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.
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 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
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.
