The AFF’s performance of _ discounts evidence – they destroy the pursuit of knowledge by propagating decadence. Gordon 06
Lewis Gordon—professor at philosophy, African and Judiac Studies at University of Connecticut Storrs—2006 (Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times, p 28-29) A striking feature (among many) of the contemporary intellectual climate, as I pointed out in the introduction of this book, is the war on evidence. There are many instances of this, but perhaps most memorable are the many "charts" and so-called evidential claims made by Ronald Reagan during his presidency. The so-called evidence he advanced was rarely ever evident. We needn’t blame Reagan for this. It was happening everywhere. Think of the scores of pseudo-intellectuals who have mastered the performance of “academese” and the rhetorical advance of evidence like claims. Lying beneath all this are, of course, nihilistic forces, and lying beneath such forces are, as Friedrich Nietzsche diagnosed little more than a century ago, decadent ones. Where truth has collapsed into commonness, then critical thinking isn't necessary, which makes the work of assessing evidence superfluous. The effect is the kind of nonthinking activities against which Ortega y Gasset argued. There are two extremes of this. On the one hand, there is oversimplicity that demands no reflection. On the other hand, there IS the dense, abstruse appearance of expertise that conceals an absence of thought. Both don't require thinking because their ultimate appeal is appearance. Evidence is paradoxically that which has been hidden but revealed as a conduit for the appearance of another hidden reality. In effect, then, It is an appearance that enables appearance, but it is an appearance that requires thinking in order to appear. In short, it is not an appearance that stimulates thought but a form of thought that stimulates appearance. This means that evidence is always symbolic; it always refers beyond Itself. Because whether affirmed or rejected, it always extends itself publicly for assessment, evidence is peculiarly social. And since it is social, evidence is subject to the complex exchange of intersubjective activities. Evidence must, in other words be subject to norms" and "criteria." By norms, I don't here mean normativity or social prejudices but instead an understanding of where an exceptional instance versus a typical instance of a case holds. This requires further understanding of relevance, which, too, requires the value of distinction. All this together provides a clue to the contemporary problem. When simply the performance of presenting evidence substitutes for evidence, then anything can count as evidence. We see this in scholarly texts where the authors announce the importance of looking at a subject and then later argue as though that announcement itself constituted examination. Think, as well, of some texts in literary and cultural studies with long, run-on commentary in end notes and footnotes that serve no role of substantiating the claims they supposedly demarcate. We also see it in cases where pronouncements of past failures of certain social remedies take the form of perennial truths.
The AFF’s decadence stops us from from various ways of knowing the world and ontologizes _ as the constitutive foundation of the world. Gordon 06
Lewis Gordon—professor of philosophy, African and Judiac Studies at the University of Connecticut—2014 (“Disciplinary Decadence and the Decolonization of Knowledge,” Africa Development 39.1: 81-92, 86-88). Failure to appreciate reality sometimes takes the form of recoiling from it. An inward path of disciplinary solitude eventually leads to what I call disciplinary decadence.12 This is the phenomenon of turning away from living thought, which engages reality and recognises its own limitations, to a deontologised or absolute conception of disciplinary life. The discipline becomes, in solipsistic fashion, the world. And in that world, the main concern is the proper administering of its rules, regulations, or, as Fanon argued, (self-devouring) methods. Becoming ‘right’ is simply a matter of applying, as fetish, the method correctly. This is a form of decadence because of the set of considerations that fall to the wayside as the discipline turns into itself and eventually implodes. Decay, although a natural process over the course of time for living things, takes on a paradoxical quality in disciplinary formation. A discipline, e.g., could be in decay through a failure to realise that decay is possible. Like empires, the presumption is that the discipline must outlive all, including its own purpose. In more concrete terms, disciplinary decadence takes the form of one discipline assessing all other disciplines from its supposedly complete standpoint. It is the literary scholar who criticises work in other disciplines as not literary. It is the sociologist who rejects other disciplines as not sociological. It is the historian who asserts history as the foundation of everything. It is the natural scientist that criticises the others for not being scientific. And it is also the philosopher who rejects all for not being properly philosophical. Discipline envy is also a form of disciplinary decadence. It is striking, for instance, how many disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences are now engaged in intellectual history with a focus on the Western philosophical canon. And then there is decadence at methodological levels. Textualism, for example, infects historiography at the level of archival legitimacy. Or worse, in some forms of textualism, the expectation of everything being contained in the text becomes evident in work in the human sciences that announce studying its subject through an analysis exclusively of texts on the subject. There are scholars in race theory, e.g., who seem to think that theorising the subject is a matter of determining what has been said on it by a small set of canonical texts. When appearance is reduced to textuality, what, then, happens to inquiry? What are positivism and certain forms of semiological imitation of mathematical phenomena but science envy? When biologism, sociologism, psychologism, and many others assert themselves, to what, ultimately, are they referring? In the human sciences, the problem becomes particularly acute in the study of problem people. Such people misbehave also in disciplinary terms. The failure to squeeze them into disciplinary dictates, from a disciplinarily decadent perspective, is proof of a problem with the people instead of the discipline. It serves as further proof of the pathological nature of such people.
Decadence destroys the possibility of a decolonized ethics of the oppressed to overturn. Gordon 14
Lewis Gordon—professor of philosophy, African and Judiac Studies at the University of Connecticut—2014 (“Disciplinary Decadence and the Decolonization of Knowledge,” Africa Development 39.1: 81-92, 88). The first is regarding the political significance of this critique. For politics to exist, there must be discursive opposition over relations of power. Such activity involves communicative possibilities that rely on the suspension of violent or repressive forces. In effect, that makes politics also a condition of appearance. To be political is to emerge, to appear, to exist. Colonisation involves the elimination of discursive opposition between the dominant group and the subordinated group. A consequence of this is the attempted elimination of speech (a fundamental activity of political life) with a trail of concomitant conditions of its possibility. It is not that colonised groups fail to speak. It is that their speaking lacks appearance or mediation; it is not transformed into speech. The erasure of speech calls for the elimination of such conditions of its appearance such as gestural sites and the constellation of muscles that facilitates speech – namely, the face. As faceless, problem people are derailed from the dialectics of recognition, of self and other, with the consequence of neither self nor other. Since ethical life requires others, a challenge is here raised against models of decolonial practice that centre ethics. The additional challenge, then, is to cultivate the options necessary for both political and ethical life. To present that call as an ethical one would lead to a similar problem of coloniality as did, say, the problem of method raised by Fanon. European modernity has, in other words, subverted ethics. As with the critique of epistemology as first philosophy, ethics, too, as first philosophy must be called into question. It is not that ethics must be rejected. It simply faces its teleological suspension, especially where, if maintained, it presupposes instead of challenging colonial relations. Even conceptions of the ethical that demand deference to the Other run into trouble here since some groups, such as blacks and Indians/Native Americans, are often not even the Other. This means, then, that the ethical proviso faces irrelevance without the political conditions of its possibility. This is a major challenge to liberal hegemony, which calls for ethical foundations of political life, in European modernity. It turns it upside down. But in doing so, it also means that ethics-centred approaches, even in the name of liberation, face a similar fate.
Interpretation - The AFF may only garner offense from hypothetical enactment of the resolution
This does not require the use of any particular style, type of evidence, or assumption about the role of the judge — only that the topic should determine the debate’s subject matter. Solves their method good offense – they can read as a framework argument to justify a topical plan, there’s no reason voting off it is key.====
Merriam-Webster defines production as:
Merriam-Webster’s Learner’s Dictionary, “production.” the process of making or growing something for sale or use
West’s Encyclopedia of American Law defines nuclear power as:
"Nuclear Power." West's Encyclopedia of American Law, edition 2. 2008. The Gale Group 16 Aug. 2016 http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Nuclear+Power A form of energy produced by an atomic reaction, capable of producing an alternative source of electrical power to that supplied by coal, gas, or oil. The dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, by the United States in 1945 initiated the atomic age. Nuclear energy immediately became a military weapon of terrifying magnitude. For the physicists who worked on the atom bomb, the promise of nuclear energy was not solely military. They envisioned nuclear power as a safe, clean, cheap, and abundant source of energy that would end society's dependence on fossil fuels. At the end of World War II, leaders called for the peaceful use of nuclear energy.
Resolved reflects policy passage before a legislative body. Parcher 01
(1) Pardon me if I turn to a source besides Bill. American Heritage Dictionary: Resolve: 1. To make a firm decision about. 2. To decide or express by formal vote. 3. To separate something into constituent parts See Syns at *analyze* (emphasis in orginal) 4. Find a solution to. See Syns at *Solve* (emphasis in original) 5. To dispel: resolve a doubt. - n 1. Frimness of purpose; resolution. 2. A determination or decision. (2) The very nature of the word "resolution" makes it a question. American Heritage: A course of action determined or decided on. A formal statemnt of a deciion, as by a legislature. (3) The resolution is obviously a question. Any other conclusion is utterly inconcievable. Why? Context. The debate community empowers a topic committee to write a topic for ALTERNATE side debating. The committee is not a random group of people coming together to "reserve" themselves about some issue. There is context - they are empowered by a community to do something. In their deliberations, the topic community attempts to craft a resolution which can be ANSWERED in either direction. They focus on issues like ground and fairness because they know the resolution will serve as the basis for debate which will be resolved by determining the policy desireablility of that resolution. That's not only what they do, but it's what we REQUIRE them to do. We don't just send the topic committee somewhere to adopt their own group resolution. It's not the end point of a resolution adopted by a body - it's the prelimanary wording of a resolution sent to others to be answered or decided upon. (4) Further context: the word resolved is used to emphasis the fact that it's policy debate. Resolved comes from the adoption of resolutions by legislative bodies. A resolution is either adopted or it is not. It's a question before a legislative body. Should this statement be adopted or not. (5) The very terms 'affirmative' and 'negative' support my view. One affirms a resolution. Affirmative and negative are the equivalents of 'yes' or 'no' - which, of course, are answers to a question.
Violation:
Standards:
1. Engagement – there are infinite non topical AFFs - a precise and predictable point of difference is key to effective dialogue. Steinberg and Freeley 13
Steinberg and Freeley 13, * David, Lecturer in Communication studies and rhetoric. Advisor to Miami Urban Debate League. Director of Debate at U Miami, Former President of CEDA. And Austin, attorney who focuses on criminal, personal injury and civil rights law, JD, Suffolk University, Argumentation and Debate, Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making, 121-4. NS from file
Debate is a means of settling differences, so there must be a controversy, a difference of opinion or a conflict of interest before there can be a debate. If everyone is in agreement on a feet or value or policy, there is no need or opportunity 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 state¬ment. Controversy is an essential prerequisite of debate. Where there is no clash of ideas, proposals, interests, or expressed positions of issues, there is no debate. Controversy invites decisive choice between competing positions. 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 live 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? Does 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? How 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 card, 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 are best understood when seated clearly such that all parties to the debate share an understanding about the objec¬tive of the debate. This enables focus on substantive and objectively identifiable issues facilitating comparison of competing argumentation leading to effective decisions. Vague understanding results in unfocused deliberation and poor deci¬sions, general feelings of tension without opportunity for resolution, frustration, and emotional distress, as evidenced by the failure of the U.S. Congress to make substantial progress on the immigration debate. Of course, arguments may be presented without disagreement. For exam¬ple, claims are presented and supported within speeches, editorials, and advertise¬ments even without opposing or refutational response. Argumentation occurs in a range of settings from informal to formal, and may not call upon an audi¬ence or judge to make a forced choice among competing claims. Informal dis¬course occurs as conversation or panel discussion without demanding a decision about a dichotomous or yes/no question. However, by definition, debate requires "reasoned judgment on a proposition. The proposition is a statement about which competing advocates will offer alternative (pro or con) argumenta-tion calling upon their audience or adjudicator to decide. The proposition pro¬vides focus for the discourse and guides the decision process. Even when a decision will be made through a process of compromise, it is important to iden¬tify the beginning positions of competing advocates to begin negotiation and movement toward a center, or consensus position. It is frustrating and usually unproductive to attempt to make a decision when deciders are unclear as to what the decision is about. The proposition may be implicit in some applied debates (“Vote for me!”); however, when a vote or consequential decision is called for (as in the courtroom or in applied parliamentary debate) it is essential that the proposition be explicitly expressed (“the defendant is guilty!”). In aca¬demic debate, the proposition provides essential guidance for the preparation of the debaters prior to the debate, the case building and discourse presented during the debate, and the decision to be made by the debate judge after the debate. Someone disturbed by the problem of a growing underclass of poorly educated, socially disenfranchised youths might observe, “Public schools are doing a terri¬ble 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 some¬thing 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. This focus contributes to better and more informed decision making with the potential for better results. In aca¬demic debate, it provides better depth of argumentation and enhanced opportu¬nity for reaping the educational benefits of participation. In the next section, we will consider the challenge of framing the proposition for debate, and its role in the debate. 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 a topic, such as ‘"homeless¬ness,” or “abortion,” Or “crime,” or “global warming,” we are likely to have an interesting discussion but not to establish a profitable basis for argument. For example, the statement “Resolved: That the pen is mightier than the sword” is debatable, yet by itself fails to provide much basis for dear argumen¬tation. If we take this statement to mean Iliad the written word is more effec¬tive than physical force for some purposes, we can identify a problem area: the comparative effectiveness of writing or physical force for a specific purpose, perhaps promoting positive social change. (Note that “loose” propositions, such as the example above, may be defined by their advocates in such a way as to facilitate a clear contrast of competing sides; through definitions and debate they “become” clearly understood statements even though they may not begin as such. There are formats for debate that often begin with this sort of proposition. However, in any debate, at some point, effective and meaningful discussion relies on identification of a clearly stated or understood proposition.) Back to the example of the written word versus physical force. 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, web¬site development, advertising, cyber-warfare, disinformation, or what? What does it mean to be “mightier" 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 Laurania 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 advo¬cates, 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
Outweighs: A. Even if their method is good, it isn’t valuable if it’s not procedurally debatable – they don’t get access to any of their offense 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 C. Debate is about process not content – we inevitably switch sides, even if it’s arguing against one method with another. The individual ideas we learn, like , aren’t as valuable as learning how to effectively apply those ideas outside of round by engaging in precise discussions instead of just asserting opinions. D. They force the NEG to extremist generics – this is why cap and anthro are such common responses to their position - which causes more evasion than if we had a substantive debate about in the topic.
2. Procedural Fairness - Non topical advocacies mean they can defend anything outside the resolution which is unpredictable, and also defend uncontestable offense like _. This kills NEG ground and thus equal access to the ballot.
This is an independent voting issue which outweighs:
A. Evaluation – even if their arguments seem true, that’s only because they already had an advantage – fairness is a meta constraint on your ability to determine who best meets their ROB.
B. Fairness is key to effective dialogue. Galloway 07
Ryan, “DINNER AND CONVERSATION AT THE ARGUMENTATIVE TABLE: RECONCEPTUALIZING DEBATE AS AN ARGUMENTATIVE DIALOGUE”, Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28 (2007)
Debate as a dialogue sets an argumentative table, where all parties receive a relatively fair opportunity to voice their position. Anything that fails to allow participants to have their position articulated denies one side of the argumentative table a fair hearing. The affirmative side is set by the topic and fairness requirements. While affirmative teams have recently resisted affirming the topic, in fact, the topic selection process is rigorous, taking the relative ground of each topic as its central point of departure. Setting the affirmative reciprocally sets the negative. The negative crafts approaches to the topic consistent with affirmative demands. The negative crafts disadvantages, counter-plans, and critical arguments premised on the arguments that the topic allows for the affirmative team. According to fairness norms, each side sits at a relatively balanced argumentative table. When one side takes more than its share, competitive equity suffers. However, it also undermines the respect due to the other involved in the dialogue. When one side excludes the other, it fundamentally denies the personhood of the other participant (Ehninger, 1970, p. 110). A pedagogy of debate as dialogue takes this respect as a fundamental component. A desire to be fair is a fundamental condition of a dialogue that takes the form of a demand for equality of voice. Far from being a banal request for links to a disadvantage, fairness is a demand for respect, a demand to be heard, a demand that a voice backed by literally months upon months of preparation, research, and critical thinking not be silenced. Affirmative cases that suspend basic fairness norms operate to exclude particular negative strategies. Unprepared, one side comes to the argumentative table unable to meaningfully participate in a dialogue. They are unable to “understand what ‘went on…’” and are left to the whims of time and power (Farrell, 1985, p. 114). Hugh Duncan furthers this line of reasoning: Opponents not only tolerate but honor and respect each other because in doing so they enhance their own chances of thinking better and reaching sound decisions. Opposition is necessary because it sharpens thought in action. We assume that argument, discussion, and talk, among free an informed people who subordinate decisions of any kind, because it is only through such discussion that we reach agreement which binds us to a common cause…If we are to be equal…relationships among equals must find expression in many formal and informal institutions (Duncan, 1993, p. 196-197). Debate compensates for the exigencies of the world by offering a framework that maintains equality for the sake of the conversation (Farrell, 1985, p. 114). For example, an affirmative case on the 2007-2008 college topic might defend neither state nor international action in the Middle East, and yet claim to be germane to the topic in some way. The case essentially denies the arguments that state action is oppressive or that actions in the international arena are philosophically or pragmatically suspect. Instead of allowing for the dialogue to be modified by the interchange of the affirmative case and the negative response, the affirmative subverts any meaningful role to the negative team, preventing them from offering effective “counter-word” and undermining the value of a meaningful exchange of speech acts. Germaneness and other substitutes for topical action do not accrue the dialogical benefits of topical advocacy.
C. Links best to the role of the judge to determine the winner as per the ballot – that’s impossible if the round’s unfair. Even if their method is good for education there’s no reason you vote on it, just as even if exercise is good for soccer playerss you don’t vote for the team that ran most.
3. We solve all their offense
A. Arguments don’t injure people, but policies do—voting aff on this is censorship because it says we can’t even introduce ideas without harming them. Anderson 06
Amanda Anderson 6, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English at Brown University, Spring 2006, “Reply to My Critic(s),” Criticism, Vol. 48, No. 2, p. 281-290
Probyns piece is a mixture of affective fallacy, argument by authority, and bald ad hominem. There's a pattern here: precisely the tendency to personalize argument and to foreground what Wendy Brown has called "states of injury." Probyn says, for example, that she "felt ostracized by the books content and style." Ostracized? Argument here is seen as directly harming persons, and this is precisely the state of affairs to which I object. Argument is not injurious to persons. Policies are injurious to persons and institutionalized practices can alienate and exclude. But argument itself is not directly harmful; once one says it is, one is very close to a logic of censorship. The most productive thing to do in an open academic culture (and in societies that aspire to freedom and democracy) when you encounter a book or an argument that you disagree with is to produce a response or a book that states your disagreement. But to assert that the book itself directly harms you is tantamount to saying that you do not believe in argument or in the free exchange of ideas, that your claim to injury somehow damns your opponent's ideas. When Probyn isn't symptomatic, she's just downright sloppy. One could work to build up the substance of points that she throws out the car window as she screeches on to her next destination, but life is short, and those with considered objections to liberalism and proceduralism would not be particularly well served by the exercise. As far as I can tell, Probyn thinks my discussion of universalism is of limited relevance (though far more appealing when put, by others, in more comfortingly equivocating terms), but she's certain my critique of appeals to identity is simply not able to accommodate the importance of identity in social and political life. As I make clear throughout the book, and particularly in my discussion of the headscarf debate in France, identity is likely to be at the center of key arguments about life in plural democracies; my point is not that identity is not relevant, but simply that it should not be used to trump or stifle argument. In closing, I'd like to speak briefly to the question of proceduralism's relevance to democratic vitality. One important way of extending the proceduralist arguments put forth by Habeimas is to work on how institutions and practices might better promote participation in democratic life. The apathy and nonparticipation plaguing democratic institutions in the United States is a serious problem, and can be separated from the more romantic theoretical investments in a refusal to accept the terms of what counts as argument, or in assertions of inassimilable difference. With respect to the latter, which is often glorified precisely as the moment when politics or democracy is truly occurring, I would say, on the contrary democracy is not happening then-rather, the limits or deficiencies of an actually existing democracy are making themselves felt. Acknowledging struggle, conflict, and exclusion is vital to democracy, but insisting that exclusion is not so much a persistent challenge for modern liberal democracies but rather inherent to the modern liberal-democratic political form as such seems to me precisely to remain stalled in a romantic critique of Enlightenment. It all comes down to a question of whether one wants to work with the ideals of democracy or see them as essentially normative in a negative sense: this has been the legacy of a certain critique of Enlightenment, and it is astonishingly persistent in the left quarters in the academy. One hears it clearly when Robbins makes confident reference to liberalisms tendency to ignore "the founding acts of violence on which a social order is based." One encounters it in the current vogue for the work of Giorgio Agamben and Carl Schmitt. Saying that a state of exception defines modernity or is internal to the law itself may help to sharpen your diagnoses of certain historical conditions, but if absolutized as it is in these accounts, it gives you nothing but a negative diagnostic and a compensatory flight to a realm entirely other-the kind of mystical, Utopian impulse that flees from these conditions rather than confronts and fights them on terms that derive from the settled-if constantly evolving-normative basis of democratic modernity. If one is outraged by the flagrant disregard of democratic procedures in the current U.S. political regime, then one needs to be able to coherently say why democratic procedures matter, what principles underwrite them, and what historical movements and institutions have helped us to secure and support them. Argument as a critical practice and as a key component of democratic institutions and public debate has a vital role to play in such a task.
B. All arguments are framework - we don’t have the power to impose a norm, only to persuade you that their arguments should be rejected. Anderson 6
Amanda Anderson, Caroline Donovan Professor of English Literature and Department Chair at Johns Hopkins University, Senior Fellow at the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, holds a Ph.D. in English from Cornell University, 2006 (“Reply to My Critic(s),” Criticism, Volume 48, Number 2, Spring, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Project MUSE, p. 285-287)
Let's first examine the claim that my book is "unwittingly" inviting a resurrection of the "Enlightenment-equals-totalitarianism position." How, one wonders, could a book promoting argument and debate, and promoting reason-giving practices as a kind of common ground that should prevail over assertions of cultural authenticity, somehow come to be seen as a dangerous resurgence of bad Enlightenment? Robbins tells us why: I want "argument on my own terms"—that End Page 285 is, I want to impose reason on people, which is a form of power and oppression. But what can this possibly mean? Arguments stand or fall based on whether they are successful and persuasive, even an argument in favor of argument. It simply is not the case that an argument in favor of the importance of reasoned debate to liberal democracy is tantamount to oppressive power. To assume so is to assume, in the manner of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, that reason is itself violent, inherently, and that it will always mask power and enforce exclusions. But to assume this is to assume the very view of Enlightenment reason that Robbins claims we are "thankfully" well rid of. (I leave to the side the idea that any individual can proclaim that a debate is over, thankfully or not.) But perhaps Robbins will say, "I am not imagining that your argument is directly oppressive, but that what you argue for would be, if it were enforced." Yet my book doesn't imagine or suggest it is enforceable; I simply argue in favor of, I promote, an ethos of argument within a liberal democratic and proceduralist framework. As much as Robbins would like to think so, neither I nor the books I write can be cast as an arm of the police. Robbins wants to imagine a far more direct line of influence from criticism to political reality, however, and this is why it can be such a bad thing to suggest norms of argument. Watch as the gloves come off: Faced with the prospect of submitting to her version of argument—roughly, Habermas's version—and of being thus authorized to disagree only about other, smaller things, some may feel that there will have been an end to argument, or an end to the arguments they find most interesting. With current events in mind, I would be surprised if there were no recourse to the metaphor of a regular army facing a guerilla insurrection, hinting that Anderson wants to force her opponents to dress in uniform, reside in well-demarcated camps and capitals that can be bombed, fight by the rules of states (whether the states themselves abide by these rules or not), and so on—in short, that she wants to get the battle onto a terrain where her side will be assured of having the upper hand. Let's leave to the side the fact that this is a disowned hypothetical criticism. (As in, "Well, okay, yes, those are my gloves, but those are somebody else's hands they will have come off of.") Because far more interesting, actually, is the sudden elevation of stakes. It is a symptom of the sorry state of affairs in our profession that it plays out repeatedly this tragicomic tendency to give a grandiose political meaning to every object it analyzes or confronts. We have evidence of how desperate the situation is when we see it in a critic as thoughtful as Bruce Robbins, where it emerges as the need to allegorize a point about an argument in such a way that it gets cast as the equivalent of war atrocities. It is especially ironic in light of the fact that to the extent that I do give examples of the importance of liberal democratic proceduralism, I invoke the disregard of the protocols of international adjudication in the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq; I also speak End Page 286 about concerns with voting transparency. It is hard for me to see how my argument about proceduralism can be associated with the policies of the Bush administration when that administration has exhibited a flagrant disregard of democratic procedure and the rule of law. I happen to think that a renewed focus on proceduralism is a timely venture, which is why I spend so much time discussing it in my final chapter. But I hasten to add that I am not interested in imagining that proceduralism is the sole political response to the needs of cultural criticism in our time: my goal in the book is to argue for a liberal democratic culture of argument, and to suggest ways in which argument is not served by trumping appeals to identity and charismatic authority. I fully admit that my examples are less political events than academic debates; for those uninterested in the shape of intellectual arguments, and eager for more direct and sustained discussion of contemporary politics, the approach will disappoint. Moreover, there will always be a tendency for a proceduralist to under-specify substance, and that is partly a principled decision, since the point is that agreements, compromises, and policies get worked out through the communicative and political process. My book is mainly concentrated on evaluating forms of arguments and appeals to ethos, both those that count as a form of trump card or distortion, and those that flesh out an understanding of argument as a universalist practice. There is an intermittent appeal to larger concerns in the political democratic culture, and that is because I see connections between the ideal of argument and the ideal of deliberative democracy. But there is clearly, and indeed necessarily, significant room for further elaboration here.
C. T version of the AFF
D. They can read these arguments on the NEG, there’s no reason affirming is key – switch side debate is key to tolerance instead of dogmatism. Muir 93:
Values clarification, Stewart is correct in pointing out, does not mean that no values are developed. Two very important values— tolerance and fairness—inhere to a significant degree in the ethics of switch-side debate. A second point about the charge of relativism is that tolerance is related to the development of reasoned moral viewpoints. The willingness to recognize the existence of other views, and to grant alternative positions a degree of credibility, is a value fostered by switch-side debate: Alternately debating both sides of the same question inculcates a deep-seated attitude of tolerance toward differing points of view. To be forced to debate only one side leads to an ego-identification with that side. , . . The other side in contrast is seen only as something to be discredited. Arguing as persuasively as one can for completely opposing views is one way of giving recognition to the idea that a strong case can generally be made for the views of earnest and intelligent men, however such views may clash with one's own. . . .Promoting this kind of tolerance is perhaps one of the greatest benefits debating both sides has to offer. 5' The activity should encourage debating both sides of a topic, reasons Thompson, because debaters are "more likely to realize that propositions are bilateral. It is those who fail to recognize this fact who become intolerant, dogmatic, and bigoted.""* While Theodore Roosevelt can hardly be said to be advocating bigotry, his efforts to turn out advocates convinced of their rightness is not a position imbued with tolerance.At a societal level, the value of tolerance is more conducive to a fair and open assessment of competing ideas. John Stuart Mill eloquently states the case this way: Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right. . . . the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race. . . . If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of the truth, produced by its collision with error."*' At an individual level, tolerance is related to moral identity via empathic and critical assessments of differing perspectives. Paul posits a strong relationship between tolerance, empathy, and critical thought. Discussing the function of argument in everyday life, he observes that in order to overcome natural tendencies to reason egocentrically and sociocentrically, individuals must gain the capacity to engage in self-reflective questioning, to reason dialogically and dialectically, and to "reconstruct alien and opposing belief systems empathically."*- Our system of beliefs is, by definition, irrational when we are incapable of abandoning a belief for rational reasons; that is, when we egocentrically associate our beliefs with our own integrity. Paul describes an intimate relationship between private inferential habits, moral practices, and the nature of argumentation. Critical thought and moral identity, he urges, must be predicated on discovering the insights of opposing views and the weaknesses of our own beliefs. Role playing, he reasons, is a central element of any effort to gain such insight.
Outweighs: unwillingness to listen to other viewpoints is the root cause of their harms since_.
Voter: Drop the debater on T – the round is already skewed from the beginning because their advocacy excluded by ability to generate NC offense– letting them sever doesn’t solve any of the abuse
Theory is an issue of competing interpretations because reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention based on preference rather than argumentation and encourages a race to the bottom in which debaters will exploit a judge’s tolerance for questionable argumentation.
It is impossible to solve colonization within a European body of knowledge – their foundation recreate every problem they criticizes. Wynter 06
- Impact – can’t solve antiblackness if you work within antiblack disciplines since that consciousness will always invade “radical” thought – just like you couldn’t explain to someone in the medival era why some planets seemed to move backwards because the planetary model was geocentric, you can’t explain to someone who uses western phil a true liberation strategy for black people
Syliva Wynter 6—2006 ( “Interview with Syliva Wynter,ProudFlesh Interview: New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics and Consciousness, Issue 4). NS
PROUD FLESH: At this point in your life’s work, who could think of your writing without thinking of its critical thesis on “humanism,” of Western humanism, or what it calls “Man,” which also raises critical questions of “consciousness,” does it not? And other questions, too, of course. SYLVIA WYNTER: Such as, “Why does this meaning have to be put on being Black—this meaning of non-being?” These are the kinds of questions that you guys are going to ask. I beg you guys to go back and read about Copernicus, Galileo and so on. The Darwinian thing was a bit of a struggle, but not as much--strangely enough . . . PROUD FLESH: Yes, you consistently show how “the Copernican revolution” was one enabled by imperialist exploration-cum-exploitation or conquest. For undergraduates in Western universities, in particular, they simply stick the Copernicus issue in the anthology of “modern Western philosophy,” as a lesser textual concern, without dealing with it or its significance; I mean, with no context or explanation. SYLVIA WYNTER: They never even wanted to write about it! And why? Because I think they are aware of the implications, if taken seriously. That’s how they took over the world. We have to take it all seriously. YOU CANNOT SOLVE THE ISSUE OF “CONSCIOUSNESS” IN TERMS OF THEIR BODY OF “KNOWLEDGE.” You just can’t. Just as within the medieval order of knowledge there was no way in which you could explain why it is that certain planets seemed to be moving backwards. Because you were coming from a geocentric model, right? So you had to “know” the world in that way. Whereas from our “Man-centric” model, we cannot solve “consciousness” because “Man” is a purely ontogenetic/purely biological conception of being, who then creates “culture.” So if we say “consciousness” is “constructed,” who does the constructing? You see? Whereas in Fanon’s understanding of ontogeny-and-sociogeny, there’s no problem. Do you see what I mean?
The alternative is radical decolonization that challenges the AFF’s overrepresentation of Western Man. Wynter 03
- Alt - basically do the AFF (burn everything down, end the world, whatever) without their use of western phil concepts – like pic out of psychoanalysis, western ontology focus, and social death focus - External impacts - global conflict, poverty, sexism, etc are all caused by overrepresentation of western man
Sylvia Wynter—2003 (“Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation--An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 3, Number 3,257-337). NS
The argument proposes that the struggle of our new millennium will be one between the ongoing imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves. Because of this overrepresentation, which is defined in the first part of the title as the Coloniality of Being/ Power/Truth/Freedom, any attempt to unsettle the coloniality of power will call for the unsettling of this overrepresentation as the second and now purely secular form of what Aníbal Quijano identifies as the "Racism/ Ethnicism complex," on whose basis the world of modernity was brought into existence from the fifteenth/sixteenth centuries onwards (Quijano 1999, 2000), 2 and of what Walter Mignolo identifies as the foundational "colonial difference" on which the world of modernity was to institute itself (Mignolo 1999, 2000). 3 The correlated hypothesis here is that all our present struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal distribution of the earth resources (20 percent of the world's peoples own 80 percent of its resources, consume two-thirds of its food, and are responsible for 75 percent of its ongoing pollution, with this leading to two billion of End Page 260 earth's peoples living relatively affluent lives while four billion still live on the edge of hunger and immiseration, to the dynamic of overconsumption on the part of the rich techno-industrial North paralleled by that of overpopulation on the part of the dispossessed poor, still partly agrarian worlds of the South 4 )—these are all differing facets of the central ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle. Central to this struggle also is the usually excluded and invisibilized situation of the category identified by Zygmunt Bauman as the "New Poor" (Bauman 1987). That is, as a category defined at the global level by refugee/economic migrants stranded outside the gates of the rich countries, as the postcolonial variant of Fanon's category of les damnés (Fanon 1963)—with this category in the United States coming to comprise the criminalized majority Black and dark-skinned Latino inner-city males now made to man the rapidly expanding prison-industrial complex, together with their female peers—the kicked-about Welfare Moms—with both being part of the ever-expanding global, transracial category of the homeless/the jobless, the semi-jobless, the criminalized drug-offending prison population. So that if we see this category of the damnés that is internal to (and interned within) the prison system of the United States as the analog form of a global archipelago, constituted by the Third- and Fourth-World peoples of the so-called "underdeveloped" areas of the world—most totally of all by the peoples of the continent of Africa (now stricken with AIDS, drought, and ongoing civil wars, and whose bottommost place as the most impoverished of all the earth's continents is directly paralleled by the situation of its Black Diaspora peoples, with Haiti being produced and reproduced as the most impoverished nation of the Americas)—a systemic pattern emerges. This pattern is linked to the fact that while in the post-sixties United States, as Herbert Gans noted recently, the Black population group, of all the multiple groups comprising the post-sixties social hierarchy, has once again come to be placed at the bottommost place of that hierarchy (Gans, 1999), with all incoming new nonwhite/non-Black groups, as Gans's fellow sociologist Andrew Hacker (1992) earlier pointed out, coming to claim "normal" North American identity by the putting of visible distance between themselves and the Black population group (in effect, claiming "normal" human status by distancing themselves from the group that is still made to occupy the nadir, End Page 261 "nigger" rung of being human within the terms of our present ethnoclass Man's overrepresentation of its "descriptive statement" Bateson 1969 as if it were that of the human itself), then the struggle of our times, one that has hitherto had no name, is the struggle against this overrepresentation. As a struggle whose first phase, the Argument proposes, was first put in place (if only for a brief hiatus before being coopted, reterritorialized Godzich 1986) by the multiple anticolonial social-protest movements and intellectual challenges of the period to which we give the name, "The Sixties." The further proposal here is that, although the brief hiatus during which the sixties' large-scale challenge based on multiple issues, multiple local terrains of struggles (local struggles against, to use Mignolo's felicitous phrase, a "global design" Mignolo 2000) erupted was soon to be erased, several of the issues raised then would continue to be articulated, some in sanitized forms (those pertaining to the category defined by Bauman as "the seduced"), others in more harshly intensified forms (those pertaining to Bauman's category of the "repressed" Bauman 1987). Both forms of "sanitization" would, however, function in the same manner as the lawlike effects of the post-sixties' vigorous discursive and institutional re-elaboration of the central overrepresentation, which enables the interests, reality, and well-being of the empirical human world to continue to be imperatively subordinated to those of the now globally hegemonic ethnoclass world of "Man." This, in the same way as in an earlier epoch and before what Howard Winant identifies as the "immense historical rupture" of the "Big Bang" processes that were to lead to a contemporary modernity defined by the "rise of the West" and the "subjugation of the rest of us" (Winant 1994)—before, therefore, the secularizing intellectual revolution of Renaissance humanism, followed by the decentralizing religious heresy of the Protestant Reformation and the rise of the modern state—the then world of laymen and laywomen, including the institution of the political state, as well as those of commerce and of economic production, had remained subordinated to that of the post-Gregorian Reform Church of Latin-Christian Europe (Le Goff 1983), and therefore to the "rules of the social order" and the theories "which gave them sanction" (See Konrad and Szelenyi guide-quote), as these rules were articulated by its theologians and implemented by its celibate clergy (See Le Goff guide-quote).
The role of the ballot is to challenge the representations of the 1AC legitimated through a Western philosophical worldview. Their cultural framing is a prior question to their advocacy – they do not get to weigh the method. Wynter 92
- discourse and the cultural background of a theory help construct it and can’t be separated form the theory itself since they’re woven in to how it’s interpreted (by the judge for example), how it’s justified, and what political efficacy it has. They don’t get to weigh “ending the world” against the alt since their justification shape how their method works and are thus a prior question
Sylvia Wynter 92—1992 (“Beyond the Categories of the Master Conception: The Counterdoctrine of the Jamesian Poiesis,” in C.L.R. James Caribbean, eds. Paget Henry and Paul Buhle, 63-91). NS
To be effective systems of power must be discursively legitimated. This is not to say that power is originally a set of institutional structures that are subsequently legitimated. On the contrary, it is to suggest the equiprimordiality of structure and cultural conceptions in the genesis of power. These cultural conceptions, encoded in language and other signifying systems, shape the development of political structures and are also shaped by them. The cultural aspects of power are as original as the structural aspects; each serves as a code for the other's development. It is from these elementary cultural conceptions that complex legitimating discourses are constructed.
9/10/16
Africa PIC
Tournament: Voices | Round: 5 | Opponent: Loyola NT | Judge: Karen Qi Evaluate the round with the question “is the aff more desirable than the squo or a competitive policy option” – best for learning how to advocate positions in the real world instead of vague generalities
Plan text: All countries ought to prohibit the production of nuclear excluding countries across the continent of Africa. These countries will retain a choice over whether to prohibit, expand, or maintain nuclear power.
Net benefits: 1 Nuclear is currently being built in South Africa. ISS 5/11 ISS – African center for Peace and Security Training. “Africa going nuclear?.” ISS. May 11, 2016. https://www.issafrica.org/acpst/news/africa-going-nuclear JJN On a continent that has too often been cavalier about the future wellbeing of its people, it’s encouraging – at least from the development perspective – that South Africa is not alone in planning to build nuclear reactors. South Africa now has the only nuclear power plant on the African continent, comprising the two reactors at Koeberg, just north of Cape Town, producing a total of about 1 860 megawatts (MW) of electricity. It also has plans – which have become highly controversial – to build six to eight more reactors/units, adding a further 9 600 MW to the national grid. But 11 other African nations have also drafted plans to go fissile, according to Anton Khlopkov, Director of the Centre for Energy and Security Studies in Moscow. These are Algeria, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Namibia, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Tunisia and Uganda, which constitute about a quarter of the 45 countries worldwide that are actively considering embarking upon nuclear power programmes. Speaking at a seminar on nuclear power in Africa at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) in Pretoria last week, Khlopkov pointed out that this number had dropped from about 60 before the Fukushima nuclear power disaster in Japan five years ago. So Fukushima was a blow to nuclear power, but evidently not a fatal one. Russia is the world’s largest exporter of nuclear power, he said, constructing 25 of the world’s nuclear power plants currently. The export sales of its national nuclear corporation Rosatom were US$6.4 billion last year (including also nuclear fuel and spent nuclear fuel reprocessing.) Its foreign orders up to 2030 are worth US$110 billion. There are now 38 nuclear power reactors of Russian design operating outside of Russia, in 10 countries; and 25 more reactors that Rosatom is contracted to build in 12 countries. The most advanced plans for nuclear power plant construction in Africa are in Algeria, which proposes to build two units, generating 2 400 MW by 2030; Egypt, two units of 4 800 MW by 2030; Ghana, one unit of 1 000 MW by 2025; Kenya, four units, 4 000 MW by 2033; Morocco, one reactor by 2030; Nigeria, four units, 4 000 MW by 2027 and, of course, South Africa’s 9 600 MW fleet. Rosatom is one of several national nuclear corporations bidding for the South African contract. It is also in negotiations with Algeria, Egypt and Morocco to build their proposed nuclear power plants. It's not clear which other nuclear vendors are interested in building these and the other proposed African nuclear power plants. That Africa needs a lot more electricity is unquestionable. As Khlopkov said, only 24 of the population of sub-Saharan Africa now has access to electricity. Outside South Africa, the entire installed generation capacity of sub-Saharan Africa is only 28 gigawatts; about the same as Argentina’s. African manufacturers now experience power shortages for an average of 56 days a year, costing them 6 of sales revenues. The average electricity tariff in sub-Saharan Africa is US$0.13 per kilowatt-hour, compared to a range of US$0.04 to US$0.08 in the developing world at large. But is nuclear the solution for Africa?
Nuclear power is key to expand electricity in Africa and spur economic growth. Luke 15 Ronke Luke, Africa banking on nuclear power, 10/4/15, http://www.mining.com/web/africa-banking-on-nuclear-power/ VC It’s no secret that Africa’s economic development has been stifled by the shortage of electricity across the continent. The Africa Progress Report 2015 puts the annual electricity-related economic loss at 2 percent to 4 percent of GDP. In Ghana and Tanzania, electricity shortages are costing businesses 15 percent of sales. Over 600 million people are getting restless waiting for power. South Africa alone accounts for 50 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s current installed capacity of 9 GW. According to The Africa Progress Report 2015, at the current pace of electrification (investing $8 billion or 0.49 percent of GDP annually), the continent will achieve universal access in 2080. Declaring this unacceptable, Africa Progress Report 2015 projects Africa needs to invest $55 billion (or 3-4 percent of total GDP) annually to speed up the pace and reach universal access to electricity by 2030. Discussions about Africa’s power options often focus on renewables, hydropower and natural gas. Diesel, heavily used for power generation across Africa, and coal, widely used in Southern Africa, are not championed in discussions with international development organizations and financiers. To close the huge power deficit and boost their economies, Africa’s larger economies – South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria -and smaller uranium rich countries – Namibia and Niger – have decided it might be time to go nuclear. Ghana, Senegal, Uganda, and Morocco have also publicly expressed their interest in nuclear power. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has indicated that it will help African countries cooperate in developing nuclear electricity. IAEA will advise on international best practices and standards. National governments will be responsible for regulatory oversight.
South African nuclear energy policy gets modeled – sub-Saharan countries follow their example. Barber 14. D.A. Barber, Africa’s Nuclear Energy Hopefuls Learning From South Africa, 10/21/14, http://afkinsider.com/75817/africas-nuclear-energy-hopefuls-learning-south-africa/#sthash.9RdgtYHe.dpuf VC During August’s U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit, the U.S.-based Nuclear Energy Institute hosted a delegation of African leaders from Niger, Namibia and South Africa to discuss nuclear energy development. “The take-away was primarily that nuclear has a role to play in the electrification of Africa,” Lipman told AFKInsider. “The strong message that the Africans gave us was that Africa is open for business and they’re going to have nuclear power no matter what,” says Lipman. South Africa’s participation in the Nuclear Energy Institute meeting is understandable, but Namibia and Niger are also considering nuclear because they both have the fuel to power the plants. The Africa Energy Outlook notes that sub-Saharan Africa “includes three of the ten-largest uranium resource-holders in the world,” which include Namibia and Niger. According to the International Energy Agency, while Namibia gets half its electric power from South Africa, it also holds about 8.2 percent of the world’s uranium reserves mined from two sites to fuel nuclear power stations around the world. For this reason, Namibia’s government has committed to a goal of supplying its own electricity from nuclear power. Niger also has two uranium mines which supplies about 7.7 percent of the world’s uranium. In May 2014, Niger and French nuclear power plant builder AREVA signed a 5-year agreement for operating those mines. But Nuclear Energy Institute’s Lipman says there are still opportunities for American companies to get involved. “They want to see American companies participate and they were very clear that our competitors are there,” Lipman told AFKInsider. “Whether it’s the Russians, Koreans, the Chinese, or the French, they’re there now; they’re cultivating those relationships,” says Lipman. Learning from South Africa The sub-Saharan Africa countries who have expressed interest in nuclear power need only look to South Africa to see the challenges that may lie ahead. While the newly-signed South African nuclear pacts set the framework for foreign suppliers to bid on the new nuclear build in a fair, competitive and cost effective manner. The South Africa Department of Energy signed nuclear energy technology cooperation pacts with Russia on September 20 and announced another with France on Oct 10. The energy department already has a nuclear pact with the U.S. and will soon finalize pacts China and Japan, uses these to set the procurement guidelines for foreign suppliers to bid on the nuclear program.
Poverty is a conflict multiplier and causes massive structural violence and unrest across the continent. Aigbe 14 Omoruyi Aigbe, CONFLICT AND POVERTY IN AFRICA: THE EFFECT OF NATURAL RESOURCE AND LEADERSHIP, 7/25/14 VC On April 15 2013, the United Nations’ Security Council met at the headquarter in New York, to discuss on preventing conflict in Africa; calling for a high priority to be given to addressing core root causes such as poverty, hunger, human rights abuses, marginalization and impunity. No doubt, conflicts rise where there is poor governance, human rights abuses and grievances over the unequal distribution of resources, wealth and power. Following up to that experts at the ’First Africa Union (AU), Regional Economic Communities (REC), Regional Mechanisms (RMs) For Conflict Prevention and Management’ met in Abuja Nigeria, under the auspices of ECOWAS in November of 2013, blaming poverty and underdevelopment as the root cause of conflicts in different parts of Africa, including the violence in Central African Republic (CAR), Somalia, Sudan and South Sudan. The problem of poverty is multidimensional; it goes beyond economics to include social, political, and cultural issues. Scholars like Laune Nathan (2003), John Burton (1997), Richard Sandbrook (1982) and Ted Gurr (1970) have in the past agreed that poverty is a result of lack of basic human needs, which lead to reactions that result in conflict. They are the proponent of human needs theory. However, Burton (ibid) argues that the denial of peoples’ biological needs and psychological needs that relate to growth and development are the drivers of conflict and instability in developing countries. Basic needs (such as food, water, shelter and health) unlike interest cannot be compromised or traded, concealed, or bargained for; an attempt to do this, leads to conflict. Robust evidence on the causes of conflict shows that low national incomes are almost always correlated with the occurrence of violence and conflict. According to Aristotle cited in Okanya (1996), “social strife and revolutions are not brought out by the conspiratorial or malignant nature of man; rather revolutions are derived from poverty and distributive injustice.” Consequently, when majority of people are poor and has no hope of ameliorating their condition, they are bound to be restive and seek recompense through violence, this is arguably the case of the Niger/Delta region in Nigeria. No regime can hold stability and peace when it is created on a sea of poverty (Okanya, Ibid). Conflict evidently brings poverty in as much as it brings destruction, violence, and hatred. Poverty, on the other hand, is a cause of conflict: when grievances are not handled properly, it is argued, poor people, who are restive, will stage an uprising (i.e Egypt and Tunisia), questioning government altogether and joining rebel groups, this may explain the strength of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Decline in the economy and extreme poverty may then underpin the tendencies to resort to violent unrest. Nevertheless, at the root of conflicts always lie multifaceted factors: inequality of political, social, economic and cultural opportunities among different groups, lack of democratic governance and effective leadership, absence of civil society and mechanism for non-violent conflict management. However, some actors argue that the current research on the poverty-development-conflict nexus seems not to have provided convincing evidence on the association between poverty and conflict, the correlation is often understood to be indirect at best. 2 South African drought is bad now, but it’s going to get worse. Schneider 16. Keith Schneider, Drought Pushes South Africa To Water, Energy, and Food Reckoning, 1/19/16, http://www.circleofblue.org/2016/africa/drought-pushes-south-africa-to-water-energy-and-food-reckoning/ VC South Africa straddles the nation-defining economic line between developed and developing and has reached an inflection point in its progress. The nation’s 20th-century desperate need of new software and a bigger hard drive in the 21st. The powerful and closely tied ropes of ecological and economic transition are binding South Africa, the continent’s second largest economy, to a tree of slow deterioration and critical choices. How high will food prices climb if there is no break in the worst drought in 34 years? Will water shortages, expected over the next decade, change South Africa’s program to continue building two immense, thirsty, overdue, and expensive coal-fired power plants? How much is South Africa willing to invest in drinking water supply and wastewater treatment networks that have been poorly maintained, say local water authority managers, and need to expand to reach millions of residents and prevent raw sewage from contaminating rivers and lakes? The problems are not short-term. Neither are the solutions, say authorities and citizens. Supplies of water, energy, and food — the basic resources that drive every human community — are not assured in a nation where demand is growing and the capacity to deliver is in jeopardy. Over the next several months, in a series of regular frontline reports, Circle of Blue seeks to bring our readers new insights about how South Africa understands and anticipates the converging economic and ecological trends of this century, and builds a new foundation of stability and security for its citizens.
South African nuclear power is key to desalination and solving water shortages. Theletsane 16. Winnie Theletsane, ‘SA HAS TO BUILD NUCLEAR POWER STATIONS DUE TO LACK OF WATER’, 2/17/16, http://ewn.co.za/2016/02/17/SA-has-to-build-nuclear-power-station-due-to-lack-water VC CAPE TOWN - Minister of Energy Tina Joemat-Pettersson says South Africa has to build nuclear power stations because the country doesn’t have enough water. Joemat-Pettersson argued the case in Parliament during the second and final day of debate on President Jacob Zuma’s State of the Nation Address (Sona). “Koeberg Nuclear Power Station uses 22 billion litres of sea water, it does not use fresh water, and it recycles water. Twenty-two billion litres of sea water; nuclear energy also contributes to desalination and we are going to need it.” The mister says by contrast, coal-fired power stations consume billions of litres of water. “Medupi Power Station will use 17 billion litres of fresh water a year; 17 billion litres of water, which we will all be looking for because this drought is not going to stop tomorrow.” Joemat-Pettersson says renewable energy cannot provide sufficient baseload supplies to support the industrialisation of the country.
South African water shortages cause failed harvests and jeopardize food security. VOA 16 Voice of America, South Africa: Drought Leads to Failed Crops, Water Shortages, 1/10/16, http://www.voanews.com/a/south-africa-drought-leads-to-failed-crops-water-shortages/3138823.html VC Chakela is joined by dozens more residents of Senekal, a small town in South Africa's rural Free State province, one of four regions declared disaster areas as a drought dries up South Africa's heartland - along with much of eastern and southern Africa - bringing with it failed crops and acute water shortages. The drought is a sign of a changing climate the whole region must prepare for, say experts. The El Nino weather phenomenon has returned to southern Africa, marked by delayed rainfall and unusually high temperatures, according to the World Food Program. The environmental effects of El Nino are expected to last until at least 2017, affecting the food security of 29 million people due to poor harvests, said the WFP report. The conditions in Senekal should serve as a warning to the rest of region to prepare themselves for the dry years ahead, said Tshepiso Ramakarane, manager of the Setsoto municipality, where Senekal is located. "For the next 10 to 15 years, the situation is likely to get worse," he warned, adding that only days of sustained rainfall can solve the town's woes, despite the occasional scattered shower. "We are in the middle of a crisis." Other towns in the district have even less water, but Senekal is in worse shape because of its poor infrastructure and distance from the nearest dam, pointing up the vulnerability of many places in the country to drought due to poor sanitation and running water systems.
Food insecurity causes failed states and causes extinction. Brown 09 Lester R Brown - founder of the Worldwatch Institute and the Earth Policy Institute “Can Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?” Scientific American, May
The biggest threat to global stability is the potential for food crises in poor countries to cause government collapse. Those crises are brought on by ever worsening environmental degradation One of the toughest things for people to do is to anticipate sudden change. Typically we project the future by extrapolating from trends in the past. Much of the time this approach works well. But sometimes it fails spectacularly, and people are simply blindsided by events such as today's economic crisis. For most of us, the idea that civilization itself could disintegrate probably seems preposterous. Who would not find it hard to think seriously about such a complete departure from what we expect of ordinary life? What evidence could make us heed a warning so dire--and how would we go about responding to it? We are so inured to a long list of highly unlikely catastrophes that we are virtually programmed to dismiss them all with a wave of the hand: Sure, our civilization might devolve into chaos--and Earth might collide with an asteroid, too! For many years I have studied global agricultural, population, environmental and economic trends and their interactions. The combined effects of those trends and the political tensions they generate point to the breakdown of governments and societies. Yet I, too, have resisted the idea that food shortages could bring down not only individual governments but also our global civilization. I can no longer ignore that risk. Our continuing failure to deal with the environmental declines that are undermining the world food economy--most important, falling water tables, eroding soils and rising temperatures--forces me to conclude that such a collapse is possible. The Problem of Failed States Even a cursory look at the vital signs of our current world order lends unwelcome support to my conclusion. And those of us in the environmental field are well into our third decade of charting trends of environmental decline without seeing any significant effort to reverse a single one. In six of the past nine years world grain production has fallen short of consumption, forcing a steady drawdown in stocks. When the 2008 harvest began, world carryover stocks of grain (the amount in the bin when the new harvest begins) were at 62 days of consumption, a near record low. In response, world grain prices in the spring and summer of last year climbed to the highest level ever. As demand for food rises faster than supplies are growing, the resulting food-price inflation puts severe stress on the governments of countries already teetering on the edge of chaos. Unable to buy grain or grow their own, hungry people take to the streets. Indeed, even before the steep climb in grain prices in 2008, the number of failing states was expanding see sidebar at left. Many of their problem's stem from a failure to slow the growth of their populations. But if the food situation continues to deteriorate, entire nations will break down at an ever increasing rate. We have entered a new era in geopolitics. In the 20th century the main threat to international security was superpower conflict; today it is failing states. It is not the concentration of power but its absence that puts us at risk. States fail when national governments can no longer provide personal security, food security and basic social services such as education and health care. They often lose control of part or all of their territory. When governments lose their monopoly on power, law and order begin to disintegrate. After a point, countries can become so dangerous that food relief workers are no longer safe and their programs are halted; in Somalia and Afghanistan, deteriorating conditions have already put such programs in jeopardy. Failing states are of international concern because they are a source of terrorists, drugs, weapons and refugees, threatening political stability everywhere. Somalia, number one on the 2008 list of failing states, has become a base for piracy. Iraq, number five, is a hotbed for terrorist training. Afghanistan, number seven, is the world's leading supplier of heroin. Following the massive genocide of 1994 in Rwanda, refugees from that troubled state, thousands of armed soldiers among them, helped to destabilize neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo (number six). Our global civilization depends on a functioning network of politically healthy nation-states to control the spread of infectious disease, to manage the international monetary system, to control international terrorism and to reach scores of other common goals. If the system for controlling infectious diseases--such as polio, SARS or avian flu--breaks down, humanity will be in trouble. Once states fail, no one assumes responsibility for their debt to outside lenders. If enough states disintegrate, their fall will threaten the stability of global civilization itself.
Turns the case – food shortages create massive structural violence and a non-human environment. Cribb 10 Cribb 10 (Julian Cribb is a Fellow of the Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering. He is former Director, National Awareness for CSIRO and Science Editor of The Australian newspaper. He was national foundation president of the Australian Science Communicators (ASC), president of the National Rural and Resources Press Club, a member of CSIRO advisory committees for agriculture, fisheries and entomology. He has served as a Director of the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), the Crawford Fund, the Secretariat for International Landcare, CSIRO Publishing, the Australian Minerals and Energy Environment Foundation and the National Science and Technology Centre, Questacon. He was the creator of “Future Harvest” the global public awareness campaign for the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). Cribb, Julian. “Coming Famine : The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid It.” Berkeley, CA, USA: University of California Press, 2010. 15-6. ebrary collections.)
Some observers also claim a link between food insecurity and terrorism, pointing out that hungry countries are among those most likely to furnish terrorism recruits. In 2002, heads of state from fifty countries met at a development summit in Mexico where they discussed the role of poverty and hunger as a breeding ground for terrorism. “No-one in this world can feel comfortable or safe while so many are suffering and deprived,” UN secretary general Kofi Annan told them. The president of the UN General Assembly, Han Seung-Soo, added that the world’s poorest countries were a breeding ground for violence and despair. The Peruvian president Alejandro Toledo added, “To speak of development is to speak also of a strong and determined fight against terrorism.” 10 Around the world many guerrilla and insurgent causes—such as Shining Path, the Tamil Tigers, and Abu Sayyaf—have claimed injustice in land ownership and use as one of their motivating causes. A lack of water is a key factor in encouraging terrorism. Mona El Kody, the chair of the National Water Research Unit in Egypt told the Third World Water Forum that living without an adequate level of access to water created a “non-human environment” that led to frustration, and from there to terrorism. “A non-human environment is the worst experience people can live with, with no clean water, no sanitation,” she said, adding that this problem was at its most acute in the Middle East, where 1 percent of the world’s freshwater is shared by 5 percent of the world’s population. Ms. El Kody added that inadequate water resources had the additive effect of reducing farming and food production, thereby increasing poverty—another factor that can lead to terrorism. 11 Most of the “new” conflicts are to be found in Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia—the result of a cycle of constant famine, deprivation, and periodic violence, leading in inevitable sequence to worse hunger, greater deprivation, and more vicious fighting. Food and economic insecurity and natural resource scarcities . . . can be major sources of conflict. When politically dominant groups seize land and food resources, deny access to other culturally or economically marginalized groups, and cause hunger and scarcities, violence often flares. In Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Sudan, food crises resulting from drought and mismanagement of agriculture and relief and development aid led to rebellion and government collapse, followed by even greater food shortfalls in ensuing years of conflict. Denial of the right to food has been linked to uprisings and civil war in Central America and Mexico. Food insecurity is also integral to civil conflicts in Asia. Competition for resources has generated cycles of hunger and hopelessness that have bred violence in Sri Lanka as well as Rwanda. 12 These afflicted regions are generally places disconnected from the global economic mainstream, where strong-man governments arise and just as quickly crumble, having only political quicksand on which to build a foundation for stability and progress. This is vital to an understanding of what is going wrong with global food production: in nearly all these countries, food is of the first importance, and only after you have enough food can you form a government stable enough to deliver water, health care, education, opportunity for women, justice, and economic development. By neglecting or reducing support for basic food production— as many have during the past twenty-five years—in order to spread aid across these equally deserving causes, the world’s aid donors may unintentionally have laid the foundation for future government failure and conflict. 3 Nuclear power is bound up with the global politics of nuclear weapons security – the aff is an instance where nuclear weapons states can perpetuate their power against non weapons states. Chung 14
CHUNG, ALEX H. "Postcolonial Perspectives on Nuclear Non-Proliferation." (2014).TF
Nuclear weapons were introduced to the world over 65 years ago by the United States with¶ the purpose of winning a war against the Axis powers of Japan and Germany (Daadler and¶ Lodal 2008, p. 80). The destructive nature of nuclear weapons presents a tremendous¶ existential threat to the safety and security of the world. In the words of Rajiv Gandhi,¶ addressing the UN General Assembly on 9 June 1988, “Nuclear war will not mean the death¶ of a hundred million people. Or even a thousand million. It will mean the extinction of four¶ thousand million: the end of life as we know it on our planet earth,” (Shultz et al. 2007, p. 2).¶ Accordingly, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) envisioned the end of nuclear¶ weapons, as the most universally accepted arms control agreement with 189 state members,¶ by recognising five Nuclear Weapon States (NWS) – the US, Russia, China, France, and¶ Britain (Peterson 2010). In return for the promise by all NWS states to completely disarm,¶ and assistance in the acquisition of civilian nuclear energy technology, all Non-Nuclear¶ Weapon States (NNWS) forever forego obtaining nuclear weapons, thereby preventing¶ horizontal proliferation with the stated goal of complete global nuclear disarmament¶ (Gusterson 1999, p. 113). It is significant to note that international institutions such as the¶ UN and the nuclear non-proliferation regime “are largely the product of interstate diplomacy¶ dominated by Western great powers,” (Barkawi and Laffey 2006, p. 331). The five NWS states¶ also hold the five permanent member seats on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC),¶ leading some to criticise the NPT for legitimising and institutionalising nuclear power at the¶ hands of the very few, and at the same time prohibiting the pursuit of nuclear security by the¶ rest of the world (Biswas 2001, p. 486; Biswas, forthcoming 2012). While there have been symbolic reductions in the nuclear stockpiles of the NWS states via bilateral and multilateral¶ treaties, the indefinite and unconditional extension of the NPT in 1995 continues to legitimise¶ the existence of nuclear weapons in the hands of the NWS/P-5, allowing them to modernise¶ their nuclear arsenals, and engage in vertical nuclear proliferation without interference from¶ the international community (Singh 1998, p. 41).¶ The exclusive nature of the NPT and the alignment of NWS status with the UNSC P-5 is¶ indicative of an international regime that perpetuates logics of colonial violence, oppression,¶ and inequity as represented by the emblematic clash between nuclear “haves” and nuclear¶ “have-nots” (Biswas 2001, p. 486; Peterson 2010). As such, the institutionalised demarcation¶ of NWS and NNWS states has led to accusations of “nuclear apartheid” (Biswas 2001, p.¶ 486; Singh 1998, p. 48). Put simply, “nuclear apartheid” highlights the material inequalities¶ in the distribution of global nuclear resources – “inequities that are written into,¶ institutionalised, and legitimised through some of the major arms-control treaties, creating an¶ elite club of nuclear ‘haves’ with exclusive rights to maintain nuclear arsenals that are to be¶ denied to the vast majority of nuclear ‘have nots’,” (Biswas 2001, p. 486). This is evidenced¶ by the United States having “worked diligently to preserve its nuclear supremacy” since¶ 1945; by attempting to keep the nuclear “secret” in perpetuity, by limiting America’s¶ European allies’ ability to command atomic weapons independently, and endeavouring,¶ unsuccessfully, to keep the Middle East and South Asia free of nuclear weapons (Maddock¶ cited in Rotter 2011, p. 1175).
The 1AC’s prohibition on African nuclear power is a representation of fear of lack of Western control and is an act of colonial violence. Hecht 10
The salience of "uranium from Africa" - both in the lead-up to the war and in subsequent opposition to it - traded on three sets of fears and assumptions widespread in the American public sphere: • the fear of nuclear weapons, and the assumption that acquiring "uranium" is tantamount to building an atomic bomb; • the fear of "Africa" as a dark, corrupt continent, and the assumption that actions there are ultimately unknowable or incomprehensible; • the fear of any nuclear materials not within direct Western control, and the assumption that the difference between licit and illicit nuclear trade is clear-cut. Commentators on the Iraq war spilled a lot of ink on the first of these, very little on the second, and only a bit more on the third. But they largely missed the complex technological and political threads that bind these three outlooks together. In this essay I attempt to break these restraints by offering three genealogies for "uranium from Africa." First, I consider the problem of when uranium counts as a "nuclear" thing, when it doesn't, and what Africa has to do with it. Before "uranium" becomes weapons-usable, it must be mined as ore, processed into yellowcake, converted into uranium hexafluoride, enriched, and pressed into bomb fuel. At what stage in this process does it come to count as a "nuclear material"? The answer, I argue, has depended on time, place, purpose, and markets. Second, I excavate the phrase's more specific rendition, displaying fragments of a history of "yellowcake from Niger." Places matter. Niger is not merely an avatar for global threats, but a nation with its own politics, priorities, and conflicts, all of which have significant bearing on the production and distribution of its uranium. Third, I examine another moment when African provenance of uranium was geopolitically contested: the flow of Namibian uranium to the U.S., Japan, and Europe during the height of international sanctions against apartheid. In this instance, licit trade and black markets were materially entwined in ways that made African things invisible
The symbolism of nuclear power is uniquely key – it’s the only path towards respect for black nations. Johnston 15
Franklin JOHNSTON strategist, project manager and advises the minister of education Friday, July 10, 2015 “Racism thrives because black nations fail” Jamaica Observer
Racism exists wherever there are black people. Why? In Jos, Nigeria, blacks just killed 42 blacks and we do not blink, yet we're rabid when police kill one black youth in the USA. Recall 300 virgins taken a year ago? Silence! Is it that we expect savagery of blacks but not whites? You racist!¶ It was a liberal dream that, with education, laws, and cultural exchange racism would die. But it did not. They love our jazz, ladies, entertainers, athletes, tennis aces, yet racism is as in days of Jim Crow or Enoch Powell's "river of blood" speech. Mixed marriages, integrated schools, black MPs, black president, did racism die? No way!¶ So, let's go back to first principles. Is racism normal? Are species wired to prefer their own? Are blacks fighting a losing battle? So let's deconstruct racism.¶ Old theories of racism and solutions don't work, nor do set asides and quotas; what next? What fuels racism? Some say slavery caused racism. But it is dead, and despite multi-hued slaves only black racism grows. Most ethnic groups are racist to blacks, and we equally so! Racist Africa expelled Asians (UK took them) as Dom Rep does Haitians today. Our racists target Indian, Chinese using derogatory names and belittle their success as "yuh see 'ow all a dem pack up inna on 'ouse, an a calaloo and rice dem eat an dem av money; mi haffi eat meat!" Many envy success, live a hedonist party life, and avoid hard graft. Blacks love talk of descending from African kings and love titles, but how does living in the past help today? Quite a racist conundrum. So, what really is racism?¶ Racism is about power not race. Black power was good, but misguided. One black man's success is no use as racism is not about personal power. Racism is about nation power. The day one black nation has top military, space and nuclear capability, racism goes into immediate remission. We can then dump goody-goody projects, empowerment seminars and basket weaving. Blacks will have power and get respect!¶ No black nation colonised a white one or other -- not ever! They had no power. Many black nations exist, but none prospers. That slavery is the root of racism or the cause of black poverty is a cleverly crafted subterfuge by lazy-brained blacks; rip-off reparations and back-to-Africa scams. Racism against "Gooks" died with Japan's prosperity; the Chinese blew it away with cash and WMDs. India (remember we dissed Coolie man?) is gone clear with technology, space and nuclear arms. African is the only major population to be universally disrespected, even here; why? They have no prosperous, potential menacing nation. Others ask: Can they make the grade? Maybe, but with no proof of concept, let's stick it to blacks!¶ Racism is rife in black nations. Small Jamaica is up front with big Nigeria as having great potential but mired in ennui, corruption and racism. China, USA, Russia, Europe call the shots and back it with cash or nukes! Racism in America will wane when we stop our minstrel show and build Jamaica. Global racism will fade when rich Nigeria goes nuclear and is seated at the top table. We may change hearts, but the ability to say "or else" is the power the world respects. Black nations fail and this feeds global racism. We are our worst enemies.¶ Did capitalism cause racism? Marcus Garvey was on track with economic and military plans. The best capitalists were colour blind African, Arab and later European men who founded offshore slavery; and I am open to reparations from all of them. But I would like to put a lick on 'Cudjoe' in West Africa for selling my grandfather of the fifth power to white people. I do not forgive Africa.¶ Racism is not of slavery and rich blacks can't stanch racism as it's not personal it's national. Whites are powerful for eons; other races got there later. Blacks are powerless victims and purveyors of racism. Black power was good but misguided. To riot in white man's country can't help us as it is still his land; riot in your own and build it fool! Only a prosperous black country with the fearsome trappings of WMDs can halt racism. When China was communist -- known for laundries and food; and it was dissed -- it built economic success, WMDs and got respect. Other races ordered their folks, scientists invented, stole or borrowed technology and got to a point where they could destroy the world -- welcome to the head table! Every black nation is a satrapy. Ours, with the best brand, shames the new world negro; rich, big Nigeria shames itself and black people everywhere! Blacks can end racism but we will not apply ourselves!
Taking nuclear technology away from South Africa is founded upon the racist legacy of apartheid. TNO 13. - White people in South Africa dismantled their nukes because they didn’t want them in the hands of a black gov. - The US supplied SA with HEU to build the bombs, but now they’re pressured to get rid of it post-apartheid The New Observer, The Bomb That Never Could Be Used: South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons, 7/31/13, http://newobserveronline.com/the-bomb-that-never-could-be-used-south-africas-nuclear-weapons/ VC White South Africa built six atom bombs by 1989 at the Pelindaba nuclear research facility which was to the west of Pretoria. In 1989, the ruling National Party decided to hand power to black majority rule, but did not wish to see the weapons handed over to either a black government or one of the African National Congresses’ allies such as Libya. The nuclear weapons project serves as testament to two important facts about white South Africa. Firstly, it is yet another proof, if any was needed, of the falsity of the “environmental” theory of development. South Africa did not develop nuclear technology “just because” of its geographic location. The development was possible because of the race of the people who lived there, and had nothing to do with the geography, climate, or any other factor. Secondly, the fact that white South Africa developed these weapons for supposed use against its enemies, shows the delusion under which the apartheid leaders lived. The policy of apartheid guaranteed that white South Africa would inevitably be overrun with blacks, and the possibility of using these weapons in any operational thereafter was, therefore, nonexistent. White South Africa’s reliance on black labor meant that no matter where such a weapon might be aimed, whites and blacks alike would be targeted. The nuclear weapons project stands as a tribute to Afrikaner technological and scientific ability, but was an exercise in political self-delusion, just like apartheid. Additional information: – The South African nuclear weapons project was publicly acknowledged in March 1993 by then state president F.W. de Klerk. It was only announced after the weaponry had been fully dismantled and the core elements destroyed or removed. – The United States supplied South Africa with its first supply of Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) for use at the Safari-1 research reactor, commissioned in 1965 at Pelindaba. The US supplied South Africa with about 100 kilograms of weapon-grade uranium fuel until 1975, when anti-Apartheid sanctions stopped the shipments. – Apartheid South Africa then turned to Israel for further assistance with its nuclear weapons programme. It is still a matter of debate as to how much technology Israel supplied, but it was probably limited to tools rather than actual weaponry.
Clinton’s ahead, by a margin of about 3 percentage points in an average of national polls, or 4 points in our popular vote composite, which is based on both national polls and state polls. While the race has tightened, be wary of claims that the election is too close to call — that isn’t where the preponderance of the evidence lies, at least for the moment. If one candidate is ahead by 3 or 4 percentage points, there will be occasional polls showing a tied race or her opponent narrowly ahead, along with others showing the candidate with a mid- to high single-digit lead. We’ve seen multiple examples of both of those recently.¶ In swing states, the race ranges from showing Trump up by 1 point in Iowa to a Clinton lead of about 6 points in her best states, such as Virginia. That’s a reasonably good position for Clinton, but it isn’t quite as safe as it might sound. That’s because the swing states tend to rise and fall together. A further shift of a few points in Trump’s favor, or a polling error of that magnitude, would make the Electoral College highly competitive.¶ 2. What’s the degree of uncertainty?¶ Higher than people might assume. Between the unusually early conventions and the late election — Nov. 8 is the latest possible date on which Election Day can occur — it’s a long campaign this year. But just as important, many voters — close to 20 percent — either say they’re undecided or that they plan to vote for third-party candidates. At a comparable point four years ago, only 5 to 10 percent of voters fell into those categories.¶ High numbers of undecided and third-party voters are associated with higher volatility and larger polling errors. Put another way, elections are harder to predict when fewer people have made up their minds. Because FiveThirtyEight’s models account for this property, we show a relatively wide range of possible outcomes, giving Trump better odds of winning than most other statistically based models, but also a significant chance of a Clinton landslide if those undecideds break in her favor.¶ 3. What’s the short-term trend in the polls?¶ It’s been toward Trump over the past few weeks. Clinton’s lead peaked at about 8.5 percentage points in early August, according to our models, and Trump has since sliced that figure roughly in half. Of Trump’s roughly 4-point gain since then, about 2 points come from Trump’s having gained ground, while the other 2 points come from Clinton’s having lost ground — possibly a sign that her lofty numbers in early August were inflated by a convention bounce.
Public popularity supports nuclear energy despite the Fukushima disaster – best polls prove Riffkin 15
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- A slim majority of Americans (51) now favor the use of nuclear energy for electricity in the U.S., while 43 oppose it. This level of support is similar to what Gallup found when it last measured these attitudes two years ago, but it is down from the peak of 62 five years ago. Current support is on the low end of what Gallup has found in the past 20 years, with the 46 reading in 2001 the only time that it sank lower. The high point in support for the use of nuclear power, in 2010, was recorded shortly after President Barack Obama announced that the federal government would provide loan guarantees for the construction of two nuclear reactors, the first to be built in the U.S. in three decades. Support has generally dropped since then. However, between 2011 and 2012, support was stable, with 57 favoring nuclear energy. This is notable given that Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster took place shortly after polling in 2011.
That flips the election for the GOP – our link prices in other factors and we don’t need to win that Hillary gets the blame Needham 16
The Democratic presidential nominee will win the race for the presidency, but the election is shaping up as historically tight, according to a political model. Less than 11 months from Election Day, Moody’s Analytics is predicting that whomever lands the Democratic nomination will capture the White House with 326 electoral votes to the Republican nominee’s 212. Those results are heavily dependent on how swing states vote. The latest model from Moody’s reflects razor-thin margins in the five most important swing states — Florida, Ohio, Colorado, New Hampshire and Virginia. In each of those states, the Democratic advantage is less than 1 percentage point, well within the margin of error. The election model weighs political and economic strength in each state and determines the share of the vote that the incumbent party will win. The most important economic variable in the model is the growth in incomes in the two years leading up to the election. That factor captures the strength of the job market in each state, including job growth, hours worked, wage growth and the quality of the jobs being created. The model also factors in home and gasoline prices. So far, the strength of the economy has kept the model on track for the Democratic nominee. But the trajectory of the president’s approval rating also makes a difference in who could win the White House. If President Obama’s approval rating shifts only a little more than 4 percentage points, a bit more than the margin of error for many presidential opinion polls, the move could further cut into Democratic hopes to retain the White House. Growing concern about terrorism and other issues could dent Obama’s approval rating further. Usually, if the sitting president’s approval rating is improving in the year leading up the election, the incumbent party receives a boost. But in most elections, the president’s rating has declined in the lead-up to the election, favoring the challenger party.
The real estate mogul has made strong public statements supporting nuclear power, but tends to favor further development of natural gas. In the aftermath of the 2011 Japan Fukushima nuclear disaster, Trump told Fox News “nuclear is a way we get what we have to get, which is energy.” “I’m in favor of nuclear energy, very strongly in favor of nuclear energy,” Trump said. “If a plane goes down people keep flying. If you get into an auto crash people keep driving.” The permitting process for nuclear power needs to be reformed, Trump explained. He qualified this statement saying “we have to be careful” because nuclear power “does have issues.” Trump specified that he favored the development of natural gas over nuclear energy in the same interview: “we’re the Saudi Arabia times 100 of natural gas, but we don’t use it.”
And, nuclear energy would become the key spinning factor for Republicans because of Clinton’s lack of support and Obama’s current policy – Republicans will pit nuclear power policy against Clinton regardless of her actual policy Siciliano 1/10
The presidential election may offer hope for a resurgence of interest in nuclear energy. And if a Republican wins the White House, it's more likely that the centerpiece of that effort, a controversial nuclear waste site at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, will move forward. Republicans stand for what they call the "law of the land," referring to the fact that Congress chose Yucca Mountain to be the nation's nuclear waste dump, and that has not changed despite President Obama's and congressional Democrats' success in upending the project and focusing instead on wind and solar power. But even with a president who favors nuclear energy, it will still prove difficult to build the site to take radioactive waste from nearly 100 power plants. Nuclear power is one of the cleanest forms of electricity, yet the question of what to do with waste continues to fester. Many people see Yucca Mountain as the answer, but opponents say it's unsafe. But both sides agree that building more nuclear plants hinges on waste disposal. It pits the administration against lawmakers and exposes a rift between the pro-nuke and anti-nuke wings of the environmental movement. A big barrier to the nuclear option is price. Ben Zycher, senior energy fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said new nuclear reactors cost far too much, especially since natural gas is so cheap. That could sideline nuclear energy and Yucca Mountain this election year. Yucca Mountain's main adversary, Nevada Democrat Harry Reid, is retiring from Congress at the end of the year, but Zycher said other Nevada officials will step into the breach. "It may be a case without Reid in the Senate the path would be eased, but that's not particularly obvious," he said. David McIntyre, spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, charged with licensing the dump, agrees, saying it "would be immensely difficult" to start back up after so many years of administration stalling. And Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton is "not going to endorse it," Zycher said. Litigation and 2016 Rod McCullum, the Nuclear Energy Institute's director of used fuel issues, calls managing nuclear waste the "most technically simple, but politically complicated things we do." It might arise in the presidential election because President Obama has stalled longstanding nuclear waste policy, defying Congress, many states and the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which designates Yucca Mountain as America's long-term nuclear waste repository. Obama's efforts to hamstring Yucca during his first term helped keep Reid loyal. But both are leaving Washington, and federal courts have ruled that the administration could not kill the Yucca project without congressional consent and while continuing to collect money from utilities and states to build it. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2013 dealt a blow to the administration by ordering the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to complete its work on licensing the facility, which it recently did despite Reid having choked off the commission's funding. McCullum said the commission has been "eeking" along.
Trump win means he will nuke ISIS – results in massive civilian casualties and Middle East destabilization. Hobbus 15
R. Hobbus 15, J.D., investigative journalist specializing in international politics, “Trump: I Will Absolutely Use A Nuclear Weapon Against ISIS,” 8/10, Real News Right Now, http://realnewsrightnow.com/2015/08/trump-i-will-absolutely-use-a-nuclear-weapon-against-isis/ NEW YORK, Ny. – In response to a question regarding his policy on ISIS, Republican presidential candidate and billionaire Donald Trump told Meet the Press on Sunday that as Commander-in-Chief, he would authorize the use of nuclear weapons to combat Islamic extremism. “Let’s face it, these people are barbarians,” Trump said. “And thanks to Obama’s failed policy in Iraq and Syria, they’re beheading Christians all over the world.” Mr. Trump said he’s already conferred with a number of high-level active military officials and has put together a comprehensive strategy to defeat the Islamic State within his first one hundred days in office. “It starts with the deployment of four or five of our Ohio-class nuclear submarines to the Persian Gulf,” Trump said. “We’re going to hit them and we’re going to hit them hard. I’m talking about a surgical strike on these ISIS stronghold cities using Trident missiles.” The Trident is a submarine-launched ballistic missile equipped with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, or MIRVs. With a payload of up to fourteen reentry vehicles, each carrying a 362-pound thermonuclear warhead with a yield of 100 kilotons, a single Trident has roughly seventy times the destructive power of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Trump’s plan to use thermonuclear weapons against ISIS-held areas such as the Syrian city of Al-Raqqah would result in an astronomically high number of civilian casualties, according to CNN military analyst Peter Mansoor. “Al-Raqqah alone has a population of over two hundred-thousand people, the vast majority of whom are not affiliated in any way with the Islamic State,” Mansoor said. “A strike of this magnitude would not only result in the loss of millions of innocent lives and infrastructure, but it would set diplomacy and stability in the region back at least a hundred years.”
ME war goes nuclear – causes extinction. Russel 9
Russell 9 – Senior Lecturer in the Department of National Security Affairs @ Naval Postgraduate School James, “Strategic Stability Reconsidered: Prospects for Nuclear War and Escalation in the Middle East,” Online
Strategic stability in the region is thus undermined by various factors: (1) asymmetric interests in the bargaining framework that can introduce unpredictable behavior from actors; (2) the presence of non-state actors that introduce unpredictability into relationships between the antagonists; (3) incompatible assumptions about the structure of the deterrent relationship that makes the bargaining framework strategically unstable; (4) perceptions by Israel and the United States that its window of opportunity for military action is closing, which could prompt a preventive attack; (5) the prospect that Iran’s response to pre-emptive attacks could involve unconventional weapons, which could prompt escalation by Israel and/or the United States; (6) the lack of a communications framework to build trust and cooperation among framework participants. These systemic weaknesses in the coercive bargaining framework all suggest that escalation by any the parties could happen either on purpose or as a result of miscalculation or the pressures of wartime circumstance. Given these factors, it is disturbingly easy to imagine scenarios under which a conflict could quickly escalate in which the regional antagonists would consider the use of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. It would be a mistake to believe the nuclear taboo can somehow magically keep nuclear weapons from being used in the context of an unstable strategic framework. Systemic asymmetries between actors in fact suggest a certain increase in the probability of war – a war in which escalation could happen quickly and from a variety of participants. Once such a war starts, events would likely develop a momentum all their own and decision-making would consequently be shaped in unpredictable ways. The international community must take this possibility seriously, and muster every tool at its disposal to prevent such an outcome, which would be an unprecedented disaster for the peoples of the region, with substantial risk for the entire world.
And, turns case – Trump disrespects indigenous people’s right to his lands and justifies xenophobic bigotry. Ross 15
Gyasi Ross editor at LargeBlackfeet Nation/Suquamish Territories “What a Trump Presidency Would Mean For Native People (Yeah, It's As Crazy As You'd Expect)” Indian Country 10/19/15
That’s right: there is one singularly bad candidate for Native people who shows an ugly hate toward Native people and just shows a nastiness towards brown people in general. That’s right: Donald Trump. He’s kind of a scumbag. I laughed about it early on, “He doesn’t even believe what he’s saying.” And I still don’t think that he believes 90 of what he says—but it doesn’t matter. If you rile up enough racist/xenophobic/misogynistic energy—as he has done—things get dangerous. It changes the tone; America already struggles getting past it’s racist past. It certainly doesn’t need new bigots stirring the pot.¶ And even if Trump doesn’t believe the racist garbage that he spews, it still has a hateful effect and stirs up the genuinely racist folks within America. And it’s not just the toothless, uneducated masses that have latched onto Trump’s prejudiced dog-whistles (they have); the neo-conservative bigots who utilize passive aggressive race-neutral language to antagonize people of color also have heeded his call. ¶ Of course his hate speech toward brown skinned migrants is epic; he seems to despise our brothers and sisters to the south (who have more right to be on this continent than he does). Yet, he says that the Mexicans who come here “… have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”¶ Well damn. It’s no surprise that his hate speech inspired hate crimes by some Neanderthals in Boston against a homeless Latino man. When the men were arrested they said, “Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported.”¶ Idiots call this type of racism “Nativist,” but that’s an evil lie. Donald Trump is not Native to this land and it’s not Native people carrying out this hate. It’s other immigrants. White immigrants who don’t like brown immigrants. ¶ He’s kinda equal opportunity in his hate of people of color. When speaking about the Black Lives Matter movement, a movement dedicated to securing basic human rights for black folks in this nation, Trump said, “I think they’re trouble. I think they’re looking for trouble…And I think it’s a disgrace that they’re getting away with it.”¶ But even with his obvious distaste of Mexican folks and Black folks, he has the longest history of antagonizing Native people.¶ Obviously, there’s the history of Trump crying to Congress that American Indian casinos should be shut down because Indian casinos are going to create “…the biggest organized crime problem in the history of this country. Al Capone is going to look like a baby.” Then, there was Trump playing racial police about mixed members of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe saying "They don't look like Indians to me.” Additionally, recently Trump was kind enough to speak for Native people about the Washington Redskins franchise, saying , "I know Indians that are extremely proud of that name." (in fairness, Jeb Bush did this same thing—these over-privileged and rich white men love to speak for Native people). ¶ Trump also recently went on record to say that if he were elected President, “I will immediately approve the Keystone XL pipeline...” that tramples on the sacred sites and water supplies of many, many Native people. ¶ Bad news. ¶ There are plenty more examples. And while we don’t have absolute certainty as to who will be best for Native people in this upcoming election cycle, we do know who will be the worst for Native people, Mexicans and black folks. ¶ Thank you Donald Trump for making that clear.
9/10/16
SEPT-OCT Elections DA v2
Tournament: Voices | Round: 1 | Opponent: Mission San Jose PB | Judge: David Dosch Clinton is projected to win, but the race is still close – majority of polls prove
Cohn 10/4 Nate Cohn, 10-4-2016, "Better Polling for Clinton, but Trump Is Keeping Core Support," New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/05/upshot/better-polling-for-clinton-but-trump-is-still-in-striking-distance.html Donald J. Trump had a difficult week after the first presidential debate, and, as you might expect, his polling was not great.∂ The national polls, and most polls in battleground states, released since the debate show Hillary Clinton with a comfortable advantage, perhaps by four or five percentage points nationwide among likely voters in a four-way race. She has led by even more in the head-to-head matchup.∂ The polls suggest that Mrs. Clinton’s performance has energized Democratic-leaning voters, helping to reduce the big gap between registered voters and likely voters that plagued her in many September polls. (Pollsters use responses to determine which registered voters are likely to vote on Election Day.)∂ But Mrs. Clinton’s big weakness among white working-class voters is still enough to keep Mr. Trump fairly close — perhaps closer than he’s been for much of the year.∂ On average, Mrs. Clinton has fared about two or three points better in post-debate polls than in similar surveys conducted in September. Yet she isn’t doing much better than she did in August or July — an indicator that Mr. Trump has made at least some meaningful gains over the last few months, if one assumes that the post-debate polls represent a relatively good moment for Mrs. Clinton. The three high-quality, live-interview national surveys that have been released since the debate — from Fox News, CNN/ORC and CBS News — tell a fairly consistent story about Mrs. Clinton’s renewed strength.∂ Before the debate, all three polls showed Mrs. Clinton ahead among registered voters. But, on average, they showed Mr. Trump ahead among likely voters.∂ The post-debate surveys did not show Mrs. Clinton doing much better among registered voters in the four-way race. But Mrs. Clinton took a comfortable lead of three to five points among likely voters, as the gap between registered and likely voters vanished.∂ It’s a big swing, but not an uncommon one. The period after high-profile media events can often lead to big shifts in enthusiasm, causing one side’s supporters to be disproportionately considered likely voters.∂ But there’s no guarantee that the shift holds. Sometimes it’s temporary, like a convention bounce. Other times, it’s a longer-lasting shift in voter interest, which really does pick up ahead of an election.∂ It’s worth noting that the CNN, Fox News and CBS News polls were among the best surveys for Mr. Trump before the debate, in no small part because they showed Mrs. Clinton facing the largest penalty among likely voters. Other surveys — like those from ABC/Washington Post and NBC/Wall Street Journal before the debate — actually showed Mrs. Clinton faring better among likely voters than registered voters. If most of Mrs. Clinton’s post-debate gains are driven by higher enthusiasm, she might not make as many gains in those surveys as she did in the CBS, Fox and CNN polls. Even so, Mrs. Clinton would probably lead by four or five points in an average of high-quality, live-interview national surveys.∂ That surge in Democratic enthusiasm has translated into gains in the battleground states. The bounce is most obvious in Sun Belt states like Florida, North Carolina, Colorado and even Nevada, where Democrats are most dependent on nonwhite and irregular voters to win elections. In general, the post-debate polls in these states are among Mrs. Clinton’s best polls of the year.∂ They show that Florida, in particular, might be a big problem for the Trump campaign. Mrs. Clinton has led in all four post-debate surveys of Florida. The two most highly regarded surveys of the bunch — from Quinnipiac and Mason-Dixon — showed Mrs. Clinton with four- and five-point leads. There is nearly no path to the presidency for Mr. Trump without Florida.∂ Mrs. Clinton also led by one to three points in three polls of North Carolina, a state that Mitt Romney won in 2012. Two polls showed Mrs. Clinton ahead by 11 points in Colorado.∂ But Mrs. Clinton did not post such impressive margins in the North, where Democrats have traditionally depended on winning considerable support among white working-class voters. Quinnipiac showed Mrs. Clinton still trailing by five points in Ohio, where she led in most polls until Labor Day. The polls in Pennsylvania, Michigan and New Hampshire were better for her — with leads of four to nine points — but they are not among her best surveys of the year.∂ Mrs. Clinton’s debate win may have energized her supporters, but she does not appear to have made much progress shoring up her weakness among white voters without a college degree.∂ Mr. Trump led by an average of 56 to 28 among white voters without a degree in the three national surveys, nearly the same as the 58-to-29 margin he held in pre-debate surveys in September. Both were better for Mr. Trump than Mr. Romney’s 58-to-35 lead with that group in pre-election polls in 2012. They’re also better for Mr. Trump than many surveys after the Democratic convention.∂ Mr. Trump's strength among white working-class voters isn’t enough to put him in the lead — not nationally, not in the Sun Belt and not even in the relatively white states of the North. But it does keep him close.∂ The danger for Mr. Trump is that there’s very little he can do to fix his problem in Florida or North Carolina. If the Democratic turnout is strong, as post-debate polls imply, and Mrs. Clinton makes gains among well-educated white voters, as polls have shown all year, there just isn’t much room for him to fight back with additional gains among white working-class voters.∂ But if he can dodge Mrs. Clinton’s shot at a knockout blow in North Carolina or Florida, his strength among white working-class voters gives him a chance to defeat her.∂ To do it, he would need Ohio, Iowa, Maine’s Second Congressional District, where Mr. Trump leads — and then just nine more electoral votes to reach 269, the number needed to throw the race to the Republican-held House. He could do it by winning both Nevada and New Hampshire, or by winning Pennsylvania, or a tougher state like Wisconsin or Michigan.∂ It wouldn’t be easy. Mrs. Clinton has a clear polling edge in the states he needs. But it’s still possible. The Upshot’s model still gives Mr. Trump a 21 percent chance of becoming president.
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- A slim majority of Americans (51) now favor the use of nuclear energy for electricity in the U.S., while 43 oppose it. This level of support is similar to what Gallup found when it last measured these attitudes two years ago, but it is down from the peak of 62 five years ago. Current support is on the low end of what Gallup has found in the past 20 years, with the 46 reading in 2001 the only time that it sank lower. The high point in support for the use of nuclear power, in 2010, was recorded shortly after President Barack Obama announced that the federal government would provide loan guarantees for the construction of two nuclear reactors, the first to be built in the U.S. in three decades. Support has generally dropped since then. However, between 2011 and 2012, support was stable, with 57 favoring nuclear energy. This is notable given that Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster took place shortly after polling in 2011.
The real estate mogul has made strong public statements supporting nuclear power, but tends to favor further development of natural gas. In the aftermath of the 2011 Japan Fukushima nuclear disaster, Trump told Fox News “nuclear is a way we get what we have to get, which is energy.” “I’m in favor of nuclear energy, very strongly in favor of nuclear energy,” Trump said. “If a plane goes down people keep flying. If you get into an auto crash people keep driving.” The permitting process for nuclear power needs to be reformed, Trump explained. He qualified this statement saying “we have to be careful” because nuclear power “does have issues.” Trump specified that he favored the development of natural gas over nuclear energy in the same interview: “we’re the Saudi Arabia times 100 of natural gas, but we don’t use it.”
And, nuclear energy would become the key spinning factor for Republicans because of Clinton’s lack of support and Obama’s current policy – Republicans will pit nuclear power policy against Clinton regardless of her actual policy. Plan fractures democrats. Siciliano 16 John Siciliano, 1-10-2016, "The 2016 politics of nuclear energy," Washington Examiner , WP http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-2016-politics-of-nuclear-energy/article/2579855
The presidential election may offer hope for a resurgence of interest in nuclear energy. And if a Republican wins the White House, it's more likely that the centerpiece of that effort, a controversial nuclear waste site at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, will move forward. Republicans stand for what they call the "law of the land," referring to the fact that Congress chose Yucca Mountain to be the nation's nuclear waste dump, and that has not changed despite President Obama's and congressional Democrats' success in upending the project and focusing instead on wind and solar power. But even with a president who favors nuclear energy, it will still prove difficult to build the site to take radioactive waste from nearly 100 power plants. Nuclear power is one of the cleanest forms of electricity, yet the question of what to do with waste continues to fester. Many people see Yucca Mountain as the answer, but opponents say it's unsafe. But both sides agree that building more nuclear plants hinges on waste disposal. It pits the administration against lawmakers and exposes a rift between the pro-nuke and anti-nuke wings of the environmental movement. A big barrier to the nuclear option is price. Ben Zycher, senior energy fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said new nuclear reactors cost far too much, especially since natural gas is so cheap. That could sideline nuclear energy and Yucca Mountain this election year. Yucca Mountain's main adversary, Nevada Democrat Harry Reid, is retiring from Congress at the end of the year, but Zycher said other Nevada officials will step into the breach. "It may be a case without Reid in the Senate the path would be eased, but that's not particularly obvious," he said. David McIntyre, spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, charged with licensing the dump, agrees, saying it "would be immensely difficult" to start back up after so many years of administration stalling. And Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton is "not going to endorse it," Zycher said. Litigation and 2016 Rod McCullum, the Nuclear Energy Institute's director of used fuel issues, calls managing nuclear waste the "most technically simple, but politically complicated things we do." It might arise in the presidential election because President Obama has stalled longstanding nuclear waste policy, defying Congress, many states and the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which designates Yucca Mountain as America's long-term nuclear waste repository. Obama's efforts to hamstring Yucca during his first term helped keep Reid loyal. But both are leaving Washington, and federal courts have ruled that the administration could not kill the Yucca project without congressional consent and while continuing to collect money from utilities and states to build it. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2013 dealt a blow to the administration by ordering the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to complete its work on licensing the facility, which it recently did despite Reid having choked off the commission's funding. McCullum said the commission has been "eeking" along.
Trump win means he will nuke ISIS – results in massive civilian casualties and Middle East destabilization. Hobbus 15 R. Hobbus 15, J.D., investigative journalist specializing in international politics, “Trump: I Will Absolutely Use A Nuclear Weapon Against ISIS,” 8/10, Real News Right Now, http://realnewsrightnow.com/2015/08/trump-i-will-absolutely-use-a-nuclear-weapon-against-isis/ NEW YORK, Ny. – In response to a question regarding his policy on ISIS, Republican presidential candidate and billionaire Donald Trump told Meet the Press on Sunday that as Commander-in-Chief, he would authorize the use of nuclear weapons to combat Islamic extremism. “Let’s face it, these people are barbarians,” Trump said. “And thanks to Obama’s failed policy in Iraq and Syria, they’re beheading Christians all over the world.” Mr. Trump said he’s already conferred with a number of high-level active military officials and has put together a comprehensive strategy to defeat the Islamic State within his first one hundred days in office. “It starts with the deployment of four or five of our Ohio-class nuclear submarines to the Persian Gulf,” Trump said. “We’re going to hit them and we’re going to hit them hard. I’m talking about a surgical strike on these ISIS stronghold cities using Trident missiles.” The Trident is a submarine-launched ballistic missile equipped with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, or MIRVs. With a payload of up to fourteen reentry vehicles, each carrying a 362-pound thermonuclear warhead with a yield of 100 kilotons, a single Trident has roughly seventy times the destructive power of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Trump’s plan to use thermonuclear weapons against ISIS-held areas such as the Syrian city of Al-Raqqah would result in an astronomically high number of civilian casualties, according to CNN military analyst Peter Mansoor. “Al-Raqqah alone has a population of over two hundred-thousand people, the vast majority of whom are not affiliated in any way with the Islamic State,” Mansoor said. “A strike of this magnitude would not only result in the loss of millions of innocent lives and infrastructure, but it would set diplomacy and stability in the region back at least a hundred years.”
ME war goes nuclear – causes extinction. Russel 9 Russell 9 – Senior Lecturer in the Department of National Security Affairs @ Naval Postgraduate School James, “Strategic Stability Reconsidered: Prospects for Nuclear War and Escalation in the Middle East,” Online Strategic stability in the region is thus undermined by various factors: (1) asymmetric interests in the bargaining framework that can introduce unpredictable behavior from actors; (2) the presence of non-state actors that introduce unpredictability into relationships between the antagonists; (3) incompatible assumptions about the structure of the deterrent relationship that makes the bargaining framework strategically unstable; (4) perceptions by Israel and the United States that its window of opportunity for military action is closing, which could prompt a preventive attack; (5) the prospect that Iran’s response to pre-emptive attacks could involve unconventional weapons, which could prompt escalation by Israel and/or the United States; (6) the lack of a communications framework to build trust and cooperation among framework participants. These systemic weaknesses in the coercive bargaining framework all suggest that escalation by any the parties could happen either on purpose or as a result of miscalculation or the pressures of wartime circumstance. Given these factors, it is disturbingly easy to imagine scenarios under which a conflict could quickly escalate in which the regional antagonists would consider the use of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. It would be a mistake to believe the nuclear taboo can somehow magically keep nuclear weapons from being used in the context of an unstable strategic framework. Systemic asymmetries between actors in fact suggest a certain increase in the probability of war – a war in which escalation could happen quickly and from a variety of participants. Once such a war starts, events would likely develop a momentum all their own and decision-making would consequently be shaped in unpredictable ways. The international community must take this possibility seriously, and muster every tool at its disposal to prevent such an outcome, which would be an unprecedented disaster for the peoples of the region, with substantial risk for the entire world.
The next president is make it or break it for warming – its real and anthropogenic – GOP victory kills any possible progress. Neuhauser 15 Neuhauser, 15 - energy, environment and STEM reporter for U.S. News and World Report. (Alan, “The Climate Change Election”, August 14, 2015, US News, http://www.usnews.com/news/the-report/articles/2015/08/14/the-2016-election-is-critical-for-stopping-climate-change) For as long as Americans have voted and pundits have bloviated, each presidential election cycle has seemed The Most Important in All History. Next year, though, may truly – actually, seriously – be different, if climate scientists are right. The next candidate Americans send to the Oval Office, experts say, may also be the very last who can avert catastrophe from climate change. "It is urgent and the timeframe is critical and it has to be right now," says Vicki Arroyo, executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center at Georgetown Law. "We can't lose another four years, much less eight years." This is not an overnight ice age or a rise of the apes. But global warming is already here, parching the American West, flooding coastal cities, strengthening storms, erasing species and inflaming armed conflict, with a rise of just 0.85 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels. And it's going to get worse, experts say. Last year, a U.N. panel of scientists predicted the world had until 2050 to slash emissions by as much as 70 percent to keep temperatures from rising another 1.15 degrees by the end of the century. That's the threshold of an unstoppable cycle of Arctic and Antarctic melting, the release of heat-trapping gases that had been caught in the ice, more warming, more melting, more warming, more melting – until the glaciers and ice caps disappear. But some researchers – including the man who first presented the facts on climate change to Congress in 1988 – say that that tipping point may come even sooner, perhaps as early as 2036: Humans, in short, are having an even greater impact than expected. "Sea level projections and upcoming United Nations meetings in Paris are far too sluggish compared with the magnitude and speed of sea level changes," the scientist, Columbia professor James Hansen, wrote Wednesday in a QandA on the web forum Reddit, discussing a study he published in July. The needed changes are monumental: Halting climate change and heading off its worst consequences is going to require a wholesale switch from fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas to renewables like wind and solar – potentially upending utilities, energy producers and construction contractors, the sort of change "of the magnitude of the invention of the steam engine or the electrification of society," says Jules Kortenhorst, CEO of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonpartisan energy research group. "How quickly can we transform one of the most complex industrial systems – our energy system – across the globe in order to move toward low carbon?" he asks . "There is absolutely no doubt we have to act now." This presents an election – and a choice – with no historical analogues. "This will be a make-or-break presidency as far as our ability to avert a climate change catastrophe," says Michael Mann, meteorology professor and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, whose "hockey-stick" shaped graph warned of sharply rising emissions and temperatures. Pick any issue throughout history, he and others argue, none has shared the three qualities that make climate change stand apart: its threat to the entire planet, the short window to respond, and how sharply it has divided the two parties' candidates. "Republicans and Democrats have argued over issues for years, but I can't think of an example where one party didn't even say that the issue exists," says Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University who has advised Evangelical and conservative climate action groups, and who has urged policymakers to address warming. Four of the five Democratic candidates has pledged or supported Obama administration efforts to cut the heat-trapping emissions that cause climate change: Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Martin O'Malley and Lincoln Chafee. Former Sen. Jim Webb has said he'd expand the use of fossil fuels and once voted to block the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating certain greenhouse gas emissions. Among the Republicans, eight of the 17 candidates have hedged: Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina, Lindsey Graham, Jim Gilmore, Bobby Jindal, John Kasich, George Pataki and Rand Paul have acknowledged that humans do contribute to global warming, but have questioned or stopped short of saying how much – a position at odds with the findings of a vast majority of scientists. "The climate is changing; I don't think anybody can argue it's not. Human activity has contributed to it," Bush said in an email interview with Bloomberg BNA in July – a statement that notably did not mention how much humans were at fault. During a campaign stop in New Hampshire in June, he had previously told listeners, "The climate is changing, whether men are doing it or not," one month after calling it "arrogant" to say climate science is settled. The rest of the GOP field – including three senators who rejected a January amendment tying human activity to climate change – has dismissed the issue outright. Paul also voted against the amendment. "As a scientist it's very frustrating to hear politicians basically saying, 'This isn't true,' or, 'They're just making it up to get government money,'" Hayhoe says. "A thermometer is not Democrat or Republican. What observations are telling us is not political – it is what it is." And there are conservative solutions for warming. Some party members, in fact, see it as an inherently Republican issue: Carbon emissions, for example, distort the free market, forcing others to pay the higher and indirect costs of climate change (storm recovery, disaster relief) plus the health costs associated with air pollution. "We allow the coal industry to socialize its costs, and we conservatives don't like allowing people to socialize anything," says former South Carolina Rep. Bob Inglis, who now explores free-market solutions to climate change as head of the Energy and Enterprise Institute at George Mason University. A revenue-neutral carbon tax, one that does not support other programs and instead goes back to households, could fix that distortion, he and others argue. "The question is not, 'Is there going to be a tax on carbon?' It's, 'Do you want a tax that you have a voice in and control, or do you want to keep writing checks after disasters that you have no control over?'" says retired Rear Admiral David Titley, who has advised some of the GOP presidential candidates and directs the Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk at Penn State University. "That $60 billion relief bill for Hurricane Sandy that passed very quickly through a Republican-led House, did you get a vote on that tax? Because that's a tax." Yet Inglis, himself is a living example of what can happen to conservatives who call for climate action. The recipient of the JFK Profile in Courage Award in April, he was unseated in the Republican primary in 2010 after shifting his position on global warming. "Republicans say, 'Look at what happened to him when he said it was real. Do you want that to happen to you?'" Hayhoe describes. Oil, gas and coal companies, along with billionaire Libertarian industrialists David and Charles Koch, rank among the biggest campaign donors, and often seem as allergic to new taxes as a bubble boy to fresh pollen. But popular sentiment among voters appears to be changing: Most Republican voters say they support climate action, and last week, Shell did not renew its membership in the Koch-backed American Legislative Exchange Council because of the group's opposition to climate action. Even the climate statements by the eight Republicans who have hedged on warming, vague as they were, may signify a kind of progress – especially during the primaries, when candidates play to their parties' more extreme bases. "In the Great Recession in 2010, it was this very atheistic position with regard to climate change: 'We don't believe,'" Inglis says. "Then, in the 2014 cycle, 'I'm not a scientist,' that was an agnostic position. These are data points on a trend line toward a tipping point." Republicans can exploit a distinct advantage on climate action, too, he adds: Voters tend to support the presidents who buck party stereotypes. "Nixon goes to China, Bill Clinton signs welfare reform – the country will trust a conservative to touch climate," Inglis argues. But climate scientists, environmental advocates and Democrats remain deeply skeptical. The most recent Republican president, for one, backpedaled on his 2000 campaign pledge to rein-in carbon emissions. Campaign donations remain hugely influential, and as Republican candidates lambaste the environmental agenda of the Obama administration, stopping climate change will actually require they expand upon Obama initiatives: resist industry pressure to slow the roll-out of tighter fuel standards for cars, push states to reduce emissions from their power sectors and uphold and ratchet-up international commitments to slow carbon emissions. There's also the Supreme Court: with four Supreme Court justices now over the age of 70, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg pushing 80, the next president will likely have the chance to nominate new jurists to the court – a court that will almost certainly decide challenges to various environmental actions aimed at slowing global warming. "If we are going to avoid catastrophic, irreversible climate change impacts, we have to be ramping down our carbon emissions dramatically in the years ahead. The current administration has begun that process, but our next president must not only continue but build on that progress," Mann says. It is on the global stage where perhaps the spotlight – and climate scientists' hopes and expectations – will shine brightest. In December, negotiators from nearly 200 nations will meet in Paris to hammer-out an international climate accord. It is expected to include commitments from China and India, heavy polluters spurred to rein-in their emissions and invest in clean energy by America's own commitment to slash carbon emissions from its power sector. "The rest of the world is going to expect the U.S. to live up to its commitment made at the Paris meeting, no matter who is in the White House," says Henrik Selin, professor of international relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. "If you have a president who comes in and starts rolling back the Obama initiatives, you're going to have international leaders being very unhappy about this – and they are not just countries, they are trading partners. This is not just a domestic issue, it's also very much a foreign policy issue." And so far, he and others argue, none of the Republican candidates have offered a clear vision on climate, let alone any plan to slow warming. "If we want to get to that low-carbon future, we have to agree that's where we're going to go, and then we can fight over the speed at which we're going to get there," Kortenhorst, of the Rocky Mountain Institute, says. As David Sandalow, who held senior posts in the State Department and Energy Department under Obama and is an inaugural fellow at the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy, describes: "There's a very big difference between electing a candidate who's committed to seriously addressing this problem and one who isn't. The implications of failing to address the problem in the next four years could be very serious."
10/8/16
SEPT-OCT Multi-Plank CP
Tournament: Voices | Round: 1 | Opponent: Mission San Jose PB | Judge: David Dosch
-CP Text: Countries ought to - adopt the IAEA Action Plan on Nuclear Safety - designate sub-seabed disposal as the sole candidate for its permanent nuclear waste repository.
IAEA regulations produce concrete results to strengthen power plant safety. Amano 11
Yukiya Amano (Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency), Draft IAEA Action Plan on Nuclear Safety, 9/5/11, https://www.iaea.org/About/Policy/GC/GC55/Documents/gc55-14.pdf VC The purpose of the Action Plan is to define a programme of work to strengthen the global nuclear safety framework. The plan consists of actions building on the Ministerial Declaration, the conclusions and recommendations of the Working Sessions, and the experience and knowledge therein, including the INSAG letter report (GOVINF/2011/11), and the facilitation of consultations among Member States. The success of this Action Plan in strengthening nuclear safety is dependent on its implementation through the full cooperation and participation of Member States and will require also the involvement of many other stakeholders. They are therefore encouraged to work cooperatively to implement the Action Plan to maximize the benefit of the lessons learned from the accident and to produce concrete results as soon as possible. Progress on the implementation of the Action Plan will be reported to the September 2012 meeting of the Board of Governors and the 2012 General Conference and subsequently on an annual basis as may be necessary. In addition, the extraordinary meeting of the Contracting Parties to the Convention on Nuclear Safety (CNS) in 2012 will provide an opportunity to consider further measures to strengthen nuclear safety Strengthening nuclear safety in light of the accident is addressed through a number of measures proposed in this Action Plan including 12 main actions, each with corresponding sub-actions, focusing on: safety assessments in the light of the accident at TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station; IAEA peer reviews; emergency preparedness and response; national regulatory bodies; operating organizations; IAEA Safety Standards; international legal framework; Member States planning to embark on a nuclear power programme; capacity building; protection of people and the environment from ionizing radiation; communication and information dissemination; and research and development. Safety assessments in the light of the accident at TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station Undertake assessment of the safety vulnerabilities of nuclear power plants in the light of lessons learned to date from the accident • Member States to promptly undertake a national assessment of the design of nuclear power plants against site specific extreme natural hazards and to implement the necessary corrective actions in a timely manner. • The IAEA Secretariat, taking into account existing experiences, to develop a methodology and make it available for Member States that may wish to use it in carrying out their national assessments. • The IAEA Secretariat, upon request, to provide assistance and support to Member States in the implementation of a national assessment of the design of nuclear power plants against site specific extreme natural hazards. • The IAEA Secretariat, upon request, to undertake peer reviews of national assessments and to provide additional support to Member States. IAEA peer reviews Strengthen IAEA peer reviews in order to maximize the benefits to Member States • The IAEA Secretariat to strengthen existing IAEA peer reviews by incorporating lessons learned and by ensuring that these reviews appropriately address regulatory effectiveness, operational safety, design safety, and emergency preparedness and response; Member States to provide experts for peer review missions. • The IAEA Secretariat, in order to enhance transparency, to provide summary information on where and when IAEA peer reviews have taken place, and to make publicly available in a timely manner the results of such reviews with the consent of the State concerned. • Member States to be strongly encouraged to voluntarily host IAEA peer reviews, including follow-up reviews, on a regular basis; the IAEA Secretariat to respond in a timely manner to requests for such reviews. • The IAEA Secretariat to assess, and enhance as necessary, the effectiveness of the IAEA peer reviews. Emergency preparedness and response Strengthen emergency preparedness and response • Member States to conduct a prompt national review and thereafter regular reviews of their emergency preparedness and response arrangements and capabilities, with the IAEA Secretariat providing support and assistance through Emergency Preparedness Review (EPREV) missions, as requested. • The IAEA Secretariat, Member States and relevant international organizations to review and strengthen the international emergency preparedness and response framework, taking into account recommendations given in the final report of the International Action Plan for Strengthening the International Preparedness and Response System for Nuclear and Radiological Emergencies, and encouraging greater involvement of the relevant international organizations in the Joint Radiation Emergency Management Plan of the International Organizations. • The IAEA Secretariat, Member States and relevant international organizations to strengthen the assistance mechanisms to ensure that necessary assistance is made available promptly. Consideration to be given to enhancing and fully utilizing the IAEA Response and Assistance Network (RANET), including expanding its rapid response capabilities. • Member States to consider, on a voluntary basis, establishing national rapid response teams that could also be made available internationally through RANET. • The IAEA Secretariat, in case of a nuclear emergency and with the consent of the State concerned, to conduct timely fact-finding missions and to make the results publicly available. National regulatory bodies Strengthen the effectiveness of national regulatory bodies • Member States to conduct a prompt national review and thereafter regular reviews of their regulatory bodies, including an assessment of their effective independence, adequacy of human and financial resources and the need for appropriate technical and scientific support, to fulfil their responsibilities. • The IAEA Secretariat to enhance the Integrated Regulatory Review Service (IRRS) for peer review of regulatory effectiveness through a more comprehensive assessment of national regulations against IAEA Safety Standards. • Each Member State with nuclear power plants to voluntarily host, on a regular basis, an IAEA IRRS mission to assess its national regulatory framework. In addition, a follow-up mission to be conducted within three years of the main IRRS mission. Operating organizations Strengthen the effectiveness of operating organizations with respect to nuclear safety • Member States to ensure improvement, as necessary, of management systems, safety culture, human resources management, and scientific and technical capacity in operating organizations; the IAEA Secretariat to provide assistance to Member States upon request. • Each Member State with nuclear power plants to voluntarily host at least one IAEA Operational Safety Review Team (OSART) mission during the coming three years, with the initial focus on older nuclear power plants. Thereafter, OSART missions to be voluntarily hosted on a regular basis. • The IAEA Secretariat to strengthen cooperation with WANO by amending their Memorandum of Understanding to enhance information exchange on operating experience and on other relevant safety and engineering areas and, in consultation with other relevant stakeholders, to explore mechanisms to enhance communication and interaction among operating organizations. IAEA Safety Standards Review and strengthen IAEA Safety Standards and improve their implementation • The Commission on Safety Standards and the IAEA Secretariat to review, and revise as necessary using the existing process in a more efficient manner, the relevant IAEA Safety Standards2 in a prioritised sequence. • Member States to utilize as broadly and effectively as possible the IAEA Safety Standards in an open, timely and transparent manner. The IAEA Secretariat to continue providing support and assistance in the implementation of IAEA Safety Standards. International legal framework Improve the effectiveness of the international legal framework • States parties to explore mechanisms to enhance the effective implementation of the Convention on Nuclear Safety, the Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management, the Convention on the Early Notification of a Nuclear Accident and the Convention on Assistance in the Case of a Nuclear Accident or Radiological Emergency, and to consider proposals made to amend the Convention on Nuclear Safety and the Convention on the Early Notification of a Nuclear Accident. • Member States to be encouraged to join and effectively implement these Conventions. • Member States to work towards establishing a global nuclear liability regime that addresses the concerns of all States that might be affected by a nuclear accident with a view to providing appropriate compensation for nuclear damage. The IAEA International Expert Group on Nuclear Liability (INLEX) to recommend actions to facilitate achievement of such a global regime. Member States to give due consideration to the possibility of joining the international nuclear liability instruments as a step toward achieving such a global regime.
The counterplan solves the accidents advantage – it enhances nuclear safety and creates high quality standards. Amano 11
Yukiya Amano (Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency), Draft IAEA Action Plan on Nuclear Safety, 9/5/11, https://www.iaea.org/About/Policy/GC/GC55/Documents/gc55-14.pdf VC In June 2011 a Ministerial Conference on Nuclear Safety was convened to direct, under the leading role of the IAEA, the process of learning and acting upon lessons following the accident at TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in order to strengthen nuclear safety, emergency preparedness and radiation protection of people and the environment worldwide. At the conference a Ministerial Declaration was adopted which inter alia: • “Requested the IAEA Director General to prepare a Report on the June 2011 IAEA Ministerial Conference on Nuclear Safety and a draft Action Plan, building on the Declaration of the Ministerial Conference and the conclusions and recommendations of the three Working Sessions, and the expertise and knowledge available therein, and to promote coordination and cooperation, as appropriate, with other relevant international organizations to follow up on the outcomes of the Conference, as well as facilitate consultations among Member States on the draft Action Plan”; • “Requested the IAEA Director General to present the Report and the draft Action Plan covering all the relevant aspects relating to nuclear safety, emergency preparedness and response, and radiation protection of people and the environment, as well as the relevant international legal framework, to the IAEA Board of Governors and the General Conference at their forthcoming meetings in 2011”; • “Called upon the IAEA Board of Governors and the General Conference to reflect the outcome of the Ministerial Conference in their decisions and to support the effective, prompt and adequately resourced implementation of the Action Plan”. In considering this Action Plan, it is important to note that: • The responsibility for ensuring the application of the highest standards of nuclear safety and for providing a timely, transparent and adequate response to nuclear emergencies, including addressing vulnerabilities revealed by accidents, lies with each Member State and operating organization. • The IAEA Safety Standards provide the basis for what constitutes a high level of safety for protecting people and the environment from harmful effects of ionizing radiation, and will continue to be objective, transparent and technologically neutral. • Transparency in all aspects of nuclear safety through timely and continuous sharing and dissemination of objective information, including information on nuclear emergencies and their radiological consequences, is of particular importance to improve safety and to meet the high level of public expectation. Nuclear accidents may have transboundary effects; therefore it is important to provide adequate responses based on scientific knowledge and full transparency. • As understanding of the accident develops, additional analysis of the root causes will be carried out. Further lessons may be learned and, as appropriate, be incorporated into the proposed actions by updating the Action Plan. The High Level Conference to be organized by Japan and the IAEA in 2012 will provide an opportunity for learning further lessons and for enhancing transparency.
SSD is the best storage option – buries nuclear waste under the sea. Wilson 14
Wilson, founder of BuildingGreen, Inc. and executive editor of Environmental Building News, founded the Resilient Design Institute Alex, "Safe Storage of Nuclear Waste", Green Building Advisor, www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/energy-solutions/safe-storage-nuclear-waste SP
The big question now is how long it will be until the plant can be decommissioned and what to do with the large quantities of radioactive waste that are being stored onsite. Terrorism risks with nuclear power My concern with nuclear power has always been more about terrorism than accidents during operation or storage. I continue to worry that terrorists could gain entry to nuclear plant operations and sabotage plants from the inside — disabling cooling systems and causing a meltdown. There is also a remote risk of unanticipated natural disasters causing meltdowns or radiation release, as we saw so vividly with the Fukushima Power Plant catastrophe in Japan in March, 2011. For more than 30 years, the nuclear industry in the U.S. and nuclear regulators have been going down the wrong path with waste storage — seeking a repository where waste could be buried deep in a mountain. Nevada’s Yucca Mountain was the place of choice until… it wasn’t. Any time we choose to put highly dangerous waste in someone’s backyard, it’s bound to cause a lot of controversy, even in a sparsely populated, pro-resource-extraction place like Nevada. NIMBY opposition can be boosted by people in powerful places, and in the case of Yucca Mountain, Nevada senator Harry Reid has played such a role. (He has been the Senate Majority Leader since 2006 and served prior to that as the Minority Leader and Democratic Whip.) Aside from NIMBYism, the problem with burying nuclear waste in a mountain (like Yucca Mountain) or salt caverns (like New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns — an earlier option that was pursued for a while in the 1970s) is that the maximum safety is provided at Day One, and the margin of safety drops continually from there. The safety of such storage sites could be compromised over time due to seismic activity (Nevada ranks fourth among the most seismically active states), volcanism (the Yucca Mountain ridge is comprised mostly of volcanic tuff, emitted from past volcanic activity), erosion, migrating aquifers, and other natural geologic actions. A better storage option I believe a much better solution for long-term storage of high-level radioactive waste is to bury it deep under the seabed in a region free of seismic activity where sediment is being deposited and the seafloor getting thicker. In such a site, the level of protection would increase, rather than decrease, over time. In some areas of seabed, more than a centimeter of sediment is being deposited annually. Compacted over time, such sediment deposition could be several feet in a hundred years, and in the geologic time span over which radioactive waste is hazardous, hundreds to thousands of feet of protective sedimentary rock would be formed. The oil and gas industry — for better or worse — knows a lot about drilling deep holes beneath a mile or two of ocean. I suspect that the deep-sea drilling industry would love such a growth opportunity to move into seabed waste storage, and I believe the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or other agencies could do a good job regulating such work. The waste could be placed in wells extending thousands of feet below the seabed in sedimentary rock in geologically stable regions. Let's say a 3,000-foot well is drilled beneath the seabed two miles beneath the surface of the ocean. Waste could be inserted into that well to a depth of 1,000 feet, and the rest of the well capped with 2,000 feet of concrete or some other material. Hundreds of these deep-storage wells could be filled and capped, and such a sub-seabed storage field could be designated as forever off-limits. Industry or the Department of Energy would have to figure out how to package such waste for safe handling at sea, since the material is so dangerous, but I believe that is a surmountable challenge. For example, perhaps the radioactive waste could be vitrified (incorporated into molten glass-like material) to reduce leaching potential into seawater should an accident occur at sea, and that waste could be tagged with radio-frequency emitters so that any lost containers could be recovered with robotic submarines in the event of such accidents. While I’m not an expert in any of this, I’ve looked at how much money taxpayers and industry have already poured into Yucca Mountain — about $15 billion by the time the Obama Administration terminated federal funding for it in 2010, according to Bloomberg News — and the estimates for how much more it would take to get a working waste storage facility of that sort operational had risen to about $96 billion by 2008, according to the U.S. Department of Energy at the time. I believe that sub-seabed storage would be far less expensive.
Solves the aff ssd is able to isolate any radioactive nuclear waste from humans. Bala 2014
Amal Bala, Sub-Seabed Burial of Nuclear Waste: If the Disposal Method Could Succeed Technically, Could It Also Succeed Legally?, 41 B.C. Envtl. Aff. L. Rev. 455 (2014),SP In general, two related methods of underwater disposal of SNF exist: dumping containers of radioactive waste into the ocean, and sub-seabed disposal. 92 The purpose of underwater disposal of SNF is the same as any other type of SNF disposal, which is to isolate radioactive waste from human contact and the environment long enough for any release of radiation to become harmless.93 The potential advantages of certain types of underwater SNF disposal for the United States could include effective containment of the waste and avoiding the controversy of a land-based national repository, such as the failed project at Yucca Mountain. 94 Underwater disposal of SNF, specifically subseabed disposal, could occur far from the coast of any state or nation and could thereby avoid the NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) syndrome, but this result is not guaranteed considering existing laws and a popular belief that Earth’s oceans are a global commons
10/8/16
SEPT-OCT Natives Epistemology K
Tournament: Voices | Round: 3 | Opponent: University JC | Judge: Sean Fee We agree that nuclear power should be prohibited, but are pic-ing out of the 1AC justifications.
Subpoint A: We’ll isolate 2 reasons the AC is colonialism in disguise
1- Epistemology
The 1AC is based on an opposition between western and indigenous peoples and epistemologies that is rooted in essentialism. This form of criticism reinforces colonialism by reinforcing hierarchical difference Andersen, PhD, 09 (Chris, Prof. Native Studies @ Alberta, “critical indigenous studies From Difference to Density” Cultural Studies Review 15 (2) p. 80-84) In two recent articles,3 American Indian studies professor Duane Champagne challenges ‘Western’ academic disciplines’ epistemological ability to analyse contemporary Indigeneity.4 Specifically, their failure to consider Indigenous collectivities’ active role in colonial contexts in terms not readily discernable in Western forms of knowledge means these disciplines miss large elements of Indigeneity and, as such, fail to offer a plausible basis for its analysis. Champagne contends that despite its current failure to do so, American Indian studies—extrapolated here to include all Indigenous studies—should instead assume this mantle by presuming the distinctive agency of Indigenous peoples, including a focus on exploring our relations according to our distinctive epistemologies and according to the goals and mandates set by Indigenous communities. Not only will this distinguish Native studies from the rest of the academia, it will better position it to assist Indigenous peoples in righting their relationships with dominant, ‘whitestream’ society.5 I agree with Champagne’s assertion that Indigenous studies—whether within or outside specific departments and faculties—should exist in contemporary academia and that Indigenous communities ought to constitute a central focus to this endeavour. Despite his obvious love for the discipline (a fidelity I share), however, his peculiar positioning of Indigenous studies as different needlessly marginalises our density and, in doing so, unnecessarily gives ground to disciplinary turf long claimed by older disciplines. Thus, although he usefully positions Indigenous communities as producers of complex knowledge about indigeneity, his separation of Indigenous from white society unnecessarily marginalises two elements of our density critical to this relationship: 1) the extent of Indigenous communities’ knowledges about whiteness (a social fact which requires an expertise in ‘Western’ concepts); and 2) the extent to which the production of academic knowledge through Indigenous studies is shaped by the ‘whitestream’ academic relations of power, marking it in tension with other forms of knowledge (such as community knowledge). Both are unfortunate omissions. Regarding the first, the epistemological aprioris of whiteness are a dominant representational source through which Western societies produce and consume Indigeneity. As such, Champagne recklessly jettisons so-called Western disciplinary concepts and methodologies as immutable precisely where and when they are most necessary. Regarding the second, he dismisses the contextual importance of accounting for the academic institutional conditions under which native studies units (are allowed to) exist. My sympathetic critique of Champagne’s argument is divided into three major parts and a conclusion. Part one extrapolates his analysis of current native studies and his prescriptions for how to fix it. In this context I examine his charge that ‘Western’ disciplines (anthropology, history, sociology and so on) are too epistemologically constricted to properly explain Indigenous agency or communities and I emphasise his failure to account for the conditions of possibility under which Native American studies entered into academic history (to borrow Foucauldian phraseology).6 This latter element challenges the relationships he posits between both Indigenous studies and other academic disciplines and Indigenous knowledge within and outside the academy. Part two unpacks his tropes to reveal an epistemological and ontological essentialism which positions Indigeneity as separate from (his notion of) colonialism, such that an endogamous focus on the former obviates the need for accounting for the influence of the latter (or at least, that native studies can analyse the former in a manner which separates it from the Western academic herd). I argue that Champagne reproduces a variant strain of ‘Aboriginalism’ 7 that oversimplifies contemporary Indigeneity and overstates the immutability of concepts emanating from existing ‘Western’ disciplines. In doing so, he unnecessarily limits the contributions Indigenous studies is ideally positioned to make in deconstructing Aboriginalist discourses and in doing so produces an oddly parochial formulation of the discipline. Finally, in part three I offer my own prescriptions for an Indigenous studies anchored in Indigenous density (rather than difference). The temporal and epistemological complexity of our relationships with whitestream society means that Indigenous studies must counter hegemonic representations of Indigeneity which marginalise or altogether ignore our density. Following in the footsteps of Geonpul scholar Moreton-Robinson’s path-breaking work, I argue that Indigenous studies’ study of both Indigeneity and whiteness must use all available epistemologies, not just those which apparently distance Western disciplines from Indigenous studies analysis.8 While Champagne’s formulation can possibly be stretched to examine whiteness, the epistemological strategies he proposes for analysing Indigeneity capture only specific, isolated elements of our complexity. The essay ends with a discussion of the implications of this argument. I Locating (Champagne in) the discipline of native studies Native studies ‘state of the discipline’ pieces often begin by differentiating our scholarship from that of longer-standing disciplines.9 Though these are as often prescriptive as reflective of actual practice, such immanent analysis signals a healthy and growing discipline. American Indian scholar Clara Sue Kidwell suggests that, at least in native studies, these debates often play themselves out in a tension between two poles of analysis: essentialism/difference and adaptation/assimilation.10 She suggests that the essentialism cluster is rooted in an extreme form of post-colonialism which ‘implies that American Indian ways of thinking existed before colonialism and remain unknowable by anyone outside those cultures. Native American studies/American Indian studies can recover the long-suppressed values, epistemologies, and voices from colonial oppression’.11 Conversely, adaptation clusters typically emphasise the agency of Indigenous collectivities in the face of whitestream colonialism. Like the essentialism cluster, however, Kidwell argues that in its extreme variant: the idea of adaptation, or acculturation, or agency represents the ultimate disappearance of Indian identity into American society. If Indians dress like everyone else, speak like everyone else, attend public schools, are citizens of the state in which they live and citizens of the United States, how can they justify claims to a distinctive identity?12 Like others taking the essentialist position in the debate,13 Champagne contends that Indigeneity and Indigenous communities are fundamentally different in ways which elide the epistemological premises of Western disciplines (more on this in part two). These disciplines employ data collection concepts and practices saturated with a concern for ‘examining the issues, problems, and conceptualizations that confront American or Western civilization’.14 Indigenous issues are merely positioned as a specific instance of more general patterns of minority oppression.15 Such thinking has, he suggests, detracted intellectual energy from the more laudable Indigenous studies disciplinary goal of ‘conceptualising, researching, and explaining patterns of American Indian individual and collective community choices and strategies when confronted with relations with the American state and society’.16 Champagne suggests that most native studies departments are multidisciplinary in character with faculty scattered in numerous disciplines teaching theories and concepts from numerous academic fields, to students as often as not from non-Aboriginal backgrounds, with a vague mandate for increasing or generating broader awareness about Indigenous history and contemporary realities.17 He admits that this multidisciplinarity is often advantageous in that ‘programs could be constructed from long-standing disciplines, and often seasoned scholars could be called upon to provide guidance and support’.18 However, to the extent that concepts central to Western disciplines remain ‘oriented toward examining the issues, problems, and conceptualizations that confront American or Western civilization’,19 these approaches effectively stifle the ability of American Indian studies to produce disciplinarily endogamous theory and methodology. The existing Indigenous studies academic landscape is thus, Champagne explains, littered with disjointed and epistemologically scattered forays into (and about) Indigenous communities. The current inability to produce distinctive theory and method has exacerbated institutional marginality (his context is American but this is readily extrapolated more broadly): fiscal conservativism limits the likelihood that even well-meaning administrators will build-in the solid, permanent funding required for stable Native studies departments (since money made available for ‘Aboriginal issues’ is just as likely to go to more wellregarded disciplines such as anthropology, history or education); broader multicultural or diversity concerns overshadow the distinctiveness of Indigenous experiences by linking them to broader forms of ‘minority’ oppression (thus the seemingly natural fit of native studies departments within ‘ethnic studies’ faculties); and mainstream theorising and methodological thinking has shown a reluctance to ‘think outside the box’ of Western modes of analysis.20 Champagne argues in a nutshell that: the university bureaucratic environment, weak resource support, the emphasis on race and ethnic paradigms over an indigenous paradigm, and the relegation of Indian Studies to serve general diversity interests for the university will continue to constrain, and often will prevent, full development of indigenous studies departments and programs at many universities.21 Champagne’s understanding of native studies’ relationship to the academy is reminiscent of the humanism Foucault critiques in his examination of nineteenth- and twentieth-century sexuality regulation.22 Foucault takes such explanations to task for their tendency to position power repressively as an entity which prevents actions and curtails freedoms. Foucauldian notions of power instead stress its repressive and constitutive character. They emphasise how discursive power shapes the formation of subjectivities which, in turn, shape the conditions under which subjects ‘enter into history’. Wedded to a repressive understanding of power, Champagne makes a homologous correlation between the current academic institutional marginality of Native studies and the forms of marginality Indigenous communities experience outside the academy. Thus correlated, he argues that a robust and holistic Indigenous paradigm can assist in rectifying this repression. For Champagne, then, academic and nonacademic Indigenous knowledge are comrades-in-arms, with Indigenous studies—anchored in an Indigenous paradigm—providing the missing link. In this guise, his Indigenous paradigm places Indigenous communities and nations at its centre, instead of colonial critique. Native studies, Champagne explains, ‘cannot center on a critique of the colonial experience but rather must focus on the individual and community choices American Indians make to realize their culture, values, and political and economic interests within the constraints and opportunities presented by changing colonial contexts’.23 While colonial critique can be useful for examining external forces relating to political, legal and market conditions, it ‘excludes choice and social action on the part of Native historical and cultural experience, and in effect American Indians are not analyzed as players in their own historical contexts but rather viewed as billiard balls knocked around by powerful colonial powers and forces’.24 Champagne thus draws a clear distinction between, on the one hand, what he thinks Western disciplines, with their focus on colonialism, can explain about indigeneity and on the other, what makes Indigenous peoples truly Indigenous and, presumably, what these disciplines remain unable to explicate. Perhaps equally importantly, he assumes that such boundaries are discrete and readily discernable, such that he effectively erases the object–subject relationship within which all other academic disciplines produce knowledge.25 Champagne’s ostensible focus on Indigenous communities reflects a central disciplinary trope of native studies. For example, Cook-Lynn states bluntly that ‘Indian Studies as an academic discipline was meant to have as it constituencies the native tribal nations of America and its major purpose the defense of lands and resources and the sovereign right to nationtonation status’.26 This emphasis on tribally specific knowledge is also emphasised by Muskogee scholar Craig Womack, who argues the need for ‘more attention devoted to tribally specific concerns’ in a literary context,27 part of a larger ‘literary nationalism’ movement with broadly allied concerns.28 Holm et al. argue even more specifically that native studies should emphasise the exploration and support of and for what they term ‘peoplehood’, positioned to include language, sacred history, territory and ceremony,29 while Kidwell suggests that native studies should endeavour to emphasise Indigenous relationships with land, the inclusion of Indigenous intellectual traditions, our inherent sovereignty and the importance of our Indigenous languages.30 Thus, while Champagne’s focal concerns are not abnormal, his attempt to isolate Indigenous communities epistemologically from the broader social fabric of dominant, whitestream society effectively removes a large part of our arsenal for combatting the damaging representations of Indigeneity woven into larger society. Parts of his argument turn on the idea that colonialism exists external to Indigenous communities and nations, as something we are subject to. Thus, it isn’t that we don’t suffer (from) colonialism; rather, its power resides outside our communities. From this perspective, theories of colonialism are explanatory tools but are not enough in-and-of-themselves because their externality precludes their ability to fully comprehend and analyse our communities’ distinctiveness. In line with the repressive formulation of power which anchors his understanding of Indigenous studies, for Champagne colonialism = sameness/assimilation and indigeneity = difference/freedom. I will have more to say on this below, but suffice it to say for now that his prescriptions become particularly problematic when he attempts to circumscribe the theories and methods native studies should use in analysis of/with Indigenous communities. One can perhaps forgive Champagne’s diagnosis in this context, since it represents only part of his argument and, as I said, is a common trope of Indigenous studies. However, consider a fuller example of his positioning of colonialism: Colonial theories emphasize external forces such as political, legal, market, and cultural constraints and hegemonies to which American Indian communities are subject. Colonial arguments are powerful tools and explain much change in American Indian communities, but the kind of change that is explained is externally enforced and often coercive. Such change is often subtly resisted and not internalized. footnote omitted An old Spanish saying is ‘I bend my knee but not my heart’.31 While his statements might legitimately swell our hearts with pride at the ways our ancestors resisted colonialism/oppression while retaining their dignity, traditions and collective self consciousness, they nonetheless avoid questions about how the cultural power of nationstates do not merely oppress, but seduce as well.32 Champagne’s essentialism in effect marginalises the complex ways in which our Indigenous habitus (to borrow from Pierre Bourdieu) is inevitably and irrevocably constituted in and by the fields of struggle we occupy.33 His colonialism thus staggers between a vulgar Marxism which stresses an autonomous subject who can/must reject (or accept) colonialism and an equally vulgar structural-functionalism that measures Indigenous agency and collective choices against a Cartesian indigeneity which exists outside the life and reach of contemporary nation-states’ cultural power.
2nd- Paternalism
The aff attempt to “save” indigenous people is a recasting of whiteman’s burden- it relies on the belief that indigenous groups are too primitive to make their own economic decisions Gover and Walker 92 (Kevin, Prof of Law ASU, Jana L, ESCAPING ENVIRONMENTAL PATERNALISM: ONE TRIBE'S APPROACH TO DEVELOPING A COMMERCIAL WASTE DISPOSAL PROJECT IN INDIAN COUNTRY http://faculty.virginia.edu/ejus/ESCAPE.htm) We have been asked to address the issue of environmental racism in the context of commercial solid and hazardous waste projects on Indian reservations. Let us say at the outset that we have no quarrel with those who believe that undesirable facilities-such as waste disposal facilities more likely to be found in a poor minority community than in a wealthy white one.' However, the environmental community must come to understand that not all such facilities are unwanted by the host community and that, in those cases where a community wishes to have such a facility, its decision is to be respected. As an example of such a host community located in Indian country, we will use our experience in helping the Campo Band of Mission Indians of California develop a solid waste project on its reservation. With respect to waste disposal, there are two issues facing Indian tribes today. First, how do tribes dispose of the solid waste generated on their reservations, and second, does a tribe want to use its land as a site for a commercial waste project as a form of economic development? Almost without exception, over the last year the media has focused its entire attention on the issue of commercial projects. We cannot count the number of articles in magazines and newspapers titled "Dances with Garbage."2 The media has created a steady drumbeat of stories about tribes all over the country building landfills and taking in hazardous waste, implying that the waste industry is marauding unchecked in Indian country, immune from any environmental regulation whatsoever. Is it true? In our experience over the last few years, this is just not the case, and we believe that much of the media attention has been misguided and uninformed. Even if we assume that some waste companies are targeting Indian country, tribes have almost always repelled these so-called attacks.3 In most cases, tribes are not even giving these companies an interview. Of the dozens of proposals that apparently have been made to tribes, only a small number remain under serious consideration.4 Tribal governments quite clearly have demonstrated that they are fully capable of deciding whether or not a project will serve their best interests. To set the record straight, the bigger problem is not that the waste industry is beating a path to the tribal door. Rather, it is the unauthorized and illegal dumping occurring on reservations. For most Indian communities the problem of open dumping on tribal lands is of much greater concern than the remote prospect that a commercial waste disposal facility may be sited on a reservation. Until 1986, Congress had left tribal governments completely out of the federal environmental scheme. In 1986, Congress enacted the first tribal amendments to federal environmental laws. Those amendments allowed tribes to be treated as states for program enforcement and grants under the Safe Drinking Water Act.5 Congress enacted similar amendments to Superfund in 1986,6 the Clean Water Act in 1987,7 and the Clean Air Act in 1990. 8 Unfortunately, Congress has not yet enacted tribal amendments to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA)9 authorizing tribes to assume primary enforcement authority for solid and hazardous waste programs. This means that even though tribes possess inherent authority to do so,10 tribal amendments will be necessary before tribes will be eligible under RCRA for any federal grant or contract assistance to deal with their waste problems. On Indian lands, it is estimated that there are over 650 sites where solid waste has been disposed of.11 This includes 108 tribally-owned landfills constructed years ago by the Indian Health Service (IHS).12 Although IHS originally built these landfills to meet the then existing federal standards, now, under the more stringent federal standards, only a handful of the 108 are reported to be in compliance with EPA requirements.13 One estimate by the Indian Health Service found that it would cost $160 million to construct on reservations solid waste facilities that would be in compliance with EPA standards,14 and to date, we do not know where this money will come from.15 The threat of tribal environmental liability comes at a time when Indian reservations are some of the most impoverished places in the country. Off the reservations, states, counties, and cities are scrambling to deal with their own problems of an ever increasing waste stream, rapidly dwindling capacity in existing landfills, and increasing public opposition to the siting of "locally unwanted land uses"-or"LULUs"-such as landfills. We refer to these public position groups as NIMBYs or "Not in My Backyard" groups. Another term used to describe them which seems particularly fitting where tribal waste projects are concerned is "CAVE" or "citizens against virtually everything." At any rate, the overall high poverty level for Indian communities and the NIMBY pressure on state and local governments to put landfills in someone else's backyard have contributed to the false belief that reservations alone have been targeted by the waste companies. The second and more controversial issue facing tribes involves the use of reservation lands as sites for commercial solid and hazardous waste disposal facilities. Looking at the waste industry as a form of economic development, in many respects it can be a good match for tribal communities. The industry is usually willing to pay the costs of developing new projects without requiring a tribe to put any cash up front. Since most tribes just do not have the money to independently fund large-scale economic development, this makes the industry attractive to Indian communities desperate for development. The waste industry needs isolation and an abundance of land, and, again, because of the overall lack of tribal economic development, undeveloped land is a resource that many tribes have. The waste industry also provides numerous opportunities for unskilled and semi-skilled workers, including training in the construction and environment compliance fields. On most reservations, unemployment is extremely high and opportunities for training Indians very limited. Finally, the waste industry is and must be recognized as an indispensable and legitimate part of the services sector of the economy, and as such, can be an extremely profitable form of development for tribes. All of this means that, under certain circumstances, a solid or hazardous waste disposal project may represent a viable and appropriate form of industrial development for some tribes and can provide extraordinary opportunities for economic development on some reservations. It is not appropriate for every community, and we certainly are not urging tribes to site waste facilities on their reservations. Each tribe must decide for itself if it is interested in such development. Our intent is merely to put things in a more honest perspective and to describe one process that, when and if a tribe seriously considers a commercial waste proposal, it can use to evaluate the proposal effectively and, if it's feasible, plan for its development. (Continued) For tribes considering developing commercial waste projects on their reservations, the major issue they face will not be an environmental one, but instead one of power and racism. Much of the environmental community seems to assume that, if an Indian community decides to accept such a project, it either does not understand the Potential consequences or has been bamboozled by an unprincipled waste company. In either case, the clear implication is that Indians lack the intelligence to balance and protect adequately their own economic and environmental interests. This is clearly a racist assumption; the same assumption that guided the federal policies that very nearly eradicated Indian people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.40 It is "environmentalist racism," and ultimately every bit as destructive as the open hostility to Indian people that we experience in many Parts Of this country.
The affirmative has a one size fits all solution – allowing each group to decide is the best solution Leonard, JD, 97 (Louis G., Executive Editor, 1996 -- 1997, BOSTON COLLEGE THIRD WORLD LAW JOURNAL. SOVEREIGNTY, SELF-DETERMINATION, AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE IN THE MESCALERO APACHE'S DECISION TO STORE NUCLEAR WASTE 24 B.C. Envtl. Aff. L. Rev. 651 Spring) If there are adequate improvements in the federal regulatory framework surrounding nuclear waste, and improvements in internal tribal decision-making, tribes should have the general authority to decide whether to allow a waste-site on their land. Increased technical assistance and greater involvement by tribes at the federal level will help to educate tribal members from the outset and thus allow for an informed decision and a real opportunity for tribes to better resolve these issues for themselves. n355 This type of empowerment through education and knowledge is the only way to begin to right the generations of marginalization and discrimination that have characterized mainstream society's relationships with tribes throughout history. n356 These are the recommendations of an environmental justice approach: tribal self-determination empowered by knowledge. n357
Subpoint B: Our Critique turns and outweighs the case
Discourse matters- the resolution choses the policies we discuss but the affirmative picked their advantage framing for strategic purposes- they should have to bear the strategic costs for these choices- live by the sword die by the sword 2. Resolveability- our PIC solves any policy implications of their advocacy, in order to win the affirmative must win that their advantage framing is valuable. This is fair and predictable- since they get to pick what goes in the AC they should be prepared to defend it 3. The kritik turns the case- essentialist notions of indigenous identity are the root cause of imperialism Chow, PhD, 98 *Rey, Prof. Modern Culture and Media @Brown, Ethics After Idealism, p. 8-9) On the other hand, precisely because of the obstinacy of the methods of area studies, this is also a moment of danger because the turn toward "other" cultures that is espoused in the name of cultural studies could easily be used to refuse and replace rather than strengthen the theoretical modes of inquiry that remain a valuable part of comparative literature. For instance, it is disturbing to hear a kind of claim that is now often made about the study of nonWestern cultures in the age of multiculturalism: "Now we can go back to the study of indigenous cultures and forget all about `Western theory'!" Even though this is a caricatural paraphrase, I believe it accurately sums up the sentiments that are involved in the antitheoretical clamor for cultural studies. Let me be more specific about why such sentiments are problematic. In the age of the general criticism of Western imperialism, the study of nonWestern cultures easily assumes a kind of moral superiority, since such cultures are often also those that have been colonized and ideologically dominated by the West. For the same reason, "theory," for all its fundamental questioning of Western logocentrism, has easily but effectively been lumped together with everything "Western" and facilely rejected as a nonnecessity. This is evident in the manner in which the following type of question, for all its illogicality, continues to be in vogue among some practitioners of Asian studies: "Why should we use Western theory to study Asian cultures?" In the climate of multiculturalism, such practitioners find in cultural studies' obligatory turns toward pluralism a kind of rhetorical justification that works to their own advantage—for what better "reason" is there for the rejection of "Western theory" than the widely advocated study of "other" cultures? In the name of studying the West's ''others," then, the critique of cultural politics that is an inherent part of both poststructural theory and cultural studies is pushed aside, and "culture" returns to a coherent, idealist essence that is outside language and outside mediation. 21 Pursued in a morally complacent, antitheoretical mode, "culture" now functions as a shield that hides the positivism, essentialism, and nativism—and with them the continual acts of hierarchization, subordination, and marginalization—that have persistently accompanied the pedagogical practices of area studies; "cultural studies" now becomes a means of legitimizing continual conceptual and methodological irresponsibility in the name of cultural otherness. One prominent instance of such legitimation is the argument for returning to "indigenous" origins. As Spivak points out, the notion of a return to pure "indigenous theory" is not a viable one because of the history of imperialism: I cannot understand what indigenous theory there might be that can ignore the reality of nineteenthcentury history. As for syntheses: syntheses have more problems than answers to offer. To construct indigenous theories one must ignore the last few centuries of historical involvement. I would rather use what history has written for me.22 To add to Spivak's point, it should be emphasized that the advocacy for a return to indigenous theory and culture usually masks, with the violence of "the West," the violence of the cultural politics that is within an indigenous culture.
4. The external impact outweighs the case- their AC framing promotes fascism that causes global imperialism Chow, PhD, 98 *Rey, Prof. Modern Culture and Media @Brown, Ethics After Idealism, p. 26-7) The Story of O, or, the New Fascism In the foregoing pages, I have tried to argue that fascism needs to be understood not only in its negative but more importantly in its positive aspects, and that fascism's production of idealism is a projectional production of luminosity as self evidence. In an essay entitled "The Evidence of Experience," which does not at first seem to have anything to do with the topic of fascism, Joan Scott has made comparable observations about the use of "experience" in the North American academy today. 39 In the general atmosphere of a felt need to deconstruct universalist claims about human history, Scott writes, scholars of various disciplines have increasingly turned to personal experience as a means of such deconstruction. However, she argues, by privileging experience as the critical weapon against universalisms, we are leaving open the question as to what authorizes experience itself. Scott charges that the appeal to experience "as uncontestable evidence and as an originary point of explanation" for historical difference has increasingly replaced the necessary task of exploring "how difference is established, how it operates, how and in what ways it constitutes subjects who see and act in the world."40 For me, what is especially interesting is the manner in which Scott emphasizes the role of vision and visibility throughout her essay. Beginning her discussion with Samuel R. Delany's autobiographical meditation, The Motion of Light in Water, Scott notes that "a metaphor of visibility as literal transparency is crucial to his project." She concludes that, for Delany, "knowledge is gained through vision; vision is a direct apprehension of a world of transparent objects."41 What Scott articulates here is the other side of Virilio's argument about the coterminous nature of visual perception and destruction—that is, the coterminous nature of visual perception and knowledge: "Seeing is the origin of knowing."42 While the technology of seeing, or seeing as technology, has become an inalienable part of the operation of militarism and fascist propaganda, Scott shows how it has also come to dominate our thinking about identity, so much so that visibility and luminosity are the conditions toward which accounts of difference and alternative histories derived from "personal experience" now aspire. This kind of aspiration, Scott implies, is an aspiration toward the selfevidence of the self's (personal) experience. The self as evidence: this means that the self, like the Stalin myth in Soviet cinema, is so transparent, so shone through with light, that it simply is, without need for further argument about its history or what Scott calls its "discursive character."
5. No aff offense- racism and romanticism are two sides of the same coin- their turns don’t grapple with the critical distinction between essentialized and nuanced conceptions of native identity Gagne, PhD, 3 (Karen, Prof. Sociology @Wisconsin Platteville, “Falling in Love With Indians: The Metaphysics of Becoming America.” CR: The New Centennial Review, 3:3 p. 206-207) Rroberto fernández retamar argues in caliban and other essays (1989) that the image of the Carib/cannibal, a “bestial man situated on the margins of civilization,” is contrasted with that of the Arawak/Taino, the peaceful, meek, and even timorously cowardly native. This Taino, he writes, would be transformed into the paradisiacal inhabitant of a utopian world—as in the world of Thomas More in 1516. Further, this notion of an Edenic creature would serve as a “working hypothesis for the bourgeois left, and, as such, offers an ideal model of the perfect society free from the constrictions of that feudal world against which the bourgeoisie is in fact struggling.” The vision of the cannibal, then, corresponds to the right wing of that same bourgeoisie. Retamar writes, “It belongs to the ideological arsenal of politicians of action, those who perform the dirty work in whose fruits the charming dreamers of utopias will equally share” (7; my emphasis). Both of these visions, as Shakespeare was to address in The Tempest, were perfectly reconcilable. The first epigraph I include above came from a book I found recently at a feminist bookshop. While I had hoped to find some literature to support my topic, I hadn’t expected to find one quite so precisely related to my premise concerning both “falling in love” and “becoming American.” But there it was, right on display near the register. Upon reading it, I considered it a different angle on the subject of representing Native Americans than that provided by Ian Frazier’s On the Rez (2000), and realized that both works provided contemporary examples of becoming American by falling in love with “natives.” Its author is an “acclaimed environmental activist and essay writer,” and the book is titled in very simple letters, Red. The subtitle, in much smaller letters, is Passion and Patience in the Desert (Williams 2001). The title of my paper is a twist on Richard Drinnon’s Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (1997). I argue that both Indian loving and Indian hating constitute two sides of the same racialization of the indigenous populations of the Americas, as well as two sides in the racialization of the colonizers. This duality has been significant to the process of the Self-development of the colonizer. Far from being a process of psychological development of the individual European, however, this process is the “collective attitude” that is the history of the Americas, to use a phrase by E. Franklin Frazier, cited by Greg Thomas (1999); it is “part of American psychology and the mentality of America,” to quote Robert F. Williams, cited again by Greg Thomas (2002). Further, these two ideas—which tend to coincide with the left and right visions of the bourgeoisie—are complementary rather than contradictory, as suggested by Retamar (7). They are complimentary visions in the “arsenal of the bourgeois,” and must be attacked accordingly.
Our alternative embraces epistemological pluralism- it recognizes the diversity and density of native communities instead of homogenizing them as a collective group of noble savages bamboozled by the nuclear industry. Emphasizing density instead of absolute difference avoids throwing out the baby with the bathwater Andersen, PhD, 09 (Chris, Prof. Native Studies @ Alberta, “critical indigenous studies From Difference to Density” Cultural Studies Review 15 (2) p. 95-6) By way of conclusion, let me offer some thoughts on where my removal of difference—a central pillar of Champagne’s Native studies—leaves us with respect to fashioning a discipline which can honour our past complexity while accounting for its contemporary and future manifestations.68 Champagne spends much of his analytical time arguing that Western concepts and disciplines are of only limited use to Indigenous studies because they fail to account for the distinctive needs, aspirations and epistemologies of Indigenous communities. A proper Indigenous studies discipline must thus produce: points of view and conceptualizations drawing on the everyday strategies and conceptions of American Indian communities that require mainstream academics and policy makers to rethink and extend the views of indigenous groups, as a means to include their views and socio-cultural actions outside the use of class, ethnicity, race, and even nationality. Native American Studies, and more generally indigenous studies, calls for conceptualizations and strategies that encompass issues, rights, and strategies of political, cultural, and territorial survival.69 He thus positions Native studies (a position familiar to Native studies practitioners) as a dog on the leash for Indigenous communities and nations. Such a position offers little in the way of analysis about the complexity of academic/community relations but it certainly feels good to say. He doesn’t appear to realise the extent to which analysing such a relationship necessarily requires sliding into disciplinary territory long claimed by other disciplines. If his point is that as Indigenous studies practitioners we need to claim this territory as our own, I am in full agreement. My point is merely that staking such a claim requires none of the epistemological baggage he wants to pack for the journey, and indeed raises troubling issues that require us to carefully unpack what he proposes to bring. Two of these are worth unpacking here. First, the community/academic relationship which appears to anchor Champagne’s formulation is problematic in that it ignores the ways that whiteness in the academy shapes the boundaries of its knowledge production in ways which do not necessarily subscribe to the regimes under which community knowledges are produced: Moreton-Robinson contends quite rightly that such representations ‘may not reflect the same knowledges about authenticity that are created and deployed within and by Indigenous communities and as such they may not be acceptable’.70 In ignoring this complexity, how on earth is Champagne to deal with the conflicts that inevitably arise? It does little good to acquiesce to one discourse or the other (though more often than not academic representations are given the nod), nor can we pretend that such differences are always reconcilable. These conflicts arise in situations pertaining to fundamentally irreconcilable positions on precisely the relationships between humans and nature (as Champagne points to) but they can also arise in more mundane situations, such as how to provide honorariums for elders involved in research projects in ways which don’t claw back from their monthly social assistance cheques. Second, even (or especially) if Indigenous studies is a dog on the leash for Indigenous communities and nations, why does this necessarily require an entirely new set of theoretical or methodological precepts that differ from those of mainstream disciplines? I agree with the broad strokes of Champagne’s argument about constructing a specific niche for ourselves in the academic, as do many other Native studies practitioners. But many of us have been involved in situations in which an Indigenous community has approached our department to ask for research assistance for mundane issues about collecting data on telephone or internet use in their community; proper application of census documents to produce the robust statistical profiles through which they interface with government funders; water purity samples to make determinations of water safety; or even archival documents to assist them in legal battles over hunting, fishing and other resource extraction questions. Although the disciplines of sociology, biological sciences, history or anthropology could and have undertaken this assistance, so can many existing Indigenous studies departments. It seems inherently strange to call for a theoretical and methodological orientation—and thus, according to Champagne, a discipline—which possessed none of this capability. His model presupposes the difference of Indigenous communities and in doing so slams the shutters closed on forms of expertise which might nonetheless prove of central concern to the communities. Champagne contends that ‘the issues confronting indigenous peoples are not reducible to race, class, ethnicity or other common analytical dimensions in use within mainstream disciplines’.71 The problem, from an epistemological standpoint, is that no issues of any peoples can be reduced to these factors. Concepts—all concepts—are by definition schematic and as such are laughably simplistic in the face of the enormous complexity of human life. This complexity requires us to acknowledge that Indigenous communities are—and have been for centuries—more than the ‘holistic, institutionally nondifferentiated’ entities in which ‘knowledge is inherently integrated with community, culture, and political and economic relations’72 painted by Champagne. Thus, although not fully captured by terms like race, ethnicity or class, such terms nonetheless assist greatly in reflecting upon the relationships between our communities and the various nation-states, and not only because they possess symbolic power in dominant society. The real irony of Champagne’s model of Indigenous studies is that his choices of analytical focus require none of the theoretical or methodological prescriptions he begs of them. For example, his most prominent critique of Indigenous studies—that a ‘cacophony’ of theoretical and methodological tools will ‘doom’ it to institutional marginality73—is usually emphasised as a disciplinary strength. Thus, Indigenous studies scholar Jace Weaver writes that: in dealing with the totalizing systems that we know as Native cultures, each view from traditional disciplines is limited and partial, NAS must draw together the various disciplines and their methods in order to achieve something approaching a complete picture of Natives, their cultures and experiences.74 This isn’t an issue for Champagne, apparently, since his positioning of Indigenous communities strips them of any of the epistemological complexity that would require us to intrude on others’ disciplinary turf. He sees this as his model’s strength but in fact it becomes its Achilles heel. By beginning with the assumption that Indigenous communities are epistemologically dense (rather than just different), however, Weaver’s appeal for interdisciplinarity becomes vital. Indeed, failure to account, interdisciplinarily, for this density elevates the danger of producing a naive, substantialist and ultimately parochial Indigenous studies.
CP Text: The Nuclear Regulatory Commission should designate sub-seabed disposal as the sole candidate for its permanent nuclear waste repository. Wilson 14
Wilson, founder of BuildingGreen, Inc. and executive editor of Environmental Building News, founded the Resilient Design Institute Alex, "Safe Storage of Nuclear Waste", Green Building Advisor, www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/energy-solutions/safe-storage-nuclear-waste SP
The big question now is how long it will be until the plant can be decommissioned and what to do with the large quantities of radioactive waste that are being stored onsite. Terrorism risks with nuclear power My concern with nuclear power has always been more about terrorism than accidents during operation or storage. I continue to worry that terrorists could gain entry to nuclear plant operations and sabotage plants from the inside — disabling cooling systems and causing a meltdown. There is also a remote risk of unanticipated natural disasters causing meltdowns or radiation release, as we saw so vividly with the Fukushima Power Plant catastrophe in Japan in March, 2011. For more than 30 years, the nuclear industry in the U.S. and nuclear regulators have been going down the wrong path with waste storage — seeking a repository where waste could be buried deep in a mountain. Nevada’s Yucca Mountain was the place of choice until… it wasn’t. Any time we choose to put highly dangerous waste in someone’s backyard, it’s bound to cause a lot of controversy, even in a sparsely populated, pro-resource-extraction place like Nevada. NIMBY opposition can be boosted by people in powerful places, and in the case of Yucca Mountain, Nevada senator Harry Reid has played such a role. (He has been the Senate Majority Leader since 2006 and served prior to that as the Minority Leader and Democratic Whip.) Aside from NIMBYism, the problem with burying nuclear waste in a mountain (like Yucca Mountain) or salt caverns (like New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns — an earlier option that was pursued for a while in the 1970s) is that the maximum safety is provided at Day One, and the margin of safety drops continually from there. The safety of such storage sites could be compromised over time due to seismic activity (Nevada ranks fourth among the most seismically active states), volcanism (the Yucca Mountain ridge is comprised mostly of volcanic tuff, emitted from past volcanic activity), erosion, migrating aquifers, and other natural geologic actions. A better storage option I believe a much better solution for long-term storage of high-level radioactive waste is to bury it deep under the seabed in a region free of seismic activity where sediment is being deposited and the seafloor getting thicker. In such a site, the level of protection would increase, rather than decrease, over time. In some areas of seabed, more than a centimeter of sediment is being deposited annually. Compacted over time, such sediment deposition could be several feet in a hundred years, and in the geologic time span over which radioactive waste is hazardous, hundreds to thousands of feet of protective sedimentary rock would be formed. The oil and gas industry — for better or worse — knows a lot about drilling deep holes beneath a mile or two of ocean. I suspect that the deep-sea drilling industry would love such a growth opportunity to move into seabed waste storage, and I believe the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or other agencies could do a good job regulating such work. The waste could be placed in wells extending thousands of feet below the seabed in sedimentary rock in geologically stable regions. Let's say a 3,000-foot well is drilled beneath the seabed two miles beneath the surface of the ocean. Waste could be inserted into that well to a depth of 1,000 feet, and the rest of the well capped with 2,000 feet of concrete or some other material. Hundreds of these deep-storage wells could be filled and capped, and such a sub-seabed storage field could be designated as forever off-limits. Industry or the Department of Energy would have to figure out how to package such waste for safe handling at sea, since the material is so dangerous, but I believe that is a surmountable challenge. For example, perhaps the radioactive waste could be vitrified (incorporated into molten glass-like material) to reduce leaching potential into seawater should an accident occur at sea, and that waste could be tagged with radio-frequency emitters so that any lost containers could be recovered with robotic submarines in the event of such accidents. While I’m not an expert in any of this, I’ve looked at how much money taxpayers and industry have already poured into Yucca Mountain — about $15 billion by the time the Obama Administration terminated federal funding for it in 2010, according to Bloomberg News — and the estimates for how much more it would take to get a working waste storage facility of that sort operational had risen to about $96 billion by 2008, according to the U.S. Department of Energy at the time. I believe that sub-seabed storage would be far less expensive.
Solves the aff ssd is able to isolate any radioactive nuclear waste from humans. Bala 2014
Amal Bala, Sub-Seabed Burial of Nuclear Waste: If the Disposal Method Could Succeed Technically, Could It Also Succeed Legally?, 41 B.C. Envtl. Aff. L. Rev. 455 (2014),SP
In general, two related methods of underwater disposal of SNF exist: dumping containers of radioactive waste into the ocean, and sub-seabed disposal. 92 The purpose of underwater disposal of SNF is the same as any other type of SNF disposal, which is to isolate radioactive waste from human contact and the environment long enough for any release of radiation to become harmless.93 The potential advantages of certain types of underwater SNF disposal for the United States could include effective containment of the waste and avoiding the controversy of a land-based national repository, such as the failed project at Yucca Mountain. 94 Underwater disposal of SNF, specifically subseabed disposal, could occur far from the coast of any state or nation and could thereby avoid the NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) syndrome, but this result is not guaranteed considering existing laws and a popular belief that Earth’s oceans are a global commons
A. Interp: The aff must defend that all countries prohibit the production of nuclear power. To clarify, they can’t advocate that a certain country or subset of countries prohibit nuclear power.
Counterplans that prohibit nuclear power for all countries except for one country or a subset of countries are theoretically illegitimate.====
Generic nouns such as “countries” without an article are the most common type of generalization, used in all contexts of writing and speech. Byrd “Generic Meaning,” Georgia State University, Transcript of lecture given by Pat Byrd (Department of Applied Linguistics and ESL). Douglas Biber and Susan Conrad, two of the authors of the Longman Grammar, have written about what they call "seemingly synonymous words." They have shown how the adjectives big, great, and large are used differently in academic writing from in fiction. Their point is that when a language has forms that seem to be synonyms--the forms are likely to be used in different ways in different settings. One can't just be substituted for another without a change in meaning or a violation of style. A big toe isn't the same as a large toe. And I don't think I know what a great toe might be. Or, for another example, a political scientist would call Georgia a large state but not necessarily a great state. But a politician from Georgia is likely to talk about the great State of Georgia.¶ A similar process is at work with the use of these generic forms in context. We have a set of sentences that seem to have very much the same meaning. It is probable that the uses of these forms do not entirely overlap. However, we do not yet have a complete picture of how generic forms are used. But the use of computers for linguistic research is a new field, and we get more information all the time. ¶ Here are some things that we do know about these generic noun phrase types when they are used in context:¶ 1. The + singular: The computer has changed modern life. ¶ This form is considered more formal than the others--and is not as likely to be used in conversation as the plural noun: Computers have changed modern life. ¶ Master (1987) found in the sample that he analyzed that this form with the was often used to introduce at topic--and came at the beginning of a paragraph and in introductions and conclusions.¶ 2. Zero + plural: Computers are machines. Computers have changed modern life. ¶ Probably the most common form for a generalization. It can be used in all contexts--including both conversation (Basketball players make too much money) and academic writing (Organisms as diverse as humans and squid share many biological processes). ¶ Perhaps used more in the hard sciences and social sciences than in the humanities. ¶ 3. A + singular: A computer is a machine. ¶ This generic structure is used to refer to individual instances of a whole group and is used to classify whatever is being discussed.¶ The form is often used for definitions of terms. ¶ It is also often used to explain occupations. My sister is a newspaper reporter. I am a teacher. ¶ Use is limited to these "classifying" contexts. Notice that this form can't always be subtituted for the other: *Life has been changed by a computer. *A computer has changed modern life. ¶ 4. Zero + noncount: Life has been changed by the computer. ¶ The most basic meaning and use of noncount nouns is generic--they are fundamentally about a very abstract level of meaning. Thus, the most common use of noncount nouns is this use with no article for generic meaning. ¶ Zero Article and Generic Meaning¶ Most nouns without articles have generic meaning. Two types are involved.¶ 1. Zero + plural: Computers are machines. Computers have changed modern life.¶ 2. Zero + noncount: Life has been changed by the computer.
Determining semantics comes before other standards: A. It’s the only stasis point we know before the round so it controls the internal link to engagement, and there’s no way to use ground if debaters aren’t prepared to defend it. B. Grammar is the most objective since it doesn’t rely on arbitrary determinants of what constitutes the best type of debate – it’s the only impact you can evaluate. C. The AFF isn’t topical regardless of fairness or education since it doesn’t affirm the text - we wouldn’t debate rehab again just because it was a good topic. Regardless of theory, you negate substantively because they fail their resolutional burden.
B. Violation: They specify
C. Standards:
1. Limits – they allow way too many affs. In addition to the 45 countries with plants or plants under-construction, there are over 45 additional countries considering nuclear power – some of which don’t even have government level consideration – exploding NEG prep burden and predictability which kills fairness and engagement. Procedurally, if I can’t access their education it doesn’t matter. T version of the AFF solves their offense – they can read advantages specific to any country which ensures NEG responses
Even if there are some turns, that AFF is massively over prepared for them since it limits their prep burden. Generics don’t solve – agent CPs or state bad Ks aren’t persuasive vs a nuanced AFF.
D. Vote on substantive engagement: otherwise we’re speaking without debating and there’s nothing to separate us from dueling oratory. It also creates the most valuable long-term skills since we need to learn how to defend our beliefs in any context, like politics.
Drop the debater on T:
A. Hold them accountable for their interp – a topical advocacy frames the debate - drop the arg lets them jump ship to a new layer killing NEG ground. B. Drop the arg on T is the same thing as drop the debater since T indicts their advocacy
Competing interps since reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention based on preference rather than argumentation and encourages a race to the bottom in which debaters exploit a judge’s tolerance for questionable argumentation.====
No RVIs: A. They incentivize debaters to go all in in theory and bait it with abusive practices, killing substantive clash on other flows. B. They can run theory on me too if I’m unfair so 1) theory is reciprocal because we’re both able to check abuse and 2) also cures time skew because they can collapse in the 2ar to their shell.
