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1 +Extinction is inevitable—the will to survival embodied by the aff strips value from life and freezes becoming, which outweighs on magnitude — vote neg to comport our ethics towards the world-to-come—this can include endorsing their extinction discourse while still doing the plan—it’s a mutually exclusive strategy of joyous ethics that doesn’t affirm all death but undercuts the metaphysical justifications for all modes of oppression
2 +Mitchell ‘16: Wilfrid Laurier University (Audra, “Is IR going extinct?,” European Journal of International Relations 1–23, dml)
3 +Perhaps most profoundly, taking extinction seriously would involve relinquishing the fetishism of survival as it relates to dominant conceptions of the human rather than simply adapting these conceptions to new sources and registers of threat.6 In other words, it would be necessary to dispense with the imperative to ensure at all costs the survival of currently existing norms and modes of human life. However, why should emancipation from this imperative be desirable? Simply put, the imperative to preserve dominant, existing modes of human life monopolizes human energy, dominates frameworks of value and imposes stasis on extant life forms. This imperative imposes a kind of death (in the Heideggerian sense) on life forms: it prevents them from unfolding into their indeterminate, virtual possibilities, entrapping them in the mode of rigid metaphysical categories. The severing of possibilities of becoming can already be intuited within the biopolitical discourses of extinction discussed earlier. These discourses simultaneously frame the survival of ‘humanity-as-it-is’ as the dominant principle of being and highest value, while presenting it as imminently and irreversibly threatened (see Evans and Reid, 2014). Within this stark opposition, the political possibilities of becoming are precluded by the imperative to survive ‘as we are’ at all costs. What if, instead, it were possible to refuse the demand to survive — without embracing an extinction-wish or desiring the elimination of any species? In the context of IR, this would entail resisting the powerful discourses of biopolitical discipline, catastrophism, resilience and mitigation discussed earlier and becoming open to the possibilities of extinction, in two senses: in the sense that extinction may occur; and in the sense of the new modes of ethico-political action and forms of life it might enable. Being open to the possibility of extinction does not involve relinquishing all claims to continued existence or the desire to pursue them. Instead, by removing the imperative to secure the indefinite survival of dominant forms of life at all costs, it might free these energies to develop modes of being-otherwise. As Colebrook (2014a: 58) puts it: As long as we calculate the future as one of sustaining, maintaining, adapting and rendering ourselves viable … there would be no future for us other than an eventual, barely lived petering out. If, however, we entertained the erasure of the human … then there might be a future. (Colebrook, 2014a: 58) What visions, logics and inputs might IR contribute to this new future, and how might it be transformed as a result? Cosmopolitics and the possibilities of extinction Extinction is not only about endings; it can also be understood as a force that engenders ethico-political creativity in and with the conditions of finitude (Mitchell, 2016). Viewing (mass) extinction in this way consists of ‘a confrontation with perishing, finitude, and fragility but one that fills us with at least as much wonder as dread, more political energy than resignation, and takes seriously that apocalypses are not ends but irreversible transitions’ (Grove, 2015). This, in turn, involves reframing nihilism not as an apolitical collapse into apathy and submission to visions of the inevitable, but rather as a ‘speculative opportunity’ that opens up new futures (Brassier, 2007: xi). In other words, rather than promoting (only) a ‘will to nothingness’, let alone a malevolent extinction-wish, engaging with the possibilities of non-being can make it possible to embrace the indeterminacy of the universe and its creative forces. I shall now argue that it demands and enables a politics attuned to the biological, geological and cosmological forces of the universe: a cosmopolitics. According to Isabelle Stengers (2005), ‘cosmopolitics’ is politics rooted in the acknowledgement of the multiple, diverse and constantly transforming beings that constitute the cosmos. It hinges on the belief that all beings make interventions that shape, disrupt and transform political processes. Importantly, participation in these processes does not require representation in terms of human interests or even the ability to act or speak in a human-oriented sense. Indeed, Stengers (2005: 996) asserts that ‘the political arena is peopled with shadows of that which does not have, cannot have or does not want to have a political voice’. A range of beings — whether they are considered human and nonhuman, living and non-living, organic and inorganic — can intervene in politics by ‘forcing thought’ through their effects, properties, presence or absence. For instance, water can make its force felt politically by destroying human habitations and ecosystems in the form of floods, by withdrawing and creating droughts, or by sustaining and nurturing multiple life forms. For Stengers, these issues are not made political by humans: to the extent that they have an effect in the world, they are always-already political. According to Stengers, the interventions of multiple beings help to slow down processes of universalization central to traditional modes of cosmopolitanism. Indeed, the presence of other beings with conflicting interests and needs makes universalization, and political decisionmaking, ‘as difficult as possible’ (Stengers, 2005: 1003). Cosmopolitics is conflictual and agonistic: the insurgence of awkward subjects and the obstructions, disruptions and disjunctures they create can nurture pluralism and generate creative politics. Crucially, cosmopolitics is not simply an intensification or variant of cosmopolitanism. Whereas cosmopolitanism stresses the suffix -politan, cosmopolitics shifts emphasis to the prefix cosmo-, that is, it takes the cosmos, rather than human communities, as the basis and locus of political action. Cosmopolitanism, as Colebrook contends, is based on the extrapolation and expansion of a polity that, while it may be expanded to include other beings, is centrifugal to the figure of humanity. In other words, the cosmos of cosmopolitanism ‘is always an extension of the composed polity, an abstraction or idealization of man englobed in his world of human others’ (Colebrook, 2014a: 110). Even the most radical contemporary reframings of cosmopolitanism, in contrast, involve stretching the scope of the human-dominated polity to include all humans and (certain) nonhumans (see Linklater, 2011). Anthony Burke (2013, 2015) has attempted to radically rethink cosmopolitanism in terms of the intermeshing of complex processes, material conditions and (human and nonhuman) actors across planetary space-time. However, I want to argue that this project is better understood in the context of cosmopolitics, insofar as it seeks to render the cosmos the ontological basis of politics. I want to argue that a modified form of cosmopolitics — one attuned to the inhuman — is demanded by, and can ground meaningful responses to, (mass) extinction. Specifically, Stengers’s cosmopolitics acknowledges the role of the weak, marginalized and ‘shadowy’ subjects; it focuses largely on presence, that is, on the positive beings that interrupt human activities. In order to respond to mass extinction, cosmopolitics must place more focus on absence, negation and non-being. Colebrook hints at this in her call to ‘destroy cosmopolitanism for the sake of the cosmos’ (Colebrook, 2014a: 96) She claims that arguing that: if the crises of the twenty-first century were to prompt us to think at all it may be in a cosmic and inhuman mode, asking … what the elements of this earth are, what force they bear, how we are composed in relation to those forces. (Colebrook, 2014a: 114) If we consider (mass) extinction as one of these forces, a different kind of cosmopolitics emerges — one that responds to extinction and considerably adds to the conceptual mass of IR. This mode of cosmopolitics makes it possible to generate new forms of solidarity based not on the fear of collective annihilation, but rather on a sense of shared vulnerability that is the condition of earthly coexistence. For Rosi Braidotti (2013), such solidarities emerge from the defamiliarization of dominant norms of ‘humanity’, which, she argues, is best achieved by thinking as if ‘humanity’ were already extinct. This, she contends, compels humans to ‘think critically about who we are and what we are actually in the process of becoming’ (Braidotti, 2013: 49–50). From this perspective, attention to the inhuman, and to the possible extinction of humans, can produce an ‘enlarged sense of inter-connection between self and others, including the non-human or “earth” others’ (Braidotti, 2013: 49–50). The same processes of defamiliarization, Colebrook (2014a: 58) suggests, would make possible a radical new form of feminism that, in embracing ‘a thought of life beyond the human’, would place neither man nor woman at its centre (Colebrook, 2014b: 16). By unsettling the foundations of ‘humanity’ itself, she contends, thinking the inhuman makes it possible to transcend boundaries such as gender and race that essentialize characteristics as ‘essentially’ human. This would have profound importance for feminist, queer and decolonial international politics: it would undercut the metaphysical foundations of sources of exclusion and oppression against which they struggle. In short, contemplating the extinction of ‘the human’ makes it possible to imagine alternative, future life forms that bear resemblances to, but are not restricted by, existing norms of ‘humanity’. Moreover, a cosmopolitics attuned to the inhuman could profoundly transform global ethics by grounding it not in a politics of ressentiment, but rather one of gratitude. The geographer Nigel Clark (2011) argues that humans should embrace the finite, deeply contingent and potentially meaningless (in a transcendent, metaphysical sense) existence furnished by an indifferent Earth. Specifically, he claims that human existence is contingent upon conditions created by previous (largely extinct) life forms and by inhuman forces, both contemporary and temporally distant. From this perspective, existence is a gift given to humans (among others) but it is not given-for-us in the correlationist sense. Instead, humans are indebted to a chain of interlocking forces that are ultimately indifferent to their existence. Clark argues that humans should embrace this gift with the knowledge that it can, and eventually will, be withdrawn. This means accepting and honouring it without treating it as an entitlement or devaluing it on account of its finitude. His account contrasts sharply with the discourses of catastrophe, resilience and biopolitics discussed earlier, which devalue any mode of life that cannot be indefinitely sustained through human intervention. Clark finds an ethico-political alternative to these logics in an ethos of gratitude and reciprocation. For Clark, the latter is epitomized by the actions of the government of Kiribati — the small island state perhaps most imminently threatened by rising sea levels — in creating one of the world’s largest marine parks in 2006 (the Phoenix Islands Protected Area). In so doing, Clark contends, this community expressed unconditional gratitude for the gift of existence rather than resentment of its endangerment. Moreover, by seeking to protect and preserve the watery medium that threatens to destroy it, Kiribatians embodied a mode of meaningful response to disaster that was not constrained to sustaining survival-as-we-know-it. Moreover, a cosmopolitics attuned to extinction and to the inhuman would foster a new mode of future-oriented politics based not on the continuity of the present, but rather on the creative possibilities of discontinuity and unpredictable difference. For Evans and Reid (2014: 164), biopolitical responses to extinction reflect a ‘cult of mourning’ for the coming death of existing species life that ‘manages to turn the wondrous phenomenon of the emergence of new forms of life … into a problematic of security and threat’. Indeed, in popular literature on extinction, there is a marked tone of mourning and fear about what might ‘replace’ humans as Earth’s dominant species, and the readers’ focus is trained on monstrous figures such as robots, microbes or giant rats (see Zalasiewicz, 2008). In contrast, cosmopolitics attuned to extinction and the inhuman would be open to the new forms of being that might emerge from, or even in place of, humans. For instance, it might involve overcoming fear and revulsion of the hybrid or mutant creatures that are emerging, at least in part from human scientific interventions, treating them with love and care instead of abjection (see Haraway, 2011; Latour, 2012). Crucially, it would also involve embracing the defamiliarized modalities of currently existing humanity discussed earlier. This includes beings so transformed through technological and evolutionary change as to be almost unrecognizable to ‘us’ (currently existing humans), and the ‘defamiliarized’ beings no longer essentialized in terms of race, sex or gender. The cosmopolitics I am outlining here would embrace these beings-to-come instead of fearing and resenting them. This amounts to a kind of futural gratitude that mirrors the Kiribatian marine park — an ethics of comportment towards the unknowable other that might displace ‘us’. However, how can currently existing humans adopt such an ethics? Emmanuel Levinas (1998: 50) terms this mode of ethics ‘being-forbeyond-my-death’, that is, being ‘for a time that would be without me … in order to be for that which is after me’. Although Levinas is referring to human individuals and their comportment towards future generations of humans, this principle can be translated across species boundaries and to a collective register. It profoundly shifts the emphasis of human action — instead of attempting to secure existing conditions, it encourages ‘action for a world to come’, and responsiveness to the ethical demands of the (remote, unknowable) Other (Levinas, 1998: 51). Clark, writing in a Levinasian vein, agrees that embracing future life forms is not passive. Instead, it requires the ability to see ‘the intolerability of the world as it is presently imagined and demands the seemingly impossible; the creation of a new one’ (Clark, 2011: 195). Crucially, this ethos is not a replacement for security or the pursuit of indefinite survival, but rather a qualitatively different kind of politics. It cannot guarantee the survival of humanity-as-it-is — the goal to which all existing strategies and responses to extinction are oriented. It entails an ‘eschatology without hope for oneself’ (Levinas, 1998: 51): welcoming new worlds makes, and demands, no promises. While this ethos engenders cautious hope for undetermined futures, it cannot be made conditional on the survival of existing forms of life. Instead, it must be pursued ‘for the hell of it and for love of the world’ (Braidotti, 2010: 17). This shifts the logic of responsiveness to extinction from one of mastery and control to one of gratitude and hopeful, creative experimentation. As Clark (2011: 217, paraphrasing Allan Stoekl) puts it: we might have a better chance of prising the planet out of its downward ecological spiral accidentally, not as the goal of a grand, visionary project but as the unintended consequence of more joyous and generous living right here and now. In other words, adopting an attitude of hospitality and generosity towards other beings might help to open up a future of long-term flourishing for humans and other beings. However, as Clark argues, this kind of action needs to have the character of Derridean hospitality, that is, it needs to be undertaken without conditionality, or, in this case, the demand for security. Adopting this ethico-political orientation does not involve capitulation to extinction, and even less an extinction-wish. Instead, it widens the range of human responsiveness far beyond the spectrum of pre-emptive trauma, loss and tragedy, and a future of rapidly diminishing life lived in survival mode.
4 +Their appeal to catastrophe is nothing but an emotive training ground to fit the catastrophe within familiar modes of politics and lull the population into fear-laden productivity. Our frantic attempts to resolve such problems merely institutionalize the most horrendous homicidal violence and push us to the brink of war. The only political task left is that of the philosopher who interrupts the absorption of the resonance of fear that greases the wheels of modern power.
5 +Scranton ‘15: Jeremy Scranton, acclaimed journalist, activist and author, PhD in English from Princeton, currently teaching at Notre Dame, New York Times contributor, Iraq War veteran, Learning To Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of Civilization, City Lights Books, 2015, online
6 +“When it comes to global warming, differing visions of the human future are already hardening into conflict. Coal and oil companies and their government proxies have made their willingness to use military force to defend themselves and advance their interests spectacularly obvious. The labor wars of the 19th and 20th centuries show this clearly. The brutal decades-long war waged by the Nigerian government against its own people, undertaken with the outright support of Shell and Chevron, is another example, well documented in books such as A Year and a Day and Genocide in Nigeria by Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was executed for his activism. You’ve heard the call: We have to do something. We need to fight. We need to identify the enemy and go after them. Some respond, march, and chant. Some look away, deny what’s happening, and search out escape routes into imaginary tomorrows: a life off the grid, space colonies, immortality in paradise, explicit denial, or consumer satiety in a wireless, robot-staffed, 3D-printed techno-utopia. Meanwhile, the rich take shelter in their fortresses, trusting to their air conditioning, private schools, and well-paid guards. Fight. Flight. Flight. Fight. The threat of death activates our deepest animal drives. The aggression and fear that arise in response to perceived threats are some of the most intense emotions we ever experience. For human society to function at all, these instinctive reactions have to be carefully managed and channeled. Outbreaks of panic and hate are dangerous, but lower levels of aggression and fear help keep a population controllable and productive. Restrained aggression keeps people suspicious of collective action and working hard to overcome their fellows, while constant, generalized anxiety keeps people servile, unwilling to take risks, and yearning for comfort from whatever quarter, whether the dulling sameness of herd thought or the dumb security of consumer goods. Since at least September 11, 2001, people in the United States have been subject to an unprecedented terror campaign—not from Al Qaeda, but from the United States government. National domestic policy transformed “security” into constant fear, threatening its citizens at every turn: first with alarms of explosions and anthrax, then with prison, austerity-produced structural unemployment, and harassment, and finally with torture, SWAT tanks, snipers, drones, and total surveillance. Owing to the racial logic of US politics, in which white/black is the definitive semiotic distinction structuring American society, most of the government’s violence against its own citizens is directed against those with darker skin, but in subtler ways its terror campaign targets every single person who flies coach, watches the news, or uses the Internet. Fear comes to us every day in our encounters with increasingly militarized police and our humiliating interactions at metal detectors and ” “body-scan machines. Fear comes to us in the absence of job security, in our want of appeal when confronted by institutionalized inequality, and in our mistrust of corrupt institutions. Fear comes to us in widespread surveillance, in the form of a homeless woman or a hospitalized friend without adequate financial support, and in the constant nagging worry that we’re not working hard enough, not happy enough, never going to “make it.” Fear comes to us in weather porn, unpredictable shifts in formerly stable climate dynamics, and massive storms. More than in any other way, fear comes to us in images and messages, as social media vibrations, products of cultural technologies that we have interpolated into our lives. Going about our daily business, we receive constant messages of apprehension and danger, ubiquitous warnings, insistent needling jabs to the deep lizard brain. Somebody died. Something blew up. Something might blow up. Somebody attacked somebody. Somebody killed somebody. Guns. Crime. Immigrants. Terrorists. Arabs. Mexicans. White supremacists. Killer cops. Demonic thugs. Rape. ” “Murder. Global warming. Ebola. ISIS. Death. Death. Death. Sociologist Tom Pyszczynski writes: “People will do almost anything to avoid being afraid. When, despite the best efforts, fear and anxiety do break through, people go to incredible lengths to shut them down.”88 Sometimes when these vibrations shake us, we discharge them by passing them on, retweeting the story, reposting the video, hoping that others will validate our reaction, thus assuaging our fear by assuring ourselves that collective attention has been alerted to the threat. Other times we react with aversion, working to dampen the vibrations by searching out positive reinforcements, pleasurable images and videos, something funny, something—anything—to ease the fear. We buy something. We eat food. We pop a pill. We fuck. In either passing on the vibration or reacting against it, we let the fear short circuit our own autonomous desires, diverting us from our goals and loading ever more emotional static into our daily cognitive processing. We become increasingly distracted from our ambitions and increasingly susceptible to such distraction. And whether we retransmit or react, we reinforce channels of thought, perception, behavior, and emotion that, over time, come to shape our habits and our personality. As we train ourselves to resonate fear and aggression, we reinforce patterns of thought and feeling that shape a society that breeds the same. Fight-or-flight is compelling because it serves essential evolutionary purposes. It increases alertness and adrenaline flow, and generally works to keep the human animal alive. As we proceed into the Anthropocene, though, capitalism’s cultural machinery for balancing fear and aggression against desire and pleasure is grinding and sputtering sparks. What cultural theorist Lauren Berlant has identified as the “cruel optimism” of a system sustained by hopes that can never be fulfilled mixes dangerously with an atmosphere of beleaguered anxiety, increasing frustration with working-class and middle-class economic stagnation, and a pervasive sadistic voyeurism that grows by what it feeds on.89 While America’s fraying social infrastructure holds together, our fear and aggression can be channeled into labor, consumption, and economic competition, with professional sports, hyperviolent television, and occasional protests to let off steam. Once the social fabric begins to tear, though, we risk unleashing not only rioting, rebellion, and civil war, but homicidal politics the likes of which should make our blood run cold.” “Consider: Once among the most modern, Westernized nations in the Middle East, with a robust, highly educated middle class, Iraq has been blighted for decades by imperialist aggression, criminal gangs, interference in its domestic politics, economic liberalization, and sectarian feuding. Today it is being torn apart between a corrupt petrocracy, a breakaway Kurdish enclave, and a self-declared Islamic fundamentalist caliphate, while a civil war in neighboring Syria spills across its borders. These conflicts have likely been caused in part and exacerbated by the worst drought the Middle East has seen in modern history. Since 2006, Syria has been suffering ” “crippling water shortages that have, in some areas, caused 75 percent crop failure and wiped out 85 percent of livestock, left more than 800,000 Syrians without a livelihood, and sent hundreds of thousands of impoverished young men streaming into Syria’s cities.90 This drought is part of long-term warming and drying trends that are transforming the Middle East.91 Not just water but oil, too, is elemental to these conflicts. Iraq sits on the fifth-largest proven oil reserves in the world. Meanwhile, the Islamic State has been able to survive only because it has taken control of most of Syria’s oil and gas production. We tend to think of climate change and violent religious fundamentalism as isolated phenomena, but as Retired Navy Rear Admiral David Titley argues, “you can draw a very credible climate connection to this disaster we call ISIS right now.”92 A few hundred miles away, Israeli soldiers spent the summer of 2014 killing Palestinians in Gaza. Israel has also been suffering drought, while Gaza has been in the midst of a critical water crisis exacerbated by Israel’s military ” “aggression. The International Committee for the Red Cross reported that during summer 2014, Israeli bombers targeted Palestinian wells and water infrastructure.93 It’s not water and oil this time, but water and gas: some observers argue that Israel’s “Operation Protective Edge” was intended to establish firmer control over the massive Leviathan natural gas field, discovered off the coast of Gaza in the eastern Mediterranean in 2010.94 Meanwhile, thousands of miles to the north, Russian-backed separatists fought fascist paramilitary forces defending the elected government of Ukraine, which was also suffering drought.95 Russia’s role as an oil and gas exporter in the region and the natural gas pipelines running through Ukraine from Russia to Europe cannot but be key issues in the conflict. Elsewhere, droughts in 2014 sent refugees from Guatemala and Honduras north to the US border, devastated crops in California and Australia, and threatened millions of lives in Eritrea, Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Uganda, Afghanistan, India, Morocco, Pakistan, and parts of China. Across the world, massive protests and riots have swept Bosnia and Herzegovina, Venezuela, Brazil, Turkey, Egypt, and Thailand, while conflicts rage on in Colombia, Libya, the Central African Republic, Sudan, Nigeria, Yemen, and India. And while the world burns, the United States has been playing chicken with Russia over control of Eastern Europe and the melting Arctic, and with China over control of Southeast Asia and the South China Sea, threatening global war on a scale not seen in seventy years. This is our present and future: droughts and hurricanes, refugees and border guards, war for oil, water, gas, and food. We experience this world of strife today in one of two modes: either it is our environment, and we are in it, or it comes to us as images, social excitation, retransmitted fear. People are fighting and dying in ruined cities all over the planet. Neighbors are killing each other. Old women are bleeding to death in bombed rubble and children are being murdered, probably as you read this sentence. To live in that world is horrific. Constant danger strains every nerve. The only things that matter are survival, killing the enemy, ” “reputation, and having a safe place to sleep. The experience of being human narrows to a cutting edge. I remember living in that world many years ago in occupied Baghdad. Today that world seems impossibly distant, yet every day it presses in on me in a never-ending stream of words, images, appeals, and reports. I see videos. I read stories. I see pictures of this or that suffering or injustice and I am moved. To act, perhaps, but more accurately to emote. To react. To feel. To perform. We do not usually ask where these feelings come from or who they serve, but we all know that the cultural technologies transmitting these affective vibrations are not neutral: news outlets shape information to fit their owners’ prejudices, while Facebook, Twitter, and Google shape our perceptions through hidden algorithms. The specialization and demographic targeting of contemporary media tend to narrow the channels of perception to the point that we receive only those images and vibrations which already harmonize with our own prejudices, our own pre-existing desires, thus intensifying our particular emotional reac” “tions along an increasingly limited band, impelling us to discharge our emotions within the same field of ready listeners, for which we are rewarded with “Likes” and “Favorites.” Our consciousness is shaped daily through feedback systems where some post or headline provokes a feeling and we discharge that feeling by provoking it in others. Social media like Facebook crowdsource catharsis, creating self-contained wave pools of aggression and fear, pity and terror, stagnant flows that go nowhere and do nothing. Pictures of children killed by bombs or police, or pictures of the devastation left in the wake of a tropical storm may move me to sadness and horror. Retransmitting such images will pass along that sadness and horror. My act of transmission will mark me as someone who has feelings about these things and who condemns them. I can rationalize my retransmission by saying that I am “raising awareness” or trying to influence public policy: I want my fellow citizens to be as horrified as I am, so they’ll think like I do, or so they’ll vote for a representative who works to prevent such horrors from happening, or maybe so that if ” “enough of us all think the same way and feel the same way, the organs and institutions of power will be forced to hear us and align themselves along our vibrations, the way a honeybee colony will pick a site for a new hive through the dance of its advance guard scouts. These are perfectly reasonable human assumptions, because that is how physical human collectives function. Anyone who has been in a crowd, a basketball team, a nightclub, a choir, or a protest knows how bodies resonate together. But politics is the energetic distribution of bodies in systems, and we live in a system of carbon-fueled capitalism that we shouldn’t expect to work in physical human ways for several reasons, especially when it comes to responding to the threat of global warming. First, our political and social media technologies are not neutral, but have been developed to serve particular interests, most notably targeted advertising, concentration of wealth, and ideological control, and the vibrations that seem to resonate most strongly along these channels are envy, adulation, outrage, fear, hatred, and mindless pleasure. Second, the more we pass on or react to social vibrations, the more we strengthen our habits of channeling and the less we practice autonomous reflection or independent critical thought. With every protest chant, retweet, and Facebook post, we become stronger resonators and weaker thinkers. Third, however intense our social vibrations grow, they remain locked within machinery that offers no political leverage: they do not translate into political action, because they do not connect to the flows of power. Finally, while the typical collective human response to threat is to identify an enemy, pick sides, and mobilize to fight, global warming offers no apprehensible foe. That hasn’t stopped people from trying to find one. The Flood Wall Street protesters say the enemy is American corporations. Tanzania’s Jakaya Kikwete and Nauru’s Baron Waqa say the problem is the United States and Great Britain. Shell Oil and the Environmental Defense Fund seem to think that it’s intractable UN bureaucracy that’s holding us up. Barack Obama has implied that it’s China. Tea Party Republicans prod us to ever more intense levels of manic despair? One way we might begin to answer these questions is by considering the problem of global warming in terms of Peter Sloterdijk’s idea of the philosopher as an interrupter: We live constantly in collective fields of excitation; this cannot be changed so long as we are social beings. The input of stress inevitably enters me; thoughts are not free, each of us can divine them. They come from the newspaper and wind up returning to the newspaper. My sovereignty, if it exists, can only appear by my letting the integrated impulsion die in me or, should this fail, by my retransmitting it in a totally metamorphosed, verified, filtered, or recoded form. It serves nothing to contest it: I am free only to the extent that I interrupt escalations and that I am able to immunize myself against infections of opinion. Precisely this continues to be the philosopher’s mission in society, if I may express myself in such pathetic terms. His mission is to show that a subject can be an interrupter, not merely a channel that allows thematic epidemics and waves of excitation to flow through it. The classics express this with the term ‘pondering.’ With this concept, ethics and energetics enter into contact: as a bearer of a philosophical function, I have neither the right nor the desire to be either a conductor in a stress-semantic chain or the automaton of an ethical imperative.97 Sloterdijk compares the conception of political function as collective vibration to a philosophical function of interruption. As opposed to disruption, which shocks a system and breaks wholes into pieces, interruption suspends continuous processes. It’s not smashing, but sitting with. Not blockage, but reflection. Sloterdijk sees the role of the philosopher in the human swarm as that of an aberrant anti-drone slow-dancing to its own rhythm, neither attuned to the collective beat nor operating mechanically, dogmatically, deontologically, but ” “continually self-immunizing against the waves of social energy we live in and amongst by perpetually interrupting its own connection to collective life. So long as one allows oneself to be “a conductor in a stress-semantic chain,” one is strengthening channels of retransmission regardless of content, thickening the reflexive connective tissues of mass society, making all of us more susceptible to such viral phenomena as nationalism, scapegoating, panic, and war fever. Interrupting the flows of social production is anarchic and counterproductive, like all good philosophy: if it works, it helps us stop and see our world in new ways. If it fails, as it often and even usually does, the interrupter is integrated, driven mad, ignored, or destroyed. What Sloterdijk helps us see is that responding autonomously to social excitation means not reacting to it, not passing it on, but interrupting it, then either letting the excitation die or transforming it completely. Responding freely to constant images of fear and violence, responding freely to the perpetual media circuits of pleasure and terror, responding freely to the ongoing ” “alarms of war, environmental catastrophe, and global destruction demands a reorientation of feeling so that every new impulse is held at a distance until it fades or can be changed. While life beats its red rhythms and human swarms dance to the compulsion of strife, the interrupter practices dying.”
7 +AND the aff causes endless structural violence with their death bad rhetoric. The invocation of “survival” as the basis of the plan makes all atrocities possible and removes the value of survival itself – in an attempt to save our world, they have destroyed it. Vote neg on impact.
8 +Callahan ‘73: Daniel Callahan, Fellow at the Institute of Society and Ethics, 1973, The Tyranny of Survival, Pages 91-93)
9 +The value of survival could not be so readily abused were it not for its evocative power. But abused it has been. In the name of survival, all manner of social and political evils have been committed against the rights of individuals, including the right to life. The purported threat of Communist domination has for over two decades fueled the drive of militarists for ever-larger defense budgets, no matter what the cost to other social needs. During World War II, native Japanese-Americans were herded, without due process of law, to detention camps. This policy was later upheld by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States (1944) in the general context that a threat to national security can justify acts otherwise blatantly unjustifiable. The survival of the Aryan race was one of the official legitimations of Nazism. Under the banner of survival, the government of South Africa imposes a ruthless apartheid, heedless of the most elementary human rights. The Vietnamese war has seen one of the greatest of the many absurdities tolerated in the name of survival: the destruction of villages in order to save them. But it is not only in a political setting that survival has been evoked as a final and unarguable value. The main rationale B. F. Skinner offers in Beyond Freedom and Dignity for the controlled and conditioned society is the need for survival. For Jacques Monod, in Chance and Necessity, survival requires that we overthrow almost every known religious, ethical and political system. In genetics, the survival of the gene pool has been put forward as sufficient grounds for a forceful prohibition of bearers of offensive genetic traits from marrying and bearing children. Some have even suggested that we do the cause of survival no good by our misguided medical efforts to find means by which those suffering from such common genetically based diseases as diabetes can live a normal life, and thus procreate even more diabetics. In the field of population and environment, one can do no better than to cite Paul Ehrlich, whose works have shown a high dedication to survival, and in its holy name a willingness to contemplate governmentally enforced abortions and a denial of food to surviving populations of nations which have not enacted population-control policies. For all these reasons it is possible to counterpoise over against the need for survival a "tyranny of survival." There seems to be no imaginable evil which some group is not willing to inflict on another for sake of survival, no rights, liberties or dignities which it is not ready to suppress. It is easy, of course, to recognize the danger when survival is falsely and manipulatively invoked. Dictators never talk about their aggressions, but only about the need to defend the fatherland to save it from destruction at the hands of its enemies. But my point goes deeper than that. It is directed even at a legitimate concern for survival, when that concern is allowed to reach an intensity which would ignore, suppress or destroy other fundamental human rights and values. The potential tyranny survival as value is that it is capable, if not treated sanely, of wiping out all other values. Survival can become an obsession and a disease, provoking a destructive singlemindedness that will stop at nothing. We come here to the fundamental moral dilemma. If, both biologically and psychologically, the need for survival is basic to man, and if survival is the precondition for any and all human achievements, and if no other rights make much sense without the premise of a right to life—then how will it be possible to honor and act upon the need for survival without, in the process, destroying everything in human beings which makes them worthy of survival. To put it more strongly, if the price of survival is human degradation, then there is no moral reason why an effort should be made to ensure that survival. It would be the Pyrrhic victory to end all Pyrrhic victories.
10 +The alternative is to vote negative as a method of rejecting the aff’s survivalist justification and freeing ourselves from the fear of death. Death is a neutral mechanism of nature - this is an independent avenue that necessitates the alternative.
11 +Epicurus 311 BCE: Letter to Meneocues, translated by Professor Robert Drew Hicks, http://classics.mit.edu/Epicurus/menoec.html, BRACKETED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE
12 +Accustom yourself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply awareness, and death is the privation of all awareness; therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life an unlimited time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terror; for those who thoroughly apprehend that there are no terrors for them in ceasing to live. Foolish, therefore, is the person who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect. Whatever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer. But in the world, at one time people shun death as the greatest of all evils, and at another time choose it as a respite from the evils in life. The wise person does not deprecate life nor do does they he fear the cessation of life. The thought of life is no offense to them him, nor is the cessation of life regarded as an evil. And even as people choose of food not merely and simply the larger portion, but the more pleasant, so the wise seek to enjoy the time which is most pleasant and not merely that which is longest. And he who admonishes the young to live well and the old to make a good end speaks foolishly, not merely because of the desirability of life, but because the same exercise at once teaches to live well and to die well. Much worse is he who says that it were good not to be born, but when once one is born to pass with all speed through the gates of Hades. For if he truly believes this, why does he not depart from life? It were easy for him to do so, if once he were firmly convinced. If he speaks only in mockery, his words are foolishness, for those who hear believe him not.
13 +AND discourse shapes reality – the way we come to our conclusions define the way we orient ourselves towards all problems in society. Since the discourse of the aff is independently bad, it is an independent reason to reject the aff, regardless of what benefits renewables or anything else supposedly good the aff advocates for. Discourse spills over to all decision-making in society, the 1AC plan is only relevant to this one hyper-specific policy, thus neg discourse is key.
14 +Doty ‘97: Roxanne Lynn Doty, assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Arizona State University, Imperial Encounters, 1997, p. 169-171
15 +This study begins with the premise that representation is an inherent and important aspect of global political life and therefore a critical and legitimate area of inquiry. International relations are inextricably bound up with discursive practices-that put into circulation representations that are taken as "truth." The goal-of-analyzing these practices is not to reveal essential truths that have been obscured, but rather to examine bow certain representations underlie the production of knowledge and, identities and how these representations make various courses of action possible. AS Said (1979: 21) notes, Mere is no such thing as a delivered presence, but there is a re-presence, or representation. Such an assertion does not deny the existence of the material world, but rather suggests that material objects and subjects are constituted as such within discourse. SO, for example, when U.S. troops march into Grenada, this is certainly "real: though the march of troops across a piece of geographic space is in itself singularly uninteresting and socially irrelevant outside of the representations that produce meaning. It is only when "American" is attached to the troops and "Grenada” to the geographic space that meaning is created. What the physical behavior itself is, though, is still far from certain until discursive practices constitute it as an "invasion; a 'show of force," "training exercise, “a "rescue, “and SO on. What is "really" going on in such a situation is inextricably linked to the discourse within which it is located. To attempt a neat separation between discursive and nondiscursive practices, understanding the former as purely linguistic, assumes a series of Dichotomies – thought/reality appearance essence, mind matter, word/world, subjective/objective - that a critical genealogy calls into Question. Against this, the perspective taken here affirms the material and performative character of discourse. 'In suggesting that global politics, and specifically the aspect that has to do with relations between the North and the South, is linked to representational practices 1 am suggesting that the issues and concerns that constitute these relations occur within a 'reality' whose content has for the most part been defined by the representational practices of the ‘first world'. Focusing on discursive practices enables one to examine how the processes that produce "truth" and "knowledge" work and how they are articulated with the exercise of political, military, and economic power.
16 +The plan was already proposed in the context of the advantages and discourse of the 1AC meaning that any hypothetical implementation would be influenced by that rhetoric – it cannot be undone… this means no access to a perm.
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1 +The 1AC places faith in current institutional society and assumes that they could solve for the oppression that they talk about in the 1AC, but modern politics and ethics are morally hopeless - the state currently acts as the ultimate sovereign – it decides where and when rights are applied – no solvency for the aff. The link is their claim to solvency through a government policy plan.
2 +Agamben ‘8: Giorgio Agamben writes in “Beyond Human Rights” in 2008. Giorgio Agamben (Italian: aˈɡambɛn; born 22 April 1942) is an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, 4 form-of-life (borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein) and homo sacer. The concept of biopolitics (borrowed and adapted from Michel Foucault) informs many of his writings. http://jstor.reed.edu/stable/pdf/40644981.pdf; AB
3 +The reasons for such impotence lie not only in the selfishness and blindness of bureaucratic apparatuses, but also in the very ambiguity of the fundamental notions regulating the inscription of the native (that is, of life) in the juridical order of the nation-state. Hannah Arendt titled the chapter of her book Imperialism that concerns the refugee problem ‘The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man’. 2 One should try to take seriously this formulation, which indissolubly links the fate of the Rights of Man with the fate of the modern nation-state in such a way that the waning of the latter necessarily implies the obsolescence of the former. Here the paradox is that precisely the figure that should have embodied human rights more than any other – namely, the refugee – marked instead the radical crisis of the concept. The conception of human rights based on the supposed existence of a human being as such, Arendt tells us, proves to be untenable as soon as those who profess it find themselves confronted for the first time with people who have really lost every quality and every specific relation except for the pure fact of being human. 3 In the system of the nation-state, so-called sacred and inalienable human rights are revealed to be without any protection precisely when it is no longer possible to conceive of them as rights of the citizens of a state. This is implicit, after all, in the ambiguity of the very title of the 1789 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, in which it is unclear whether the two terms are to name two distinct realities or whether they are to form, instead, a hendiadys in which the first term is actually always already contained in the second. That there is no autonomous space in the political order of the nation-state for something like the pure human in itself is evident at the very least from the fact that, even in the best of cases, the status of refugee has always been considered a temporary condition that ought to lead either to naturalization or to repatriation. A stable statute for the human in itself is inconceivable in the law of the nation-state.
4 +THE ACT OF AFFIRMING IS AN ACT OF LINE DRAWING, SAYING THE LAW GOES TOO FAR IN THE CASE OF SPEECH CODES, BUT IS JUST RIGHT WHEN IT IS RESTRAINED ONLY BY THE CONSTITUTION, THIS FORM OF LINE DRAWING ONLY REIFIES THE STATE OF EXCEPTION, ENSNARING US IN THE TRAP OF POLITICS.
5 +Edkins and Pin-Fat 05: (Jenny Edkins, professor of international politics at Prifysgol Aberystwyth University (in Wales) and Veronique Pin-Fat, senior lecturer in politics at Manchester Universit, “Through the Wire: Relations of Power and Relations of Violence,” Millennium - Journal of International Studies 2005 34: pg. 14)
6 +One potential form of challenge to sovereign power consists of a refusal to draw any lines between zoe- and bios, inside and outside.59 As we have shown, sovereign power does not involve a power relation in Foucauldian terms. It is more appropriately considered to have become a form of governance or technique of administration through relationships of violence that reduce political subjects to mere bare or naked life. In asking for a refusal to draw lines as a possibility of challenge, then, we are not asking for the elimination of power relations and consequently, we are not asking for the erasure of the possibility of a mode of political being that is empowered and empowering, is free and that speaks: quite the opposite. Following Agamben, we are suggesting that it is only through a refusal to draw any lines at all between forms of life (and indeed, nothing less will do) that sovereign power as a form of violence can be contested and a properly political power relation (a life of power as potenza) reinstated. We could call this challenging the logic of sovereign power through refusal. Our argument is that we can evade sovereign power and reinstate a form of power relation by contesting sovereign power’s assumption of the right to draw lines, that is, by contesting the sovereign ban. Any other challenge always inevitably remains within this relationship of violence. To move outside it (and return to a power relation) we need not only to contest its right to draw lines in particular places, but also to resist the call to draw any lines of the sort sovereign power demands. The grammar of sovereign power cannot be resisted by challenging or fighting over where the lines are drawn. Whilst, of course, this is a strategy that can be deployed, it is not a challenge to sovereign power per se as it still tacitly or even explicitly accepts that lines must be drawn somewhere (and preferably more inclusively). Although such strategies contest the violence of sovereign power’s drawing of a particular line, they risk replicating such violence in demanding the line be drawn differently. This is because such forms of challenge fail to refuse sovereign power’s line-drawing ‘ethos’, an ethos which, as Agamben points out, renders us all now homines sacri or bare life. Taking Agamben’s conclusion on board, we now turn to look at how the assumption of bare life can produce forms of challenge. Agamben puts it in terms of a transformation: This biopolitical body that is bare life must itself instead be transformed into the site for the constitution and installation of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoe-.... If we give the name form-of-life to this being that is only its own bare existence and to this life that, being its own form, remains inseparable from it we will witness the emergence of a field of research beyond the terrain defined by the intersection of politics and philosophy, medico-biological sciences and jurisprudence.60
7 +The standard is demystifying the power of the state hierarchies—it’s the hope that we have for meaningful change that spills over this debate round. The judge as a critical educator has an obligation to question state biopolitical power.
8 +Gündoğdu ‘11: Ayten Gündoğdu writes in “Potentialities of human rights: Agamben and the narrative of fated necessity” on 19 July 2011. Contemporary Political Theory February 2012, Volume 11, Issue 1, pp 2–22. http://link.springer.com/article/10.10572Fcpt.2010.45; AB
9 +In his analysis of biopolitical sovereignty, Agamben provides us with what might be called a counternarrative of Western politics with the explicitly stated goal of ‘unveiling’ or ‘unmasking’ what has become mystified, hidden, secret or invisible, particularly with the prevalence of contractarian accounts of political power (1998, p. 8; 2005, p. 88). Agamben describes this critical task in terms of ‘disenchantment’, or the ‘patient work’ of unmasking the fiction or myth that covers up and sustains the violence of sovereignty (2005, p. 88). What underlies this urge to demystify and unveils is a particular understanding of myth as a deceptive narrative naturalizing and legitimizing violence in the name of the preservation of life. I use the term ‘counternarrative’ to call attention to what Agamben's account aims to do6: This is a critical analysis, as Agamben himself insists, that does not offer ‘historiographical theses or reconstructions’ but instead treats some historical phenomena as ‘paradigms’ so as to ‘make intelligible a broader historical-problematic context;’ to do this, it proceeds at ‘a historico-philosophical level’ (1998, p. 11; 2009, p. 9). In that sense, it is not an account that claims historical accuracy or factual verifiability. This is a crucial point that is sometimes overlooked by Agamben's critics who call into question his inaccurate treatment of historical phenomena such as the concentration camps.7 In addition, ‘counternarrative’ draws our attention to the inventive dimensions of Agamben's endeavor; as one of his critics aptly (though disapprovingly) puts it, ‘Agamben does not discover a concealed biopolitical paradigm stretching back to fourth-century Athens; rather he invents one’ (Finlayson, 2010, p. 116). The invention of a counternarrative of Western politics involves literary devices (e.g. hyperbole), which aim to provoke the readers and persuade them to abandon any politics centered on modern concepts such as sovereignty, rights and citizenship (LaCapra, 2007; cf. de la Durantaye, 2009). In analyzing Agamben's account as a ‘counternarrative’, I aim to attend to the goals that it sets for itself. It is these goals – particularly the goal of freeing human potentialities from myths that render the contingent necessary and mask other possibilities – that provide the starting point for my critical engagement with Agamben. Instead of resorting to an ‘outside’ – whether this be an alternative historical account or another theoretical tradition – I aim to read Agamben on his own terms, and suggest that as he tries to free human potentialities from contractarian myths, he might be entrapping them in another myth that ends up casting the contingent as necessary. Agamben's counternarrative of Western politics aims to uncover what has become hidden or invisible with ‘our modern habit of representing the political realm in terms of citizens’ rights, free will, and social contracts’ (1998, p. 106). Its main target is the contractarian accounts of sovereign power. As he identifies the production of bare life as the originary or foundational activity grounding sovereign power (1998, pp. 6, 83), he particularly aims to question the social contractarian ‘myth’ that covers up sovereign violence (1998, p. 109). After unveiling the foundational myths of Western politics, Agamben concludes that we cannot effectively respond to ‘the bloody mystification of a new planetary order’ if we let these myths continue to obstruct our political imagination (1998, p. 12). With his counternarrative presenting a catastrophic view of the historical present – a view that emphasizes how exception has become the rule, camp has become the paradigmatic structure organizing political space, and we have all virtually become homines sacri (1998, pp. 38, 176, 111) – Agamben aims to convince his readers of the need to think of a ‘nonstatal and nonjuridical politics and human life’ (2000, p. 112). This new politics requires the renunciation of concepts associated with sovereignty – for example, state, rights, citizenship. The contemporary predicament cannot be remedied by a return to conventional political categories and institutions, Agamben suggests, since these are deeply involved in the creation of this catastrophe in the first place. Almost anticipating his critics who would be puzzled by his renunciation of rights and rule of law at a time when the problem of legal dispossession increasingly threatens populations around the world, he explicitly states that the response to the current permanent state of exception cannot consist in confining it within constitutional boundaries and reaffirming the primacy of legal norms and rights (2005, p. 87).8 As legal norms and rights are ultimately grounded in the originary violence of separating a bare life, legal dispossession is already inscribed in them as an inescapable condition. Neither the liberal remedy of reasserting the rule of law, nor the Derridean strategy of ‘infinite negotiations’ with a law that is in force without any significance, are viable options (2005, p. 87; 1998, p. 54). Both are futile, if not lethally dangerous, endeavors.9 The only politically tenable option, Agamben contends, is to move out of sovereignty with ‘a complicated and patient strategy’ of getting the ‘door of the Law closed forever’ (1998, pp. 54, 55)
10 +THIS MEANS THAT 1. THE AC DOESN’T MEET ROLE OF THE BALLOT, THERE IS NO COUNTERNARRATIVE BEING OFFERED, ONLY THE SAME MECHANISM THAT HAS BEEN HISTORICALLY USED THAT DOESN’T CHALLENGE THE STATE AND 2. AC MAKES THE ISSUE WORSE. MY EVIDENCE INDICATES THAT WORKING THROUGH THE LAW IS A WAY THAT THE STATE LEGITIMIZES ITSELF.
11 +THE ALTERNATIVE IS TO ENDORSE DESTITUENT POWER. POLITICAL NIHILISM DIVEST HOPE IN THE POLITICAL, THE DISCOURSE OF THE AC SITUATES OUR SOLUTION TO THE STATE OF EXPECTION INSIDE OF THE MECHANISM THAT CREATES THAT EXPECTION, THE NC ALLOWS US TO THINK OUTSIDE OF THE STATE
12 +Refusing attempts to reform the legal system dooms it to its own nihilistic destruction. We should instead consider the emergence of whatever-singularity, an acceptance of bare life instead of reforming it.
13 +Prozorov 10. Sergei Prozorov, professor of political and economic studies at the University of Helsinki, “Why Giorgio Agamben is an optimist,” Philosophy Social Criticism 2010 36: pg. 106
14 +In a later work, Agamben generalizes this logic and transforms it into a basic ethical imperative of his work: ‘There is often nothing reprehensible about the individual behavior in itself, and it can, indeed, express a liberatory intent. What is disgraceful – both politically and morally – are the apparatuses which have diverted it from their possible use. We must always wrest from the apparatuses – from all apparatuses – the possibility of use that they have captured.’32 As we shall discuss in the following section, this is to be achieved by a subtraction of ourselves from these apparatuses, which leaves them in a jammed, inoperative state. What is crucial at this point is that the apparatuses of nihilism themselves prepare their demise by emptying out all positive content of the forms-of-life they govern and increasingly running on ‘empty’, capable only of (inflict- ing) Death or (doing) Nothing.¶ On the other hand, this degradation of the apparatuses illuminates the ‘inoperosity’ (worklessness) of the human condition, whose originary status Agamben has affirmed from his earliest works onwards.33 By rendering void all historical forms-of-life, nihi- lism brings to light the absence of work that characterizes human existence, which, as irreducibly potential, logically presupposes the lack of any destiny, vocation, or task that it must be subjected to: ‘Politics is that which corresponds to the essential inoperability of humankind, to the radical being-without-work of human communities. There is pol- itics because human beings are argos-beings that cannot be defined by any proper oper- ation, that is, beings of pure potentiality that no identity or vocation can possibly exhaust.’34¶ Having been concealed for centuries by religion or ideology, this originary inoperos- ity is fully unveiled in the contemporary crisis, in which it is manifest in the inoperative character of the biopolitical apparatuses themselves, which succeed only in capturing the sheer existence of their subjects without being capable of transforming it into a positive form-of-life:¶ Today, it is clear for anyone who is not in absolutely bad faith that there are no longer historical tasks that can be taken on by, or even simply assigned to, men. It was evident start- ing with the end of the First World War that the European nation-states were no longer capa- ble of taking on historical tasks and that peoples themselves were bound to disappear.35¶ Agamben’s metaphor for this condition is bankruptcy: ‘One of the few things that can be¶ declared with certainty is that all the peoples of Europe (and, perhaps, all the peoples of the Earth) have gone bankrupt’.36 Thus, the destructive nihilistic drive of the biopolitical machine and the capitalist spectacle has itself done all the work of emptying out positive forms-of-life, identities and vocations, leaving humanity in the state of destitution that Agamben famously terms ‘bare life’. Yet, this bare life, whose essence is entirely con- tained in its existence, is precisely what conditions the emergence of the subject of the coming politics: ‘this biopolitical body that is bare life must itself be transformed into the site for the constitution and installation of a form-of-life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoe.’37¶ The ‘happy’ form-of-life, a ‘life that cannot be segregated from its form’, is nothing but bare life that has reappropriated itself as its own form and for this reason is no longer separated between the (degraded) bios of the apparatuses and the (endangered) zoe that functions as their foundation.38 Thus, what the nihilistic self-destruction of the appara- tuses of biopolitics leaves as its residue turns out to be the entire content of a new form-of-life. Bare life, which is, as we recall, ‘nothing reprehensible’ aside from its con- finement within the apparatuses, is reappropriated as a ‘whatever singularity’, a being that is only its manner of being, its own ‘thus’.39 It is the dwelling of humanity in this irreducibly potential ‘whatever being’ that makes possible the emergence of a generic non-exclusive community without presuppositions, in which Agamben finds the possi- bility of a happy life.¶ If instead of continuing to search for a proper identity in the already improper and sense- less form of individuality, humans were to succeed in belonging to this impropriety as such, in making of the proper being-thus not an identity and individual property but a singularity without identity, a common and absolutely exposed singularity, then they would for the first time enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects.40¶ Thus, rather than seek to reform the apparatuses, we should simply leave them to their self-destruction and only try to reclaim the bare life that they feed on. This is to be achieved by the practice of subtraction that we address in the following section.¶
15 +This divestment is the only solution to the state of exception – a complete rejection of the affirmative’s political futurity to find a new place for being within the world.
16 +Caldwell 4, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Louisville (Anne, “Bio-Sovereignty and the Emergence of Humanity” https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v007/7.2caldwell.html#authbio)
17 +Agamben's alternative is therefore radical. He does not contest particular aspects of the tradition. He does not suggest we expand the range of rights available to life. He does not call us to deconstruct a tradition whose power lies in its indeterminate status.21 Instead, he suggests we take leave of the tradition and all its terms. Whatever being is a life that defies the classifications of the tradition, and its reduction of all forms of life to homo sacer. Whatever being therefore has no common ground, no presuppositions, and no particular attributes. It cannot be broken into discrete parts; it has no essence to be separated from its attributes; and it has no common substrate of existence defining its relation to others. Whatever being cannot then be broken down into some common element of life to which additive series of rights would then be attached. Whatever being retains all its properties, without any of them constituting a different valuation of life (1993: 18.9). As a result, whatever being is "reclaimed from its having this or that property, which identifies it as belonging to this or that set, to this or that class (the reds, the French, the Muslims) ~-~- and it is reclaimed not for another class nor for the simple generic absence of any belonging, but for its being-such, for belonging itself." (0.1-1.2). We should pay attention to this comparison. For what Agamben suggests is that whatever being is not any abstract, inaccessible life, perhaps promised to us in the future. Whatever being, should we care to see it, is all around us, wherever we reject the criteria sovereign power would use to classify and value life. "In the final instance the State can recognize any claim for identity ~-~- even that of a State identity within the State . . . What the State cannot tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without a representable condition of belonging" (Agamben 1993:85.6). At every point where we refuse the distinctions sovereignty and the state would demand of us, the possibility of a non-state world, made up of whatever life, appears.
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1 +The aff advocacy takes the wrong approach – our role as intellectuals is not to offer prescriptive solutions, rather it is to offer analyses that expose harmful powers and expose them to light, this is a pre-req to policy making
2 +Jones ‘99: Richard Wyn Jones, Professor International Politics @ Aberystwyth University, ‘99 (Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory, p. 155-163)
3 +The central political task of the intellectuals is to aid in the construction of a counterhegemony and thus undermine the prevailing patterns of discourse and interaction that make up the currently dominant hegemony. This task is accomplished through educational activity, because, as Gramsci argues, “every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic relationship” (Gramsci 1971: 350). Discussing the relationship of the “philosophy of praxis” to political practice, Gramsci claims: It the theory does not tend to leave the “simple” in their primitive philosophy of common sense, but rather to lead them to a higher conception of life. If it affirms the need for contact between intellectuals and “simple” it is not in order to restrict scientific activity and preserve unity at the low level of the masses, but precisely in order to construct an intellectual-moral bloc which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only of small intellectual groups. (Gramsci 1971: 332-333). According to Gramsci, this attempt to construct an alternative “intellectual-moral bloc” should take place under the auspices of the Communist Party – a body he described as the “modern prince.” Just as Niccolo Machiavelli hoped to see a prince unite Italy, rid the country of foreign barbarians, and create a virtu-ous state, Gramsci believed that the modern price could lead the working class on its journey toward its revolutionary destiny of an emancipated society (Gramsci 1971: 125-205). Gramsci’s relative optimism about the possibility of progressive theorists playing a constructive role in emancipatory political practice was predicated on his belief in the existence of a universal class (a class whose emancipation would inevitably presage the emancipation of humanity itself) with revolutionary potential. It was a gradual loss of faith in this axiom that led Horkheimer and Adorno to their extremely pessimistic prognosis about the possibilities of progressive social change. But does a loss of faith in the revolutionary vocation of the proletariat necessarily lead to the kind of quietism ultimately embraced by the first generation of the Frankfurt School? The conflict that erupted in the 1960s between them and their more radical students suggests not. Indeed, contemporary critical theorists claim that the deprivileging of the role of the proletariat in the struggle for emancipation is actually a positive move. Class remains a very important axis of domination in society, but it is not the only such axis (Fraser 1995). Nor is it valid to reduce all other forms of domination – for example, in the case of gender – to class relations, as orthodox Marxists tend to do. To recognize these points is not only a first step toward the development of an analysis of forms of exploitation and exclusion within society that is more attuned to social reality; it is also a realization that there are other forms of emancipatory politics than those associated with class conflict.1 This in turn suggests new possibilities and problems for emancipatory theory. Furthermore, the abandonment of faith in revolutionary parties is also a positive development. The history of the European left during the twentieth century provides myriad examples of the ways in which the fetishization of party organizations has led to bureaucratic immobility and the confusion of means with ends (see, for example, Salvadori 1990). The failure of the Bolshevik experiment illustrates how disciplined, vanguard parties are an ideal vehicle for totalitarian domination (Serge 1984). Faith in the “infallible party” has obviously been the source of strength and comfort to many in this period and, as the experience of the southern Wales coalfield demonstrates, has inspired brave and progressive behavior (see, for example, the account of support for the Spanish Republic in Francis 1984). But such parties have so often been the enemies of emancipation that they should be treated with the utmost caution. Parties are necessary, but their fetishization is potentially disastrous. History furnishes examples of progressive developments that have been positively influenced by organic intellectuals operating outside the bounds of a particular party structure (G. Williams 1984). Some of these developments have occurred in the particularly intractable realm of security. These examples may be considered as “resources of hope” for critical security studies (R. Williams 1989). They illustrate that ideas are important or, more correctly, that change is the product of the dialectical interaction of ideas and material reality. One clear security-related example of the role of critical thinking and critical thinkers in aiding and abetting progressive social change is the experience of the peace movement of the 1980s. At that time the ideas of dissident defense intellectuals (the “alternative defense” school) encouraged and drew strength from peace activism. Together they had an effect not only on short-term policy but on the dominant discourses of strategy and security, a far more important result in the long run. The synergy between critical security intellectuals and critical social movements and the potential influence of both working in tandem can be witnessed particularly clearly in the fate of common security. As Thomas Risse-Kappen points out, the term “common security” originated in the contribution of peace researchers to the German security debate of the 1970s (Risse-Kappen 1994: 186ff.); it was subsequently popularized by the Palme Commission report (Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues 1982). Initially, mainstream defense intellectuals dismissed the concept as hopelessly idealistic; it certainly had no place in their allegedly hardheaded and realist view of the world. However, notions of common security were taken up by a number of different intellectuals communities, including the liberal arms control community in the United States, Western European peace researchers, security specialists in the center-left political parties of Western Europe, and Soviet “institutchiks” – members of the influential policy institutes in the Soviet Union such as the United States of America and Canada Institute (Landau 1996: 52-54; Risse-Kappen 1994: 196-200; Kaldor 1995; Spencer 1995). These communities were subsequently able to take advantage of public pressure exerted through social movements in order to gain broader acceptance for common security. In Germany, for example, “in response to social movement pressure, German social organizations such as churches and trade unions quickly supported the ideas promoted by peace researchers and the SPD” (Risse-Kappen 1994: 207). Similar pressures even had an effect on the Reagan administration. As Risse-Kappen notes: When the Reagan administration brought hard-liners into power, the US arms control community was removed from policy influence. It was the American peace movement and what became known as the “freeze campaign” that revived the arms control process together with pressure from the European allies. (Risse-Kappen 1994: 205; also Cortright 1993: 90-110). Although it would be difficult to sustain a claim that the combination of critical movements and intellectuals persuaded the Reagan government to adopt the rhetoric and substance of common security in its entirety, it is clear that it did at least have a substantial impact on ameliorating U.S. behavior. The most dramatic and certainly the most unexpected impact of alternative defense ideas was felt in the Soviet Union. Through various East-West links, which included arms control institutions, Pugwash conferences, interparty contacts, and even direct personal links, a coterie of Soviet policy analysts and advisers were drawn toward common security and such attendant notions as “nonoffensive defense” (these links are detailed in Evangelista 1995; Kaldor 1995; Checkel 1993; Risse-Kappen 1994; Landau 1996 and Spencer 1995 concentrate on the role of the Pugwash conferences). This group, including Palme Commission member Georgii Arbatov, Pugwash attendee Andrei Kokoshin , and Sergei Karaganov, a senior adviser who was in regular contact with the Western peace researchers Anders Boserup and Lutz Unterseher (Risse-Kappen 1994: 203), then influenced Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s subsequent championing of common security may be attributed to several factors. It is clear, for example, that new Soviet leadership had a strong interest in alleviating tensions in East-West relations in order to facilitate much-needed domestic reforms (“the interaction of ideas and material reality”). But what is significant is that the Soviets’ commitment to common security led to significant changes in force sizes and postures. These in turn aided in the winding down of the Cold War, the end of Soviet domination over Eastern Europe, and even the collapse of Russian control over much of the territory of the former Soviet Union. At the present time, in marked contrast to the situation in the early 1980s, common security is part of the common sense of security discourse. As MccGwire points out, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (a common defense pact) is using the rhetoric of common security in order to justify its expansion into Eastern Europe (MccGwire 1997). This points to an interesting and potentially important aspect of the impact of ideas on politics. As concepts such as common security, and collective security before it (Claude 1984: 223-260), are adopted by governments and military services, they inevitably become somewhat debased. The hope is that enough of the residual meaning can survive to shift the parameters of the debate in a potentially progressive direction. Moreover, the adoption of the concept of common security by official circles provides critics with a useful tool for (immanently) critiquing aspects of security policy (as MccGwire 1997 demonsrates in relation to NATO expansion). The example of common security is highly instructive. First, it indicates that critical intellectuals can be politically engaged and play a role – a significant one at that – in making the world a better and safer place. Second, it points to potential future addressees for critical international theory in general, and critical security studies in particular. Third, it also underlines the role of ideas in the evolution in society. CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES AND THE THEORY-PRACTICE NEXUS Although most proponents of critical security studies reject aspects of Gramsci’s theory of organic intellectuals, in particular his exclusive concentration on class and his emphasis on the guiding role of the party, the desire for engagement and relevance must remain at the heart of their project. The example of the peace movement suggests that critical theorists can still play the role of organic intellectuals and that this organic relationship need not confine itself to a single class; it can involve alignment with different coalitions of social movements that campaign on an issue or a series of issues pertinent to the struggle for emancipation (Shaw 1994b; R. Walker 1994). Edward Said captures this broader orientation when he suggests that critical intellectuals “are always tied to and ought to remain an organic part of an ongoing experience in society: of the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless” (Said 1994: 84). In the specific case of critical security studies, this means placing the experience of those men and women and communities for whom the present world order is a cause of insecurity rather than security at the center of the agenda and making suffering humanity rather than raison d’etat the prism through which problems are viewed. Here the project stands full-square within the critical theory tradition. If “all theory is for someone and for some purpose,” then critical security studies is for “the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless,” and its purpose is their emancipation. The theoretical implications of this orientation have already been discussed in the previous chapters. They involve a fundamental reconceptualization of security with a shift in referent object and a broadening of the range of issues considered as a legitimate part of the discourse. They also involve a reconceptualization of strategy within this expanded notion of security. But the question remains at the conceptual level of how these alternative types of theorizing – even if they are self-consciously aligned to the practices of critical or new social movements, such as peace activism, the struggle for human rights, and the survival of minority cultures – can become “a force for the direction of action.” Again, Gramsci’s work is insightful. In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci advances a sophisticated analysis of how dominant discourses play a vital role in upholding particular political and economic orders, or, in Gramsci’s terminology, “historic blocs” (Gramsci 1971: 323-377). Gramsci adopted Machiavelli’s view of power as a centaur, ahlf man, half beast: a mixture of consent and coercion. Consent is produced and reproduced by a ruling hegemony that holds sway through civil society and takes on the status of common sense; it becomes subconsciously accepted and even regarded as beyond question. Obviously, for Gramsci, there is nothing immutable about the values that permeate society; they can and do change. In the social realm, ideas and institutions that were once seen as natural and beyond question (i.e., commonsensical) in the West, such as feudalism and slavery, are now seen as anachronistic, unjust, and unacceptable. In Marx’s well-worn phrase, “All that is solid melts into the air.” Gramsci’s intention is to harness this potential for change and ensure that it moves in the direction of emancipation. To do this he suggests a strategy of a “war of position” (Gramsci 1971: 229-239). Gramsci argues that in states with developed civil societies, such as those in Western liberal democracies, any successful attempt at progressive social change requires a slow, incremental, even molecular, struggle to break down the prevailing hegemony and construct an alternative counterhegemony to take its place. Organic intellectuals have a crucial role to play in this process by helping to undermine the “natural,” “commonsense,” internalized nature of the status quo. This in turn helps create political space within which alternative conceptions of politics can be developed and new historic blocs created. I contend that Gramsci’s strategy of a war of position suggests an appropriate model for proponents of critical security studies to adopt in relating their theorizing to political practice. THE TASKS OF CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES If the project of critical security studies is conceived in terms of war of position, then the main task of those intellectuals who align themselves with the enterprise is to attempt to undermine the prevailing hegemonic security discourse. This may be accomplished by utilizing specialist information and expertise to engage in an immanent critique of the prevailing security regimes, that is, comparing the justifications of those regimes with actual outcomes. When this is attempted in the security field, the prevailing structures and regimes are found to fail grievously on their own terms. Such an approach also involves challenging the pronouncements of those intellectuals, traditional or organic, whose views serve to legitimate, and hence reproduce, the prevailing world order. This challenge entails teasing out the often subconscious and certainly unexamined assumptions that underlie their arguments while drawing attention to the normative viewpoints that are smuggled into mainstream thinking about security behind its positivist façade. In this sense, proponents of critical security studies approximate to Foucault’s notion of “specific intellectuals” who use their expert knowledge to challenge the prevailing “regime of truth” (Foucault 1980: 132). However, critical theorists might wish to reformulate this sentiment along more familiar Quaker lines of “speaking truth to power” (this sentiment is also central to Said 1994) or even along the eisteddfod lines of speaking “truth against the world.” Of course, traditional strategists can, and indeed do, sometimes claim a similar role. Colin S. Gray, for example, states that “strategists must be prepared to ‘speak truth to power’” (Gray 1982a: 193). But the difference between Gray and proponents of critical security studies is that, whereas the former seeks to influence policymakers in particular directions without questioning the basis of their power, the latter aim at a thoroughgoing critique of all that traditional security studies has taken for granted. Furthermore, critical theorists base their critique on the presupposition, elegantly stated by Adorno, that “the need to lend suffering a voice is the precondition of all truth” (cited in Jameson 1990: 66). The aim of critical security studies in attempting to undermine the prevailing orthodoxy is ultimately educational. As Gramsci notes, “every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic relationship” (Gramsci 1971: 350; see also the discussion of critical pedagogy in Neufeld 1995: 116-121). Thus, by criticizing the hegemonic discourse and advancing alternative conceptions of security based on different understandings of human potentialities, the approach is simultaneously playing apart in eroding the legitimacy of the ruling historic bloc and contributing to the development of a counterhegemonic position. There are a number of avenues of avenues open to critical security specialists in pursuing this educational strategy. As teachers, they can try to foster and encourage skepticism toward accepted wisdom and open minds to other possibilities. They can also take advantage of the seemingly unquenchable thirst of the media for instant pundistry to forward alternative views onto a broader stage. Nancy Fraser argues: “As teachers, we try to foster an emergent pedagogical counterculture …. As critical public intellectuals we try to inject our perspectives into whatever cultural or political public spheres we have access to” (Fraser 1989: 11). Perhaps significantly, support for this type of emancipatory strategy can even be found in the work of the ultrapessimistic Adorno, who argues: In the history of civilization there have been not a few instances when delusions were healed not by focused propaganda, but, in the final analysis, because scholars, with their unobtrusive yet insistent work habits, studied what lay at the root of the delusion. (cited in Kellner 1992: vii) Such “unobtrusive yet insistent work” does not in itself create the social change to which Adorno alludes. The conceptual and the practical dangers of collapsing practice into theory must be guarded against. Rather, through their educational activities, proponent of critical security studies should aim to provide support for those social movements that promote emancipatory social change. By providing a critique of the prevailing order and legitimating alternative views, critical theorists can perform a valuable role in supporting the struggles of social movements. That said, the role of theorists is not to direct and instruct those movements with which they are aligned; instead, the relationship is reciprocal. The experience of the European, North American, and Antipodean peace movements of the 1980s shows how influential social movements can become when their efforts are harnessed to the intellectual and educational activity of critical thinkers. For example, in his account of New Zealand’s antinuclear stance in the 1980s, Michael C. Pugh cites the importance of the visits of critical intellectuals such as Helen Caldicott and Richard Falk in changing the country’s political climate and encouraging the growth of the antinuclear movement (Pugh 1989: 108; see also COrtright 1993: 5-13). In the 1980s peace movements and critical intellectuals interested in issues of security and strategy drew strength and succor from each other’s efforts. If such critical social movements do not exist, then this creates obvious difficulties for the critical theorist. But even under these circumstances, the theorist need not abandon all hope of an eventual orientation toward practice. Once again, the peace movement of the 1980s provides evidence of the possibilities. At that time, the movement benefited from the intellectual work undertaken in the lean years of the peace movement in the late 1970s. Some of the theories and concepts developed then, such as common security and nonoffensive defense, were eventually taken up even in the Kremlin and played a significant role in defusing the second Cold War. Those ideas developed in the 1970s can be seen in Adornian terms of the a “message in a bottle,” but in this case, contra Adorno’s expectations, they were picked up and used to support a program of emancipatory political practice. Obviously, one would be naïve to understate the difficulties facing those attempting to develop alternative critical approaches within academia. Some of these problems have been alluded to already and involve the structural constraints of academic life itself. Said argues that many problems are caused by what he describes as the growing “professionalisation” of academic life (Said 1994: 49-62). Academics are now so constrained by the requirements of job security and marketability that they are extremely risk-averse. It pays – in all senses – to stick with the crowd and avoid the exposed limb by following the prevalent disciplinary preoccupations, publish in certain prescribed journals, and so on. The result is the navel gazing so prevalent in the study of international relations and the seeming inability of security specialists to deal with the changes brought about by the end of the Cold War (Kristensen 1997 highlights the search of U.S. nuclear planners for “new targets for old weapons”). And, of course, the pressures for conformism are heightened in the field of security studies when governments have a very real interest in marginalizing dissent. Nevertheless, opportunities for critical thinking do exist, and this thinking can connect with the practices of social movements and become a “force for the direction of action.” The experience of the 1980s, when, in the depths of the second Cold War, critical thinkers risked demonization and in some countries far worse in order to challenge received wisdom, thus arguably playing a crucial role in the very survival of the human race, should act as both an inspiration and a challenge to critical security studies.
4 +Second, the knowledge claims of the AC are the jumping off point for the debate – our framework provides a more reasonable neg burden. When a student turns in an F paper, no teacher has an obligation to write an entirely new paper to show it was bad – pointing out major academic deficiencies would justify failing the paper – the ballot asks who did the better debating, so if their analysis is wrong, they haven’t.
5 +The negative authors dogmatically view the world from the point of the dominant but flawed ontology. The neg’s so called “intellectuals” jobs depend on them representing capital as benevolent and inevitable. Their framework is an attempt to make the debate space a training ground for a new generation passive participants in the machinery of the state.
6 +Lambie ‘10: – Ph.D., joint-editor of the International Journal of Cuban Studies, and Lecturer in Public Policy at De Montfort University (George Lambie, “The Cuban Revolution in the 21st Century”, Pluto Press, pg. 150-152) //AB
7 +It is interesting that when most academics analyse revolutions and transformative processes, they focus almost exclusively on leaders. In turn, they seek to interpret the ideas and actions of these prominent figures based on the influence of other elites. These factors are important, but must be recognised as only partial explanations for most instances of significant socio-economic change. The issue of the role of intellectuals in society, and exactly what constitutes intellectual formation, is a complex debate (Lambie 2000). However, on the specific issue of academic approaches to leaders, the difficulty lies ultimately in the ideological composition of the academics themselves, which is rooted in the dominant ontology, one that emphasises individualism, elite leadership and an immutable order of human nature. Given this perspective, it is difficult to imagine a set of ideas or a consciousness emerging out of what seems to be thin air. From the ridicule of Marx’s observations on the autonomy of workers in the Paris Commune, to contemporary views that see socialism as utopian, there is an ideological intolerance of any idea that defies the implicit ontological parameters of liberalism. When the dominant liberal interpretive framework does encounter what appears to be spontaneous action and organisation at the grassroots level, it sees this in terms of civil society freeing itself from the state, and as an expression of self-help. This view is theorised in Hernando de Soto’s work The Other Path (1989), which interprets the survival strategies of the poor in developing countries as a blossoming of individual initiative. A similar ideological perspective permeates much of the NGO philosophy, with its emphasis on micro-credit and market-orientated initiatives to resolve problems in civil society without the involvement of the state. This kind of thinking also informs much of the policy-driven theory that dominates sections of academia in Western countries. For instance, as procedural democracies such as the UK struggle to deal with the ‘democratic deficit’, and governments become concerned about political legitimacy, policies are devised to enhance ‘participation’ and ‘citizenship’ in an attempt to give substance to liberal hegemony. Lack of ‘participation’ or understanding of ‘citizenship’ is seen as an educational issue, and citizens have to be instructed and ‘enabled’ by policy makers and academics to realise their ‘democratic’ rights. At its core, this is nothing more than a thinly concealed indoctrina- tion exercise to impose the rule of the market onto the organisation of local structures. Commenting on the role of academics and intellectuals in general, Wayne (2003:23–24) points out: One way in which intellectuals have attempted to explain their social role has been to depoliticise what it means to be elaborators and disseminators of ideas. This involves uncoupling knowledge production from vested social interests, defining professionalism as rising above the social conflict between capital and labour, and instead promoting ‘objectivity’ and ‘rationality’ as the very essence of what it is that intellectuals do ... the ideology of ‘objectivity’ has, under the guise of working for all humanity, justified their role to capitalists ... This attitude concerning the role of academics and intellectuals was famously defended by the French writer Romain Roland after the First World War, in his work Au-dessus de la mêlée (‘Above the Battle’) (1915). Roland’s position may be justified if one argues that the shock and horror of war temporarily divested life of meaning in the minds of rational people, and retreat into the ivory tower became a mode of defence against this malaise. However, modern intellectuals have no such excuse, and have increasingly become apparatchiks of a knowledge-production system that is driven by money, career climbing and prestige, all of which can be attained through conformity. Ultimately, only by grasping the idea that human nature is not immutable can one transcend these intellectual limitations and imagine the unimaginable. Martí, Guevara, Castro and other Cuban leaders understood this intellectually and intuitively, both by participating in the historical process themselves, and by not losing touch with the masses. Of course, the Cuban political process has fluctuated in the emphasis it has given to leadership or to participation, but the two have interacted more fully and more continuously than has been seen in any other country.
8 +Their framework crowds out deliberation and turns decision making. Focusing solely on implementation cannot effectively challenge the state; analysis is key.
9 +Adaman and Madra ‘12: – Adaman: economic professor at Bogazici University in Istanbul; Madra: has a PhD from University of Massachusetts Amherst, and is an economics professor Fikret and Yahya. “Understanding Neoliberalism as Economization: The Case of the Ecology”. http://ideas.repec.org/p/bou/wpaper/2012-04.html.
10 +Neoliberal reason is therefore not simply about market expansion and the withdrawal of the welfare state, but more broadly about reconfiguring the state and its functions so that the state governs its subjects through a filter of economic incentives rather than direct coercion. In other words, supposed subjects of the neoliberal state are not citizen-subjects with political and social rights, but rather economic subjects who are supposed to comprehend (hence, calculative) and respond predictably (hence, calculable) to economic incentives (and disincentives). There are mainly two ways in which states under the sway of neoliberal reason aim to manipulate the conduct of their subjects. The first is through markets, or market-like incentive-compatible institutional mechanisms that economic experts design based on the behaviorist assumption that economic agents respond predictably to economic (but not necessarily pecuniary) incentives, to achieve certain discrete objectives. The second involves a revision of the way the bureaucracy functions. Here, the neoliberal reason functions as an internal critique of the way bureaucratic dispositifs organize themselves: The typical modus operandi of this critique is to submit the bureaucracy to efficiency audits and subsequently advocate the subcontracting of various functions of the state to the private sector either by fullblown privatization or by public-private partnerships. While in the first case citizen-subjects are treated solely as economic beings, in the second case the state is conceived as an enterprise, i.e., a production unit, an economic agency whose functions are persistently submitted to various forms of economic auditing, thereby suppressing all other (social, political, ecological) priorities through a permanent economic criticism. Subcontracting, public-private partnerships, and privatization are all different mechanisms through which contemporary governments embrace the discourses and practices of contemporary multinational corporations. In either case, however, economic policy decisions (whether they involve macroeconomic or microeconomic matters) are isolated from public debate and deliberation, and treated as matters of technocratic design and implementation, while regulation, to the extent it is warranted, is mostly conducted by experts outside political life—the so-called independent regulatory agencies. In the process, democratic participation in decision-making is either limited to an already highly-commodified, spectacularized, mediatized electoral politics, or to the calculus of opinion polls where consumer discontent can be managed through public relations experts. As a result, a highly reductionist notion of economic efficiency ends up being the only criteria with which to measure the success or failure of such decisions. Meanwhile, individuals with financial means are free to provide support to those in need through charity organizations or corporations via their social responsibility channels. Here, two related caveats should be noted to sharpen the central thrust of the argument proposed in this chapter. First, the separation of the economic sphere from the social-ecological whole is not an ontological given, but rather a political project. By treating social subjectivity solely in economic terms and deliberately trying to insulate policy-making from popular politics and democratic participation, the neoliberal project of economization makes a political choice. Since there are no economic decisions without a multitude of complex and over-determined social consequences, the attempt to block (through economization) all political modes of dissent, objection and negotiation available (e.g., “voice”) to those who are affected from the said economic decisions is itself a political choice. In short, economization is itself a political project. Yet, this drive towards technocratization and economization—which constitutes the second caveat—does not mean that the dirty and messy distortions of politics are gradually being removed from policy-making. On the contrary, to the extent that policy making is being insulated from popular and democratic control, it becomes exposed to the “distortions” of a politics of rent-seeking and speculation—ironically, as predicted by the representatives of the Virginia School. Most public-private partnerships are hammered behind closed doors of a bureaucracy where states and multinational corporations divide the economic rent among themselves. The growing concentration of capital at the global scale gives various industries (armament, chemical, health care, petroleum, etc.—see, e.g., Klein, 2008) enormous amount of leverage over the governments (especially the developing ones). It is extremely important, however, to note that this tendency toward rent-seeking is not a perversion of the neoliberal reason. For much of neoliberal theory (in particular, for the Austrian and the Chicago schools), private monopolies and other forms of concentration of capital are preferred to government control and ownership. And furthermore, for some (such as the Virginia and the Chicago schools), rent-seeking is a natural implication of the “opportunism” of human beings, even though neoliberal thinkers disagree whether rent-seeking is essentially economically efficient (as in “capture” theories of the Chicago school imply) or inefficient (as in rent-seeking theories of the Virginia school imply) (Madra and Adaman, 2010). This reconfiguration of the way modern states in advanced capitalist social formations govern the social manifests itself in all domains of public and social policy-making. From education to health, and employment to insurance, there is an observable shift from rights-based policymaking forged through public deliberation and participation, to policy-making based solely on economic viability where policy issues are treated as matters of technocratic calculation. In this regard, as noted above, the treatment of subjectivity solely in behaviorist terms of economic incentives functions as the key conceptual choice that makes the technocratization of public policy possible. Neoliberal thinking and practices certainly have a significant impact on the ecology. The next section will focus on the different means through which various forms of neoliberal governmentality propose and actualize the economization of the ecology.
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1 +Sunset bhat Neg
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1 +JF - Discourse First FW
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1 +Stanford
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1 +Interpretation: The aff must defend and can only garner offense from the desirability of the hypothetical enactment of the resolution.
2 +Most predictable—the agent and verb indicate a debate about hypothetical action
3 +Ericson ‘3: (Jon M., Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts – California Polytechnic U., et al., The Debater’s Guide, Third Edition, p. 4)
4 +The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In policy propositions, each topic contains certain key elements, although they have slightly different functions from comparable elements of value-oriented propositions. 1. An agent doing the acting ~-~~-~-“The United States” in “The United States should adopt a policy of free trade.” Like the object of evaluation in a proposition of value, the agent is the subject of the sentence. 2. The verb should—the first part of a verb phrase that urges action. 3. An action verb to follow should in the should-verb combination. For example, should adopt here means to put a program or policy into action though governmental means. 4. A specification of directions or a limitation of the action desired. The phrase free trade, for example, gives direction and limits to the topic, which would, for example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs, discussing diplomatic recognition, or discussing interstate commerce. Propositions of policy deal with future action. Nothing has yet occurred. The entire debate is about whether something ought to occur. What you agree to do, then, when you accept the affirmative side in such a debate is to offer sufficient and compelling reasons for an audience to perform the future action that you propose.
5 +Violation: CX confirms that they’re not defending res.
6 +Standards:
7 +1) Procedural Fairness ~-~~-~- affirming the predetermined subject of the resolution is a prior question to substantive debate because the aff can’t just determine what we’re debating about ~-~~-~- if they run a racism bad aff without resolution context, how am I supposed to contest? ~-~~-~- that denies a role for the debate, destroys research and turns accessibility. The aff has devolved into a monologue that can’t properly be contested. Topicality ensures a balance of ground.
8 +Dascal and Knoll ‘11: Professors Philosophy at Tel Aviv University (Marcelo and Amnon, “‘Cognitive systemic dichotomization’ in public argumentation and controversies” Argumentation: Cognition and Community. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation, p. 1-35)
9 +4.1 Adapting critical discussion to the public sphere according to the PD view In several publications, including his recent book published in 2010, Frans van Eemeren claims that critical discussion is a general model which is adequate for handling differences of opinion in the public and political spaces: The standpoints at issue in the difference of opinion can pertain to any kind of subject and they can be descriptive as well as evaluative or prescriptive…can be encountered in all areas of life, from the family circle…to…political arenas (van Eemeren 2010: 1-2). He opposes positions whose ‘exclusionist’ outlook rejects the normative approach to the political sphere on the grounds that “normative statements can never be subjected to a reasonable discussion” (ibid.: 2), because—he argues—the discussion of politics “is an area of vital interest to all of us and should clearly not be excluded from argumentative reasonableness” (ibid.: 3)—a view with which we are prone to agree. Nevertheless, he admits that in the present situation critical discussion is far from being systematically and successfully applied to that vital area: “In representative democracies, however, the out-comes of the political process tend to be predominantly the product of negotiations be-tween political leaders rather than the result of a universal and mutual process of deliberative disputation” (ibid.). Political debates, therefore, are ‘quasi-discussions’, i.e., “monologues calculated only to win the audience’s consent to one’s own views”, rather than ‘genuine discussions’, i.e., serious attempts to have an intellectual exchange, which is typical of critical discussions (ibid.). In order to overcome this situation, “democracy should always have promoted such a critical discussion of standpoints as a central aim. Only if this is the case can stimulating participation in political discourse enhance the quality of democracy" (ibid.). This can be achieved, however, only by following “the dialectical rules for argumentative discourse that make up a code of conduct for political discourse and are therefore of crucial importance to giving substance to the ideal of participatory democracy” (ibid.: 4); thereby fully acknowledging that “education in processing argumentation in a critical discussion is indispensable for a democratic society (van Eemeren 1995: 145-146). The reasons provided for the failure of the adoption of the critical discussion model in reality ranges from a general allusion to human nature (“in real-life contexts, it has to be taken into account that human interaction is not always automatically 'naturally' and fully oriented toward the ideal of dialectical reasonableness "; van Eemeren 2010: 4) to specific political sphere argumentation handicaps (unwillingness of people “to subject their thinking to critical scrutiny”; “vested interest in particular outcome”; “inequality in power and resources; “different levels of critical skills”; and “a practical demand for an immediate settlement”; van Eemeren 2010: 4). Although these causes may have some explanatory value in some cases, in our opinion their modus operandi is not accounted for and, what is more important, they do not cover the full spectrum of challenges that the successful use of critical discussion in the public and political spheres must face, as we have seen (cf. sections 2 and 3). No wonder that van Eemeren himself raises the question “whether maintaining the dialectical ideal of critical discussion in political and other real-life contexts is not utopian” (ibid.), to which he replies by admitting that "the ideal of a critical discussion is by definition not a description of any kind of reality but sets a theoretical standard that can be used for heuristic, analytic and evaluative purpose” (ibid.). This ideal seems to be so inspiring that it remains valid as a pure theoretical ideal, “even if the argumentative discourse falls short of the dialectical ideal” (ibid.). In the light of the substantial gap between the normative ideal and the actual practices of public and political argumentation that PD’s description and explanation provides, a number of doubts arise: Are there structural, rather than merely contingent obstacles in idealized critical discussion that prevents even its approximate use in the public sphere? Can a theory that claims to be a praxis based normative system fulfill its promise if it sets up a threshold that no one who tries to apply it to the public sphere can reach? Doesn’t the very fact that argumentation is excessively idealized in the model PD proposes cause the gap by distancing people concerned by public issues from argumentation at all? All these doubts suggest that a powerful structural phenomenon like the existence of CSDs in the public sphere is perhaps overlooked by PD and requires, for its overcoming, a radically different approach. 4.2 Discrepancies between the PD approach and reasonable argumentation in the public sphere The discrepancies in question have to do with basic parameters relevant to every argumentative process, namely: (A) The discussants’ goals and targets: what do they expect to achieve through the argumentation process and what is it capable of providing. (B) The preconditions for initiating a critical discussion: what are the discussants presumed to know and accept of these preconditions. (C) The argumentative process that is supposed to lead to the achievement of the discussants’ goals. (D) The influence of context and agents on the argumentative process. 4.2.1 Goals Assuming that argumentation is a voluntary endeavor, the parties are presumed to engage in it if and only if: (i) the process will serve their goals; (ii) these goals cannot be achieved by different, better means. (i) PD describes as follows the aim of engaging in an argumentative process: Argumentation is basically aimed at resolving a difference of opinion about the acceptability of a standpoint by making an appeal to the other party's reasonableness. (van Eemeren 2010: 1, with reference to van Eemeren and Grootendorst 2004: 11-18) The difference of opinion is resolved when the antagonist accepts the protagonist's viewpoint on the basis of the arguments advanced or when the protagonist abandons his viewpoint as a result of the critical responses of the antagonist. (van Eemeren 2010: 33) Simply put, the basic assumption is that a critical discussion’s aim consists in putting forth a certain position by one of the parties for the critical examination of the other, who calls it into question. The latter undertakes to refute the former’s position, while its proponent is committed to defend it. Four stages (see below) are supposed to ensure a valid performance of the refutation and defense tasks. The essential point is that at the end of the four stages the parties clearly agree whether the proponent’s position has been refuted or not and, accordingly, change their position (either retracting it or withdrawing from his questioning). In ‘mixed’ disagreements, in which the antagonist not only questions but also puts forth an opposed position, the same process takes place sequentially, i.e., at first one side (A) attacks trying to refute the other’s (B) position, and after this stage is concluded, they switch roles and the second side (B) proceeds to attack the first (A) in the same fashion. Regardless of whether the described process is indeed capable to yield a conclusive decision about the refutation of a position, and of whether the linearity of the refutation process makes sense, it is obvious that debates in the public sphere are for the most part ‘mixed’. Furthermore, in so far as these debates involve dichotomous positions (rather than just opposed ones), it is necessary that at the end of the PD process one of the parties accept the position of the other. It is also worth noticing that, contrary to deliberative democracy approaches, which in some cases approve the attempt to reach agreement in a (public) debate as a form of justification of political systems, PD claims that it is not a consensus theory at all. Instead, it conceives itself as a theory based on Popper’s critical rationality, i.e., as having as its principal goal to provide each party with the means—i.e., refutation attempts—to test critically its position: The conception of reasonableness upheld in pragma-dialectics insights from critical rationalist epistemology and utilitarian ethics conjoin … The intersubjective acceptability we attribute to the procedure, which is eventually expected to lend conventional validity to the procedure, is primarily based on its instrumentality in doing the job it is intended to do: re-solving a difference of opinion. … This means that, philosophically speaking, the rationale for accepting the pragma-dialectical procedure is pragmatic—more precisely, utilitarian italics in quoted text. … However, based on Popper's falsification idea, this is a ‘negative’ and not ‘positive’, utilitarianism. … Rather than maximization of agreement, minimization of disagreement is to be aimed for. (van Eemeren 2010: 34) The distinction between maximization of agreement and minimization of disagreement purports to stress that PD doesn’t view agreement as the suitable end of the process, but just as “an intermediate step on the way to new, and more advanced, disagreements” (van Eemeren 2010: 26n). Nevertheless, no explanation is given of how these “more advanced disagreements” are engendered as a part of the dynamics of the critical process, nor what is the role or value of such disagreements in the public sphere or elsewhere. This may be due to the fact that PD’s ‘critical discussion’ is not tuned to the generation of new positions or ideas but only to the testing of extant ones, thus echoing once again Popper, now in his focus on the justification rather than on the discovery of theories (see sections 4.2.4 and 5). In any case, it is quite clear that the only practical result of the critical discussion à la PD of opposed positions on a public issue is to determine whether one discussant succeeded in refuting the other’s position, thus obtaining the adversary’s agreement, who will then share his/her position, at least for some time. In this respect, PD’s critical discussion is close to Habermas’s ‘reasonable argumentation’, whose aim is to reach consensus.15 In spite of the apparent difference between a critical examination of a position aiming at its refutation or at its acceptance, even van Eemeren admits, to some extent, their similarity. He points out that “the pragma-dialectical procedure deals only with ‘first order’ conditions for resolving differences of opinion on the merits by means of critical discussion” (van Eemeren 2010: 34), and stresses that there are ‘higher order’ conditions, ‘internal’ and ‘external’, that are “beyond the agent’s control”, conditions that are similar to Habermas’s “ideal speech conditions” (van Eemeren 2010: 35n). Anyhow, whether according to PD the main goal of the critical discussion process in the public space is to create the opportunity for refutation or for agreement (meaning that one of the discussants acknowledges that his position is wrong), the essential assumption of this process is that the participants in it in the public sphere (or elsewhere) must be aware that one of them holds a wrong position and will have to explicitly acknowledge this. Is such a goal, especially when conceived as the ultimate aim of the proposed argumentative process, feasible and acceptable in the public sphere? In our opinion, there are at least four reasons for arguing that it is a utopian, hence unacceptable goal, if one takes seriously what should be expected from argumentative practice and theory in the public sphere. First, because PD deserves a critique similar to the one leveled against the Popperian version of critical rationalism it espouses,16 which defends a theory of knowledge “without a knowing subject” (Popper 1972); obviously, such a-contextual position becomes even more problematic if applied to the public and political spheres, where it must operate in a context essentially involved with practical rationality. Second, due to its analogy with theories such as Habermas’s that were discussed in this section as well as in 2.2—an analogy that deserves additional criticism because, unlike Habermasianism, PD overlooks the relationship between the political and public context and argumentative practice. Third, because of PD’s total overlooking of the role of CSDs in public argumentation (cf. 4.2.2). And fourth, due to unilateral value judgments of positions in the public sphere, which lead to simplistic criteria of refutation or acceptance in a domain where complexity is the rule (cf. 2.1.1 and 4.2.3). (ii) Let us admit, for the sake of argument, that the refutation goal as claimed by PD is central, feasible, acceptable, and useful in public argumentation. Aren’t there better ways to achieve this goal? The refutation and defense moves stipulated by the PD critical discussion model include, on the one side, the antagonist’s critical remarks or demands and on the other, the proponent’s replies. We believe that it must be assumed that neither the critique nor the replies are previously known to the contenders, which is why they have an interest in engage in the argumentation process: presumably, the expression of both, counter-arguments and defensive-arguments, is good to both sides. In spite of its usefulness in certain situations, this kind of exchange does not amount to the full manifestation of the dialectical critical process, wherein the context and co-text of the dialectical exchange, as well as the cognitive interaction that takes place and evolves throughout the exchange, play a decisive role in the design and ‘inner’ justification of each of the participants’ moves. Argumentation strategies that take into account these resources and make full use of their potential are no doubt setting up another, broader span of goals for the argumentative process, and are more likely to achieve these goals more effectively than they certainly would achieve their PD more limited counterparts (cf. 4.2.4 and 5). 4.2.2 Preconditions The ideal PD critical discussion can only be realized if some preconditions are satisfied. The most important ones are a) a clear-cut identification of the standpoint that provokes the disagreement, b) the decision of the parties to engage in a discussion, and c) the participants’ commitment to obey the procedural rules. As we shall see, these preconditions share a common assumption, which calls into question the feasibility of using critical discussion in the public sphere. (A) This precondition assumes that it is possible to isolate rigorously the subject matter of a critical discussion, so as to conduct a focused discussion that makes use only of relevant arguments. This precondition is quite strict, for whenever both discussants defend contrary standpoints, their disagreement should be treated as two separate fully fledged discussions: “… if another discussion begins, it must go through the same stages again—from confrontation stage to concluding stage” (van Eemeren 2010: 10n). (B) This precondition subordinates the decision to engage in the discussion to the evaluation that the discussants share enough common ground to pursue it adequately: “After the parties have decided that there is enough common ground to conduct a discussion …” (van Eemeren 2010: 33). (C) This precondition stresses the ‘contractual’ character of a critical discussion, which requires explicit mutual commitments by the discussants. Its rationale is that without such commitments the aim of the critical discussion, i.e., the resolution of the difference of opinions, will not be achieved, which makes engaging in the discussion pointless: “There is no point in venturing to resolve a difference … if there is no mutual commitment to a common starting point, which may include procedural commitments as well as substantive agreement” (van Eemeren and Grootendorst 2004: 60). These ‘first order’ preconditions, as they are labeled in PD (cf. van Eemeren 2010: 33), are the conditions that candidates to participate in a critical discussion must fulfill if they intend to do so and can afford it personally (a ‘second order’ condition) and politically (a ‘third order’ condition).17 In addition, the first order conditions demand from the prospective discussants a clear, distinct, and detailed picture of the scope of the discussion that they are about to engage in. This means not mixing up the various differences of opinion that the discussion may involve, and being able to separate them properly as the subject matter for independent discussions; a further requirement is the anticipated identification of the pieces of the ‘substantive agreement’ forming the starting point in order to ensure that they are sufficient for conducting the discussion up to a satisfactory closure.
10 +2. Engagement ~-~~-~- the debate becomes irresolvable because of the aff’s refusal to engage in the topic. A general topic is impossible to engage in effectively – debate requires a specific point of difference.
11 +Steinberg and Freeley ‘8: *Austin J. Freeley is a Boston based attorney who focuses on criminal, personal injury and civil rights law, AND **David L. Steinberg , Lecturer of Communication Studies @ U Miami, Argumentation and Debate: Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making pp45
12 +Debate is a means of settling differences, so there must be a difference of opinion or a conflict of interest before there can be a debate. If everyone is in agreement on a tact or value or policy, there is no need for debate: the matter can be settled by unanimous consent. Thus, for example, it would be pointless to attempt to debate "Resolved: That two plus two equals four," because there is simply no controversy about this statement. (Controversy is an essential prerequisite of debate. Where there is no clash of ideas, proposals, interests, or expressed positions on issues, there is no debate. In addition, debate cannot produce effective decisions without clear identification of a question or questions to be answered. For example, general argument may occur about the broad topic of illegal immigration. How many illegal immigrants are in the United States? What is the impact of illegal immigration and immigrants on our economy? What is their impact on our communities? Do they commit crimes? Do they take jobs from American workers? Do they pay taxes? Do they require social services? Is it a problem that some do not speak English? Is it the responsibility of employers to discourage illegal immigration by not hiring undocumented workers? Should they have the opportunity- to gain citizenship? Docs illegal immigration pose a security threat to our country? Do illegal immigrants do work that American workers are unwilling to do? Are their rights as workers and as human beings at risk due to their status? Are they abused by employers, law enforcement, housing, and businesses? I low are their families impacted by their status? What is the moral and philosophical obligation of a nation state to maintain its borders? Should we build a wall on the Mexican border, establish a national identification can!, or enforce existing laws against employers? Should we invite immigrants to become U.S. citizens? Surely you can think of many more concerns to be addressed by a conversation about the topic area of illegal immigration. Participation in this "debate" is likely to be emotional and intense. However, it is not likely to be productive or useful without focus on a particular question and identification of a line demarcating sides in the controversy. To be discussed and resolved effectively, controversies must be stated clearly. Vague understanding results in unfocused deliberation and poor decisions, frustration, and emotional distress, as evidenced by the failure of the United States Congress to make progress on the immigration debate during the summer of 2007. Someone disturbed by the problem of the growing underclass of poorly educated, socially disenfranchised youths might observe, "Public schools are doing a terrible job! They are overcrowded, and many teachers are poorly qualified in their subject areas. Even the best teachers can do little more than struggle to maintain order in their classrooms." That same concerned citizen, facing a complex range of issues, might arrive at an unhelpful decision, such as "We ought to do something about this" or. worse. "It's too complicated a problem to deal with." Groups of concerned citizens worried about the state of public education could join together to express their frustrations, anger, disillusionment, and emotions regarding the schools, but without a focus for their discussions, they could easily agree about the sorry state of education without finding points of clarity or potential solutions. A gripe session would follow. But if a precise question is posed—such as "What can be done to improve public education?"—then a more profitable area of discussion is opened up simply by placing a focus on the search for a concrete solution step. One or more judgments can be phrased in the form of debate propositions, motions for parliamentary debate, or bills for legislative assemblies. The statements "Resolved: That the federal government should implement a program of charter schools in at-risk communities" and "Resolved: That the state of Florida should adopt a school voucher program" more clearly identify specific ways of dealing with educational problems in a manageable form, suitable for debate. They provide specific policies to be investigated and aid discussants in identifying points of difference. To have a productive debate, which facilitates effective decision making by directing and placing limits on the decision to be made, the basis for argument should be clearly defined. If we merely talk about "homelessness" or "abortion" or "crime'* or "global warming" we are likely to have an interesting discussion but not to establish profitable basis for argument. For example, the statement "Resolved: That the pen is mightier than the sword" is debatable, yet fails to provide much basis for clear argumentation. If we take this statement to mean that the written word is more effective than physical force for some purposes, we can identify a problem area: the comparative effectiveness of writing or physical force for a specific purpose. Although we now have a general subject, we have not yet stated a problem. It is still too broad, too loosely worded to promote well-organized argument. What sort of writing are we concerned with—poems, novels, government documents, website development, advertising, or what? What does "effectiveness" mean in this context? What kind of physical force is being compared—fists, dueling swords, bazookas, nuclear weapons, or what? A more specific question might be. "Would a mutual defense treaty or a visit by our fleet be more effective in assuring Liurania of our support in a certain crisis?" The basis for argument could be phrased in a debate proposition such as "Resolved: That the United States should enter into a mutual defense treaty with Laurania." Negative advocates might oppose this proposition by arguing that fleet maneuvers would be a better solution. This is not to say that debates should completely avoid creative interpretation of the controversy by advocates, or that good debates cannot occur over competing interpretations of the controversy; in fact, these sorts of debates may be very engaging. The point is that debate is best facilitated by the guidance provided by focus on a particular point of difference, which will be outlined in the following discussion.
13 +3) Conclusivity ~-~~-~- even if the 1AC is factually correct, failure to subject their claims to testing by a well-prepared opponent produces groupthink that prevents effective advocacy – treat their claims as false until there’s structural fairness.
14 +Poscher ‘16: Director at the Institute for Staatswissenschaft and Philosophy of Law at the University of Freiburg (Ralf, “Why We Argue About the Law: An Agonistic Account of Legal Disagreement”, Metaphilosophy of Law, Tomasz Gizbert-Studnicki/Adam Dyrda/Pawel Banas (eds.), Hart Publishing, forthcoming, dml)
15 +Hegel’s dialectical thinking powerfully exploits the idea of negation. It is a central feature of spirit and consciousness that they have the power to negate. The spirit “is this power only by looking the negative in the face and tarrying with it. This … is the magical power that converts it into being.”102 The tarrying with the negative is part of what Hegel calls the “labour of the negative”103. In a loose reference to this Hegelian notion Gerald Postema points to yet another feature of disagreements as a necessary ingredient of the process of practical reasoning. Only if our reasoning is exposed to contrary arguments can we test its merits. We must go through the “labor of the negative” to have trust in our deliberative processes.104 This also holds where we seem to be in agreement. Agreement without exposure to disagreement can be deceptive in various ways. The first phenomenon Postema draws attention to is the group polarization effect. When a group of like‐minded people deliberates an issue, informational and reputational cascades produce more extreme views in the process of their deliberations.105 The polarization and biases that are well documented for such groups106 can be countered at least in some settings by the inclusion of dissenting voices. In these scenarios, disagreement can be a cure for dysfunctional deliberative polarization and biases.107 A second deliberative dysfunction mitigated by disagreement is superficial agreement, which can even be manipulatively used in the sense of a “presumptuous ‘We’”108. Disagreement can help to police such distortions of deliberative processes by challenging superficial agreements. Disagreements may thus signal that a deliberative process is not contaminated with dysfunctional agreements stemming from polarization or superficiality. Protecting our discourse against such contaminations is valuable even if we do not come to terms. Each of the opposing positions will profit from the catharsis it received “by looking the negative in the face and tarrying with it”. These advantages of disagreement in collective deliberations are mirrored on the individual level. Even if the probability of reaching a consensus with our opponents is very low from the beginning, as might be the case in deeply entrenched conflicts, entering into an exchange of arguments can still serve to test and improve our position. We have to do the “labor of the negative” for ourselves. Even if we cannot come up with a line of argument that coheres well with everybody else’s beliefs, attitudes and dispositions, we can still come up with a line of argument that achieves this goal for our own personal beliefs, attitudes and dispositions. To provide ourselves with the most coherent system of our own beliefs, attitudes and dispositions is – at least in important issues – an aspect of personal integrity – to borrow one of Dworkin’s favorite expressions for a less aspirational idea. In hard cases we must – in some way – lay out the argument for ourselves to figure out what we believe to be the right answer. We might not know what we believe ourselves in questions of abortion, the death penalty, torture, and stem cell research, until we have developed a line of argument against the background of our subjective beliefs, attitudes and dispositions. In these cases it might be rational to discuss the issue with someone unlikely to share some of our more fundamental convictions or who opposes the view towards which we lean. This might even be the most helpful way of corroborating a view, because we know that our adversary is much more motivated to find a potential flaw in our argument than someone with whom we know we are in agreement. It might be more helpful to discuss a liberal position with Scalia than with Breyer if we want to make sure that we have not overlooked some counter‐argument to our case It would be too narrow an understanding of our practice of legal disagreement and argumentation if we restricted its purpose to persuading an adversary in the case at hand and inferred from this narrow understanding the irrationality of argumentation in hard cases, in which we know beforehand that we will not be able to persuade. Rational argumentation is a much more complex practice in a more complex social framework. Argumentation with an adversary can have purposes beyond persuading him: to test one’s own convictions, to engage our opponent in inferential commitments and to persuade third parties are only some of these; to rally our troops or express our convictions might be others. To make our peace with Kant we could say that “there must be a hope of coming to terms” with someone though not necessarily with our opponent, but maybe only a third party or even just ourselves and not necessarily only on the issue at hand, but maybe through inferential commitments in a different arena. f) The Advantage Over Non‐Argumentative Alternatives It goes without saying that in real world legal disagreements, all of the reasons listed above usually play in concert and will typically hold true to different degrees relative to different participants in the debate: There will be some participants for whom our hope of coming to terms might still be justified and others for whom only some of the other reasons hold and some for whom it is a mixture of all of the reasons in shifting degrees as our disagreements evolve. It is also apparent that, with the exception of the first reason, the rationality of our disagreements is of a secondary nature. The rational does not lie in the discovery of a single right answer to the topic of debate, since in hard cases there are no single right answers. Instead, our disagreements are instrumental to rationales which lie beyond the topic at hand, like the exploration of our communalities or of our inferential commitments. Since these reasons are of this secondary nature, they must stand up to alternative ways of settling irreconcilable disagreements that have other secondary reasons in their favor – like swiftness of decision making or using fewer resources. Why does our legal practice require lengthy arguments and discursive efforts even in appellate or supreme court cases of irreconcilable legal disagreements? The closure has to come by some non‐argumentative mean and courts have always relied on them. For the medieval courts of the Germanic tradition it is bequeathed that judges had to fight it out literally if they disagreed on a question of law – though the king allowed them to pick surrogate fighters.109 It is understandable that the process of civilization has led us to non‐violent non‐ argumentative means to determine the law. But what was wrong with District Judge Currin of Umatilla County in Oregon, who – in his late days – decided inconclusive traffic violations by publicly flipping a coin?110 If we are counting heads at the end of our lengthy argumentative proceedings anyway, why not decide hard cases by gut voting at the outset and spare everybody the cost of developing elaborate arguments on questions, where there is not fact of the matter to be discovered? One reason lies in the mixed nature of our reasons in actual legal disagreements. The different second order reasons can be held apart analytically, but not in real life cases. The hope of coming to terms will often play a role at least for some time relative to some participants in the debate. A second reason is that the objectives listed above could not be achieved by a non‐argumentative procedure. Flipping a coin, throwing dice or taking a gut vote would not help us to explore our communalities or our inferential commitments nor help to scrutinize the positions in play. A third reason is the overall rational aspiration of the law that Dworkin relates to in his integrity account111. In a justificatory sense112 the law aspires to give a coherent account of itself – even if it is not the only right one – required by equal respect under conditions of normative disagreement.113 Combining legal argumentation with the non‐argumentative decision‐ making procedure of counting reasoned opinions serves the coherence aspiration of the law in at least two ways: First, the labor of the negative reduces the chances that constructions of the law that have major flaws or inconsistencies built into the arguments supporting them will prevail. Second, since every position must be a reasoned one within the given framework of the law, it must be one that somehow fits into the overall structure of the law along coherent lines. It thus protects against incoherent “checkerboard” treatments114 of hard cases. It is the combination of reasoned disagreement and the non‐rational decision‐making mechanism of counting reasoned opinions that provides for both in hard cases: a decision and one – of multiple possible – coherent constructions of the law. Pure non‐rational procedures – like flipping a coin – would only provide for the decision part. Pure argumentative procedures – which are not geared towards a decision procedure – would undercut the incentive structure of our agonistic disagreements.115 In the face of unresolvable disagreements endless debates would seem an idle enterprise. That the debates are about winning or losing helps to keep the participants engaged. That the decision depends on counting reasoned opinions guarantees that the engagement focuses on rational argumentation. No plain non‐argumentative procedure would achieve this result. If the judges were to flip a coin at the end of the trial in hard cases, there would be little incentive to engage in an exchange of arguments. It is specifically the count of reasoned opinions which provides for rational scrutiny in our legal disagreements and thus contributes to the rationales discussed above. 2. THE SEMANTICS OF AGONISTIC DISAGREEMENTS The agonistic account does not presuppose a fact of the matter, it is not accompanied by an ontological commitment, and the question of how the fact of the matter could be known to us is not even raised. Thus the agonistic account of legal disagreement is not confronted with the metaphysical or epistemological questions that plague one‐right‐answer theories in particular. However, it must still come up with a semantics that explains in what sense we disagree about the same issue and are not just talking at cross purposes. In a series of articles David Plunkett and Tim Sundell have reconstructed legal disagreements in semantic terms as metalinguistic negotiations on the usage of a term that at the center of a hard case like “cruel and unusual punishment” in a death‐penalty case.116 Even though the different sides in the debate define the term differently, they are not talking past each other, since they are engaged in a metalinguistic negotiation on the use of the same term. The metalinguistic negotiation on the use of the term serves as a semantic anchor for a disagreement on the substantive issues connected with the term because of its functional role in the law. The “cruel and unusual punishment”‐clause thus serves to argue about the permissibility of the death penalty. This account, however only provides a very superficial semantic commonality. But the commonality between the participants of a legal disagreement go deeper than a discussion whether the term “bank” should in future only to be used for financial institutions, which fulfills every criteria for semantic negotiations that Plunkett and Sundell propose. Unlike in mere semantic negotiations, like the on the disambiguation of the term “bank”, there is also some kind of identity of the substantive issues at stake in legal disagreements. A promising route to capture this aspect of legal disagreements might be offered by recent semantic approaches that try to accommodate the externalist challenges of realist semantics,117 which inspire one‐right‐answer theorists like Moore or David Brink. Neo‐ descriptivist and two‐valued semantics provide for the theoretical or interpretive element of realist semantics without having to commit to the ontological positions of traditional externalism. In a sense they offer externalist semantics with no ontological strings attached. The less controversial aspect of the externalist picture of meaning developed in neo‐ descriptivist and two‐valued semantics can be found in the deferential structure that our meaning‐providing intentions often encompass.118 In the case of natural kinds, speakers defer to the expertise of chemists when they employ natural kind terms like gold or water. If a speaker orders someone to buy $ 10,000 worth of gold as a safe investment, he might not know the exact atomic structure of the chemical element 79. In cases of doubt, though, he would insist that he meant to buy only stuff that chemical experts – or the markets for that matter – qualify as gold. The deferential element in the speaker’s intentions provides for the specific externalist element of the semantics. In the case of the law, the meaning‐providing intentions connected to the provisions of the law can be understood to defer in a similar manner to the best overall theory or interpretation of the legal materials. Against the background of such a semantic framework the conceptual unity of a linguistic practice is not ratified by the existence of a single best answer, but by the unity of the interpretive effort that extends to legal materials and legal practices that have sufficient overlap119 – be it only in a historical perspective120. The fulcrum of disagreement that Dworkin sees in the existence of a single right answer121 does not lie in its existence, but in the communality of the effort – if only on the basis of an overlapping common ground of legal materials, accepted practices, experiences and dispositions. As two athletes are engaged in the same contest when they follow the same rules, share the same concept of winning and losing and act in the same context, but follow very different styles of e.g. wrestling, boxing, swimming etc. They are in the same contest, even if there is no single best style in which to wrestle, box or swim. Each, however, is engaged in developing the best style to win against their opponent, just as two lawyers try to develop the best argument to convince a bench of judges.122 Within such a semantic framework even people with radically opposing views about the application of an expression can still share a concept, in that they are engaged in the same process of theorizing over roughly the same legal materials and practices. Semantic frameworks along these lines allow for adamant disagreements without abandoning the idea that people are talking about the same concept. An agonistic account of legal disagreement can build on such a semantic framework, which can explain in what sense lawyers, judges and scholars engaged in agonistic disagreements are not talking past each other. They are engaged in developing the best interpretation of roughly the same legal materials, albeit against the background of diverging beliefs, attitudes and dispositions that lead them to divergent conclusions in hard cases. Despite the divergent conclusions, semantic unity is provided by the largely overlapping legal materials that form the basis for their disagreement. Such a semantic collapses only when we lack a sufficient overlap in the materials. To use an example of Michael Moore’s: If we wanted to debate whether a certain work of art was “just”, we share neither paradigms nor a tradition of applying the concept of justice to art such as to engage in an intelligible controversy.
16 +This topicality shell outweighs their case and role of the ballot for six reasons:
17 +A) Even if their method is good, it isn’t valuable if it’s not procedurally debatable – they don’t gain any access to their offense because the round isn’t structurally fair.
18 +B) The best solutions are formed with critical contestation from multiple sides – it’s more likely we make a good liberation strategy if both debaters can engage and test it.
19 +Deliberative debate models impart skills vital to respond to existential challenges – this means that I should be able to engage the aff on a substantive level.
20 +Lundberg ‘10: Christian O. Lundberg Professor of Communications @ University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “Tradition of Debate in North Carolina” in Navigating Opportunity: Policy Debate in the 21st Century By Allan D. Louden, p. 311
21 +The second major problem with the critique that identifies a naivety in articulating debate and democracy is that it presumes that the primary pedagogical outcome of debate is speech capacities. But the democratic capacities built by debate are not limited to speech—as indicated earlier, debate builds capacity for critical thinking, analysis of public claims, informed decision making, and better public judgment. If the picture of modem political life that underwrites this critique of debate is a pessimistic view of increasingly labyrinthine and bureaucratic administrative politics, rapid scientific and technological change outpacing the capacities of the citizenry to comprehend them, and ever-expanding insular special-interest- and money-driven politics, it is a puzzling solution, at best, to argue that these conditions warrant giving up on debate. If democracy is open to rearticulation, it is open to rearticulation precisely because as the challenges of modern political life proliferate, the citizenry's capacities can change, which is one of the primary reasons that theorists of democracy such as Ocwey in The Public awl Its Problems place such a high premium on education (Dewey 1988,63, 154). Debate provides an indispensible form of education in the modem articulation of democracy because it builds precisely the skills that allow the citizenry to research and be informed about policy decisions that impact them, to son rhroueh and evaluate the evidence for and relative merits of arguments for and against a policy in an increasingly infonnation-rich environment, and to prioritize their time and political energies toward policies that matter the most to them. The merits of debate as a tool for building democratic capacity-building take on a special significance in the context of information literacy. John Larkin (2005, HO) argues that one of the primary failings of modern colleges and universities is that they have not changed curriculum to match with the challenges of a new information environment. This is a problem for the course of academic study in our current context, but perhaps more important, argues Larkin, for the future of a citizenry that will need to make evaluative choices against an increasingly complex and multimediatcd information environment (ibid-). Larkin's study tested the benefits of debate participation on information-literacy skills and concluded that in-class debate participants reported significantly higher self-efficacy ratings of their ability to navigate academic search databases and to effectively search and use other Web resources: To analyze the self-report ratings of the instructional and control group students, we first conducted a multivariate analysis of variance on all of the ratings, looking jointly at the effect of instmction/no instruction and debate topic . . . that it did not matter which topic students had been assigned . . . students in the Instnictional debate) group were significantly more confident in their ability to access information and less likely to feel that they needed help to do so~-~-~-~-These findings clearly indicate greater self-efficacy for online searching among students who participated in (debate).... These results constitute strong support for the effectiveness of the project on students' self-efficacy for online searching in the academic databases. There was an unintended effect, however: After doing ... the project, instructional group students also felt more confident than the other students in their ability to get good information from Yahoo and Google. It may be that the library research experience increased self-efficacy for any searching, not just in academic databases. (Larkin 2005, 144) Larkin's study substantiates Thomas Worthcn and Gaylcn Pack's (1992, 3) claim that debate in the college classroom plays a critical role in fostering the kind of problem-solving skills demanded by the increasingly rich media and information environment of modernity. Though their essay was written in 1992 on the cusp of the eventual explosion of the Internet as a medium, Worthcn and Pack's framing of the issue was prescient: the primary question facing today's student has changed from how to best research a topic to the crucial question of learning how to best evaluate which arguments to cite and rely upon from an easily accessible and veritable cornucopia of materials. There are, without a doubt, a number of important criticisms of employing debate as a model for democratic deliberation. But cumulatively, the evidence presented here warrants strong support for expanding debate practice in the classroom as a technology for enhancing democratic deliberative capacities. The unique combination of critical thinking skills, research and information processing skills, oral communication skills, and capacities for listening and thoughtful, open engagement with hotly contested issues argues for debate as a crucial component of a rich and vital democratic life. In-class debate practice both aids students in achieving the best goals of college and university education, and serves as an unmatched practice for creating thoughtful, engaged, open-minded and self-critical students who are open to the possibilities of meaningful political engagement and new articulations of democratic life. Expanding this practice is crucial, if only because the more we produce citizens that can actively and effectively engage the political process, the more likely we are to produce revisions of democratic life that are necessary if democracy is not only to survive, but to thrive. Democracy faces a myriad of challenges, including: domestic and international issues of class, gender, and racial justice; wholesale environmental destruction and the potential for rapid climate change; emerging threats to international stability in the form of terrorism, intervention and new possibilities for great power conflict; and increasing challenges of rapid globalization including an increasingly volatile global economic structure. More than any specific policy or proposal, an informed and active citizenry that deliberates with greater skill and sensitivity provides one of the best hopes for responsive and effective democratic governance, and by extension, one of the last best hopes for dealing with the existential challenges to democracy in an increasingly complex world.
22 +C) Debate is about weighing dissenting opinions, not to just have a performative monologue in which an ethical issue is inherently true or undeniable. Aff can’t just have a moral high ground in which they just claim racism or ableism to be inherently bad without resolution context.
23 +D) They force the neg to extreme generics like cap, neolib, or intersectionality against the aff, which is super predictable for them. ALMOST EVERY AFF DEBATER HAS ENORMOUS BACKFILES OR SPECIFIC CASE ANSWERS FOR THESE K’s? Yeah, that’s a BS grounds limitation of the neg. It’s funny that this T shell is more specific to the aff than the substantive ground you allow.
24 +E) I came to this debate to debate the topic, not what you want us to debate.
25 +The Voter is Jurisdiction.
26 +You as the judge don’t have the jurisdiction to vote on arguments that aren’t substantively debatable and can’t be proven true in the debate space. Three warrants:
27 +1. The ballot says vote for the better debater, my standards prove why they aren’t.
28 +2. You have the obligation as a moderator to make sure that they adhere to structural commitments and that debate can actually have debates.
29 +3. The lack of ability to engage means you as a judge cannot vote for them because then it wouldn’t be a debate, but rather a performative monologue.
30 +If you don’t feel comfortable voting on Jurisdiction, vote on Fairness – Two warrants
31 +1. Fairness is necessary for education insofar as each side must have an equal opportunity to make educational arguments. To deny someone that opportunity in the pursuit of education is to deny them the validity of another educational argument.
32 +2. The reason that people do debate is because of the competitive nature of the activity, as evidenced by my opponent’s arguments for the ballot. Some debaters will run any argument, no matter how unfair, to win the ballot. That spoils the competition for the opposing debater… in this instance, me.
33 +Topicality is an issue of competing interpretations. A reasonability paradigm only justifies competing interpretations because there is no metric for what is reasonable without comparing interpretations against one another.
34 +AND, drop the debater and drop the arg are functionally the same in this round, so drop the debater on T.
35 +T is the highest layer of the debate – it comes before the AC.
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1 +CP: Public colleges and universities in the United States ought to maintain/and or develop anti-cyberbullying legislation as a hate speech limitation applicable to college campuses.
2 +Anti-cyberbullying laws key to prevent cyberbullying.
3 +Patchin ‘10: Justin W. Patchin, ~Professor of Criminal Justice in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire~, 09/28/10, "Cyberbullying Laws and School Policy: A Blessing or Curse?," Cyberbullying Research Center, http://cyberbullying.org/cyberbullying-laws-and-school-policy-a-blessing-or-curse
4 +Many schools are now in a difficult position of having to respond to a mandate to have a cyberbullying policy, without much guidance from the state about the circumstances under which they can (or must) respond. When folks ask me if I think there needs to be a “cyberbullying law” I basically respond by saying “perhaps – but not the kind of law most legislators would propose.” I would look for a law to be more “prescriptive” than “proscriptive.” By that, I mean I would like to see specific guidance from states about *how* and *when* schools can take action in cyberbullying incidents. Many states have taken the easy way out by simply passing laws saying effectively “schools need to deal with this.” Not only have they stopped short in terms of providing specific instructions or even a framework from which schools can evaluate their role, but they have not provided any additional resources to address these issues. Some states are now requiring schools to educate students and staff about cyberbullying or online safety more generally, but have provided no funding to carry out such activities. Unfunded mandates have become cliché in education, and this is just another example. Moreover, school administrators are in a precarious position because they see many examples in the media where schools have been sued because they took action against a student when they shouldn’t have or they failed to take action when they were supposed to. Schools need help determining where the legal line is. Many states already have existing criminal and civil remedies to deal with cyberbullying. Extreme cases would fall under criminal harassment or stalking laws or a target could pursue civil action for intentional infliction of emotional distress or defamation, to name a few. Bullying (whatever the form) that occurs at school is no doubt already subject to an existing bullying policy. To be sure, schools should bring their bullying and harassment policies into the 21st Century by explicitly identifying cyberbullying as a proscribed behavior, but they need to move beyond the behaviors that occur on school grounds or those that utilize school-owned resources. But in order to do this they need guidance from their state legislators and Departments of Education so that they draft a policy and procedure that will be held up in court. School, technology, and privacy lawyers disagree about what should (or must) be in a policy. It’s no wonder many educators are simply throwing their hands up. We really like New Hampshire’s recently passed bullying law, even though like other efforts it demands a lot from schools without a corresponding increase in resources. This section is key: “Bullying or cyberbullying shall occur when an action or communication as defined in RSA 193-F:3: … (b) Occurs off of school property or outside of a school-sponsored activity or event, if the conduct interferes with a pupil’s educational opportunities or substantially disrupts the orderly operations of the school or school-sponsored activity or event.” This puts schools, students, and parents on notice that there are instances when schools can discipline students for their off campus behavior. It will take many years, though, before we will know if this law can be used as a model. Schools will need to pass policies based on the law; a school will then need to discipline a bully based on the new policy; then they will need to be sued; then the case will need to be appealed. Perhaps then the case will get to a significant enough court that it will matter. Hang on and see how it turns out. In the meantime, lobby your legislators to pass meaningful, prescriptive laws instead of laws that simply say “cyberbullying is wrong, now YOU do SOMETHING about it.” It’s election time, so I’m sure your local representative will be all ears…
5 +Cyberbullying is conducive to abuse and kills self-worth – impedes the ability to get education, turns case.
6 +ETCB ‘16: End To Cyber Bullying, ~The End to Cyber Bullying (ETCB) Organization was founded in 2011 to raise global awareness on cyberbullying, and to mobilize youth, educators, parents, and others in taking efforts to end cyberbullying~, "A Surprising Long-Term Effect of Cyberbullying, ETCB Organization, 2016, http://www.endcyberbullying.org/a-surprising-long-term-effect-of-cyberbullying
7 +If someone repeatedly tells the victim online that they is are worthless, useless, a waste of space or that they should kill themselves, soon the victim might – at least partially – begin to believe it. According to Psychcentral.com, signs that someone is experience low self-esteem include: • Self-critical or a negative opinion of themselves • Sensitivity to even constructive criticism • Fatigue, insomnia, headaches • Poor performance at school or work due to lack of trying or lethargy It is important for an individual to maintain a healthy self-esteem so that they can achieve in life. A cyberbullying victim may miss out on opportunities because the victim believes they is unworthy of achievement. It’s important to realize that these two effects go well beyond being in a bad mood and not liking something about oneself. Depression, Low Self-Esteem and Dating Abuse Research is inconclusive, but most would agree that people who are victimized in abusive dating relationships often choose those relationships because of their depression or low self-esteem. Findyouthinfo.gov states that past experience with stressful life events – cyberbullying, for example – can put someone at risk for entering an abusive dating relationship. This is especially true if the cyberabuse included abuse directed at a female victim’s sexuality, or lack thereof. Feelings of worthlessness and a negative outlook on life can throw a previously-cyberbullied victim into yet another abusive relationship. However, instead of faceless strangers and bullies dolling out abuse, it would be the victim’s significant other. Dating abuse can encompass many forms of abuse, including cyberabuse. According to Dosomething.com, other forms of abuse in dating relationships include: • Physical abuse – in the form of “hitting, punching, slapping, biting” and anything that causes physical pain. • Mental abuse – in the form of verbal putdowns and belittling. The abuser might call their victim names, “make threats, or accuse the other person of cheating.” • Emotional abuse – in the form of control over the victim’s “behavior, personality, and life.” • Sexual abuse – in the form of unwanted touching, pressuring the victim to have sex, or rape. It’s getting harder to track cyberbullying since most people make their online profiles and social networking pages private. Also, apps like Snapchat would allow cyberbullies to attack their victim and have the evidence wiped away within seconds. According to this tech expert, “Users are drawn to the impermanence of the site’s uploads and the anonymity that impermanence provides.” However impermanent the actual abusive message may be, the lasting effects of the abuse upon the psyche of the victim are anything but impermanent.
8 +Cyberbullying disproportionately affects racial/sexual minorities
9 +Brandon ‘14: Mary Howlett-Brandon, ~Doctor of Philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University~ "CYBERBULLYING: AN EXAMINATION OF GENDER, RACE, ETHNICITY, AND ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS FROM THE NATIONAL CRIME VICTIMIZATION SURVEY: STUDENT CRIME SUPPLEMENT, 2009", 2014, http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4485andcontext=etd
10 +Other and mixed race students reported cyberbullying victimization at 4.2, 26 Black students at 1.9, and Hispanic students at 1.3. Whites, however, experienced 3.1 victimization by electronic technology. Wang et al. (2009) also reported the percentage of cyberbullying by race. Black students reported the highest level of cyberbullying activity at 10.9, Hispanic students at 9.6, and the category of students classified as other at 7.3. White students reported cyberbullying victimization at 6.7. The Kessel Schneider et al. (2012) study also addressed the cyberbullying behavior of students by race and ethnicity. The race/ethnic breakdown of the sample is as follows: 75.2 White, 12.3 mixed/other, 5.8 Hispanic, 3.9 Asian, and 2.8 Black. Kessel Schneider et al. (2012) found that 5.7 of the White students and 8.4 of the non-White students conveyed they had been cyberbullied during the previous 12 months.
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1 +Stanford

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