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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,11 @@ 1 +CP 2 +CP Text—Public colleges and universities in the US ought not restrict any constitutionally protected forms of speech except in the case of student government elections. Public colleges and universities should preserve expenditure limits on student government campaigns—that fosters creativity in education and solves socio-economic disparities 3 +Powers 9: David M. Powers. College Student Affairs Journal; 2009; 28, 1; ProQuest Central pg. 124. The Constitutional Implications of Expenditure Limits in Student Government Elections. RW 4 +The university presented on main justification for the spending limit it imposed. The school contended that the main intent of the limits is to prevent student government from being diverted by interests other than ones educational" (Ftin4 2007, p. 835). The court accepted the school's contention, and asserted its own analysis: Imposing limits on candidate spending requires student candidates to focus on desirable qualities such as the art of persuasion, public speaking, and answering questions face-to-face with one's potential constituents. Students are forced to campaign personally, wearing our their shoe-leather rather than messing out parent's—or an activist organization's pocketbook (Diet, 2007, p. 835). In addition, the University President asserted further justification for the Limits: Unlimited spending in student government elections also would change the nature of the election process as a learning experience. The spending limits mean that students have to figure out no-con or low-cost ways of campaigning. They have to plan ahead to figure out their strategy, rather than just dumping a lot of money 1into advertising materials at the last minute. They have to make decisions about allocating their resources effectively. Without spending limits, the well-off students would nor have to face these constraints or make these kinds of decisions in the course of running for student government. 2007, P. 835). In regards to the tint interest, that the restriction equalizes socio-economic differences between students, the court rejected it under reasoning put forth in Bxelelry. The court wrote that the Beeklry decision "stands for the proposition that the desire to equalize the financial resources available to candidates does not justify the campaign finance limitation" (Welker, 2001, p. 1065). Secondly, the court rejected the interest that the restriction encouraged student's academic pursuits, because they found that the spending resvimion was not "narrowly tailored to that interest" (Welker, 2001, p. 1065-1066). Further, the court found that the expenditure limit was nor related in "any substantial sense" to its contended purpose of encouraging academic success, because managing a creative campaign (another of the school's alleged interests) takes just as much of the student's time as seeking financial contributions (Welker, 2001, p. 1066). The court also found that the interest of prohibiting undue corporate influence not narrowly tailored, became corporations could always endorse a specific canas didate, which could have the same influence as a financial contribution (Welker, 2001,p. 1066). Finally the noun rejected the university's contention that the restriction would foster creativity among students. The court found that the limitation was not narrowly tailored, and purported that it did not see the link connecting the cap on expenditures and fostering student candidate creativity in the election: For example, the court defined viewpoint neutrality as "the requirement that government not favor one speaker's message over anther's regarding the same topic" (Fiat, 2007, p. 833). Flaw contended that the expenditure limitation and did not constitute viewpoint discrimination because it applied equally to all candidates for student government (HA 2007, p. 833). The court rejected the plaintiff's argument that the restriction was viewpoint discrimination on account that the limitation allowed "non.candidate students" to speak without any restrictions (Fint, 2007, p. 834). This would have been a stronger argument if the court would have adopted the Alabm Shulent dissent approach, and found the entire campus to be the forum, rather than the individual election. However, the argument was not valid since the university did not allow "non-candidate students" to speak in the forum (the election) (Fkni, 2007, p. 834). In making his argument, the plaintiff was assuming that if the court did undertake no forum analysis, they would consider the entire campus the forum, rather than merely the election. 5 +Unlimited financial expenditure is a constitutionally protected form of speech on campuses—that replaces democratic values with neoliberalism 6 +PC 16: “Overturning the “Money as speech” Doctrine. 2016. ” Democracy is for the people—a Public Citizen project. http://www.democracyisforpeople.org/page.cfm?id=19. About Authors~-~- http://www.citizen.org/about/. RW 7 +Even before its disastrous 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the U.S. Supreme Court had already developed a flawed reading of the First Amendment that struck down reforms designed to prevent corruption and to ensure that the voices of the powerful did not drown out “We the People” in the halls of our democratic institutions. Although the extraordinary threat of unlimited corporate money in elections is a new expansion of the doctrine that “money is speech”, decisions of the Court since the Watergate era have enabled the richest one percent of society to buy outsized influence in our government. For over a hundred years, democratic representatives have listened to public outcry to stop the super-wealthy and big businesses from buying our elections. Reform efforts in the first half of the 20th Century prohibited corporate and union contributions to candidates.i In the wake of the Watergate scandal and allegations of illegal contributions in the 1972 election, Congress passed sweeping campaign finance reforms in the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA). FECA enacted comprehensive limits on campaign fundraising and spending, expanded disclosure requirements, established public financing for Presidential elections, and created the Federal Elections Commission to enforce the law. However, FECA was challenged in the 1976 Supreme Court case Buckley v. Valeo. In the Buckley decision, the Court upheld contribution limits, disclosure requirements, and presidential public financing. However, the Court struck down limits on “independent” expenditures and established the controversial idea that spending money for political campaigns purposes is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment. This idea became known colloquially as “money equals speech.” The Court reached this conclusion by treating “the distribution of the humblest handbill or leaflet” the same as expensive, professional advertising in a nation “dependent on television, radio, and other mass media,” and by refusing to acknowledge the corrupting power of unlimited money being used to support and attack candidates.ii This paved the way for huge increases in political spending by groups that only need to avoid a technical definition of “coordination” with candidate campaigns. Subsequent Court rulings weakened or did away with other restrictions on campaign spending. Citizens United marked the culmination of this trend, taking an errant reading of the Constitution and a broken campaign-finance system to an extreme with the conclusion: that corporations should have a First Amendment right to spend limitless amounts to influence election outcomes. Buckley and the cases that follow it, including Citizens United, rest on a number of flawed assumptions about money and politics.iii In particular, the Buckley Court assumed: That each dollar spent directly leads to some increased “quantity of speech,” and therefore placing any limits on campaign spending is the same as placing limits on political speech as a whole. That politicians are less indebted to or corrupted by people who “independently” spend huge amounts of money to elect them than to those who contribute money directly to their campaign. That government has no compelling interest in fostering equal participation in the campaign process or stopping the corrosion of democratic ideals that results when election costs spiral out of control and only the super-wealthy have influence. Spending money in election-related contexts helps people express themselves and can lead to political speech. But money itself is not the equivalent of political speech.I A system that allows corporations and the wealthiest among us to drown out the voices of others, and ensures unequal access to and leverage over elected officials, undermines the First Amendment’s core purpose – to foster and protect a flourishing marketplace of democratic ideas. 8 + 9 +Policies should seek to support democracy within academia—corruption and capitalism are uniquely harmful to the purposes of educational institutions—spills up to cause large scale structural violence 10 +Giroux 15: (Henry A high-school social studies teacher in Barrington, Rhode Island, for six years,2 Giroux has held positions at Boston University, Miami University, and Penn State University. In 2005, Giroux began serving as the Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.34 He has published more than 50 books and more than 300 academic articles, and is published widely throughout education and cultural studies literature.5 "The curse of totalitarianism and the challenge of critical pedagogy" http://philosophersforchange.org/2015/10/13/the-curse-of-totalitarianism-and-the-challenge-of-critical-pedagogy/) 11 +The forces of free-market fundamentalism are on the march ushering in a terrifying horizon of what Hannah Arendt once called “dark times.” Across the globe, the tension between democratic values and market fundamentalism has reached a breaking point. 1 The social contract is under assault, neo-Nazism is on the rise, right wing populism is propelling extremist political candidates and social movements into the forefront of political life, anti-immigrant sentiment is now wrapped in the poisonous logic of nationalism and exceptionalism, racism has become a mark of celebrated audacity, and a politics of disposability comes dangerously close to its endgame of extermination for those considered excess. Under such circumstances, it becomes frightfully clear that the conditions for totalitarianism and state violence are still with us smothering critical thought, social responsibility, the ethical imagination, and politics itself. As Bill Dixon observes: The totalitarian form is still with us because the all too protean origins of totalitarianism are still with us: loneliness as the normal register of social life, the frenzied lawfulness of ideological certitude, mass poverty and mass homelessness, the routine use of terror as a political instrument, and the ever growing speeds and scales of media, economics, and warfare. 2 In the United States, the extreme right in both political parties no longer needs the comfort of a counterfeit ideology in which appeals are made to the common good, human decency, and democratic values. On the contrary, power is now concentrated in the hands of relatively few people and corporations while power is global and free from the limited politics of the democratic state. In fact, the state for all intent and purposes has become the corporate state. Dominant power is now all too visible and the policies, practices, and wrecking ball it has imposed on society appear to be largely unchecked. Any compromising notion of ideology has been replaced by a discourse of command and certainty backed up by the militarization of local police forces, the surveillance state, and all of the resources brought to bear by a culture of fear and a punishing state aligned with the permanent war on terror. Informed judgment has given way to a corporate controlled media apparatus that celebrates the banality of balance and the spectacle of violence, all the while reinforcing the politics and value systems of the financial elite.3 Following Arendt, a dark cloud of political and ethical ignorance has descended on the United States creating both a crisis of memory and agency. Thoughtlessness has become something that now occupies a privileged, if not celebrated, place in the political landscape and the mainstream cultural apparatuses. A new kind of infantilism and culture of ignorance now shapes daily life as agency devolves into a kind of anti-intellectual cretinism evident in the babble of banality produced by Fox News, celebrity culture, schools modeled after prisons, and politicians who support creationism, argue against climate change, and denounce almost any form of reason. Education is no longer viewed as a public good but a private right, just as critical thinking is devalued as a fundamental necessity for creating an engaged and socially responsible citizenship. Politics has become an extension of war, just as systemic economic uncertainty and state sponsored violence increasingly find legitimation in the discourses of privatization and demonization which promote anxiety, moral panics, fear and undermine any sense of communal responsibility for the well-being of others. Too many people today learn quickly that their fate is solely a matter of individual responsibility, irrespective of wider structural forces. This is a much promoted hyper-competitive ideology whose message is that surviving in a society demands reducing social relations to forms of social combat. People today are expected to inhabit a set of relations in which the only obligation is to live for one’s own self-interest and to reduce the responsibilities of citizenship to the demands of a consumer culture. Yet, there is more at work here than a flight from social responsibility, if not politics itself. Also lost is the importance of those social bonds, modes of collective reasoning, public spheres and cultural apparatuses crucial to the formation of a sustainable democratic society. With the return of the Gilded Age and its dream worlds of consumption, privatization, and deregulation, both democratic values and social protections at risk. At the same time, the civic and formative cultures that make such values and protections central to democratic life are in danger of being eliminated altogether. As market mentalities and moralities tighten their grip on all aspects of society, democratic institutions and public spheres are being downsized, if not altogether disappearing. As these institutions vanish—from public schools to health care centers– there is also a serious erosion of the discourses of community, justice, equality, public values, and the common good. One consequence is a society stripped of its inspiring and energizing public spheres and the “thick mesh of mutual obligations and social responsibilities to be found in” any viable democracy.5 This grim reality marks a failure in the power of the civic imagination, political will, and open democracy. 6 It is also part of a politics that strips the social of any democratic ideals and undermines any understanding of higher education as a public good and pedagogy as an empowering practice, a practice which acts directly upon the conditions which bear down on our lives in order to change them when necessary. At a time when the public good is under attack and there seems to be a growing apathy toward the social contract, or any other civic minded investment in public values and the larger common good, education has to be seen as more than a credential or a pathway to a job. It has to be viewed as crucial to understanding and overcoming the current crisis of agency, politics, and historical memory faced by many young people today. One of the challenges facing the current generation of educators and students is the need to reclaim the role that education has historically played in developing critical literacies and civic capacities. There is a need to use education to mobilize students to be critically engaged agents, attentive to addressing important social issues and being alert to the responsibility of deepening and expanding the meaning and practices of a vibrant democracy. At the heart of such a challenge is the question of what education should accomplish in a democracy? What work do educators have to do to create the economic, political, and ethical conditions necessary to endow young people with the capacities to think, question, doubt, imagine the unimaginable, and defend education as essential for inspiring and energizing the citizens necessary for the existence of a robust democracy? In a world in which there is an increasing abandonment of egalitarian and democratic impulses, what will it take to educate young people to challenge authority and in the words of James Baldwin “rob history of its tyrannical power, and illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.”7 What role might education and critical pedagogy have in a society in which the social has been individualized, emotional life collapses into the therapeutic, and education is relegated to either a private affair or a kind of algorithmic mode of regulation in which everything is reduced to a desired measureable economic outcome. Feedback loops now replace politics and the concept of progress is defined through a narrow culture of metrics, measurement, and efficiency.8 In a culture drowning in a new love affair with empiricism and data, that which is not measurable withers. Lost here are the registers of compassion, care for the other, the radical imagination, a democratic vision, and a passion for justice. In its place emerges what Goya in one of his engravings termed “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monster.” Goya’s title is richly suggestive particularly about the role of education and pedagogy in compelling students, to be able to recognize, as my colleague David Clark points out, “that an inattentiveness to the never-ending task of critique breeds horrors: the failures of conscience, the wars against thought, and the flirtations with irrationality that lie at the heart of the triumph of every-day aggression, the withering of political life, and the withdrawal into private obsessions.”9 Given the multiple crises that haunt the current historical conjuncture, educators need a new language for addressing the changing contexts and issues facing a world in which there is an unprecedented convergence of resources–financial, cultural, political, economic, scientific, military, and technological–that are increasingly used to concentrate powerful and diverse forms of control and domination. Such a language needs to be political without being dogmatic and needs to recognize that pedagogy is always political because it is connected to the struggle over agency. In this instance, making the pedagogical more political means being vigilant about those very “moments in which identities are being produced and groups are being constituted, or objects are being created.”10 At the same time it means educators need to be attentive to those practices in which critical modes of agency and particular identities are being denied. For example, the Tuscon Unified School District board not only eliminated the famed Mexican American Studies Program, but also banned a number of Chicano and Native American books it deemed dangerous. The ban included Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest,” and “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by the famed Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. This act of censorship provides a particularly disturbing case of the war that is being waged in the United States against not only young people marginalized by race and class but also against the very spaces and pedagogical practices that make critical thinking possible. Such actions suggest the need for faculty to develop forms of critical pedagogy that not only inspire and energize. They should also be able to challenge a growing number of anti-democratic practices and policies while also resurrecting a radical democratic project that provides the basis for imagining a life beyond a social order immersed in inequality, degradation to the environment, and the elevation of war and militarization to national ideals. Under such circumstances, education becomes more than an obsession with accountability schemes, an audit culture, market values, and an unreflective immersion in the crude empiricism of a data-obsessed market-driven society. It becomes part of a formative culture in which thoughtlessness prevails providing the foundation for what the curse of totalitarianism. At a time of increased repression, it is all the more crucial for educators to reject the notion that higher education is simply a site for training students for the workforce and that the culture of higher education is synonymous with the culture of business. At issue here is the need for educators to should recognize the power of education in creating the formative cultures necessary to both challenge the various threats being mobilized against the ideas of justice and democracy while also fighting for those public spheres, ideals, values, and policies that offer alternative modes of identity, thinking, social relations, and politics. In both conservative and progressive discourses pedagogy is often treated simply as a set of strategies and skills to use in order to teach prespecified subject matter. In this context, pedagogy becomes synonymous with teaching as a technique or the practice of a craft-like skill. Any viable notion of critical pedagogy must grasp the limitations of this definition and its endless slavish imitations even when they are claimed as part of a radical discourse or project. In opposition to the instrumental reduction of pedagogy to a method—which has no language for relating the self to public life, social responsibility or the demands of citizenship–critical pedagogy illuminates the relationships among knowledge, authority, and power.11 Central to any viable notion of what makes pedagogy critical is, in part, the recognition that pedagogy is always a deliberate attempt on the part of educators to influence how and what knowledge and subjectivities are produced within particular sets of social relations. This approach to critical pedagogy does not reduce educational practice to the mastery of methodologies, it stresses, instead, the importance of understanding what actually happens in classrooms and other educational settings by raising questions regarding: what the relationship is between learning and social change, what knowledge is of most worth, what does it mean to know something, and in what direction should one desire? Pedagogy is always about power, because it cannot be separated from how subjectivies are formed, desires mobilized, how some experiences are legitimated and other are not or how some knowledge is considered acceptable while other forms are excluded from the curriculum. Pedagogy is a moral and political practice because it offers particular versions and visions of civic life, community, the future, and how we might construct representations of ourselves, others, and our physical and social environment. But it does more; it also “represents a version of our own dreams for ourselves, our children, and our communities. But such dreams are never neutral; they are always someone’s dreams and to the degree that they are implicated in organizing the future for others they always have a moral and political dimension.”12 It is in this respect that any discussion of pedagogy must begin with a discussion of educational practice as a particular way in which a sense of identity, place, worth, and above all value is informed by practices which organize knowledge and meaning.13 Central to my argument is the assumption that politics is not only about the exercise of economic and political power, but also, as Cornelius Castoriadis points out, “has to do with political judgements and value choices,”14 indicating that questions of civic education and critical pedagogy (learning how to become a skilled citizen) are central to the struggle over political agency and democracy. In this instance, critical pedagogy emphasizes critical reflection, bridging the gap between learning and everyday life, understanding the connection between power and difficult knowledge, and extending democratic rights and identities by using the resources of history and theory. However, among many educators and social theorists, there is a widespread refusal to recognize that education does not only take place in schools, but also through of what can be called the educative nature of the culture. That is, there are a range of cultural institutions extending from the mainstream media to new digital screen cultures that engage in what I have called forms of public pedagogy, which are central to the tasks of either expanding and enabling political and civic agency or shutting them down. At stake here is the crucial recognition that pedagogy is central to politics itself because it is about changing the way people see things, recognizing that politics is educative and as the late Pierre Bourdieu reminded us “the most important forms of domination are not only economic but also intellectual and pedagogical, and lie on the side of belief and persuasion.” Just as I would argue that pedagogy has to be made meaningful in order to be made critical and transformative, I think it is fair to argue that there is no politics without a pedagogy of identification; that is, people have to invest something of themselves in how they are addressed or recognize that any mode of education, argument, idea, or pedagogy has to speak to their condition and provide a moment of recognition. Lacking this understanding, pedagogy all too easily becomes a form of symbolic and intellectual violence, one that assaults rather than educates. One can see this in forms of high stakes testing and empirically driven teaching approaches which dull the critical impulse and produce what might be called dead zones of the imagination. We also see such violence in schools whose chief function is repression. Such schools often employ modes of instruction that are punitive and mean-spirited and are largely driven by regimes of memorization and conformity. Pedagogies of repression are largely disciplinary and have little regard for analysing contexts, history, making knowledge meaningful, or expanding upon what it means for students to be critically engaged agents. Expanding critical pedagogy as a mode of public pedagogy suggests being attentive to and addressing modes of knowledge and social practices in a variety of sites that not only encourage critical thinking, thoughtfulness, and meaningful dialogue but also offer opportunities to mobilize instances of moral outrage, social responsibility, and collective action. Such mobilisation opposes glaring material inequities and the growing cynical belief that today’s culture of investment and finance makes it impossible to address many of the major social problems facing the USA, Canada, Latin America, and the larger world. Most importantly, such work points to the link between civic education, critical pedagogy, and modes of oppositional political agency that are pivotal to creating a politics that promotes democratic values, relations, autonomy and social change. Hints of such a politics were evident in the various approaches developed by the Quebec student protesters, the now dormant Occupy Movement, the student movements in Chile, and the pedagogical strategies being developed by the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. Borrowing a line from Rachel Donadio, these young protestors are raising important questions about “what happens to democracy when banks become more powerful than political institutions?”15 - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,18 @@ 1 +My opponent’s usage of the term “colorblindness” appropriates and reintrenches ableism 2 +Obasogie 13 3 +Obasogie, Osagie. “Blinded by Sight”. Stanford Law Books. http://www.sistahvegan.com/2015/12/08/why-a-colorblind-vegan-utopian-world-is-ableist/. 12/11/13 LBE 4 +In effect, colorblindness as a metaphor turns blind people into racial mascots in much the same way that some sports teams demean Native American by misappropriating their imagery and social experience. A distorted, misunderstood, and objectified understanding of group abilities and social dynamics is celebrated as a rally cry at the very same time that it dehumanizes the group by denying full acknowledgment of their complex lives. Colorblindness has turned blind people against their will into a series of cartoonish representations of racial utopia that fundamentally warps their human experiences. 5 +Ableist violence is real and is intertwined with racism – you can’t solve one while furthering the other. 6 +Autistichoya 16 7 +Autistichoya. “Ableism is not ‘bad words.’ it’s violence”. http://www.autistichoya.com/2016/07/ableism-is-not-bad-words-its-violence.html. 7/25/16 LBE 8 +We bear it, heavy, wherever we go. Ableism is the violence in the clinic, in the waiting room, in the social welfare lines, in the classroom, in the recess yard, in the bedroom, in the prisons, in the streets. Ableism is the violence (and threat of violence) we live with each day. Ableism is the constant apologetics for family members and caregivers who murder their disabled relatives ~-~- they must have had it so hard, it must have been such a burden, you musn't judge unless you've walked in their shoes. (In the last few decades, more than 400 disabled people were murdered by relatives or caregivers, and those are only the stories we know about.) Ableism is the fact that a police officer who shot an unarmed Black man with his hands up decided it made more sense to claim he was actually aiming for the Brown autistic man holding a toy truck beside the Black man. Ableism is the fact that the left wants to talk about jails and prisons as the largest mental health care providers in the country, decry the crisis of incarceration of psych disabled people, and then suggest unironically that we build new facilities, new asylums, new institutions, new inpatient beds so that at least we can get "treatment." 9 +… 10 +Ableism is the fact that when violence does happen to disabled people, it's framed as inherently more tragic and pitiable because we are supposed to be these innocent fucking angels, like babies (no matter how old we are), and it's particularly low to attack us (but apparently not to attack non-disabled transgender people or non-disabled Black people or non-disabled Muslims or non-disabled women ~-~- all of that is totally okay and justifiable and besides, it must have been the victim's fault in some way) 11 +Ableism is the fact that anywhere from around 40 to 70 of U.S. prisoners are also disabled, and that the forces of white supremacy, racism, and capitalism that keep poor Black and Brown people in prisons are necessarily intertwined with ableist presuppositions about intelligence and emotional capacity. (And that all incarcerated people ~-~- disabled or not ~-~- as well as many free disabled people can be paid, completely legally, only a few cents per hour for menial labor, and that this is called opportunity and teaching work ethic.) 12 +… 13 +Ableism is the fact that on average, autistic people die 30 years younger than non-autistic people, with suicide as the second leading cause of death. As one friend put it, that's an act of murder by society, because it is so bad that too many of us decide that it is no longer worth trying to live in a world literally designed to destroy us from the moment we are first born. They hate us, and we already know it. They aim for us. They mean to kill. They mean to harm. They know what they are doing, and we know it too. There can be no innocence, not for us. Ableism is not some arbitrary list of "bad words," as much as language is a tool of oppression. Ableism is violence, and it kills. 14 + 15 +Discourse first~-~-that's key to inclusivity within debate 16 +Vincent 13 17 +Chris Vincent (debate coach, did college policy @ Louisville). “Re-Conceptualizing our Performances: Accountability in Lincoln Douglas Debate.” vBriefly. October 2013. http://vbriefly.com/2013/10/26/201310re-conceptualizing-our-performances-accountability-in-lincoln-douglas-debate/ 18 +As a community we must re-conceptualize this distinction the performance by the body and of the body by re-evaluating the role of the speech and the speech act. It is no longer enough for judges to vote off of the flow anymore. Students of color are being held to a higher threshold to better articulate why racism is bad, which is the problem in a space that we deem to be educational. It is here where I shift my focus to a solution. Debaters must be held accountable for the words they say in the round. We should no longer evaluate the speech. Instead we must begin to evaluate the speech act itself. Debaters must be held accountable for more than winning the debate. They must be held accountable for the implications of that speech. As educators and adjudicators in the debate space we also have an ethical obligation to foster an atmosphere of education. It is not enough for judges to offer predispositions suggesting that they do not endorse racist, sexist, homophobic discourse, or justify why they do not hold that belief, and still offer a rational reason why they voted for it. Judges have become complacent in voting on the discourse, if the other debater does not provide a clear enough role of the ballot framing, or does not articulate well enough why the racist discourse should be rejected. Judges must be willing to foster a learning atmosphere by holding debaters accountable for what they say in the round. They must be willing to vote against a debater if they endorse racist discourse. They must be willing to disrupt the process of the flow for the purpose of embracing that teachable moment. The speech must be connected to the speech act. We must view the entire debate as a performance of the body, instead of the argument solely on the flow. Likewise, judges must be held accountable for what they vote for in the debate space. If a judge is comfortable enough to vote for discourse that is racist, sexist, or homophobic, they must also be prepared to defend their actions. We as a community do not live in a vacuum and do not live isolated from the larger society. That means that judges must defend their actions to the debaters, their coaches, and to the other judges in the room if it is a panel. Students of color should not have the burden of articulating why racist discourse must be rejected, but should have the assurance that the educator with the ballot will protect them in those moments. Until we re-conceptualize the speech and the speech act, and until judges are comfortable enough to vote down debaters for a performance that perpetuates violence in the debate space, debaters and coaches alike will remain complacent in their privilege. As educators we must begin to shift the paradigm and be comfortable doing this. As a community we should stop looking at ourselves as isolated in a vacuum and recognize that the discourse and knowledge we produce in debate has real implications for how we think when we leave this space. Our performances must be viewed as of the body instead of just by it. As long as we continue to operate in a world where our performances are merely by bodies, we will continue to foster a climate of hostility and violence towards students of color, and in turn destroy the transformative potential this community could have. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,21 @@ 1 +NC 2 +Adopting the perspective of the oppressed is the only way to account for dominant ideologies that skew our thought processes. 3 +Mills 5: Charles W. Mills (John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy) ““Ideal Theory” as Ideology” Hypatia vol. 20, no. 3 (Summer 2005) RW 4 +Now what distinguishes ideal theory is not merely the use of ideals, since obviously nonideal theory can and will use ideals also (certainly it will appeal to the moral ideals, if it may be more dubious about the value of invoking idealized human capacities). What distinguishes ideal theory is the reliance on idealization to the exclusion, or at least marginalization, of the actual. As O’Neill emphasizes, this is not a necessary corollary of the operation of abstraction itself, since one can have abstractions of the ideal-as-descriptive-model type that abstract without idealizing. But ideal theory either tacitly represents the actual as a simple deviation from the ideal, not worth theorizing in its own right, or claims that starting from the ideal is at least the best way of realizing it. Ideal theory as an approach will then utilize as its basic apparatus some or all of the following concepts and assumptions (there is necessarily a certain overlap in the list, since they all intersect with one another): • An idealized social ontology. Moral theory deals with the normative, but it cannot avoid some characterization of the human beings who make up the society, and whose interactions with one another are its subject. So some overt or tacit social ontology has to be presupposed. An idealized social ontology of the modern type (as against, say, a Platonic or Aristotelian type) will typically assume the abstract and undifferentiated equal atomic individuals of classical liberalism. Thus it will abstract away from relations of structural domination, exploitation, coercion, and oppression, which in reality, of course, will profoundly shape the ontology of those same individuals, locating them in superior and inferior positions in social hierarchies of various kinds. • Idealized capacities. The human agents as visualized in the theory will also often have completely unrealistic capacities attributed to them—unrealistic even for the privileged minority, let alone those subordinated in different ways, who would not have had an equal opportunity for their natural capacities to develop, and who would in fact typically be disabled in crucial respects. • Silence on oppression. Almost by de nition, it follows from the focus of ideal theory that little or nothing will be said on actual historic oppression and its legacy in the present, or current ongoing oppression, though these may be gestured at in a vague or promissory way (as something to be dealt with later). Correspondingly, the ways in which systematic oppression is likely to shape the Charles W. Mills 169 basic social institutions (as well as the humans in those institutions) will not be part of the theory’s concern, and this will manifest itself in the absence of ideal-as-descriptive-model concepts that would provide the necessary macro- and micro-mapping of that oppression, and that are requisite for understanding its reproductive dynamic. • Ideal social institutions. Fundamental social institutions such as the family, the economic structure, the legal system, will therefore be conceptualized in ideal-as-idealized-model terms, with little or no sense of how their actual workings may systematically disadvantage women, the poor, and racial minorities. • An idealized cognitive sphere. Separate from, and in addition to, the idealization of human capacities, what could be termed an idealized cognitive sphere will also be presupposed. In other words, as a corollary of the general ignoring of oppression, the consequences of oppression for the social cognition of these agents, both the advantaged and the disadvantaged, will typically not be recognized, let alone theorized. A general social transparency will be presumed, with cognitive obstacles minimized as limited to biases of self-interest or the intrinsic difficulties of understanding the world, and little or no attention paid to the distinctive role of hegemonic ideologies and group-speci c experience in distorting our perceptions and conceptions of the social order. 5 +Thus, the standard is minimizing structural violence, defined as promoting the material conditions necessary for inclusion 6 + 7 +Debate is a space for real world change, but we have to consider tangible policy action above all else—ideal theory abstracts away from material consequences and legitimizes oppression 8 +Curry 14: Dr. Tommy J. Curry 14, “The Cost of a Thing: A Kingian Reformulation of a Living Wage Argument in the 21st Century”, Victory Briefs, 2014 9 +Despite the pronouncement of debate as an activity and intellectual exercise pointing to the real world consequences of dialogue, thinking, and (personal) politics when addressing issues of racism, sexism, economic disparity, global conflicts, and death, many of the discussions concerning these ongoing challenges to humanity are fixed to a paradigm which sees the adjudication of material disparities and sociological realities as the conquest of one ideal theory over the other. In “Ideal Theory as Ideology,” Charles Mills outlines the problem contemporary theoretical-performance styles in policy debate and value-weighing in Lincoln-Douglass are confronted with in their attempts to get at the concrete problems in our societies. At the outset, Mills concedes that “ideal theory applies to moral theory as a whole (at least to normative ethics as against metaethics); since ethics deals by definition with normative/prescriptive/evaluative issues, it is set against factual/descriptive issues.” At the most general level, the conceptual chasm between what emerges as actual problems in the world (e.g.: racism, sexism, poverty, disease, etc.) and how we frame such problems theoretically—the assumptions and shared ideologies we depend upon for our problems to be heard and accepted as a worthy “problem” by an audience—is the most obvious call for an anti-ethical paradigm, since such a paradigm insists on the actual as the basis of what can be considered normatively. Mills, however, describes this chasm as a problem of an ideal-as-descriptive model which argues that for any actual-empirical-observable social phenomenon (P), an ideal of (P) is necessarily a representation of that phenomenon. In the idealization of a social phenomenon (P), one “necessarily has to abstract away from certain features” of (P) that is observed before abstraction occurs. ¶ This gap between what is actual (in the world), and what is represented by theories and politics of debaters proposed in rounds threatens any real discussions about the concrete nature of oppression and the racist economic structures which necessitate tangible policies and reorienting changes in our value orientations. As Mills states: “What distinguishes ideal theory is the reliance on idealization to the exclusion, or at least marginalization, of the actual,” so what we are seeking to resolve on the basis of “thought” is in fact incomplete, incorrect, or ultimately irrelevant to the actual problems which our “theories” seek to address. Our attempts to situate social disparity cannot simply appeal to the ontologization of social phenomenon—meaning we cannot suggest that the various complexities of social problems (which are constantly emerging and undisclosed beyond the effects we observe) are totalizable by any one set of theories within an ideological frame be it our most cherished notions of Afro-pessimism, feminism, Marxism, or the like. At best, theoretical endorsements make us aware of sets of actions to address ever developing problems in our empirical world, but even this awareness does not command us to only do X, but rather do X and the other ideas which compliment the material conditions addressed by the action X. As a whole, debate (policy and LD) neglects the need to do X in order to remedy our cast-away-ness among our ideological tendencies and politics. How then do we pull ourselves from this seeming ir-recoverability of thought in general and in our endorsement of socially actualizable values like that of the living wage? It is my position that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s thinking about the need for a living wage was a unique, and remains an underappreciated, resource in our attempts to impose value reorientation (be it through critique or normative gestures) upon the actual world. In other words, King aims to reformulate the values which deny the legitimacy of the living wage, and those values predicated on the flawed views of the worker, Blacks, and the colonized (dignity, justice, fairness, rights, etc.) used to currently justify the living wages in under our contemporary moral parameters. 10 + 11 + 12 +This outweighs—learning philosophy makes us immoral. 13 +Posner 98: The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory, Richard A. Posner ~Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit; University of Chicago Law School.~, Harvard Law Review, Vol. 111, No. 7 (May, 1998), pp. 1637-1717 14 +The better read you are in philosophy or literature, and the more imaginative and analytically supple you are, the easier you will find it to reweave your tapestry of moral beliefs so that your principles allow you to do what your id tells you to do. My point is not that it's costless to change one's moral stripes, but only that the cost is less for a highly educated person. Ignorance is the ally of morality, as the medieval Roman Catholic Church recognized when it instructed priests not to ask parishioners in the confessional about specific sexually deviant practices, lest they give them ideas. Moral education equips the student to argue against moral preceptors. So even if instruction in moral reasoning improves people's moral beliefs (which I greatly doubt), the effect may be completely offset by the reduction in the likelihood that people would conform their behavior to moral precepts. To be confident that moral instruction would not have this effect, you would have to agree with Socrates that people are naturally good and do bad things only out of ignorance. 15 + 16 +Intent is a code word for privilege and ignorance – consequences outweigh 17 +Utt 13 (Jamie Utt, July 30, 2013, “Intent vs. Impact: Why Your Intentions Don’t Really Matter”, http://everydayfeminism.com/2013/07/intentions-dont-really-matter/ //YS 8.8.16) 18 +From Paula Deen to Alec Baldwin to your annoying, bigoted uncle or friend, we hear it over and over again: “I never meant any harm…” “It was never my intent…” “I am not a racist…” “I am not a homophobe…” “I’m not a sexist…” I cannot tell you how often I’ve seen people attempt to deflect criticism about their oppressive language or actions by making the conversation about their intent. At what point does the “intent” conversation stop mattering so that we can step back and look at impact? After all, in the end, what does the intent of our action really matter if our actions have the impact of furthering the marginalization or oppression of those around us? In some ways, this is a simple lesson of relationships. If I say something that hurts my partner, it doesn’t much matter whether I intended the statement to mean something else – because my partner is hurting. I need to listen to how my language hurt my partner. I need to apologize. And then I need to reflect and empathize to the best of my ability so I don’t do it again. But when we’re dealing with the ways in which our identities intersect with those around us – and, in turn, the ways our privileges and our experiences of marginalization and oppression intersect – this lesson becomes something much larger and more profound. This becomes a lesson of justice. What we need to realize is that when it comes to people’s lives and identities, the impact of our actions can be profound and wide-reaching. And that’s far more important than the question of our intent. We need to ask ourselves what might be or might have been the impact of our actions or words. And we need to step back and listen when we are being told that the impact of our actions is out of step with our intents or our perceptions of self. Identity Privilege and Intent For people of identity privilege, this is where listening becomes vitally important, for our privilege can often shield us from understanding the impact of our actions. After all, as a person of privilege, I can never fully understand the ways in which oppressive acts or language impact those around me. What I surely can do is listen with every intent to understand, and I can work to change my behavior. Because what we need to understand is that making the conversation about intent is inherently a privileged action. The reason? It ensures that you and your identity (and intent) stay at the center of any conversation and action while the impact of your action or words on those around you is marginalized. So if someone ever tells you to “check your privilege,” what they may very well mean is: “Stop centering your experience and identity in the conversation by making this about the intent of your actions instead of their impact.” That is: Not everything is about you. 19 +Oppression is created by social systems so only a focus on material conditions can solve. 20 +Johnson no date: Allan Johnson (PhD in sociology, he joined the sociology department at Wesleyan University) http://www.cabrillo.edu/~lroberts/AlanJohnsonWhatCanWeDO001.pdf. RW 21 +Privilege is a feature of social systems, not individuals. People have or don't have privilege depending on the system they're in and the social categories other people put them in. To say, then, that I have race privilege says less about me personally than it does about how the society we all live in and how it is organized to assign privilege on the basis of a socially defined set of racial categories that change historically and often overlap. The challenge facing me as an individual has more to do with how I participate in society as a recipient of race privilege and how those choices oppose or support the system itself. In dealing with the problem of privilege, we have to get used to being surrounded by paradox. Very often those who have privilege don't know it, for example, which is a key aspect of privilege. Also paradoxical is the fact that privilege doesn't necessarily lead to a "good life," which can prompt people in privileged groups to deny resentfully that they even have it. But privilege doesn't equate with being happy. It involves having what others don't have and the struggle to hang on to it at their expense, neither of which is a recipe for joy,personal fulfillment, or spiritual contentment.... To be an effective part of the solution, we have to realize that privilege and oppression are not a thing of the past. It's happening right now. It isn't just a collection of wounds inflicted long ago that now need to be healed. The wounding goes on as I write these words and as you read them, and unless people work to change the system that promotes it, personal healing by itself cannot be the answer. Healing wounds is no more a solution to the oppression that causes the wounding than military hospitals are a solution to war. Healing is a necessary process, but it isn't enough.... Since privilege is rooted primarily in systems—such as families, schools, and workplaces—change isn't simply a matter of changing people. People, of course, will have to change in order for systems to change, but the most important point is that changing people isn't enough. The solution also has to include entire systems, such as capitalism, whose paths of least resistance that shape how we feel, think, and behave as individuals, how we see ourselves and one another. s - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,6 @@ 1 +The affirmative’s description of denials of the will as equivalent to slavery trivializes the real traumas of slavery 2 +Wade, 11 (Lisa Wade, professor of sociology atandnbsp;Occidental Collegeandnbsp;and the co-author of Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions., ) Trivializing the Slave Trade » Sociological Images, No Publication 6-8-2011 3 +Just as “I’m not a racist, but…” is a sure sign that someone is about to say something racist, an essay that begins “I don’t want to trivialize the inhumane horrors that African slaves endured on slave ships destined for the Americas. But…” is certain to do just that. Indeed, Steven Heller at Imprint began his post this way, going on to suggest that the design of modern airplanes “resembles” that of slave ships. As evidence, he recalls his own discomfort in coach and compares drawings of slave ships and blueprints of airplanes. Heller prefaced his observations with a disclaimer because he knew comparing modern air travel to the slave trade was sketchy. And it is, indeed, sketchy. The descendants of slaves live life with the knowledge that their ancestors were stolen, shackled, beaten, and denied their very humanity; at least they survived the trip across the Atlantic. Nope, not like air travel one bit. So, yes, it’s lovely to be clever, but it’s also lovely to be thoughtful and sensitive. In this case, Heller’s desire to be the former won out over the latter. Or perhaps he never really thought that anyone would seriously be upset by the comparison. It’s obviously tongue-in-cheek right? I mean, slavery has been over for, like, ever. Or maybe he forgot that descendants of slaves read the freakin’ internet just like everyone else. Who knows. In any case, it’s a great example of the trivializing of the histories and traumas of a marginalized population. 4 +Hold them responsible for their representations. Educational institutions have LONG omitted and trivialized Black history, which isn’t just “the past” but a historical fact that shapes the world today – Vote negative to mount a challenge to the curriculum of anti-Black oppression that the affirmative actively participates in. 5 +Legal-Miller 12 (Althea Legal-Miller, Teaching Fellow in African American Civil Rights at UCL Institute of the Americas) Students Told to Create a Business Plan for Enslaving Africans, Clutch Magazine 2012 6 +As a historian, it is an honor to have the responsibility of storytelling. Indeed, our history is a collection of stories and a powerful instrument that expresses who we are, what we came from, how we struggle, and how we are strong. So the abuse of this precious privilege always cuts deep. The education system has long omitted, neglected, distorted and skewed our history through the lens of white privilege and racism. Yet, I was stunned by the level of apathy that was exposed this week when a girls’ school in London, England was forced to issue an apology over the use of offensive material during a high school history lesson on “The Slave Trade”. Students aged 13 and 14 were given imaginary tools including manacles, whips, thumb screws, iron brands, muskets and barracoons, and asked to devise a Dragon’s Den-style (a reality TV show known as Shark Tank in the US) business proposal for the capture and enslavement of African people. Lesson materials included direction on how to carry out a “slave raid” and manipulate “African Chiefs” through bribes and lacing them with alcohol. Perhaps the most debased suggestions were that the “best” aspect of being a slave trader was having “an affair with a beautiful African girl,” and that adult male “mixed race” offspring could be sent to Africa to “run the slave business” while his white father sailed to America. Teaching the history of enslavement via a business plan model serves to erase violence, oppression and numerous traumatic events such as the systematic rape of black girls and women. The teacher/s involved in this particular lesson plan saw nothing inappropriate or offensive about their methods. Yet, it would be hard to imagine that these same individuals would sanction a history class on the Holocaust that required students to figure out how to exterminate Jewish people. But black genocide is somehow different, less painful, less abhorrent, and thus vulnerable to trivialization. In 1986, Susan Rice (presently the subject of unjust Republican opposition to her potential nomination for the position of Secretary of State) argued that: The greatest evil in omitting or misrepresenting Black history, literature, and culture in elementary or secondary education is the unmistakable message it sends to the black child. The message is ‘your history, your culture, your language and your literature are insignificant. And so are you.’ The implicit message of this particular history lesson was not lost on one 13 year old black girl, who in a state of distress complained to her mother about the humiliation she felt during the class. The mother soon after met with two teachers who refused to acknowledge the harm caused to her daughter, and instead sought to justify the innovative approach of the class. They, and later a third teacher, argued that the class emphasized how the slave trade was largely “divorced from moral and social issues”, and that it had been taught for three years without objection. Perhaps if the narrow objectives of this so-called history lesson were a little broader, then these teachers would have understood that the history of black resistance runs deep in our veins. In the face of the school’s dismissal, the student’s mother contacted Pan African Human Rights Organization Ligali, who filed a formal complaint with the school, and subsequent press release. In a speedy reversal – which the glare of publicity so often precipitates – the principal publicly apologized on behalf of her staff for being “patronizing” and for the “trivialization” of slavery. The lesson materials were immediately withdrawn with a reassurance that “appropriate steps” had been taken in relation to “possible disciplinary action” against the teacher who devised the class. If disciplinary action is taken, then I hope it is understood that to scapegoat a single teacher is wholly inadequate, as this case exposes far deeper issues of white privilege and institutional racism within education. It is unclear why this particular class went unchallenged for three years, but such incidents remind us that it is not only a personal but a political imperative that we ask our kids “What did you learn in school today?” It is through our history that we recall, lay claim to, and understand both the past and present. And we cannot afford to abdicate our responsibility to monitor, intervene and challenge the educational system. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,16 @@ 1 +There must be a right to set ends, otherwise ethics is incoherent since it assumes subjects deliberate between multiple possible courses of action. However, to prevent this right from becoming contingent, we must have a conception of property 2 + 3 +Buck 87 (Wayne, Yale, "Kant's Justification of Private Property." In New Essays on Kant. Ed. den Ouden, 227-244.). RW 4 +Because human beings have the right to pursue their ends (i.e. they have the right to external freedom) they have a right to act in those ways necessary for achieving any ends at all. When we act to attain some end, in many cases our action involves manipulating or transforming some material object. When I eat an apple, I use the object for sustenance. When I paint, I use a brush and oils to transform a piece of canvas. Manipulation of objects is thus one of the means necessary to achieving ends in general. Hence the right to use external things is a necessary condition of the right to external freedom. As Kant puts it, if reason were to forbid the use of physical objects, external freedom would come into contradiction with itself, or "freedom would be robbing itself of the use of its Willkur" (MEJ, 52 354). Simply put, external freedom would in effect be forbidden by reason and morallyß impossible. Kant argues that this principle entails that every rational being who exists in space with others has the innate right to private property— that is, that it entails the Juridical Postulate. Let us first consider Kant's argument for the Universal Principle ofjustice, and then his derivation of the Postulate. Human beings, according to Kant, are both negatively and posi- tively free. They are free from determination by the phenomenal realm. But they are also free to limit their actions to those whose maxims are universalizable.It is just the capacity to act on universalizable maxims—those acceptable to any and every rational being— wherein human dignity and moral worth lies. Therefore, human beings have a right to act on the maxims they adopt for themselves. They have the right to determine their own ends and pursue those ends as they think best. Because human beings exist together in space, (2) So far Kant has established the inherent right to use external objects. But this is not yet to establish the Juridical Postulate, which claims that individuals have the inherent right to own things. Kant makes this second step from the right to use things to owning them by means of an analysis of the concept of "possession." our use insofar The 'subjective' condition of the possibility of actually manipulating a thing is physical possession. I am not able to use an axe unless I have it in hand, and I am not able to build a cabin unless I am standing on the spot where it is to be. These kinds of possession Kant usually calls "empirischer Besitz" and "Inhabung." I will call them "custody." Possession in this sense, then, is the subjective condition of the possibility ot actually using a thing. A thing is externally mine if it is such that any prevention of my use of it would constitute an injury Laesionj to me even if it is not in my possesion (that is, lam not the custodian /Inhaber/ oj the object (MEJ, 55-56357; my emphasis). "Possession," however, cannot just mean custody. Suppose that my right to the use of a thing lasted only as long as no one prevented me from using it as I desired. Thus if someone wrests the thing from my control to use as she pleases, my right to use it would end. But losing the right to an object merely because another grabbed it from me is precisely the situation in which I did not have a right to use it in the first place. 5 +Next, property requires the existence of the general will—rights in the state of nature are provisional, and disputes could only be resolved through unilateral coercion. That means the state is legitimate in coercively enforcing rights claims 6 +Korsgaard 08: (Christine, "Taking the Law into Our Own Hands: Kant on the Right to Revolution," in The Constitution of Agency: Essays on Practical Reason and Moral Psychology). RW 7 +Kant also believes that there is a sense in which we have rights in the state of nature. We have a natural right to our freedom (MPJ 6:237), and, Kant thinks, the Universal Principle of Justice allows us to claim rights in land and, more generally, in external objects, in property. Kant argues that it would be inconsistent with freedom to deny the possibility of property rights, on the grounds that unless we can claim rights to objects, those objects cannot be used (MPJ 6:246).7 This would be a restriction on freedom not based in freedom itself, which we should therefore reject, and this leads us to postulate that objects may be owned. But unlike Locke, Kant argues that in the state of nature these rights are only ‘‘provisional’’ (MPJ 6:256). In this, Kant is partly following Rousseau. In contrast to Locke, Rousseau argues that rights are created by the social contract, and, in a sense, relative to it. My possessions become my property, so far as you and I are concerned, when you and I have given each other certain reciprocal guarantees: I will keep my hands off your possessions if you will keep your hands off mine.8 Rights are not acquired by the metaphysical act of mixing one’s labor with the land, but instead are constructed from the human relations among people who have made such agreements.9 Kant adopts this idea, at least as far as the executive authority mother goat when they were born. However, one of them escaped, and you found it wandering around apparently unowned in the state of nature, took possession of it, fed it and cared for it for many years. Now we have discovered the matter, and each of us thinks she has a right to this particular goat. Since I think I have a right, I also think I may prosecute my right by coercive action. And you think the same. associated with a property right is concerned. I may indeed coercively enforce my rights. But if my doing so is to be consistent with the Universal Principle of Justice, it cannot be an act of unilateral coercion. To claim a right to a piece of property is to make a kind of law; for it is to lay it down that all others must refrain from using the object or land in question without my permission. But to view my claim as a law I must view it as the object of a contract between us, a contract in which we reciprocally commit ourselves to guaranteeing each other’s rights. It is this fact that leads us to enter—or, more precisely, to view ourselves as already having entered—political society. In making this argument, Kant evokes Rousseau’s concept of the general will. He argues that a general will to the coercive enforcement of the rights of all concerned is implicitly involved in every property claim. Now, with respect to an external and contingent possession, a unilateral Will cannot serve as a coercive law for everyone, since that would be a violation of freedom in accordance with universal laws. Therefore, only a Will binding everyone else—that is, a collective, universal (common), and powerful Will—is the kind of Will that can provide the guarantee required. The condition of being subject to general external n(that is, public) legislation that is backed by power is the civil society. Accordingly, a thing can be externally yours or mine that is, can be property only in a civil society. (MPJ 6:256) It is because the idea of the general will to the reciprocal enforcement of rights is implicit in any claim of right that Kant argues that rights in the state of nature are only provisional. They are provisional because this general will has not yet been instituted by setting up a common authority to enforce everyone’s rights. The act that institutes the general will is the social contract. Kant concludes from this argument that when the time comes to enforce your rights coercively, in the state of nature, the only legitimate way to do that is by joining in political society with those with whom you are in dispute. In fact, you enforce your right by first forcing them to join in political society with you so that the dispute can be settled by reciprocal rather than unilateral coercion: If it must be de jure possible to have an external object as one’s own, then the subject must also be allowed to compel everyone else with whom he comes into conflict over the question of whether such an object is his to enter, together with him, a society under a civil constitution. (MPJ 6:256) 8 +The actor is the state—public colleges and universities are founded and operated by the state 9 +Collegebound no date: "Differences Between Public and Private Universities and Liberal Arts Colleges" http://www.collegebound.net/content/article/differences-between-public-and-private-universities-and-liberal-arts-colleges/18529/. RW 10 + 11 +In the US, most public institutions are state universities founded and operated by state governments. Every state has at least one public university. This is partially due to the 1862 Morrill Land-Grant Acts, which gave each eligible state 30,000 acres of federal land to sell to finance public institutions offering study for practical fields in addition to the liberal arts. Many public universities began as teacher training schools and eventually were expanded into comprehensive universities. 12 + 13 +Thus, the standard is maintaining a system of equal outer freedom. 14 + 15 +Negate: 16 +Analytics - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,4 @@ 1 +Email: ReedWeiler123@gmail.com 2 +Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/reed.weiler.94 3 + 4 +If you have any questions about disclosure, feel free to email or message me. I will probably respond quicker if you use Facebook. I disclose all broken positions, but may also read a position from any of my teammate's wikis. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@ 1 +Interpretation: Debaters may not read new affirmatives without disclosing them on the NDCA wiki at least 30 minutes prior to the round. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,15 @@ 1 +Governmentality K 2 +Though Butler is largely based on Foucault’s theory of power, the central problem with the affirmative is that it overlooks Foucault’s lesson about governmentality—the subtle techniques by which subjects are molded in order to become governable 3 +The aff is under the mistaken assumption that removing overt restrictions on speech will liberate bodies—that overlooks how neoliberal governmentality controls the subject through their freedom—university students will speak freely, but only as individual consumers and entrepreneurs 4 +Brown 3 5 +Wendy Brown (Professor of Political Science at UC Berkley. Professor Brown received her Ph.D in Political Philosophy from Princeton University in 1983. Prior to coming to Berkeley in 1999, she taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz and at Williams College. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She lectures around the world and has held a number of distinguished visiting fellowships and lectureships. Most recently, she has been a member of the Birkbeck Critical Theory Summer School faculty (2012), a Senior Invited Fellow of the Center for Humanities at Cornell University (2013) and a visiting professor at Columbia University (2014)). “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy.” Theory and Event 7:1. 2003. http://lchc.ucsd.edu/cogn_150/Readings/brown.pdf 6 +3) The extension of economic rationality to formerly non-economic domains and institutions extends to individual conduct, or more precisely, prescribes citizen-subject conduct in a neo-liberal order. Whereas classical liberalism articulated a distinction, and at times even a tension, among the criteria for individual moral, associational, and economic actions (hence the striking differences in tone, subject matter and even prescription between Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and his Theory of Moral Sentiments), neo-liberalism normatively constructs and interpellates individuals as entrepreneurial actors in every sphere of life. It figures individuals as rational, calculating creatures whose moral autonomy is measured by their capacity for "self-care" ~-~- the ability to provide for their own needs and service their own ambitions. In making the individual fully responsible for her/himself, neo-liberalism equates moral responsibility with rational action; it relieves the discrepancy between economic and moral behavior by configuring morality entirely as a matter of rational deliberation about costs, benefits, and consequences. In so doing, it also carries responsibility for the self to new heights: the rationally calculating individual bears full responsibility for the consequences of his or her action no matter how severe the constraints on this action, e.g., lack of skills, education, and childcare in a period of high unemployment and limited welfare benefits. Correspondingly, a "mismanaged life" becomes a new mode of depoliticizing social and economic powers and at the same time reduces political citizenship to an unprecedented degree of passivity and political complacency. The model neo-liberal citizen is one who strategizes for her/ himself among various social, political and economic options, not one who strives with others to alter or organize these options. A fully realized neo-liberal citizenry would be the opposite of public-minded, indeed it would barely exist as a public. The body politic ceases to be a body but is, rather, a group of individual entrepreneurs and consumers . . . which is, of course, exactly the way voters are addressed in most American campaign discourse.8Other evidence for progress in the development of such a citizenry is not far from hand: consider the market rationality permeating universities today, from admissions and recruiting to the relentless consumer mentality of students in relationship to university brand names, courses, and services, from faculty raiding and pay scales to promotion criteria.9 Or consider the way in which consequential moral lapses (of a sexual or criminal nature) by politicians, business executives, or church and university administrators are so often apologized for as "mistakes in judgement," implying that it was the calculation that was wrong, not the act, actor, or rationale. The state is not without a project in the making of the neo-liberal subject. The state attempts to construct prudent subjects through policies that organize such prudence: this is the basis of a range of welfare reforms such as workfare and single-parent penalties, changes in the criminal code such as the "three strikes law," and educational voucher schemes. Because neo-liberalism casts rational action as a norm rather than an ontology, social policy is the means by which the state produces subjects whose compass is set by their rational assessment of the costs and benefits of certain acts, whether teen pregnancy, tax cheating, or retirement planning. The neo-liberal citizen is calculating rather than rule-abiding, a Benthamite rather than a Hobbesian. The state is one of many sites framing the calculations leading to social behaviors that keep costs low and productivity high. This mode of governmentality (techniques of governing that exceed express state action and orchestrate the subject's conduct toward themselves him or herself) convenes a "free" subject who rationally deliberates about alternative courses of action, makes choices, and bears responsibility for the consequences of these choices. In this way, Lemke argues, "the state leads and controls subjects without being responsible for them;" as individual 'entrepreneurs' in every aspect of life, subjects become wholly responsible for their well-being and citizenship is reduced to success in this entrepreneurship (201). Neo-liberal subjects are controlled through their freedom ~-~- not simply, as thinkers from the Frankfurt School through Foucault have argued, because freedom within an order of domination can be an instrument of that domination ~-~- but because of neo-liberalism's moralization of the consequences of this freedom. This also means that the withdrawal of the state from certain domains and the privatization of certain state functions does not amount to a dismantling of government but, rather, constitutes a technique of governing, indeed the signature technique of neo-liberal governance in which rational economic action suffused throughout society replaces express state rule or provision. Neo-liberalism shifts "the regulatory competence of the state onto 'responsible,' 'rational' individuals with the aim of encouraging individuals to give their lives a specific entrepreneurial form" (Lemke 202). 7 +Neoliberal rationality engulfs all moral and democratic values through a cold economic calculus, destroying value to life—this undermines political freedoms, which turns the case 8 +Brown 3 9 +Wendy Brown (Professor of Political Science at UC Berkley. Professor Brown received her Ph.D in Political Philosophy from Princeton University in 1983. Prior to coming to Berkeley in 1999, she taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz and at Williams College. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She lectures around the world and has held a number of distinguished visiting fellowships and lectureships. Most recently, she has been a member of the Birkbeck Critical Theory Summer School faculty (2012), a Senior Invited Fellow of the Center for Humanities at Cornell University (2013) and a visiting professor at Columbia University (2014)). “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy.” Theory and Event 7:1. 2003. http://lchc.ucsd.edu/cogn_150/Readings/brown.pdf 10 +However, invaluable as Marx's theory of capital and Weber's theory of rationalization are in theorizing aspects of neo-liberalism, neither brings into view the historical-institutional rupture it signifies, the form of governmentality it replaces and the form it inaugurates, and hence, the modalities of resistance it outmodes and those that must be developed if it is to be effectively challenged. Neo-liberalism is not an inevitable historical development of capital and instrumental rationality; it is not the unfolding of laws of capital or of instrumental rationality suggested by a Marxist or Weberian analysis but represents instead a new and contingent organization and operation of both. Moreover, neither analysis articulates the shift neo-liberalism heralds from relatively differentiated moral, economic, and political rationalities and venues in liberal democratic orders to their discursive and practical integration. Neo-liberal governmentality undermines the relative autonomy of certain institutions from one another and from the market ~-~- law, elections, the police, the public sphere ~-~- an independence that formerly sustained an interval and a tension between a capitalist political economy and a liberal democratic political system. The implications of this transformation are significant. If Marcuse worried about the loss of a dialectical opposition within capitalism when it "delivers the goods," that is, when, by mid-twentieth century, a relatively complacent middle class had taken the place of the hard-laboring impoverished masses Marx depicted as the negating contradiction to the concentrated wealth of capital, neo-liberalism entails the erosion of oppositional political, moral, or subjective claims located outside capitalist rationality but inside liberal democratic society, that is, the erosion of institutions, venues, and values organized by non-market rationalities in democracies. When democratic principles of governance, civil codes, and even religious morality are submitted to economic calculation, when no value or good stands outside of this calculus, sources of opposition to, and mere modulation of, capitalist rationality disappear. This reminds us that however much a Left analysis has identified a liberal political order with legitimating, cloaking, and mystifying the stratifications of society achieved by capitalism and achieved as well by racial, sexual, and gender superordinations, it is also the case that liberal democratic principles of governance ~-~- liberalism as a political doctrine ~-~- have functioned as something of an antagonism to these stratifications. As Marx himself argued in "On the Jewish Question," formal political principles of equality and freedom (with their attendant promises of individual autonomy and dignity) figure an alternative vision of humanity and alternative social and moral referents to those of the capitalist order within which they are asserted. This is the Janus-face or at least Janus-potential of liberal democracy vis a vis a capitalist economy: while liberal democracy encodes, reflects, and legitimates capitalist social relations, it simultaneously resists, counters, and tempers them. Put simply, what liberal democracy has provided over the last two centuries is a modest ethical gap between economy and polity. Even as liberal democracy converges with many capitalist values (property rights, individualism, Hobbesian assumptions underneath all contract, etc.) the formal distinction it establishes between moral and political principles on the one hand and the economic order on the other has also served as insulation against the ghastliness of life exhaustively ordered by the market and measured by market values. It is this gap that a neo-liberal political rationality closes as it submits every aspect of political and social life to economic calculation: asking not, for example, what does liberal constitutionalism stand for, what moral or political values does it protect and preserve, but rather what efficacy or profitability does constitutionalism promote . . . .or interdict? Liberal democracy cannot be submitted to neo-liberal political governmentality and survive. There is nothing in liberal democracy's basic institutions or values ~-~- from free elections, representative democracy, and individual liberties equally distributed, to modest power-sharing or even more substantive political participation ~-~- that inherently meets the test of serving economic competitiveness or inherently withstands a cost-benefit analysis. And it is liberal democracy that is going under in the present moment, even as the flag of American "democracy" is being planted everywhere it finds or creates soft ground. (The fact that "democracy" is the rubric under which so much anti-democratic imperial and domestic policy is enacted suggests that we are in an inter-regnum, or more precisely, that neo-liberalism borrows extensively from the old regime to legitimate itself even as it also develops and disseminates new codes of legitimacy. More about this below.) 11 + 12 +The alternative is to endorse an oppositional consciousness to neoliberal rationality—this counter-rationality is a starting point for a just future 13 +Brown 3 14 +Wendy Brown (Professor of Political Science at UC Berkley. Professor Brown received her Ph.D in Political Philosophy from Princeton University in 1983. Prior to coming to Berkeley in 1999, she taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz and at Williams College. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She lectures around the world and has held a number of distinguished visiting fellowships and lectureships. Most recently, she has been a member of the Birkbeck Critical Theory Summer School faculty (2012), a Senior Invited Fellow of the Center for Humanities at Cornell University (2013) and a visiting professor at Columbia University (2014)). “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy.” Theory and Event 7:1. 2003. http://lchc.ucsd.edu/cogn_150/Readings/brown.pdf 15 +A half-century ago, Herbert Marcuse argued that capitalism had eliminated a revolutionary subject (the proletariat) representing the negation of capitalism; consequently, he insisted, the Left had to derive and cultivate anti-capitalist principles, possibilities, and agency from capitalism's constitutive outside. That is, the Left needed to tap the desires ~-~- not for wealth or goods but for beauty, love, mental and physical well-being, meaningful work, and peace ~-~- manifestly unmet within a capitalist order and to appeal to those desires as the basis for rejecting and replacing the order. No longer could economic contradictions of capitalism inherently fuel opposition to it; rather opposition had to be founded in an alternative table of values. Today, the problem Marcuse diagnosed has expanded from capitalism to liberal democracy itself: oppositional consciousness cannot be generated from liberal democracy's false promises and hypocrisies. The space between liberal democratic ideals and lived realities has ceased to be exploitable because liberal democracy itself is no longer the most salient discourse of political legitimacy and the good life. Put the other way around, the politically exploitable hollowness in formal promises of freedom and equality has largely vanished to the extent that both freedom and equality have been redefined by neo-liberalism. Similarly, revealed linkages between political and economic actors ~-~- not merely bought politicians but arrangements of mutual profiteering between corporate America and its political elite ~-~- do not incite outrage at malfeasance, corruption, or injustice but appear instead as a potentially rational set of linkages between state and economy. Thus, from the "scandal" of Enron to the "scandal" of Vice President Cheney delivering Iraq to Halliburton to clean up and rebuild, there is no scandal. Rather, there is only market rationality, a rationality that can encompass even a modest amount of criminality but also treats close state-corporate ties as a potentially positive value ~-~- maximizing the aims of each ~-~- rather than as a conflict of interest.18 Similarly, even as the Bush Administration fails to come up with WMDs in Iraq and fails to be able to install order let alone democracy there, this is irrelevant to the neo-liberal criteria for success in that military episode. Indeed, even the scandal of Bush's installation as president by a politicized Supreme Court was more or less ingested by the American people as business as usual, an ingestion that represents a shift from the expectation that the Supreme Court is independent of political influence to one that tacitly accepts its inclusion in the governmentality of neo-liberalism. Even John Poindexter, a key figure in the Iran-Contra affair and director of the proposed "Terrorism Information Awareness" program that would have put all Americans under surveillance, continued to have power and legitimacy at the Pentagon until the flap over the scheme to run a futures market on political violence in the Middle East. All three projects are models of neo-liberalism's indifference to democracy; only the last forced Poindexter into retirement. These examples suggest that not only liberal democratic principles but democratic morality has been largely eviscerated ~-~- in neo-liberal terms, each of these "scandals" is framed as a matter of miscalculation or political maneuvering rather than by right and wrong, truth or falsehood, institutional propriety or impropriety. Consequently, the Left cannot count upon revealed deception, hypocrisies, interlocking directorates, featherbedding, or corruption to stir opposition to the existing regime. It cannot count on the expectation that moral principle undergirds political action or even on consistency as a value by which to judge state practices or aims. Much of the American public appeared indifferent to the fact that both the Afghan and Iraqi regimes targeted by Bush had previously been supported or even built by earlier U.S. foreign policy. It appeared indifferent as well to the fact that the "liberation" of Afghan women was touted as one of the great immediate achievements of the overthrow of the Taliban while overthrow of the Baath regime has set into motion an immediately more oppressive regime of gender in Iraq. The inconsistency does not matter much because political reasons and reasoning that exceed or precede neo-liberal criteria has ceased to matter much. This is serious political nihilism which no mere defense of free speech and privacy, let alone securing gay marriage rights or an increase in the minimum wage will reverse. What remains for the Left, then, is to challenge emerging neo-liberal governmentality in EuroAtlantic states with an alternative vision of the good, one that rejects homo oeconomicus as the norm of the human and rejects this norm's correlative formations of economy, society, state and (non)morality. In its barest form, this would be a vision in which justice would not center upon maximizing individual wealth or rights but on developing and enhancing the capacity of citizens to share power and hence, collaboratively govern themselves. In such an order, rights and elections would be the background rather than token of democracy, or better, rights would function to safeguard the individual against radical democratic enthusiasms but would not themselves signal the presence nor constitute the central principle of democracy. Instead a left vision of justice would focus on practices and institutions of shared popular power; a modestly egalitarian distribution of wealth and access to institutions; an incessant reckoning with all forms of power ~-~- social, economic, political, and even psychic; a long view of the fragility and finitude of non-human nature; and the importance of both meaningful activity and hospitable dwellings to human flourishing. However differently others might place the accent marks, none of these values can be derived from neo-liberal rationality nor meet neo-liberal criteria for the good. The development and promulgation of such a counter rationality ~-~- a different figuration of human beings, citizenship, economic life, and the political ~-~- is critical both to the long labor of fashioning a more just future and to the immediate task of challenging the deadly policies of the imperial U.S. state. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,15 @@ 1 +CP Text: Public colleges and universities in the US ought not restrict any constitutionally protected forms of speech except in the case of student government elections. Public colleges and universities should preserve expenditure limits on student government campaigns 2 +Wright and Danetz 8: Demos attorneys Brenda Wright and Lisa J. Danetz joined David Aronofsky, University of Montana Legal Counsel, in defending the University's campaign spending limits in the Supreme Court. January 7, 2008. SUPREME COURT ALLOWS SPENDING LIMITS FOR STUDENT GOVERNMENT ELECTIONS AT UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA, REJECTING FIRST AMENDMENT CHALLENGE. Demos. http://www.demos.org/press-release/supreme-court-allows-spending-limits-student-government-elections-university-montana-r. RW 3 +The Supreme Court today turned back a constitutional challenge to spending limits for student government campaigns at the University of Montana, denying review of a June 2007 ruling by the Ninth Circuit that upheld the limits. The Supreme Court's action is a victory for the Associated Students of the University of Montana ("ASUM") and the University, which argued that the limits on campaign spending serve to assure all students, regardless of their financial circumstances, an equal opportunity to win election to student government. Brenda Wright, Legal Director of Demos, a non-profit organization that assisted in defending the University's spending limits, called the ruling '"a victory for fair elections and educational opportunity," stating "the First Amendment was never designed to make made student government participation a function of a student's wealth." The case was brought in 2004 by former UM student Aaron Flint, who exceeded the $100 spending cap in his effort to win a seat on the ASUM Senate and was disqualified from taking his seat as a result of the violation. A nationally prominent opponent of campaign finance regulation, James Bopp, Jr., represented Flint and argued that the First Amendment guaranteed Flint the right to spend unlimited sums in his quest for a student government seat. The Ninth Circuit, however, found there is ample justification for ASUM's campaign limits, observing: "Imposing limits on candidate spending requires student candidates to focus on desirable qualities such as the art of persuasion, public speaking, and answering questions face-to-face with one's potential constituents. Students are forced to campaign personally, wearing out their shoe-leather rather than wearing out a parent's~-~-or an activist organization's~-~-pocketbook." The Supreme Court's ruling today means that the Ninth Circuit's decision will stand as the leading appellate precedent on the constitutionality of rules designed to foster fair access to student government participation. The Ninth Circuit includes Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington 4 + 5 +It’s mutually exclusive—unlimited financial expenditure towards elections is a form of constitutionally protected speech—fuels market capitalism 6 +PC 16: “Overturning the “Money as speech” Doctrine. 2016. ” Democracy is for the people—a Public Citizen project. http://www.democracyisforpeople.org/page.cfm?id=19. About Authors~-~- http://www.citizen.org/about/. RW 7 +Even before its disastrous 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the U.S. Supreme Court had already developed a flawed reading of the First Amendment that struck down reforms designed to prevent corruption and to ensure that the voices of the powerful did not drown out “We the People” in the halls of our democratic institutions. Although the extraordinary threat of unlimited corporate money in elections is a new expansion of the doctrine that “money is speech”, decisions of the Court since the Watergate era have enabled the richest one percent of society to buy outsized influence in our government. For over a hundred years, democratic representatives have listened to public outcry to stop the super-wealthy and big businesses from buying our elections. Reform efforts in the first half of the 20th Century prohibited corporate and union contributions to candidates.i In the wake of the Watergate scandal and allegations of illegal contributions in the 1972 election, Congress passed sweeping campaign finance reforms in the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA). FECA enacted comprehensive limits on campaign fundraising and spending, expanded disclossure requirements, established public financing for Presidential elections, and created the Federal Elections Commission to enforce the law. However, FECA was challenged in the 1976 Supreme Court case Buckley v. Valeo. In the Buckley decision, the Court upheld contribution limits, disclosure requirements, and presidential public financing. However, the Court struck down limits on “independent” expenditures and established the controversial idea that spending money for political campaigns purposes is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment. This idea became known colloquially as “money equals speech.” The Court reached this conclusion by treating “the distribution of the humblest handbill or leaflet” the same as expensive, professional advertising in a nation “dependent on television, radio, and other mass media,” and by refusing to acknowledge the corrupting power of unlimited money being used to support and attack candidates.ii This paved the way for huge increases in political spending by groups that only need to avoid a technical definition of “coordination” with candidate campaigns. Subsequent Court rulings weakened or did away with other restrictions on campaign spending. Citizens United marked the culmination of this trend, taking an errant reading of the Constitution and a broken campaign-finance system to an extreme with the conclusion: that corporations should have a First Amendment right to spend limitless amounts to influence election outcomes. Buckley and the cases that follow it, including Citizens United, rest on a number of flawed assumptions about money and politics.iii In particular, the Buckley Court assumed: That each dollar spent directly leads to some increased “quantity of speech,” and therefore placing any limits on campaign spending is the same as placing limits on political speech as a whole. That politicians are less indebted to or corrupted by people who “independently” spend huge amounts of money to elect them than to those who contribute money directly to their campaign. That government has no compelling interest in fostering equal participation in the campaign process or stopping the corrosion of democratic ideals that results when election costs spiral out of control and only the super-wealthy have influence. Spending money in election-related contexts helps people express themselves and can lead to political speech. But money itself is not the equivalent of political speech.I A system that allows corporations and the wealthiest among us to drown out the voices of others, and ensures unequal access to and leverage over elected officials, undermines the First Amendment’s core purpose – to foster and protect a flourishing marketplace of democratic ideas. 8 + 9 +Capitalism causes ecological destruction and extinction 10 +Foster 11: John Bellamy ~ Dec. 2011, Capitalism and the Accumulation of Catastrophe, Monthly Review, Vol. 63 Issue 07, http://monthlyreview.org/2011/12/01/capitalism-and-the-accumulation-of-catastrophe (Aug 2012) 11 + 12 +Yet, the continued pursuit of Keynes’s convenient lie over the last eight decades has led to a world far more polarized and beset with contradictions than he could have foreseen. It is a world prey to the enormous unintended consequences of accumulation without limits: namely, global economic stagnation, financial crisis, and planetary ecological destruction. Keynes, though aware of some of the negative economic aspects of capitalist production, had no real understanding of the ecological perils—of which scientists had already long been warning. Today these perils are impossible to overlook. Faced with impending ecological catastrophe, it is more necessary than ever to abandon Keynes’s convenient lie and espouse the truth: that foul is foul and fair is fair. Capitalism, the society of “après moi le déluge!” is a system that fouls its own nest—both the human-social conditions and the wider natural environment on which it depends. The accumulation of capital is at the same time accumulation of catastrophe, not only for a majority of the world’s people, but living species generally. Hence, nothing is fairer—more just, more beautiful, and more necessary—today than the struggle to overthrow the regime of capital and to create a system of substantive equality and sustainable human development; a socialism for the twenty-first century. 13 + 14 +Outweighs the Case: 15 +Analytics - EntryDate
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