other interests and desires. But order and comfort, it ought to go without saying, suggest a much lower threshold than does “clear and present danger.” While recognizing in a new way a fundamental right to speech and assembly, that is, the Hague court in fact found a language to severely limit that right, and perhaps even to limit it more effectively than had heretofore been possible. To put this another way (and as I will argue more fully below), the new spatial order of speech and assembly that the Court began constructing in Hague allowed for the full flowering of a truly liberal speech regime: a regime for which we are all, in fact, the poorer.
31 -
32 -Education is increasingly driven by neoliberal forces – student activism is key to retake the political sphere and democratize elite education against market-driven logic
33 -Williams 15 Jo Williams (Lecturer, College of Education at Victoria University), "Remaking education from below: the Chilean student movement as public pedagogy," Australian Journal of Adult Learning, November 2015 AZ
34 -More than ever the crisis of schooling represents, at large, the crisis of democracy itself and any attempt to understand the attack on public schooling and higher education cannot be separated from the wider assault on all forms of public life not driven by the logic of the market (Giroux, 2003:7) “Fin al lucro en educación, nuestros sueños no les pertenecen” (end profit making in education, nobody owns our dreams 1 ) (slogan of the Chilean student movement, inspired by the French student uprisings of May-June 1968) Over the past four decades, as the economic and ideological depravity of neoliberal policy and its market-driven logic (D. W. Hursh and Henderson, 2011) has been brought to bear on every aspect of education, the very concept of ‘public’ has been negated. Characteristics such as user-pays, competition, assaults on teachers, and mass standardised-testing and rankings, are among the features of a schooling, which is now very much seen as a private rather than public good (Giroux, 2003). The question of public education as a democratic force for the radical transformation of a violently unjust society seems rarely if ever asked, and a dangerous co-option and weakening of the language and practice of progressive pedagogy has occurred to the extent that notions of inclusion and success are increasingly limited to narrowly conceived individualist and competitive measures of market advantage. As Giroux notes “the forces of neo-liberalism dissolve public issues into utterly privatised and individualistic concerns (2004:62), and despite ongoing official rhetoric “the only form of citizenship increasingly being offered to young people is consumerism” (2003:7). Neoliberal education sees students and young people as passive consumers, the emphasis of schooling on learning how to be governed rather than how to govern (Giroux, 2003:7). In such a context the space for a public pedagogy, based on challenging the hegemony of neoliberal ideology and aligned with collective resistance, appears limited at best. And yet, every day people, teachers, students and communities do engage in political struggle, enacting pedagogies that seek to unveil rather than continue to mask the political structures and organisation that ensures power remains in the hands of the few, and at the service of the few, at the expense of the rest of us. Giroux characterises public pedagogies as defined by hope, struggle and a politicisation of the education process. He argues for …a politics of resistance that extends beyond the classroom as part of a broader struggle to challenge those forces of neo-liberalism that currently wage war against all collective structures capable of defending vital social institutions as a public good (Giroux, 2003:14). Central to Giroux’s argument is the need for critical educators to look to, value, and engage in and with social movements as they emerge and develop as sites of resistance. To …take sides, speak out, and engage in the hard work of debunking corporate culture’s assault on teaching and learning, orient their teaching for social change, connect learning to public life and link knowledge to the operations of power (Giroux, 2004:77). He argues that “progressive education in an age of rampant neoliberalism requires an expanded notion of the public, pedagogy, solidarity, and democratic struggle” (Giroux, 2003:13), and that moreover, educators need to work against a “politics of certainty” and instead develop and engage in pedagogical practice that problematises the world and fosters a sense of collective resistance and hope (2003:14). A neoliberal vision of the ‘good citizen’ and ‘good student’ presumes passivity, acceptance of the status quo and an individualistic disposition. Critical pedagogues must seek out and embrace opportunities to support and celebrate collective political action, not only because it develops a sense of social and political agency but also because it constitutes a powerful basis for authentic learning and active and critical citizenship in an unjust world (Freire, 1970). The Chilean student movement stands as one such example of challenging and inspiring counter-practice and a reclaiming of pedagogy as political and public. For ten years students have filled Chile’s streets, occupied their schools and universities, and organised conferences, public Remaking education from below: the Chilean student movement as public pedagogy 499 meetings, political stunts, creative actions and protests. Students and young people have been at the centre of the largest and most sustained political action seen in Chile since the democratic movement of the 80s, which eventually forced out the Pinochet dictatorship. Despite global trends in the opposite direction, the Chilean students have fundamentally influenced a nationwide education reform program constituting significant changes to the existing system which has been described as an extreme example of market-driven policy (Valenzuela, Bellei, and Ríos, 2014:220). Most importantly, they have forced and led a nationwide dialogue on the question of education and social justice in Chile and an interrogation of the current, grossly inequitable and elitist model (Falabella, 2008). This article begins by reviewing the experiences of the Chilean student movement to date and offering a brief explanation of the historical development of the education system it seeks to dismantle. It then considers the movement as an example of public pedagogies, concluding with a discussion of how it might inform notions of radical educational practice and a return of the student and pedagogue as authentic and critical subjects.
35 -The Role of the Ballot is to assume the role of an academic fighting neoliberalism to reclaim the academy and higher education. Objectivity is a lie placing an absolute truth where there is none to find except for the statement that neoliberalism is violent and uses normativity as a shield to hide their lies of oppression. Refuse that ethical criteria and embrace higher education’s true calling.
36 -Giroux 13 (Henry, American scholar and cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy in the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, “Public Intellectuals Against the Neoliberal University,” 29 October 2013, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/19654-public-intellectuals-against-the-neoliberal-university)//ghs-VA
37 -Increasingly, as universities are shaped by an audit culture, the call to be objective and impartial, whatever one's intentions, can easily echo what George Orwell called the official truth or the establishment point of view. Lacking a self-consciously democratic political focus, teachers are often reduced, or reduce themselves, to the role of a technician or functionary engaged in formalistic rituals, unconcerned with the disturbing and urgent problems that confront the larger society or the consequences of one's pedagogical practices and research undertakings. Hiding behind appeals to balance and objectivity, too many scholars refuse to recognize that being committed to something does not cancel out what C. Wright Mills once called hard thinking. Teaching needs to be rigorous, self-reflective, and committed not to the dead zone of instrumental rationality but to the practice of freedom, to a critical sensibility capable of advancing the parameters of knowledge, addressing crucial social issues, and connecting private troubles and public issues. In opposition to the instrumental model of teaching, with its conceit of political neutrality and its fetishization of measurement, I argue that academics should combine the mutually interdependent roles of critical educator and active citizen. This requires finding ways to connect the practice of classroom teaching with important social problems and the operation of power in the larger society while providing the conditions for students to view themselves as critical agents capable of making those who exercise authority and power answerable for their actions. Higher education cannot be decoupled from what Jacques Derrida calls a democracy to come, that is, a democracy that must always "be open to the possibility of being contested, of contesting itself, of criticizing and indefinitely improving itself."33 Within this project of possibility and impossibility, critical pedagogy must be understood as a deliberately informed and purposeful political and moral practice, as opposed to one that is either doctrinaire, instrumentalized or both. Moreover, a critical pedagogy should also gain part of its momentum in higher education among students who will go back to the schools, churches, synagogues and workplaces to produce new ideas, concepts and critical ways of understanding the world in which young people and adults live. This is a notion of intellectual practice and responsibility that refuses the professional neutrality and privileged isolation of the academy. It also affirms a broader vision of learning that links knowledge to the power of self-definition and to the capacities of students to expand the scope of democratic freedoms, particularly those that address the crisis of education, politics, and the social as part and parcel of the crisis of democracy itself. In order for critical pedagogy, dialogue and thought to have real effects, they must advocate that all citizens, old and young, are equally entitled, if not equally empowered, to shape the society in which they live. This is a commitment we heard articulated by the brave students who fought tuition hikes and the destruction of civil liberties and social provisions in Quebec and to a lesser degree in the Occupy Wall Street movement. If educators are to function as public intellectuals, they need to listen to young people who are producing a new language in order to talk about inequality and power relations, attempting to create alternative democratic public spaces, rethinking the very nature of politics, and asking serious questions about what democracy is and why it no longer exists in many neoliberal societies. These young people who are protesting the 1 recognize that they have been written out of the discourses of justice, equality and democracy and are not only resisting how neoliberalism has made them expendable, they are arguing for a collective future very different from the one that is on display in the current political and economic systems in which they feel trapped. These brave youth are insisting that the relationship between knowledge and power can be emancipatory, that their histories and experiences matter, and that what they say and do counts in their struggle to unlearn dominating privileges, productively reconstruct their relations with others, and transform, when necessary, the world around them.
38 -
39 -Neolib produces international conflicts and environmental collapse – extinction
40 -Ehrenfeld ‘5 (David, Dept. of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources @ Rutgers University, “The Environmental Limits to Globalization”, Conservation Biology Vol. 19 No. 2 April 2005)
41 -The known effects of globalization on the environment are numerous and highly significant. Many others are undoubtedly unknown. Given these circumstances, the first question that suggests itself is: Will globalization, as we see it now, remain a permanent state of affairs (Rees 2002; Ehrenfeld 2003a)? The principal environmental side effects of globalization—climate change, resource exhaustion (particularly cheap energy), damage to agroecosystems, and the spread of exotic species, including pathogens (plant, animal, and human)—are sufficient to make this economic system unstable and short-lived. The socioeconomic consequences of globalization are likely to do the same. In my book The Arrogance of Humanism (1981), I claimed that our ability to manage global systems, which depends on our being able to predict the results of the things we do, or even to understand the systems we have created, has been greatly exaggerated. Much of our alleged control is science fiction; it doesn’t work because of theoretical limits that we ignore at our peril. We live in a dream world in which reality testing is something we must never, never do, lest we awake. In 1984 Charles Perrow explored the reasons why we have trouble predicting what so many of our own created systems will do, and why they surprise us so unpleasantly while we think we are managing them. In his book Normal Accidents, which does not concern globalization, he listed the critical characteristics of some of today’s complex systems. They are highly interlinked, so a change in one part can affect many others, even those that seem quite distant. Results of some processes feed back on themselves in unexpected ways. The controls of the system often interact with each other unpredictably. We have only indirect ways of finding out what is happening inside the system. And we have an incomplete understanding of some of the system’s processes. His example of such a system is a nuclear power plant, and this, he explained, is why system-wide accidents in nuclear plants cannot be predicted or eliminated by system design. I would argue that globalization is a similar system, also subject to catastrophic accidents, many of them environmental—events that we cannot define until after they have occurred, and perhaps not even then. The comparatively few commentators who have predicted the collapse of globalization have generally given social reasons to support their arguments. These deserve some consideration here, if only because the environmental and social consequences of globalization interact so strongly with each other. In 1998, the British political economist John Gray, giving scant attention to environmental factors, nevertheless came to the conclusion that globalization is unstable and will be short-lived. He said, “There is nothing in today’s global market that buffers it against the social strains arising from highly uneven economic development within and between the world’s diverse societies.” The result, Gray states, is that “The combination of an unceasing stream of new technologies, unfettered market competition and weak or fractured social institutions” has weakened both sovereign states and multinational corporations in their ability to control important events. Note that Gray claims that not only nations but also multinational corporations, which are widely touted as controlling the world, are being weakened by globalization. This idea may come as a surprise, considering the growth of multinationals in the past few decades, but I believe it is true. Neither governments nor giant corporations are even remotely capable of controlling the environmental or social forces released by globalization, without first controlling globalization itself. Two of the social critics of globalization with the most dire predictions about its doom are themselves masters of the process. The late Sir James Goldsmith, billionaire financier, wrote in 1994, It must surely be a mistake to adopt an economic policy which makes you rich if you eliminate your national workforce and transfer production abroad, and which bankrupts you if you continue to employ your own people.... It is the poor in the rich countries who will subsidize the rich in the poor countries. This will have a serious impact on the social cohesion of nations. Another free-trade billionaire, George Soros, said much the same thing in 1995: “The collapse of the global marketplace would be a traumatic event with unimaginable consequences. Yet I find it easier to imagine than the continuation of the present regime.” How much more powerful these statements are if we factor in the environment! As globalization collapses, what will happen to people, biodiversity, and ecosystems? With respect to people, the gift of prophecy is not required to answer this question. What will happen depends on where you are and how you live. Many citizens of the Third World are still comparatively self-sufficient; an unknown number of these will survive the breakdown of globalization and its attendant chaos. In the developed world, there are also people with resources of self-sufficiency and a growing understanding of the nature of our social and environmental problems, which may help them bridge the years of crisis. Some species are adaptable; some are not. For the non- human residents of Earth, not all news will be bad. Who would have predicted that wild turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo), one of the wiliest and most evasive of woodland birds, extinct in New Jersey 50 years ago, would now be found in every county of this the most densely populated state, and even, occasionally, in adjacent Manhattan? Who would have predicted that black bears (Ursus americanus), also virtually extinct in the state in the mid-twentieth century, would now number in the thousands (Ehrenfeld 2001)? Of course these recoveries are unusual—rare bright spots in a darker landscape. Finally, a few ecological systems may survive in a comparatively undamaged state; most will be stressed to the breaking point, directly or indirectly, by many environmental and social factors interacting unpredictably. Lady Luck, as always, will have much to say. In his book The Collapse of Complex Societies, the archaeologist Joseph Tainter (1988) notes that collapse, which has happened to all past empires, inevitably results in human systems of lower complexity and less specialization, less centralized control, lower economic activity, less information flow, lower population levels, less trade, and less redistribution of resources. All of these changes are inimical to globalization. This less-complex, less-globalized condition is probably what human societies will be like when the dust settles. I do not think, however, that we can make such specific predictions about the ultimate state of the environment after globalization, because we have never experienced anything like this exceptionally rapid, global environmental damage before. History and science have little to tell us in this situation. The end of the current economic system and the transition to a postglobalized state is and will be accompanied by a desperate last raid on resources and a chaotic flurry of environmental destruction whose results cannot possibly be told in advance. All one can say is that the surviving species, ecosystems, and resources will be greatly impoverished compared with what we have now, and our descendants will not thank us for having adopted, however briefly, an economic system that consumed their inheritance and damaged their planet so wantonly. Environment is a true bottom line—concern for its condition must trump all purely economic growth strategies if both the developed and developing nations are to survive and prosper. Awareness of the environmental limits that globalized industrial society denies or ignores should not, however, bring us to an extreme position of environmental determinism. Those whose preoccupations with modern civilization’s very real social problems cause them to reject or minimize the environmental constraints discussed here ( Hollander 2003) are guilty of seeing only half the picture. Environmental scientists sometimes fall into the same error. It is tempting to see the salvation of civilization and environment solely in terms of technological improvements in efficiency of energy extraction and use, control of pollution, conservation of water, and regulation of environmentally harmful activities. But such needed developments will not be sufficient—or may not even occur— without corresponding social change, including an end to human population growth and the glorification of consumption, along with the elimination of economic mechanisms that increase the gap between rich and poor. The environmental and social problems inherent in globalization are completely interrelated—any attempt to treat them as separate entities is unlikely to succeed in easing the transition to a postglobalized world. Integrated change that combines environmental awareness, technological innovation, and an altered world view is the only answer to the life-threatening problems exacerbated by globalization (Ehrenfeld 2003b). If such integrated change occurs in time, it will likely happen partly by our own design and partly as an unplanned response to the constraints imposed by social unrest, disease, and the economics of scarcity. With respect to the planned component of change, we are facing, as eloquently described by Rees (2002), “the ultimate challenge to human intelligence and self-awareness, those vital qualities we humans claim as uniquely our own. Homo sapiens will either. . .become fully human or wink out ignominiously, a guttering candle in a violent storm of our own making.” If change does not come quickly, our global civilization will join Tainter’s (1988) list as the latest and most dramatic example of collapsed complex societies. Is there anything that could slow globalization quickly, before it collapses disastrously of its own environmental and social weight? It is still not too late to curtail the use of energy, reinvigorate local and regional communities while restoring a culture of concern for each other, reduce nonessential global trade and especially global finance (Daly and Cobb 1989), do more to control introductions of exotic species (including pathogens), and accelerate the growth of sustainable agriculture. Many of the needed technologies are already in place. It is true that some of the damage to our environment—species extinctions, loss of crop and domestic animal varieties, many exotic species introductions, and some climatic change— will be beyond repair. Nevertheless, the opportunity to help our society move past globalization in an orderly way, while there is time, is worth our most creative and passionate efforts. The citizens of the United States and other nations have to understand that our global economic system has placed both our environment and our society in peril, a peril as great as that posed by any war of the twentieth century. This understanding, and the actions that follow, must come not only from enlightened leadership, but also from grassroots consciousness raising. It is still possible to reclaim the planet from a self-destructive economic system that is bringing us all down together, and this can be a task that bridges the divide between conservatives and liberals. The crisis is here, now. What we have to do has become obvious. Globalization can be scaled back to manageable proportions only in the context of an altered world view that rejects materialism even as it restores a sense of communal obligation. In this way, alone, can we achieve real homeland security, not just in the United States, but also in other nations, whose fates have become so thoroughly entwined with ours within the global environment we share.
42 -
43 -Student protests oppose neoliberalism in higher education, translating theory into praxis
44 -Delgado and Ross 16 Sandra Delgado (doctoral student in curriculum studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada) and E. Wayne Ross (Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada), "Students in Revolt: The Pedagogical Potential of Student Collective Action in the Age of the Corporate University" 2016 (published on Academia.edu) AZ
45 -As students’ collective actions keep gaining more political relevance, student and university movements also establish themselves as spaces of counter-hegemony (Sotiris, 2014). Students are constantly opening new possibilities to displace and resist the commodification of education offered by mainstream educational institutions. As Sotiris (2014) convincingly argues, movements within the university have not only the potential to subvert educational reforms, but in addition, they have become “strategic nodes” for the transformation of the processes and practices in higher education, and most importantly for the constant re-imagination and the recreation of “new forms of subaltern counter-hegemony” (p. 1). The strategic importance of university and college based moments lays precisely in the role that higher education plays in contemporary societies, namely their role in “the development of new technologies, new forms of production and for the articulation of discourses and theories on contemporary issues and their role in the reproduction of state and business personnel.” (p.8) Universities and colleges therefore, have a crucial contribution in “the development of class strategies (both dominant and subaltern), in the production of subjectivities, (and) in the transformation of collective practices” (p.8) The main objective of this paper is to examine how contemporary student movements are disrupting, opposing and displacing entrenched oppressive and dehumanizing reforms, practices and frames in today’s corporate academia. This work is divided in four sections. The first is an introduction to student movements and an overview of how student political action has been approached and researched. The second and third sections take a closer look at the repertoires of contention used by contemporary student movements and propose a framework based on radical praxis that allows us to better understand the pedagogical potential of student disruptive action. The last section contains a series of examples of students’ repertoires or tactics of contention that exemplifies the pedagogical potential of student social and political action. An Overview of Student Movements Generally speaking, students are well positioned as political actors. They have been actively involved in the politics of education since the beginnings of the university, but more broadly, students have played a significant role in defining social, cultural and political environments around the world (Altbach, 1966; Boren, 2001). The contributions and influences of students and student movements to revolutionary efforts and political movements beyond the university context are undeniable. One example is the role that students have played in the leadership and membership of the political left (e.g. students’ role in the Movimiento 26 de Julio - M-26-7 in Cuba during the 50’s and in the formation of The New Left in the United States, among others). Similarly, several political and social movements have either established alliances with student organizations or created their own chapters on campuses to recruit new members, mobilize their agendas in education and foster earlier student’s involvement in politics2 (Altbach, 1966; Lipset, 1969). Students are often considered to be “catalysts” of political and social action or “barometers” of the social unrest and political tension accumulated in society (Barker, 2008). Throughout history student movements have had a diverse and sometimes contradictory range of political commitments. Usually, student organizations and movements find grounding and inspiration in Anarchism and Marxism, however it is also common to see movements leaning towards liberal and conservative approaches. Hence, student political action has not always been aligned with social movements or organizations from the political left. In various moments in history students have joined or been linked to rightist movements, reactionary organizations and conservative parties (Altbach, 1966; Barker, 2008). Students, unlike workers, come from different social classes and seemly different cultural backgrounds. As a particularly diverse social group, students are distinguished for being heterogeneous and pluralists in their values, interests and commitments (Boren, 2001). Such diversity has been a constant challenge for maintaining unity, which has been particularly problematic in cases of national or transnational student organizations (Prusinowska, Kowzan, and Zielińska, 2012; Somma, 2012). To clarify, social classes are defined by the specific relationship that people have with the means of production. In the case of students, they are not a social class by themselves, but a social layer or social group that is identifiable by their common function in society (Stedman, 1969). The main or central aspect that unites student is the transitory social condition of being a student. In other words, students are a social group who have a common function, role in society or social objective, which is “to study” something (Lewis, 2013; Simons and Masschelein, 2009). Student movements can be understood as a form of social movement (LuesherMamashela, 2015). They have an internal organization that varies from traditionally hierarchical structures, organizational schemes based on representative democracy with charismatic leadership, to horizontal forms of decision-making (Altbach, 1966; Lipset, 1969). As many other movements, student movements have standing claims, organize different type of actions, tactics or repertoires of contention, 3 and they advocate for political, social or/and educational agendas, programs or pleas.
46 -Student protest combats racial inequality by sparking national dialogue and movements
47 -Curwen 15 Thomas Curwen, Jason Song and Larry Gordon (reporters), "What's different about the latest wave of college activism," LA Times, 11/18/2015 AZ
48 -Although some of the strategies may seem familiar, it is the speed and the urgency of today's protests that are different. "What is unique about these issues is how social media has changed the way protests take place on college campuses," said Tyrone Howard, associate dean of equity, diversity and inclusion at UCLA. "A protest goes viral in no time flat. With Instagram and Twitter, you're in an immediate news cycle. This was not how it was 20 or 30 years ago." Howard also believes that the effectiveness of the actions at the University of Missouri has encouraged students on other campuses to raise their voices. "A president stepping down is a huge step," he said. "Students elsewhere have to wonder, 'Wow, if that can happen there, why can't we bring out our issues to the forefront as well?'" Shaun R. Harper, executive director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education, agrees. The resignation of two top Missouri administrators, Harper said, showed students and athletes around the country that they have power they may not have realized before. The protests show "we're all together and we have the power to make the change we deserve," said Lindsay Opoku-Acheampong, a senior studying biology at Occidental. "It's affirming," said Dalin Celamy, also a senior at the college. "It lets us know we're not crazy; it's happening to people who are just like you all over the country." Celamy, along with other students, not only watched the unfolding protests across the country, but also looked to earlier protests, including an occupation of an administrative building at Occidental in 1968. Echoes of the 1960s in today's actions are clear, said Robert Cohen, a history professor at New York University and author of "Freedom's Orator," a biography of Mario Savio, who led the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. "The tactical dynamism of these nonviolent protests and the public criticism of them are in important ways reminiscent of the 1960s," Cohen said. "Today's protests, like those in the '60s, are memorable because they have been effective in pushing for change and sparking dialogue as well as polarization." Although the targets of these protests are the blatant and subtle forms of racism and inequity that affect the students' lives, the message of the protests resonates with the recent incidents of intolerance and racial inequity on the streets of America. There is a reason for this, Howard said. Campuses are microcosms of society, he said, and are often comparable in terms of representation and opportunity. "So there is a similar fight for more representation, acceptance and inclusion." The dynamic can create a complicated and sensitive social order for students of color to negotiate. "Latino and African American students are often under the belief if they leave their community and go to colleges, that it will be better," Howard said. "They believe it will be an upgrade over the challenges that they saw in underserved and understaffed schools. But if the colleges and universities are the same as those schools, then there is disappointment and frustration." In addition, Howard said, when these students leave their community to go to a university, they often feel conflicted. "So when injustice comes up," he said, "they are quick to respond because it is what they saw in their community. On some level, it is their chance to let their parents and peers know that they have not forgotten the struggle in the community." On campuses and off, Harper, of the University of Pennsylvania center, finds a rising sense of impatience among African Americans about social change. "As a black person, I think black people are just fed up. It's time out for ignoring these issues," he said. While protests in the 1960s helped create specific safeguards for universities today, such as Title IX, guaranteeing equal access for all students to any educational program or activity receiving federal financial assistance, a gap has widened over the years between students and administrators over perceptions of bias. Institutions often valued for their support of free speech find themselves wrestling with the prospect of limiting free speech, but to focus on what is or isn't politically correct avoids the more important issue, Cohen said: whether campuses are diverse enough or how to reduce racism. Occidental student Raihana Haynes-Venerable has heard criticism that modern students are too sensitive, but she argues that subtle forms of discrimination still have a profound effect. She pointed to women making less than men and fewer minorities getting jobs as examples. "This is the new form of racism," she said.
49 -Thus the plan –
50 -Resolved: Public colleges and universities in the United States ought not restrict constitutionally protected speech to free speech zones.
51 -Free speech zones limit student discourse and should be prohibited
52 -Hudson 16 (David L. Hudson Jr. is a First Amendment expert and law professor who serves as First Amendment Ombudsman for the Newseum Institute’s First Amendment Center. He contributes research and commentary, provides analysis and information to news media. He is an author, co-author or co-editor of more than 40 books, including Let The Students Speak: A History of the Fight for Free Expression in American Schools (Beacon Press, 2011), The Encyclopedia of the First Amendment (CQ Press, 2008) (one of three co-editors), The Rehnquist Court: Understanding Its Impact and Legacy (Praeger, 2006), and The Handy Supreme Court Answer Book (Visible Ink Press, 2008). He has written several books devoted to student-speech issues and others areas of student rights. He writes regularly for the ABA Journal and the American Bar Association’s Preview of United States Supreme Court Cases. He has served as a senior law clerk at the Tennessee Supreme Court, and teaches First Amendment and Professional Responsibility classes at Vanderbilt Law School and various classes at the Nashville School of Law), "How Campus Policies Limit Free Speech," Huffington Post, 6/1/2016 AZ
53 -Restricting where students can have free speech
54 -In addition, many colleges and universities have free speech zones. Under these policies, people can speak at places of higher learning in only certain, specific locations or zones. While there are remnants of these policies from the 1960s, they grew in number in the late 1990s and early 2000s as a way for administrators to deal with controversial expression. These policies may have a seductive appeal for administrators, as they claim to advance the cause of free speech. But, free speech zones often limit speech by relegating expression to just a few locations. For example, some colleges began by having only two or three free speech zones on campus. The idea of zoning speech is not unique to colleges and universities. Government officials have sought to diminish the impact of different types of expression by zoning adult-oriented expression, antiabortion protestors and political demonstrators outside political conventions. In a particularly egregious example, a student at Modesto Junior College in California named Robert Van Tuinen was prohibited from handing out copies of the United States Constitution on September 17, 2013 - the anniversary of the signing of the Constitution. Van Tuinen was informed that he could get permission to distribute the Constitution if he preregistered for time in the “free speech zone.” But later, Van Tuinen was told by an administrator that he would have to wait, possibly until the next month. In the words of First Amendment expert Charles Haynes, “the entire campus should be a free speech zone.” In other words, the default position of school administrators should be to allow speech, not limit it. Zoning speech is troubling, particularly when it reduces the overall amount of speech on campus. And many free speech experts view the idea of a free speech zone as “moronic and oxymoronic.” College or university campuses should be a place where free speech not only survives but thrives.
55 -The First Amendment protects only public discourse
56 -Weinstein 11 – James Weinstein, Amelia D. Lewis Professor of Constitutional Law, Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, Arizona State University: 2011(PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY AS THE CENTRAL VALUE OF AMERICAN FREE SPEECH DOCTRINE, Virginia Law Review Vol 97:3 p.3, Available at https://web.law.asu.edu/Portals/31/Weinstein_UVA_May_2011.pdf Accessed on 12/14/16)IG
57 -As Professor Robert Post's pioneering work has demonstrated, this extremely rigorous protection applies primarily within the do- main of "public discourse." Public discourse consists of speech on matters of public concern, or, largely without respect to its subject matter, of expression in settings dedicated or essential to democratic self-governance, such as books, magazines, films, the internet, or in public forums such as the speaker's corner of the park. It is in this realm that the people-the ultimate governors in a democracy-can freely examine and discuss the rules, norms, and conditions that constitute society. Precisely because public discourse in the United States is so strongly protected, however, the realm dedicated to such expression cannot be conceived as covering the entire expanse of human expression. Just as it is imperative in a democracy to have a realm in which any idea, practice, or norm can be questioned as vituperatively as the speaker chooses, there must be other settings in which the government may efficiently carry out the results yielded by the democratic process. Accordingly, in set- tings dedicated to some purpose other than public discourse-such as those dedicated to effectuating government programs in the government workplace," to the administration of justice in the courtroom," or to instruction in public schools the government has far greater leeway to regulate the content of speech.
58 -It is not just the content of the speech that determines whether the expression will be highly protected as public discourse, but also the setting or medium in which the expression occurs." In modern democratic societies, certain modes of communication form "a structural skeleton that is necessary, although not sufficient, for public discourse to serve the constitutional value of democracy”. For this reason, "it is assumed that if a medium is constitutionally protected by the First Amendment, each instance of the medium would also be protected." The importance of the medium in which a given instance of speech occurs to democratic self- governance is, in my view, the best explanation of why the Su- preme Court rigorously protects nudity in film and cable television-media that are in its view part of the "structural skeleton" of public discourse-but not in live performances by erotic dancers on the stage of a "strip club."
59 -
60 -Framework – SV
61 -The standard is minimizing structural violence
62 -1. Global justice requires a reduction in inequality and a focus on material rights
63 -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 AJ
64 -Notwithstanding these drawbacks, these scholars provide very compelling arguments against mainstream conceptions of justice. In this approach, the obli- gation of justice is derived from the moral equality of human beings irrespective of their race, creed and nationality (O'Neill 1991; Brown 1992: 169; Beitz 1979; Sen 1999). The emphasis is on the positive rights of citizens - that is the kinds of rights that require state authorities to do something in order to provide citizens with the opportunities and abilities to act to fulfil their own potential - as opposed to negative rights/liberty, which refers to freedom from coercion and non-interfer- ence. The notion of justice as meeting needs, as seen in Chapter 2, figures very prominently in quite a number of the influencing materials that form the starting point for the discourse on global sustainable development. It has been suggested, in general, that this idea of justice is 'increasingly influential on non-governmen- tal organizations and the community of international policy makers' (Brighouse 2004: 67). In general, proponents of justice as need criticize liberal ideas of justice for concentrating on political equality (equal right to speech, vote, etc.) without addressing the problem of material equality - especially in the form of equal access to resources. They also claim that the ability to own property as well as the ability to exercise political rights (say the right to vote) depends first and foremost on the ability of citizens to function effectively. When the basic human needs of citizens, for example food, are not being met, other rights become merely 'hypothetical and empty' (Sen 1999: 75). Following on from this basic reasoning, the rights approach to justice is rejected and, in its place, human basic need is seen as the correct basis of political morality and the right benchmark for the determination of political judgment (Plant 1991: 185). In previous sections we saw that libertarian notions of justice sanction unlimited material inequality between citizens, provided that each person has obtained their possessions through legitimate means. All that matters is that the state should ensure fair rules of transitions and equality before the law. We saw also that liberal accounts of justice, especially Rawls' liberal egalitarianism, reject this formula- tion of justice because it does not secure the welfare of the less able in society. On the contrary, Rawls recommends that political institutions should be structured in ways that protect the interests of the least advantaged individuals in society. Accordingly, he sanctions societal inequities provided that such inequities work to the advantage of the least well-off. On closer reading, however, it turns out that Rawls difference principle (that inequities should work in favour of the least well- off) does not contain any explicit demand relating to the basic needs of the poor. As such, it is possible for Rawls' proviso to be met even when the least well-off in the society are denied their basic needs. For example, a distribution that changes from 20:10:2 to 100:30:4 satisfies Rawls difference principle but tells us noth- ing about the actual well-being of the least well-off. So, whereas some (mainly libertarians) criticize Rawls for not specifying the extent to which other people's liberty can be sacrificed for the sake of the least well-off, others (proponents of justice as meeting need) criticize Rawls for leaving the fate of the least well-off unprotected. Many scholars in the latter group sometimes argue along Marxian lines that as long as the means of production remain in the hands of the 'haves' there is no guarantee that inequities will benefit the least well-off. Maslow (1968), Bradshaw (1972) and Forder (1974) have all consequently argued that only the theory of need provides, as Maslow (1968: 4) puts it, 'the ultimate appeal for the determination of the good, bad, right and wrong' in a po- litical community. Without the theory of need, they say, it would be impossible to justify the welfare state in capitalist Western democracies. On the other hand, the co-existence of welfare and capitalism confirms the place of need as the criterion of moral political judgment. O'Neill (1991), Sen (1999) and Nussbaum (2000) have all extended versions of this argument to the international domain. O'Neill (1980, 1991) argues that adherence to the Kantian categorical imperative entails that the global community must act to remove the aching poverty and famine that threaten the existence of millions of people in developing countries. Sen (1999), for his part, calls for the strengthening of international institutions to make them able to assist the least well in the global society to achieve the measure of actual living that is required for the basic function and well-being of citizens. For Sen, as for O'Neill, all forms of liberty and rights are meaningful only when people have the substantive 'freedom to achieve actual living' (Sen 1999: 73; cf. O'Neill 1989: 288; 1986). Thomas Pogge also places emphasis on human basic need and starts his well-known book World Poverty and Human Rights with the rhetorical ques- tion: 'How can severe poverty of half of humankind continue despite enormous economic and technological progress and despite the enlightened moral norms and values of our heavily dominant Western civilization?' (Pogge 2002: 3). Many environmentalists believe that this is the conception of justice most con- sistent with the Bnmdtland version of sustainable development (Dobson 1998; Benton 1999: 201; Langhelle 2000: 299). This assertion is not difficult to sustain because the Bnmdtland Report contains several explicit arguments that firmly link the concept of sustainability with meeting the needs of the global population. It says, for example: The satisfaction of human needs and aspirations is the major objective of sustainable development. The essential needs of vast numbers in the develop- ing countries - for food, clothing, shelter, jobs - are not being met, and be- yond their basic needs, these people have legitimate aspirations for improved quality of life .... Sustainable development requires meeting basic needs of all and extending to all the opportunity to satisfy their aspirations for a better life. (WCED 1987: 43).
65 -
66 -2. Their frameworks start from the position of equal access which is not actually met, obligating us to correct injustice
67 -Bruenig 14 (Matt, cites political theorist Charles Mills) “Charles Mills on White Liberalism” AT
68 -One such methodological assumption, Mills argues, is the assumption that the proper way to philosophize about political justice is through the use of "ideal theory." Under an ideal theory approach to theorizing about politics, the requirements of justice are derived by imagining how best to construct a system from scratch at the beginning of history. You see this ideal theory approach present in theorizing about the "state of nature," the "veil of ignorance", and the "original position" more generally. In all cases, you essentially construct an ideal society at the beginning of time and then use that ideal society to determine the justness of institutions in actually-existing societies and to prescribe ways to make those societies more just. The decision to use ideal theory to ferret out the requirements of justice is not, according to Mills, a neutral one. Instead, it is one that tracks the justice concerns of the white philosophers who comprise the tradition that continues to this day to rely on this method. For white philosophers, expository devices that operationally exclude all of history pose no particular problem. History is largely irrelevant to the kinds of justice concerns that press upon white populations. To the extent that it is relevant, it's only marginally so and therefore easily relegated to an after-the-fact special consideration that is separate from the core theories. This is not the case for non-whites as the ghosts of historical injustices heavily factor into their present justice needs. For these populations, the issues of rectificatory and reparative justice are not secondary issues best treated as footnoted exceptions. Rather, they are center stage. Whereas white philosophers operating in the racially-exclusionary liberal tradition find it most fitting to start with ideal theory and then move on to non-ideal historical problems as a side issue, a less racially-biased philosophical tradition would go in the reverse order. Abstract thought experiments that walled off history (as in ideal theory) would at minimum be replaced with ones that fully included history into their considerations. Instead of asking, as in Rawls, what kind of political institutions people would select at the beginning of time if they didn't know who in that society they'd wind up being, you would ask what kind of institutions those same people would select if they knew the society they would blindly enter into has a legacy of racist oppression that has set the stage for lasting racial disparities. That the liberal tradition continues to select the ideal theory approach to contemplating justice, even as it marginalizes the justice concerns of non-white people, is, according to Mill, a legacy of its racist origins and the philosophical methodologies those origins set in place.
69 -
70 -Prefer reasonable aff interps and drop the argument on T. The judge should use reasonability with a bright line of the presence of link and impact turn ground for the negative.
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -2016-12-17 19:05:21.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -David Larson
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Valley LG
ParentRound
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -8
Round
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -6
Team
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -La Canada Zhao Aff
Title
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -JANFEB - Neolib Aff - v2
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Blake
Caselist.CitesClass[9]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,7 +1,0 @@
1 -By regulating appropriate "space and time," free speech zones make any student protest meaningless
2 -Crocker 7 Thomas Crocker (Assistant Professor, University of South Carolina School of Law. J.D., Yale; Ph.D., Vanderbilt), "Displacing Dissent: The Role of "Place" in First Amendment Jurisprudence," Fordham Law Review, 2007 AZ
3 -Because where we speak is often just as important as what we say, increased efforts by the government to restrict the location of speech threaten to undermine the guarantees of the First Amendment. The Supreme Court's current free speech doctrine permits the imposition of reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions on speech without raising constitutional concerns. 7 Government officials have seized upon this doctrinal permissiveness to develop practices that suppress and control the content of speech by regulating the place of speech. Such suppression and control is most (in)visible in the case of political dissent. Dissent or political protest is expressed most effectively in public, especially at places where government officials-above all the President-appear. To convey a message of dissent is to convey no message at all if it is spoken where no other persons-much less the targeted government officials-can hear or see the message. It is precisely this aim-the elimination of dissenters' ability to appear as dissent to specific audiences-that has been the object of much recent regulation. Regulation of place has stifled political dissent by creating special "protest zones" at presidential appearances, 8 by deploying free speech cages at national party conventions, 9 and by designating large areas of urban centers as "restricted zones."10 More generally, officials control or displace speech by establishing university "free speech zones,"' I limiting mass protests such as those in New York against the Iraq War,12 and restricting use of sidewalks, 1 3 malls, 1 4 and airports. 15 The simple regulation of place has made dissent effectively invisible, practically pointless, and criminally dangerous. For example, when President George W. Bush visited Columbia, South Carolina, in 2002, Brett Bursey sought to welcome him with a sign that read "No War for Oil.' 16 Standing among others who were waiting to greet the President without messages of dissent, Bursey was ordered by officials to remove himself to a designated protest zone three quarters of a mile away and out of sight of the President. 17 When he refused, he was arrested, charged with violating 18 U.S.C. § 1752,18 and later convicted of violating Secret Service restrictions on a person's presence where the President is temporarily visiting. 19 Bursey was not singled out simply because he wished to convey a message of dissent, but because he wished to convey a message of dissent in a particular place and in the presence of other persons standing along a roadway to greet the President as he passed. By the simple regulation of place, government officials succeeded in suppressing dissent.20 Many commentators lament the decline of the public sphere brought about by the increased organization of modem life.21 Quite apart from rising concerns over security, modem life has diminished the role of traditional places where the public might gather and mingle, such as town greens, parks, sidewalks, and pedestrian streets.22 Justice Anthony Kennedy has noted this problem: "Minds are not changed in streets and parks as they once were. To an increasing degree, the more significant interchanges of ideas and shaping of public consciousness occur in mass and electronic media."'23 Although the Internet provides a vibrant new forum for discursive practices, there is a countervailing worry that the ability to select content to an ever more refined degree will lead to greater social fragmentation. 24 Moreover, the Internet does not provide for serendipitous occasions to encounter others face-to-face or to discover the new or the strange in both a social and public setting.25 Trends of modem life and government regulation of public fora have led to the disappearance of meaningful public discourse, dissent, and protest from the public sphere. Thus, the combination of the physical displacement of traditional public spheres with the strategic disruption of political protest provides ample reason to question whether the bland treatment of place in the Court's current First Amendment jurisprudence appropriately protects, let alone enables, the values of free speech.
4 -
5 -Neoliberalism rips apart communal bonds to maintain the illusion that structural inequalities are individual problems – the impact is systemic victim-blaming, poverty, and violence.
6 -Smith 12 (Candace, author for Societpages, cites Bruno Amable, Associate Professor of Economics at Paris School of Economics) “Neoliberalism and Individualism: Ego Leads to Interpersonal Violence?” Sociology Lens is the associated site for Sociology Compass, Wiley-Blackwell’s review journal on all fields sociological AT
7 -There appears to be a link between neoliberalism, individualism, and violence. In reference to the association between neoliberalism and individualism, consider neoliberalism’s insistence that we do not need society since we are all solely responsible for our personal well-being (Peters 2001; Brown 2003). From a criminological standpoint, it is not hard to understand how this focus on the individual can lead to violence. According to Hirschi’s (1969) social control theory, for instance, broken or weak social bonds free a person to engage in deviancy. Since, according to this theory, individuals are naturally self-interested, they can use the opportunity of individualization to overcome the restraining powers of society. Bearing in mind neoliberalism’s tendency to value the individual over society, it could be argued that this ideology is hazardous as it acts to tear apart important social bonds and to thereby contribute to the occurrence of ego-driven crimes, including violent interpersonal crimes. Such a thought suggests that as neoliberalism becomes more prominent in a country, it can be expected that individualism and, as a result, interpersonal violence within that country will increase. When it comes to individualization, this idea is one of the fundamental aspects of neoliberalism. In fact, Bauman (2000:34) argues that in neoliberal states “individualization is a fate, not a choice.” As Amable (2011) explains, neoliberals have realized that in order for their ideology to be successful, a state’s populace must internalize the belief that individuals are only to be rewarded based on their personal effort. With such an ego-driven focus, Scharff (2011) explains that the process of individualization engenders a climate where structural inequalities are converted into individual problems.
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -2017-01-28 00:02:31.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Devane Murphy
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -George Ranch AS
ParentRound
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -9
Round
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -1
Team
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -La Canada Zhao Aff
Title
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -JANFEB - Neolib Aff - Updates
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Emory
Caselist.CitesClass[10]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,7 +1,0 @@
1 -Interpretation: All debaters who have attended at least 1 bid tournaments must disclose all positions they have read on the NDCA 2016-17 LD wiki. The disclosure must include a tag, citation, and the first and last 3 words of each piece of evidence they read originally written by another author.
2 -The disclosure must occur within 24 hours after the position is broken.
3 -Research: Disclosure creates a high incentive to do deeper and more focused research, since debaters quickly learn the stock arguments and can do specific research that they know will be useful.
4 -Nails 13 Jacob Nails (Debate Coach, Sacred Heart HS). “A Defense of Disclosure (Including Third-Party Disclosure).” NSDUpdate. October 10th, 2013. http://nsdupdate.com/2013/a-defense-of-disclosure-including-third-party-disclosure-by-jacob-nails/ AJ
5 -I fall squarely on the side of disclosure. I find that the largest advantage of widespread disclosure is the educational value it provides. First, disclosure streamlines research. Rather than every team and every lone wolf researching completely in the dark, the wiki provides a public body of knowledge that everyone can contribute to and build off of. Students can look through the different studies on the topic and choose the best ones on an informed basis without the prohibitively large burden of personally surveying all of the literature. The best arguments are identified and replicated, which is a natural result of an open marketplace of ideas. Quality of evidence increases across the board. In theory, the increased quality of information could trade off with quantity. If debaters could just look to the wiki for evidence, it might remove the competitive incentive to do one’s own research. Empirically, however, the opposite has been true. In fact, a second advantage of disclosure is that it motivates research. Debaters cannot expect to make it a whole topic with the same stock AC – that is, unless they are continually updating and frontlining it. Likewise, debaters with access to their opponents’ cases can do more targeted and specific research. Students can go to a new level of depth, researching not just the pros and cons of the topic but the specific authors, arguments, and advocacies employed by other debaters. The incentive to cut author-specific indicts is low if there’s little guarantee that the author will ever be cited in a round but high if one knows that specific schools are using that author in rounds. In this way, disclosure increases incentive to research by altering a student’s cost-benefit analysis so that the time spent researching is more valuable, i.e. more likely to produce useful evidence because it is more directed. In any case, if publicly accessible evidence jeopardized research, backfiles and briefs would have done LD in a long time ago.
6 -
7 -Academic Honesty
EntryDate
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -2017-02-13 03:21:05.0
Judge
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Tom Kadie
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Mountain View DZ
ParentRound
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -10
Round
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -5
Team
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -La Canada Zhao Aff
Title
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -0 Must Disclose
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Stanford
Caselist.CitesClass[11]
Cites
... ... @@ -1,66 +1,0 @@
1 -1AC – Neolib
2 -By regulating appropriate "space and time," free speech zones make any student protest meaningless
3 -Crocker 7 Thomas Crocker (Assistant Professor, University of South Carolina School of Law. J.D., Yale; Ph.D., Vanderbilt), "Displacing Dissent: The Role of "Place" in First Amendment Jurisprudence," Fordham Law Review, 2007 AZ
4 -Because where we speak is often just as important as what we say, increased efforts by the government to restrict the location of speech threaten to undermine the guarantees of the First Amendment. The Supreme Court's current free speech doctrine permits the imposition of reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions on speech without raising constitutional concerns. 7 Government officials have seized upon this doctrinal permissiveness to develop practices that suppress and control the content of speech by regulating the place of speech. Such suppression and control is most (in)visible in the case of political dissent. Dissent or political protest is expressed most effectively in public, especially at places where government officials-above all the President-appear. To convey a message of dissent is to convey no message at all if it is spoken where no other persons-much less the targeted government officials-can hear or see the message. It is precisely this aim-the elimination of dissenters' ability to appear as dissent to specific audiences-that has been the object of much recent regulation. Regulation of place has stifled political dissent by creating special "protest zones" at presidential appearances, 8 by deploying free speech cages at national party conventions, 9 and by designating large areas of urban centers as "restricted zones."10 More generally, officials control or displace speech by establishing university "free speech zones,"' I limiting mass protests such as those in New York against the Iraq War,12 and restricting use of sidewalks, 1 3 malls, 1 4 and airports. 15 The simple regulation of place has made dissent effectively invisible, practically pointless, and criminally dangerous. For example, when President George W. Bush visited Columbia, South Carolina, in 2002, Brett Bursey sought to welcome him with a sign that read "No War for Oil.' 16 Standing among others who were waiting to greet the President without messages of dissent, Bursey was ordered by officials to remove himself to a designated protest zone three quarters of a mile away and out of sight of the President. 17 When he refused, he was arrested, charged with violating 18 U.S.C. § 1752,18 and later convicted of violating Secret Service restrictions on a person's presence where the President is temporarily visiting. 19 Bursey was not singled out simply because he wished to convey a message of dissent, but because he wished to convey a message of dissent in a particular place and in the presence of other persons standing along a roadway to greet the President as he passed. By the simple regulation of place, government officials succeeded in suppressing dissent.20 Many commentators lament the decline of the public sphere brought about by the increased organization of modem life.21 Quite apart from rising concerns over security, modem life has diminished the role of traditional places where the public might gather and mingle, such as town greens, parks, sidewalks, and pedestrian streets.22 Justice Anthony Kennedy has noted this problem: "Minds are not changed in streets and parks as they once were. To an increasing degree, the more significant interchanges of ideas and shaping of public consciousness occur in mass and electronic media."'23 Although the Internet provides a vibrant new forum for discursive practices, there is a countervailing worry that the ability to select content to an ever more refined degree will lead to greater social fragmentation. 24 Moreover, the Internet does not provide for serendipitous occasions to encounter others face-to-face or to discover the new or the strange in both a social and public setting.25 Trends of modem life and government regulation of public fora have led to the disappearance of meaningful public discourse, dissent, and protest from the public sphere. Thus, the combination of the physical displacement of traditional public spheres with the strategic disruption of political protest provides ample reason to question whether the bland treatment of place in the Court's current First Amendment jurisprudence appropriately protects, let alone enables, the values of free speech.
5 -
6 -This geography implies that speech becomes dangerous and thus illegal as it becomes effective – that necessarily means effective protest become illegal and what’s left is empty.
7 -Mitchell 03 - Don Mitchell, Distinguished Professor of Geography at Syracuse’s Maxwell School: 2003 (“The Liberalization of Free Speech: Or, How Protest in Public Space is Silenced” Stanford Agora Vol. 4 p.9-14 Available at agora.stanford.edu/agora/volume4/articles/mitchell/mitchell.pdf Accessed on 12/11/16)IG
8 -The Gitlow decision, and after it the appeals court decision regarding William Epton,31 referenced Holmes’s words in Schenck, and tried to determine just what constituted a “clear and present danger.” But “the future embraced the Holmes of Abrams rather than the Holmes of Schenck.”32 In his dissent in Abrams, Holmes wrote this:
9 -When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by the free trade in ideas – that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes can safely be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment. Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophesy based upon imperfect knowledge. While that experiment is part of our system I think therefore we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.33
10 -As remarkable and stirring as that passage is, it is also deeply problematic. Its liberal foundation, for example, has no means to recognize differences in power – or even in access to the market, powers that, as we have come to know so well in the current era of media communication, can be absolutely determinant of who can speak and who can be heard.34
11 -As importantly, and as I have explored in detail in other work,35 it is problematic because it puts into place – by implication in Holmes’s own words, but later made explicit in a whole series of cases36 – a distinction between speech and conduct. Even “First Amendment absolutists,” like Justice Hugo Black saw nothing wrong with the regulation of peaceful rallies if their conduct interfered with some other legitimate interest.37 This conduct could be widely interpreted.38 For most of the first half of the twentieth century, conduct that could be prohibited included the mere act of picketing. Courts upheld numerous injunctions against picketing on the basis that the conduct it entailed was necessarily either violent or harassing.39 Indeed, in one famous case in the 1920s, Chief Justice William Taft wrote of picketing, that its very “persistence, importunity, following and dogging” offended public morals and created a dangerous nuisance.40 The problem with picketing, Taft thought, was twofold. First, through its combination of action and speech, it tried to convince people not to enter some establishment; second, it tended to draw a crowd.41 To the degree it did both – that is, to the degree that is successfully communicated its message – it interrupted business and, in Taft’s eyes, undermined the business’s property rights, and therefore could be legitimately enjoined.42 Speech was worth protecting to the degree that is was not effective. Not until the 1940s did the Court begin to recognize that there might be an important speech right worth protecting in addition to the unprotected conduct.43
12 -There is an additional result of Holmes’s declaration about the value of speech in Abrams. Whereas the First Amendment is silent on why speech is to be protected from Congressional interference,44 Holmes makes it clear that the protection of speech serves a particular purpose: improving the state.45 Indeed, he quickly admits that speech likely to harm the state can be outlawed.46 And neither he nor the Court ever moved away from the “clear and present danger” test of Schenck.47 Speech, Holmes argues, is a good insofar as it helps promote and protect the “truth” of the state.48 There is a large amount of room allowed here for criticism of the state, but it can still be quieted by anything that can reasonably construed as a “legitimate state interest” (like protecting the property rights of a company subject to a strike).49 According to the Gitlow Court (if not Holmes, who did not see in Gitlow’s pamphlet enough of a clear and present danger), any speech that “endangers the foundations of organized government and threatens its overthrow by unlawful means” can be banned.50 Note here that speech does not have to advocate the overthrow of government; rather, it can be banned if through its persuasiveness others might seek to overthrow the government.51 On such grounds all manner of manifestos, and many types of street speaking, may be banned. And more broadly, as evidenced in picketing cases like American Steel Foundries, a similar prohibition may be placed on speech that, again through its persuasiveness (e.g. as to the unjustness of some practice or event) rather than through direct exhortation, may incite people to violence. Of course, speech (and its sister right, assembly), must take place somewhere and it must implicate some set of spatial relations, some regime of control over access to places to speak and places to listen.52 Consequently, the limits to speech, or more accurately the means of limiting speech, become increasingly geographic beginning in utopian. 13
13 -1939 in the case Hague v. CIO, when the Supreme Court finally recognized that public spaces like streets and parks were necessary not only to speech itself but to political organizing.53 The problem is not always exactly what is said, but where it is said. At issue in Hague was whether the rights to speech and assembly extends to the use of the streets and other public places for political purposes, and in what ways that use could be regulated. The Court based its decision in a language of common law, arguing that “wherever the title of the streets and parks may rest, they have immemorially been held in trust for use of the public and, time out of mind, have been used for purposes of assembly, communicating thoughts between citizens, and discussing public questions.”54 But whatever the roots for such a claim may be in common law, it hardly stands historical scrutiny in the United States, where the violent repression of street politics has always been as much a feature of urban life as its promotion.55 That makes Hague v. CIO a landmark decision: it states clearly for the first time that “the use of the streets and parks for the communication of views on national questions may be regulated in the interest of all … but it must not, in the guise of regulation, be abridged or denied.”56 At the same time, the Court made it clear that protected speech in public spaces was always to be “exercised in subordination to the general comfort and convenience, and in consonance with peace and good order….”57 The question, then, became one of finding the ways to regulate speech (and associated conduct) such that order – and even “general comfort” – was always maintained.
14 -The answers to that question were spatial. They were based on a regulation of urban geography in the name of both “good order” and “general comfort” and of the rights to speech and assembly. Speech rights needed to be balanced against other interests and desires. But order and comfort, it ought to go without saying, suggest a much lower threshold than does “clear and present danger.” While recognizing in a new way a fundamental right to speech and assembly, that is, the Hague court in fact found a language to severely limit that right, and perhaps even to limit it more effectively than had heretofore been possible. To put this another way (and as I will argue more fully below), the new spatial order of speech and assembly that the Court began constructing in Hague allowed for the full flowering of a truly liberal speech regime: a regime for which we are all, in fact, the poorer.
15 -
16 -Education is increasingly driven by neoliberal forces – student activism is key to retake the political sphere and democratize elite education against market-driven logic
17 -Williams 15 Jo Williams (Lecturer, College of Education at Victoria University), "Remaking education from below: the Chilean student movement as public pedagogy," Australian Journal of Adult Learning, November 2015 AZ
18 -More than ever the crisis of schooling represents, at large, the crisis of democracy itself and any attempt to understand the attack on public schooling and higher education cannot be separated from the wider assault on all forms of public life not driven by the logic of the market (Giroux, 2003:7) “Fin al lucro en educación, nuestros sueños no les pertenecen” (end profit making in education, nobody owns our dreams 1 ) (slogan of the Chilean student movement, inspired by the French student uprisings of May-June 1968) Over the past four decades, as the economic and ideological depravity of neoliberal policy and its market-driven logic (D. W. Hursh and Henderson, 2011) has been brought to bear on every aspect of education, the very concept of ‘public’ has been negated. Characteristics such as user-pays, competition, assaults on teachers, and mass standardised-testing and rankings, are among the features of a schooling, which is now very much seen as a private rather than public good (Giroux, 2003). The question of public education as a democratic force for the radical transformation of a violently unjust society seems rarely if ever asked, and a dangerous co-option and weakening of the language and practice of progressive pedagogy has occurred to the extent that notions of inclusion and success are increasingly limited to narrowly conceived individualist and competitive measures of market advantage. As Giroux notes “the forces of neo-liberalism dissolve public issues into utterly privatised and individualistic concerns (2004:62), and despite ongoing official rhetoric “the only form of citizenship increasingly being offered to young people is consumerism” (2003:7). Neoliberal education sees students and young people as passive consumers, the emphasis of schooling on learning how to be governed rather than how to govern (Giroux, 2003:7). In such a context the space for a public pedagogy, based on challenging the hegemony of neoliberal ideology and aligned with collective resistance, appears limited at best. And yet, every day people, teachers, students and communities do engage in political struggle, enacting pedagogies that seek to unveil rather than continue to mask the political structures and organisation that ensures power remains in the hands of the few, and at the service of the few, at the expense of the rest of us. Giroux characterises public pedagogies as defined by hope, struggle and a politicisation of the education process. He argues for …a politics of resistance that extends beyond the classroom as part of a broader struggle to challenge those forces of neo-liberalism that currently wage war against all collective structures capable of defending vital social institutions as a public good (Giroux, 2003:14). Central to Giroux’s argument is the need for critical educators to look to, value, and engage in and with social movements as they emerge and develop as sites of resistance. To …take sides, speak out, and engage in the hard work of debunking corporate culture’s assault on teaching and learning, orient their teaching for social change, connect learning to public life and link knowledge to the operations of power (Giroux, 2004:77). He argues that “progressive education in an age of rampant neoliberalism requires an expanded notion of the public, pedagogy, solidarity, and democratic struggle” (Giroux, 2003:13), and that moreover, educators need to work against a “politics of certainty” and instead develop and engage in pedagogical practice that problematises the world and fosters a sense of collective resistance and hope (2003:14). A neoliberal vision of the ‘good citizen’ and ‘good student’ presumes passivity, acceptance of the status quo and an individualistic disposition. Critical pedagogues must seek out and embrace opportunities to support and celebrate collective political action, not only because it develops a sense of social and political agency but also because it constitutes a powerful basis for authentic learning and active and critical citizenship in an unjust world (Freire, 1970). The Chilean student movement stands as one such example of challenging and inspiring counter-practice and a reclaiming of pedagogy as political and public. For ten years students have filled Chile’s streets, occupied their schools and universities, and organised conferences, public Remaking education from below: the Chilean student movement as public pedagogy 499 meetings, political stunts, creative actions and protests. Students and young people have been at the centre of the largest and most sustained political action seen in Chile since the democratic movement of the 80s, which eventually forced out the Pinochet dictatorship. Despite global trends in the opposite direction, the Chilean students have fundamentally influenced a nationwide education reform program constituting significant changes to the existing system which has been described as an extreme example of market-driven policy (Valenzuela, Bellei, and Ríos, 2014:220). Most importantly, they have forced and led a nationwide dialogue on the question of education and social justice in Chile and an interrogation of the current, grossly inequitable and elitist model (Falabella, 2008). This article begins by reviewing the experiences of the Chilean student movement to date and offering a brief explanation of the historical development of the education system it seeks to dismantle. It then considers the movement as an example of public pedagogies, concluding with a discussion of how it might inform notions of radical educational practice and a return of the student and pedagogue as authentic and critical subjects.
19 -The Role of the Ballot is to assume the role of an academic fighting neoliberalism to reclaim the academy and higher education.
20 -Giroux 13 (Henry, American scholar and cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy in the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, “Public Intellectuals Against the Neoliberal University,” 29 October 2013, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/19654-public-intellectuals-against-the-neoliberal-university)//ghs-VA
21 -Increasingly, as universities are shaped by an audit culture, the call to be objective and impartial, whatever one's intentions, can easily echo what George Orwell called the official truth or the establishment point of view. Lacking a self-consciously democratic political focus, teachers are often reduced, or reduce themselves, to the role of a technician or functionary engaged in formalistic rituals, unconcerned with the disturbing and urgent problems that confront the larger society or the consequences of one's pedagogical practices and research undertakings. Hiding behind appeals to balance and objectivity, too many scholars refuse to recognize that being committed to something does not cancel out what C. Wright Mills once called hard thinking. Teaching needs to be rigorous, self-reflective, and committed not to the dead zone of instrumental rationality but to the practice of freedom, to a critical sensibility capable of advancing the parameters of knowledge, addressing crucial social issues, and connecting private troubles and public issues. In opposition to the instrumental model of teaching, with its conceit of political neutrality and its fetishization of measurement, I argue that academics should combine the mutually interdependent roles of critical educator and active citizen. This requires finding ways to connect the practice of classroom teaching with important social problems and the operation of power in the larger society while providing the conditions for students to view themselves as critical agents capable of making those who exercise authority and power answerable for their actions. Higher education cannot be decoupled from what Jacques Derrida calls a democracy to come, that is, a democracy that must always "be open to the possibility of being contested, of contesting itself, of criticizing and indefinitely improving itself."33 Within this project of possibility and impossibility, critical pedagogy must be understood as a deliberately informed and purposeful political and moral practice, as opposed to one that is either doctrinaire, instrumentalized or both. Moreover, a critical pedagogy should also gain part of its momentum in higher education among students who will go back to the schools, churches, synagogues and workplaces to produce new ideas, concepts and critical ways of understanding the world in which young people and adults live. This is a notion of intellectual practice and responsibility that refuses the professional neutrality and privileged isolation of the academy. It also affirms a broader vision of learning that links knowledge to the power of self-definition and to the capacities of students to expand the scope of democratic freedoms, particularly those that address the crisis of education, politics, and the social as part and parcel of the crisis of democracy itself. In order for critical pedagogy, dialogue and thought to have real effects, they must advocate that all citizens, old and young, are equally entitled, if not equally empowered, to shape the society in which they live. This is a commitment we heard articulated by the brave students who fought tuition hikes and the destruction of civil liberties and social provisions in Quebec and to a lesser degree in the Occupy Wall Street movement. If educators are to function as public intellectuals, they need to listen to young people who are producing a new language in order to talk about inequality and power relations, attempting to create alternative democratic public spaces, rethinking the very nature of politics, and asking serious questions about what democracy is and why it no longer exists in many neoliberal societies. These young people who are protesting the 1 recognize that they have been written out of the discourses of justice, equality and democracy and are not only resisting how neoliberalism has made them expendable, they are arguing for a collective future very different from the one that is on display in the current political and economic systems in which they feel trapped. These brave youth are insisting that the relationship between knowledge and power can be emancipatory, that their histories and experiences matter, and that what they say and do counts in their struggle to unlearn dominating privileges, productively reconstruct their relations with others, and transform, when necessary, the world around them.
22 -
23 -Best data proves neoliberal civilization is unsustainable absent major structural changes
24 -Ahmed 3/16 Nafeez Ahmed (executive director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development). “Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?” The Guardian. Published 3/14, Updated 3/16/14 AJ
25 -A new study partly-sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution. Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that "the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history." Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to "precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common." The independent research project is based on a new cross-disciplinary 'Human And Nature DYnamical' (HANDY) model, led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharrei of the US National Science Foundation-supported National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, in association with a team of natural and social scientists. The HANDY model was created using a minor Nasa grant, but the study based on it was conducted independently. The study based on the HANDY model has been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed Elsevier journal, Ecological Economics. It finds that according to the historical record even advanced, complex civilisations are susceptible to collapse, raising questions about the sustainability of modern civilisation: "The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent." By investigating the human-nature dynamics of these past cases of collapse, the project identifies the most salient interrelated factors which explain civilisational decline, and which may help determine the risk of collapse today: namely, Population, Climate, Water, Agriculture, and Energy. These factors can lead to collapse when they converge to generate two crucial social features: "the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity"; and "the economic stratification of society into Elites rich and Masses (or "Commoners") poor" These social phenomena have played "a central role in the character or in the process of the collapse," in all such cases over "the last five thousand years." Currently, high levels of economic stratification are linked directly to overconsumption of resources, with "Elites" based largely in industrialised countries responsible for both: "... accumulated surplus is not evenly distributed throughout society, but rather has been controlled by an elite. The mass of the population, while producing the wealth, is only allocated a small portion of it by elites, usually at or just above subsistence levels." The study challenges those who argue that technology will resolve these challenges by increasing efficiency: "Technological change can raise the efficiency of resource use, but it also tends to raise both per capita resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction, so that, absent policy effects, the increases in consumption often compensate for the increased efficiency of resource use." Productivity increases in agriculture and industry over the last two centuries has come from "increased (rather than decreased) resource throughput," despite dramatic efficiency gains over the same period. Modelling a range of different scenarios, Motesharrei and his colleagues conclude that under conditions "closely reflecting the reality of the world today... we find that collapse is difficult to avoid." In the first of these scenarios, civilisation: ".... appears to be on a sustainable path for quite a long time, but even using an optimal depletion rate and starting with a very small number of Elites, the Elites eventually consume too much, resulting in a famine among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society. It is important to note that this Type-L collapse is due to an inequality-induced famine that causes a loss of workers, rather than a collapse of Nature." Another scenario focuses on the role of continued resource exploitation, finding that "with a larger depletion rate, the decline of the Commoners occurs faster, while the Elites are still thriving, but eventually the Commoners collapse completely, followed by the Elites." In both scenarios, Elite wealth monopolies mean that they are buffered from the most "detrimental effects of the environmental collapse until much later than the Commoners", allowing them to "continue 'business as usual' despite the impending catastrophe." The same mechanism, they argue, could explain how "historical collapses were allowed to occur by elites who appear to be oblivious to the catastrophic trajectory (most clearly apparent in the Roman and Mayan cases)." Applying this lesson to our contemporary predicament, the study warns that: "While some members of society might raise the alarm that the system is moving towards an impending collapse and therefore advocate structural changes to society in order to avoid it, Elites and their supporters, who opposed making these changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory 'so far' in support of doing nothing."
26 -
27 -Empirics confirm – neolib results in permanent war.
28 -Klassen 15 – Jerome, Associate Lecturer in International Relations; Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global Governance; McCormack Graduate School, 2015 (“Hegemony in Question: US Primacy, Multi-Polarity and Global Resistance,” Polarising Development–Introducing Alternatives to Neoliberalism and the Crisis, Pluto Press)
29 -In the neoliberal period, a new structure of production, accumulation, and class and state formation emerged. With the end of Bretton Woods, the United States was able to run systematic trade deficits with Europe and Asia, which were forced to recycle dollar payments into US Treasury bonds or Wall Street securities. In the process, the dollar was saved as world money, capital controls were weakened in rival states, and the United States was able to run trade and government deficits. At the same time, Wall Street became the centre of global finance, and US firms gained access to new investment funds. Through these new modes of financialisation, the world economy was reconstituted under US centrality. President Reagan’s defeat of the US labour movement also paved the way for a new regime of ‘flexible accumulation’ in the US economy – one based on low wage, deskilled, racialised, gendered and part-time labour markets.
30 -Alongside these economic shifts, the United States pursued an aggressive military policy. In Latin America, it backed military coups in Chile (1973) and Argentina (1986), and financed the Contras against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. After the 1979 revolution in Iran, the United States established Rapid Deployment Forces in the Gulf, and supported Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran the following year. After the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan, the United States also financed the mujahideen resistance to the communist government in Kabul. At the same time, Reagan supported South Africa’s invasion of Angola and labelled the African National Congress a terrorist organisation. Through these international proxy wars, the United States tried to weaken or defeat the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist resistance of the 1970s and 1980s.
31 -It is vital to recognise that, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the transition to capitalism in China, the last obstacles to US grand strategy fell by the wayside. Indeed, after 1990, the United States was able to achieve the fundamental goals of hegemonic liberalism: the globalisation of capital and preeminent power for the United States itself. As a sign of this project, the Defense Planning Guidance of the Bush I Administration called for a strategy to ‘preclude the emergence of any potential future global competitor’. To this end, the Quadrennial Defense Review of the Clinton Administration argued that the role of the US military is to ‘sustain American global leadership’, and to secure ‘uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources’. In line with this, the National Security Strategy of the Bush II Administration aimed to ‘dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equalling, the power of the United States’. Likewise, the National Security Strategy of the Obama Administration posits that the United States should ‘underwrite global security’ by ‘renewing American leadership’ and reviving the national economy as ‘the wellspring of American power’.
32 -Across the governments of the post-Cold War period, then, a single strategy has been advanced – one of globalising capital and US primacy. To these ends, the United States has engaged in permanent war, intervening in countries such as Panama, Colombia, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Honduras, Venezuela and Syria. However, US strategy has been challenged, if not degraded, by new dynamics in the global political economy.
33 -Student protests oppose neoliberalism in higher education, translating theory into praxis
34 -Delgado and Ross 16 Sandra Delgado (doctoral student in curriculum studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada) and E. Wayne Ross (Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada), "Students in Revolt: The Pedagogical Potential of Student Collective Action in the Age of the Corporate University" 2016 (published on Academia.edu) AZ
35 -As students’ collective actions keep gaining more political relevance, student and university movements also establish themselves as spaces of counter-hegemony (Sotiris, 2014). Students are constantly opening new possibilities to displace and resist the commodification of education offered by mainstream educational institutions. As Sotiris (2014) convincingly argues, movements within the university have not only the potential to subvert educational reforms, but in addition, they have become “strategic nodes” for the transformation of the processes and practices in higher education, and most importantly for the constant re-imagination and the recreation of “new forms of subaltern counter-hegemony” (p. 1). The strategic importance of university and college based moments lays precisely in the role that higher education plays in contemporary societies, namely their role in “the development of new technologies, new forms of production and for the articulation of discourses and theories on contemporary issues and their role in the reproduction of state and business personnel.” (p.8) Universities and colleges therefore, have a crucial contribution in “the development of class strategies (both dominant and subaltern), in the production of subjectivities, (and) in the transformation of collective practices” (p.8) The main objective of this paper is to examine how contemporary student movements are disrupting, opposing and displacing entrenched oppressive and dehumanizing reforms, practices and frames in today’s corporate academia. This work is divided in four sections. The first is an introduction to student movements and an overview of how student political action has been approached and researched. The second and third sections take a closer look at the repertoires of contention used by contemporary student movements and propose a framework based on radical praxis that allows us to better understand the pedagogical potential of student disruptive action. The last section contains a series of examples of students’ repertoires or tactics of contention that exemplifies the pedagogical potential of student social and political action. An Overview of Student Movements Generally speaking, students are well positioned as political actors. They have been actively involved in the politics of education since the beginnings of the university, but more broadly, students have played a significant role in defining social, cultural and political environments around the world (Altbach, 1966; Boren, 2001). The contributions and influences of students and student movements to revolutionary efforts and political movements beyond the university context are undeniable. One example is the role that students have played in the leadership and membership of the political left (e.g. students’ role in the Movimiento 26 de Julio - M-26-7 in Cuba during the 50’s and in the formation of The New Left in the United States, among others). Similarly, several political and social movements have either established alliances with student organizations or created their own chapters on campuses to recruit new members, mobilize their agendas in education and foster earlier student’s involvement in politics2 (Altbach, 1966; Lipset, 1969). Students are often considered to be “catalysts” of political and social action or “barometers” of the social unrest and political tension accumulated in society (Barker, 2008). Throughout history student movements have had a diverse and sometimes contradictory range of political commitments. Usually, student organizations and movements find grounding and inspiration in Anarchism and Marxism, however it is also common to see movements leaning towards liberal and conservative approaches. Hence, student political action has not always been aligned with social movements or organizations from the political left. In various moments in history students have joined or been linked to rightist movements, reactionary organizations and conservative parties (Altbach, 1966; Barker, 2008). Students, unlike workers, come from different social classes and seemly different cultural backgrounds. As a particularly diverse social group, students are distinguished for being heterogeneous and pluralists in their values, interests and commitments (Boren, 2001). Such diversity has been a constant challenge for maintaining unity, which has been particularly problematic in cases of national or transnational student organizations (Prusinowska, Kowzan, and Zielińska, 2012; Somma, 2012). To clarify, social classes are defined by the specific relationship that people have with the means of production. In the case of students, they are not a social class by themselves, but a social layer or social group that is identifiable by their common function in society (Stedman, 1969). The main or central aspect that unites student is the transitory social condition of being a student. In other words, students are a social group who have a common function, role in society or social objective, which is “to study” something (Lewis, 2013; Simons and Masschelein, 2009). Student movements can be understood as a form of social movement (LuesherMamashela, 2015). They have an internal organization that varies from traditionally hierarchical structures, organizational schemes based on representative democracy with charismatic leadership, to horizontal forms of decision-making (Altbach, 1966; Lipset, 1969). As many other movements, student movements have standing claims, organize different type of actions, tactics or repertoires of contention, 3 and they advocate for political, social or/and educational agendas, programs or pleas.
36 -Free speech zones are a form of respectability politics that limits movements for racial equality
37 -Gamble 16 Joelle Gamble (Director of Roosevelt’s national network of emerging thinkers and doers), "Fighting for Black Lives—and Against the Rules of Political Expression," Roosevelt Forward, 7/14/2016 AZ
38 -What happens when the ballot box doesn’t result in policies that address critical issues? Or, to frame the question differently, how can election results reflect the views of all Americans when so many cannot vote? As the Brennan Center reports, 17 states have rolled out new voter restriction laws ahead of the 2016 election. We are already seeing unconscionable levels of disenfranchisement of people of color, young people, and the elderly across the country. When traditional channels of political expression are insufficient to create change, other means become paramount. However, despite purporting to value free speech and assembly, the U.S. has rules that allow for bias and respectability politics to curb expression. For example, there are time, manner, and place restrictions on public protest. The state can curb protests deemed to be disorderly, unreasonably loud, or disruptive of traffic—including protests, like those of the Movement for Black Lives, directed against the state itself. The police discretion allowed here results in the kinds of arrests we saw in Baton Rouge over the weekend: Hundreds were arrested for things as simple as stepping off the sidewalk—by police wearing riot gear. Essentially, the central question is this: When the rules are inadequate for elevating a serious issue, when does breaking them become the right course of action? Americans have a very persistent belief that anyone who does not follow the rules should be discredited. But, we rarely stop to think about the circumstances under which the rules are insufficient for solving problems—or protecting lives. Instead, we subject protesters’ conduct to a litmus test of respectability and ask them to file calmly down a sidewalk. This only works if the political system is set up to acknowledge people’s voices when they participate through traditional means. But, as mentioned earlier, this is not the case—especially for people of color. When Black folks protest police brutality, instead of acknowledging the problem, prevailing powers instead divert the question to Black-on-Black crime. And when Black folks protest Black-on-Black crime, no one reports one it at all.
39 -Student and faculty activism is key to ending campus rape.
40 -Rev. Dr. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, 15, The Hunting Ground : Stop Victim Blaming and End Campus Rape, 3-26-2015, Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-dr-susan-brooks-thistlethwaite/the-hunting-ground-stop-victim-blaming-and-end-campus-rape_b_6943488.html
41 - “One in five women in college will be sexually assaulted.” That is only one of the horrifying statistics in the new documentary The Hunting Ground on the “epidemic” of campus sexual assault. It is the work of Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, whose previous documentary, The Invisible War, about sexual assault in the military, was nominated for an Academy Award. The film is premiering starting this week and will be shown on CNN later this year. It is horrifying and inspiriting in turn. I just saw it, and I can tell you there were gasps from the audience at several points. The power of this documentary is not due to horrifying statistics, however, but to so much searing personal testimony of those, women and men, who have been sexually assaulted on college campuses and who have been blamed and shamed, and who have not seen justice. Perhaps even more heartbreaking is the voices of parents of students who have committed suicide following an assault. But the gasps were telling, because they often came at the blatant contradictions between the halting voices of the ones victimized not only by campus sexual assault, but also by their schools’ failure to support them, and the high-sounding, even pious rhetoric of especially college and university presidents extolling the virtues of their institutions. Now I have been a seminary president, and I know that making your school sound like a paradise of virtue and opportunity is often expected. But it is blatantly immoral for an institution to fail to live up to those very virtues when it comes to sexual assault. And the truth is: the failure to live up to those virtues is not accidental. It is all about money. One crucial point made over and over in the film is that these sexual assaults are not a few “bad apples” on campuses, but a systematic pattern of enabling that results when colleges and universities prefer to dismiss, defer, and finally hide the extent of campus sexual assault because they are in the business of getting tuition, donor dollars, and the revenues from sports teams. This is the hidden financial motive that makes this a systemic issue and not just a matter of individual cases of sexual assault. Rape on campus statistics could deter students from attending, make schools look bad to donors, and if the assailant is ultimately proved to be an athlete, hurt the revenue from college sports. Even the culture of impunity around certain fraternities that are known to be places where sexual assaults occur has a financial motive for schools. Fraternities provide housing stock that overcrowded schools need. The film is not just horrifying. It is also inspiring because it is the students themselves who are working to change this culture and force schools to confront this epidemic of sexual assault. The central narrative is the journey of two women, Andrea Pino and Annie E. Clark, who go from being victims, to becoming survivors and then powerful national activists on campus rape. Pino and Clark were students at the University of North Carolina when they were each raped. But it was the lack of action by administrators, and what must be seen as a culture of complicity at the school, that led them to file a Title IX complaint against UNC. Through their networking efforts and the courageous work of other campus activists, now 95 schools are under investigation under Title IX for the ‘hostile and intimidating environment’ created by campus rapes. These young people researched the law on their own, with no one to help them, and taught themselves and then others how to use the law to force their schools to do what the schools should have been willing to do all along. “I learned you could be 20 and take on a 200-year-old university.” Administrators are very often doing the exact opposite of justice for students who have been victimized by rape. The attitude of some administrators to students when they attempt to report rape has to be heard to be believed, as the film makes clear. “When I went to an administrator to report my assault, I was told that rape is like a football game,” Clark remembers. “The administrator asked me if, looking back, there was anything I would have done differently.” Victim-blaming. There it is. This is the consistent pattern behind the testimonies, the statements over and over that the rape was terrible, but the experience of trying to report, trying to get their schools to hear them, believe them and then act with fairness was sometimes worse. That’s why “88 percent of victims don’t report,” as another statistic in the film reveals. I waited through the whole film for someone to talk about going to a campus chaplain for help. There is no mention of that, and if chaplains had been victim-advocates, I think one of the many survivors would have noted it. I found that absence a huge indictment of the religious chaplaincy system. The failure to deal adequately with campus rape is not just due to uninformed administration or chaplaincy, but as the film makes unrelentingly clear, is the result of a systematic effort to silence victims because colleges and universities have a huge financial investment in the status quo. The victim-blaming is part of the enabling culture as sexual assault is still not seen as a crime of violence, and an exercise of power of one (or more than one) over another. Instead, sexual assault is still considered shameful for the victim, and accusations of rape are met with disbelief and silencing. But you can see the positive changes in Andrea Pino and Annie E. Clark and many others in the film as they go from being victims to becoming survivors and then activists. This is a hard journey, and as they open themselves to support other victims, they feel their own pain again. There is no doubt, however, that their work is making a difference. The documentary is being requested by campuses nationwide. There have been more than 1,600 inquiries and 150 campuses are booked so far. I believe the two most basic religious questions are: “What can I trust?” and “Am I alone?” The immoral failure of schools of higher learning to be a place students can trust is, in the broadest sense, a betrayal of this religious value. The moral high ground of this film is this reality: “You are not alone.” Sign up to take action on the film’s website and #EndCampusRape.
42 -Black women are silenced when they are raped and prevented from speaking out
43 -Cherise Charleswell 14 Boys Will Be Boys: America's Campus Rape Policy I The Hampton Institute, 7-2-2014 AT
44 -In October of 2013, a Georgia Tech fraternity suspended (hyperlink~-~--http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2013/10/georgia-tech-frat-suspended-over-rapebait-email/) a social chair for sending a "rapebait email" to his chapter which specifically offered advice about how to take advantage of drunk girls. In June, a Tufts University student, Wagatwe Wanjuki, made headlines and sparked the hashtag #SurvivorPrivilege, after she was expelled from the university after she was raped. It was in 2009, a year after her attack, that Wagatwe first came forward about her repeated assault by a fellow student. Tuft University's response was that, per their legal counsel, they did not have to take action. In fact, she was told to drop out, a year shy of graduation, by the Dean of Undergraduate Education, who happened to be her assailant's academic advisor. The fact that Wagatwe is a young Black woman and of an immigrant background has many implications for how she was treated, and how society treats and views Black women who are victims of rape. It harkens back to stereotypes and falsehoods about Black women's sexuality that creates over-sexed caricatures who could not possibly be victims or sexually violated. Surely, they are the temptress with insatiable sexual appetites. On top of having to cope with expulsion, Wagatwe found herself under attack from those, notably George Will in his Washington Post article , who claimed that she was seeking a special and "coveted status" as a rape victim and survivor. According to Will, women lie about being assaulted because they covet the sympathy. In his own words he states: "Colleges and universities are being educated by Washington and are finding the experience excruciating. They are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous ('micro-aggressions,' often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate." Yes, women are that emotional, that needy, that childish, that they systematically go about dreaming up these fantasies of rape, in hopes of finally getting attention that they so desperately crave. In a classic patriarchal and chauvinistic manner, Will dismisses women's claims of sexual assault. Do you need a clearer example of rape culture than that? Wagatwe, responded with the creation of the #SurvivorPrivilege hashtag which sparked a social media firestorm: More can be found out about Wagatwe Wanjuki and the current activism that she carries out here. Barriers to Reporting, Prosecution, and Treatment Despite the prevalence of sexual assault and rape, many offenders are neither arrested or prosecuted (as pointed out only 12 of rapes on college campuses are reported). These rates of reporting can be attributed to a wide array of barriers. In short, the greatest barrier to reporting of rape, prosecution of rapists, and treatment seeking on college campuses is once again patriarchy. Patriarchy fuels campus rape cultures which are more focused on power, prestige, and competiveness. It also supports victim blaming, shaming, which involves being subjected to insensitive, harsh, hurtful, and judgmental questions (often about a student's prior sexual history, as if that has any bearing on or relationship to the fact that another student raped them) which only compound a victims distress. Thus, facing a school's hostile adjudication process often proves too difficult of a barrier. Why are the schools adjudication processes so hostile? Well, simply because the schools would prefer to not even have to bother with claims of rape, which negatively impact their reputations. The negative press then in turn impacts their ability to recruit students (consider the ranking of universities and how sensitive the higher education market is to public perception) and hold on to their images of prestige and scholarship. Thus, administrators who faced the problem often tried to keep it a private matter to be resolved behind closed doors with minimal campus disturbance; which in turns only helps to perpetuate rape culture. When the concern is given to only protect the power structure and reputation of a school that is rape culture. What administrators should have/should be doing is making these incidents known to the student body, to increase awareness of rape, and allow for teachable moments, that can help reduce future assaults and cultivate an environment that makes it safe for victims to come forward and perpetrators removed from college campuses (especially when considering that rapist are often repeat offenders). 90 of college rapes are actually committed by about 3 of college men, which gives credence to the argument that, if these cases were handled in a proper way (criminal prosecution) the number of campus rapes can be significantly reduced.
45 -Thus the plan –
46 -Resolved: Public colleges and universities in the United States ought not restrict constitutionally protected speech to free speech zones.
47 -Free speech zones limit student discourse and should be prohibited
48 -Hudson 16 (David L. Hudson Jr. is a First Amendment expert and law professor who serves as First Amendment Ombudsman for the Newseum Institute’s First Amendment Center. He contributes research and commentary, provides analysis and information to news media. He is an author, co-author or co-editor of more than 40 books, including Let The Students Speak: A History of the Fight for Free Expression in American Schools (Beacon Press, 2011), The Encyclopedia of the First Amendment (CQ Press, 2008) (one of three co-editors), The Rehnquist Court: Understanding Its Impact and Legacy (Praeger, 2006), and The Handy Supreme Court Answer Book (Visible Ink Press, 2008). He has written several books devoted to student-speech issues and others areas of student rights. He writes regularly for the ABA Journal and the American Bar Association’s Preview of United States Supreme Court Cases. He has served as a senior law clerk at the Tennessee Supreme Court, and teaches First Amendment and Professional Responsibility classes at Vanderbilt Law School and various classes at the Nashville School of Law), "How Campus Policies Limit Free Speech," Huffington Post, 6/1/2016 AZ
49 -Restricting where students can have free speech
50 -In addition, many colleges and universities have free speech zones. Under these policies, people can speak at places of higher learning in only certain, specific locations or zones. While there are remnants of these policies from the 1960s, they grew in number in the late 1990s and early 2000s as a way for administrators to deal with controversial expression. These policies may have a seductive appeal for administrators, as they claim to advance the cause of free speech. But, free speech zones often limit speech by relegating expression to just a few locations. For example, some colleges began by having only two or three free speech zones on campus. The idea of zoning speech is not unique to colleges and universities. Government officials have sought to diminish the impact of different types of expression by zoning adult-oriented expression, antiabortion protestors and political demonstrators outside political conventions. In a particularly egregious example, a student at Modesto Junior College in California named Robert Van Tuinen was prohibited from handing out copies of the United States Constitution on September 17, 2013 - the anniversary of the signing of the Constitution. Van Tuinen was informed that he could get permission to distribute the Constitution if he preregistered for time in the “free speech zone.” But later, Van Tuinen was told by an administrator that he would have to wait, possibly until the next month. In the words of First Amendment expert Charles Haynes, “the entire campus should be a free speech zone.” In other words, the default position of school administrators should be to allow speech, not limit it. Zoning speech is troubling, particularly when it reduces the overall amount of speech on campus. And many free speech experts view the idea of a free speech zone as “moronic and oxymoronic.” College or university campuses should be a place where free speech not only survives but thrives.
51 -Free speech zones and no protest zones infringe on protected speech and shut down impromptu uprising which disarms the most effective form of resistance and forces reform efforts to bend to the will of the established system
52 -Mitchell 03 - Don Mitchell, Distinguished Professor of Geography at Syracuse’s Maxwell School: 2003 (“The Liberalization of Free Speech: Or, How Protest in Public Space is Silenced” Stanford Agora Vol. 4 p.36-37 Available at agora.stanford.edu/agora/volume4/articles/mitchell/mitchell.pdf Accessed on 12/11/16)IG
53 -In the end, a federal judge upheld the city’s position, seeing no illegitimate abridgement of protesters’ rights in the City’s establishment of a no protest zone. The judge stated, plainly enough, that “free speech must sometimes bend to public safety.”150 In this case it had to bend for 50 blocks, and right out of downtown – even though in Madsen, the court had found a 36 foot exclusion zone to be reasonable but both a 300 foot zone in which approaching patrons and workers of clinics, and a 300 foot no-protest zone around residences of clinic workers to be too great a burden on free speech, ordering a much smaller no-protest bubble to be drawn.151 Given this sort of spatial specificity in the Supreme Court’s decision, it seems unlikely that such a large protest exclusion zone could withstand scrutiny.
54 -But there is another issue at work too. The judge in Seattle supported the City’s contention that sanctioned protest was acceptable. The no-protest zone was necessary because of impromptu protests. But, of course, the very effectiveness of the Seattle protests was their (apparent) spontaneity.152 That is what caught the media’s – and the public’s – imagination; and that is what allowed for the massive upsurge of political debate, in the U.S. and around the world, that followed.
55 -Perhaps, tactically, Seattle’s “mistake” was to not establish designated protest and no-protest zones in advance of the meetings. Such a move had been effective in the 1996 Democratic and Republican Conventions (and in earlier ones too). And in subsequent years and events it has become standard practice, as with the 2000 National Conventions, the annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington, and the World Economic Forum meeting in New York in February 2002, where protesters are kept out of certain areas by fences, barricades and a heavy police presence.153 In the case of the 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, it was the protesters who were fenced off, with the City establishing an official “protest zone” in a fenced parking lot a considerable distance from the convention site.154 The rationale, of course, was “security,” a rationale backed by appeals to the authority of the Secret Service. The ACLU, among others, sued the city, eventually winning a decision that invalidated the city’s plans. The city was forced to establish a protest zone closer to the convention center, with the judge chiding the City of Los Angeles for failing to consider the First Amendment when it established the rules for protest and security around the event. “You can’t shut down the 1st Amendment about what might happen,” the judge said. “You can always theorize some awful scenario.”155 This victory should not be considered very large. Its effect, and the effect of other cases like it, has largely reduced the ACLU and other advocates of speech rights to arguing the fine points of geography, pouring over maps to determine just where protest may occur. Protesters are put entirely on the defensive, always seeking to justify why their voices should be heard and their actions seen, always having to make a claim that it is not unreasonable to assert that protest should be allowed in a place where those being protested against can actually hear it, and always having to “bend” their tactics – and their rights – to fit a legal regime that in every case sees protest subordinate to “the general order” (which, of course, really means the “established order”).
56 -Framework – SV
57 -The standard is minimizing structural violence
58 -1. Global justice requires a reduction in inequality and a focus on material rights
59 -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 AJ
60 -Notwithstanding these drawbacks, these scholars provide very compelling arguments against mainstream conceptions of justice. In this approach, the obli- gation of justice is derived from the moral equality of human beings irrespective of their race, creed and nationality (O'Neill 1991; Brown 1992: 169; Beitz 1979; Sen 1999). The emphasis is on the positive rights of citizens - that is the kinds of rights that require state authorities to do something in order to provide citizens with the opportunities and abilities to act to fulfil their own potential - as opposed to negative rights/liberty, which refers to freedom from coercion and non-interfer- ence. The notion of justice as meeting needs, as seen in Chapter 2, figures very prominently in quite a number of the influencing materials that form the starting point for the discourse on global sustainable development. It has been suggested, in general, that this idea of justice is 'increasingly influential on non-governmen- tal organizations and the community of international policy makers' (Brighouse 2004: 67). In general, proponents of justice as need criticize liberal ideas of justice for concentrating on political equality (equal right to speech, vote, etc.) without addressing the problem of material equality - especially in the form of equal access to resources. They also claim that the ability to own property as well as the ability to exercise political rights (say the right to vote) depends first and foremost on the ability of citizens to function effectively. When the basic human needs of citizens, for example food, are not being met, other rights become merely 'hypothetical and empty' (Sen 1999: 75). Following on from this basic reasoning, the rights approach to justice is rejected and, in its place, human basic need is seen as the correct basis of political morality and the right benchmark for the determination of political judgment (Plant 1991: 185). In previous sections we saw that libertarian notions of justice sanction unlimited material inequality between citizens, provided that each person has obtained their possessions through legitimate means. All that matters is that the state should ensure fair rules of transitions and equality before the law. We saw also that liberal accounts of justice, especially Rawls' liberal egalitarianism, reject this formula- tion of justice because it does not secure the welfare of the less able in society. On the contrary, Rawls recommends that political institutions should be structured in ways that protect the interests of the least advantaged individuals in society. Accordingly, he sanctions societal inequities provided that such inequities work to the advantage of the least well-off. On closer reading, however, it turns out that Rawls difference principle (that inequities should work in favour of the least well- off) does not contain any explicit demand relating to the basic needs of the poor. As such, it is possible for Rawls' proviso to be met even when the least well-off in the society are denied their basic needs. For example, a distribution that changes from 20:10:2 to 100:30:4 satisfies Rawls difference principle but tells us noth- ing about the actual well-being of the least well-off. So, whereas some (mainly libertarians) criticize Rawls for not specifying the extent to which other people's liberty can be sacrificed for the sake of the least well-off, others (proponents of justice as meeting need) criticize Rawls for leaving the fate of the least well-off unprotected. Many scholars in the latter group sometimes argue along Marxian lines that as long as the means of production remain in the hands of the 'haves' there is no guarantee that inequities will benefit the least well-off. Maslow (1968), Bradshaw (1972) and Forder (1974) have all consequently argued that only the theory of need provides, as Maslow (1968: 4) puts it, 'the ultimate appeal for the determination of the good, bad, right and wrong' in a po- litical community. Without the theory of need, they say, it would be impossible to justify the welfare state in capitalist Western democracies. On the other hand, the co-existence of welfare and capitalism confirms the place of need as the criterion of moral political judgment. O'Neill (1991), Sen (1999) and Nussbaum (2000) have all extended versions of this argument to the international domain. O'Neill (1980, 1991) argues that adherence to the Kantian categorical imperative entails that the global community must act to remove the aching poverty and famine that threaten the existence of millions of people in developing countries. Sen (1999), for his part, calls for the strengthening of international institutions to make them able to assist the least well in the global society to achieve the measure of actual living that is required for the basic function and well-being of citizens. For Sen, as for O'Neill, all forms of liberty and rights are meaningful only when people have the substantive 'freedom to achieve actual living' (Sen 1999: 73; cf. O'Neill 1989: 288; 1986). Thomas Pogge also places emphasis on human basic need and starts his well-known book World Poverty and Human Rights with the rhetorical ques- tion: 'How can severe poverty of half of humankind continue despite enormous economic and technological progress and despite the enlightened moral norms and values of our heavily dominant Western civilization?' (Pogge 2002: 3). Many environmentalists believe that this is the conception of justice most con- sistent with the Bnmdtland version of sustainable development (Dobson 1998; Benton 1999: 201; Langhelle 2000: 299). This assertion is not difficult to sustain because the Bnmdtland Report contains several explicit arguments that firmly link the concept of sustainability with meeting the needs of the global population. It says, for example: The satisfaction of human needs and aspirations is the major objective of sustainable development. The essential needs of vast numbers in the develop- ing countries - for food, clothing, shelter, jobs - are not being met, and be- yond their basic needs, these people have legitimate aspirations for improved quality of life .... Sustainable development requires meeting basic needs of all and extending to all the opportunity to satisfy their aspirations for a better life. (WCED 1987: 43).
61 -Outweighs
62 -A. Arbitrariness – It’s morally arbitrary to hold people responsible for what they can’t change. Treating poor people differently than others is thus morally arbitrary, destroying the foundations of a theory.
63 -B. Any theory that condones an unequal global order should be rejected since it would not be accepted by those at the bottom – this makes it useless as a political philosophy, which must be publicly justifiable since people can reasonably disagree with any justification for a principle given the wide variety of warranted moral frameworks
64 -Second, all value stems from experienced wellbeing. Harris 10
65 -Sam Harris 2010. CEO Project Reason; PHD UCLA Neuroscience; BA Stanford Philosophy. The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values.”
66 -I believe that we will increasingly understand good and evil, right and wrong, in scientific terms, because moral concerns translate into facts about how our thoughts and behaviors affect the well-being of conscious creatures like ourselves. If there are facts to be known about the well-being of such creatures—and there are—then there must be right and wrong answers to moral questions. Students of philosophy will notice that this commits me to some form of moral realism (viz. moral claims can really be true or false) and some form of consequentialism viz. the rightness of an act depends on how it impacts the well-being of conscious creatures). While moral realism and consequentialism have both come under pressure in philosophical circles, they have the virtue of corresponding to many of our intuitions about how the world works. Here is my (consequentialist) starting point: all questions of value (right and wrong, good and evil, etc.) depend upon the possibility of experiencing such value. Without potential consequences at the level of experience—happiness, suffering, joy, despair, etc. —all talk of value is empty. Therefore, to say that an act is morally necessary, or evil, or blameless, is to make (tacit) claims about its consequences in the lives of conscious creatures (whether actual or potential).I am unaware of any interesting exception to this rule. Needless to say, if one is worried about pleasing God or His angels, this assumes that such invisible entities are conscious (in some sense) and cognizant of human behavior. It also generally assumes that it is possible to suffer their wrath or enjoy their approval, either in this world or the world to come. Even within religion, therefore, consequences and conscious states remain the foundation of all values.
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1 -2016-09-11 01:40:24.0
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1 -Rashed Islam
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1 -Steele, Tan, Bistagne
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1 -Scoggin, Bistagne, Tan
1 +Rashed Islam
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1 -Sean Fee
1 +Joseph Barquin
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1 -2016-09-19 00:23:28.0
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1 -Castillo, Lonam, Zhou
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1 -2016-10-10 00:18:10.0
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1 -Nick Rogers
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1 -Voices
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1 -2016-10-12 01:50:23.0
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1 -Scott Phillips
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1 -2016-12-17 19:05:19.0
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1 -David Larson
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1 -Valley LG
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1 -2017-01-28 00:02:30.0
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1 -Devane Murphy
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1 -George Ranch AS
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1 -Emory
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1 -2017-02-13 03:21:04.0
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1 -Tom Kadie
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1 -Mountain View DZ
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1 -5
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1 -Stanford
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1 -2017-04-29 17:13:43.0
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1 -Kassie Colon
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1 -TOC

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