Tournament: XXX | Round: 1 | Opponent: XX | Judge: XX
Interp: All debaters who have attended at least 2 bid tournaments this season must disclose all broken positions on the NDCA 15-16 LD wiki.  The disclosure must includes summaries, tags, cites, and first 3 last 3 words from each piece of evidence. 

The disclosure must occur within 24 hours after the position is broken.

1.Resource equity:

2.  Research:
A. Disclosure provides a key body of accessible knowledge.  Nails 13

Nails 13 Jacob Nails (Debate Coach, Sacred Heart HS). “A Defense of Disclosure (Including Third-Party Disclosure).” NSDUpdate. October 10th, 2013. http://nsdupdate.com/2013/a-defense-of-disclosure-including-third-party-disclosure-by-jacob-nails/.  NS

I fall squarely on the side of disclosure...across the board. 

B.  Disclosure increases quality and quantity of research.  Nails 13

Nails 13 Jacob Nails (Debate Coach, Sacred Heart HS). “A Defense of Disclosure (Including Third-Party Disclosure).” NSDUpdate. October 10th, 2013. http://nsdupdate.com/2013/a-defense-of-disclosure-including-third-party-disclosure-by-jacob-nails/.  NS

In theory, the increased...a long time ago.

3. Academic honesty

4. Deliberation

A. Their aff fails without prior predictability. Mindset change, education, and portable skills come from internal reflection during pre-round preparation, not in-round debate. Goodin and Niemeyer 2003
(Robert E. Goodin, Australian National University philosophy prof, editor of Oxford Handbooks of Political Science, founding editor of Blackwell's Journal of Political Philosophy, and Simon J. Niemeyer, ANU political science research fellow, 2003, "When Does Deliberation Begin? Internal Reflection versus Public Discussion in Deliberative Democracy," POLITICAL STUDIES: 2003 VOL 51, 640–649, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0032-3217.2003.00450.x/pdf)

What happened in...approach an issue.

Deliberation is the internal link to gaining educational value from the debate, it is a prerequisite to preparing to respond - Discussion isn't an end in itself.
Goodin and Niemeyer 2003 (Robert E. Goodin, Australian National University philosophy prof, editor of Oxford Handbooks of Political Science, founding editor of Blackwell's Journal of Political Philosophy, and Simon J. Niemeyer, ANU political science research fellow, 2003, "When Does Deliberation Begin? Internal Reflection versus Public Discussion in Deliberative Democracy," POLITICAL STUDIES: 2003 VOL 51, 640–649, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0032-3217.2003.00450.x/pdf)

In all those...and so on

Tournament: Greenhill RR | Round: 7 | Opponent: Montgomery WP | Judge: Panel
Interpretation - The AFF may only garner offense from hypothetical enactment of the resolution 

Resolved reflects policy passage before a legislative body.  Parcher 01
(Jeff, Fmr. Debate Coach at Georgetown University, February, http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200102/0790.html)

(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
.  It’s key to long term activism which turns case and outweighs because of existential threats. Lundberg 10

Christian O. Lundberg 10 Professor of Communications @ University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “Tradition of Debate in North Carolina” in Navigating Opportunity: Policy Debate in the 21st Century By Allan D. Louden, p. 311

The second major problem with the critique that identifies a naivety in articulating debate and democracy is that it presumes that the primary pedagogical outcome of debate is speech capacities. But the democratic capacities built by debate are not limited to speech—as indicated earlier, debate builds capacity for critical thinking, analysis of public claims, informed decision making, and better public judgment. If the picture of modem political life that underwrites this critique of debate is a pessimistic view of increasingly labyrinthine and bureaucratic administrative politics, rapid scientific and technological change outpacing the capacities of the citizenry to comprehend them, and ever-expanding insular special-interest- and money-driven politics, it is a puzzling solution, at best, to argue that these conditions warrant giving up on debate. If democracy is open to rearticulation, it is open to rearticulation precisely because as the challenges of modern political life proliferate, the citizenry's capacities can change, which is one of the primary reasons that theorists of democracy such as Ocwey in The Public awl Its Problems place such a high premium on education (Dewey 1988,63, 154). Debate provides an indispensible form of education in the modem articulation of democracy because it builds precisely the skills that allow the citizenry to research and be informed about policy decisions that impact them, to sort through and evaluate the evidence for and relative merits of arguments for and against a policy in an increasingly information-rich environment, and to prioritize their time and political energies toward policies that matter the most to them. The merits of debate as a tool for building democratic capacity-building take on a special significance in the context of information literacy. John Larkin (2005, HO) argues that one of the primary failings of modern colleges and universities is that they have not changed curriculum to match with the challenges of a new information environment. This is a problem for the course of academic study in our current context, but perhaps more important, argues Larkin, for the future of a citizenry that will need to make evaluative choices against an increasingly complex and multimediated information environment (ibid-). Larkin's study tested the benefits of debate participation on information-literacy skills and concluded that in-class debate participants reported significantly higher self-efficacy ratings of their ability to navigate academic search databases and to effectively search and use other Web resources: To analyze the self-report ratings of the instructional and control group students, we first conducted a multivariate analysis of variance on all of the ratings, looking jointly at the effect of instmction/no instruction and debate topic . . . that it did not matter which topic students had been assigned . . . students in the Instnictional debate) group were significantly more confident in their ability to access information and less likely to feel that they needed help to do so----These findings clearly indicate greater self-efficacy for online searching among students who participated in (debate).... These results constitute strong support for the effectiveness of the project on students' self-efficacy for online searching in the academic databases. There was an unintended effect, however: After doing ... the project, instructional group students also felt more confident than the other students in their ability to get good information from Yahoo and Google. It may be that the library research experience increased self-efficacy for any searching, not just in academic databases. (Larkin 2005, 144) Larkin's study substantiates Thomas Worthcn and Gaylcn Pack's (1992, 3) claim that debate in the college classroom plays a critical role in fostering the kind of problem-solving skills demanded by the increasingly rich media and information environment of modernity. Though their essay was written in 1992 on the cusp of the eventual explosion of the Internet as a medium, Worthcn and Pack's framing of the issue was prescient: the primary question facing today's student has changed from how to best research a topic to the crucial question of learning how to best evaluate which arguments to cite and rely upon from an easily accessible and veritable cornucopia of materials. There are, without a doubt, a number of important criticisms of employing debate as a model for democratic deliberation. But cumulatively, the evidence presented here warrants strong support for expanding debate practice in the classroom as a technology for enhancing democratic deliberative capacities. The unique combination of critical thinking skills, research and information processing skills, oral communication skills, and capacities for listening and thoughtful, open engagement with hotly contested issues argues for debate as a crucial component of a rich and vital democratic life. In-class debate practice both aids students in achieving the best goals of college and university education, and serves as an unmatched practice for creating thoughtful, engaged, open-minded and self-critical students who are open to the possibilities of meaningful political engagement and new articulations of democratic life. Expanding this practice is crucial, if only because the more we produce citizens that can actively and effectively engage the political process, the more likely we are to produce revisions of democratic life that are necessary if democracy is not only to survive, but to thrive. Democracy faces a myriad of challenges, including: domestic and international issues of class, gender, and racial justice; wholesale environmental destruction and the potential for rapid climate change; emerging threats to international stability in the form of terrorism, intervention and new possibilities for great power conflict; and increasing challenges of rapid globalization including an increasingly volatile global economic structure. More than any specific policy or proposal, an informed and active citizenry that deliberates with greater skill and sensitivity provides one of the best hopes for responsive and effective democratic governance, and by extension, one of the last best hopes for dealing with the existential challenges to democracy in an increasingly complex world. 

2.  Procedural Fairness
This is an independent voting issue which outweighs:

A.  Evaluation
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
3. Constructive Constraints
Absolute affirmative flexibility leaves the negative without meaningful ground to advance well-developed counter-arguments. Establishing boundaries is important because they spur imagination and innovation, improving the quality of debates. Thomas and Brown 11
Douglas Thomas, Associate Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, founding member of the Critical and Cultural Studies division of the National Communication Association, holds a Ph. D. in Communication from the University of Minnesota, and John Seely Brown, Visiting Scholar and Adviser to the Provost at the University of Southern California, independent cochairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge, former Chief Scientist and Director of the Palo Alto Research Center at Xerox, holds a Ph.D. in Computer and Communication Sciences from the University of Michigan, 2011 (“A Tale of Two Cultures,” A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, Published by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, ISBN 1456458884, p. 35)

We believe, however, that learning should be viewed in terms of an environment—combined with the rich resources provided by the digital information network—where the context in which learning happens, the boundaries that define it, and the students, teachers, and information within it all coexist and shape each other in a mutually reinforcing way. Here, boundaries serve not only as constraints but also, oftentimes, as catalysts for innovation. Encountering boundaries spurs the imagination to become more active in figuring out novel situations within the constraints of the situation or context. Environments with well-defined and carefully constructed boundaries are not usually thought of as standardized, nor are they tested and measured. Rather, they can be described as a set of pressures that nudge and guide change. They are substrates for evolution, and they move at varying rates of speed.

4.  We solve all their offense -
A.  T version of the AFF
B.  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:
Department of Communications at George Mason (Star A., “A Defense of the Ethics of Contemporary Debate,” Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 26, No. 4. Gale Academic Onefile)
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.

Voter: Drop the debater on T

Theory is an issue of competing interpretations

Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 3 | Opponent: West Des Moines Valley SC | Judge: Lawrence Zhao
Interpretation - The AFF may only garner offense from hypothetical enactment of the resolution
Resolved reflects policy passage before a legislative body.  Parcher 01
(Jeff, Fmr. Debate Coach at Georgetown University, February, http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200102/0790.html)

(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
.  It’s key to long term activism which turns case and outweighs because of existential threats. Lundberg 10

Christian O. Lundberg 10 Professor of Communications @ University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “Tradition of Debate in North Carolina” in Navigating Opportunity: Policy Debate in the 21st Century By Allan D. Louden, p. 311

The second major problem with the critique that identifies a naivety in articulating debate and democracy is that it presumes that the primary pedagogical outcome of debate is speech capacities. But the democratic capacities built by debate are not limited to speech—as indicated earlier, debate builds capacity for critical thinking, analysis of public claims, informed decision making, and better public judgment. If the picture of modem political life that underwrites this critique of debate is a pessimistic view of increasingly labyrinthine and bureaucratic administrative politics, rapid scientific and technological change outpacing the capacities of the citizenry to comprehend them, and ever-expanding insular special-interest- and money-driven politics, it is a puzzling solution, at best, to argue that these conditions warrant giving up on debate. If democracy is open to rearticulation, it is open to rearticulation precisely because as the challenges of modern political life proliferate, the citizenry's capacities can change, which is one of the primary reasons that theorists of democracy such as Ocwey in The Public awl Its Problems place such a high premium on education (Dewey 1988,63, 154). Debate provides an indispensible form of education in the modem articulation of democracy because it builds precisely the skills that allow the citizenry to research and be informed about policy decisions that impact them, to sort through and evaluate the evidence for and relative merits of arguments for and against a policy in an increasingly information-rich environment, and to prioritize their time and political energies toward policies that matter the most to them. The merits of debate as a tool for building democratic capacity-building take on a special significance in the context of information literacy. John Larkin (2005, HO) argues that one of the primary failings of modern colleges and universities is that they have not changed curriculum to match with the challenges of a new information environment. This is a problem for the course of academic study in our current context, but perhaps more important, argues Larkin, for the future of a citizenry that will need to make evaluative choices against an increasingly complex and multimediated information environment (ibid-). Larkin's study tested the benefits of debate participation on information-literacy skills and concluded that in-class debate participants reported significantly higher self-efficacy ratings of their ability to navigate academic search databases and to effectively search and use other Web resources: To analyze the self-report ratings of the instructional and control group students, we first conducted a multivariate analysis of variance on all of the ratings, looking jointly at the effect of instmction/no instruction and debate topic . . . that it did not matter which topic students had been assigned . . . students in the Instnictional debate) group were significantly more confident in their ability to access information and less likely to feel that they needed help to do so----These findings clearly indicate greater self-efficacy for online searching among students who participated in (debate).... These results constitute strong support for the effectiveness of the project on students' self-efficacy for online searching in the academic databases. There was an unintended effect, however: After doing ... the project, instructional group students also felt more confident than the other students in their ability to get good information from Yahoo and Google. It may be that the library research experience increased self-efficacy for any searching, not just in academic databases. (Larkin 2005, 144) Larkin's study substantiates Thomas Worthcn and Gaylcn Pack's (1992, 3) claim that debate in the college classroom plays a critical role in fostering the kind of problem-solving skills demanded by the increasingly rich media and information environment of modernity. Though their essay was written in 1992 on the cusp of the eventual explosion of the Internet as a medium, Worthcn and Pack's framing of the issue was prescient: the primary question facing today's student has changed from how to best research a topic to the crucial question of learning how to best evaluate which arguments to cite and rely upon from an easily accessible and veritable cornucopia of materials. There are, without a doubt, a number of important criticisms of employing debate as a model for democratic deliberation. But cumulatively, the evidence presented here warrants strong support for expanding debate practice in the classroom as a technology for enhancing democratic deliberative capacities. The unique combination of critical thinking skills, research and information processing skills, oral communication skills, and capacities for listening and thoughtful, open engagement with hotly contested issues argues for debate as a crucial component of a rich and vital democratic life. In-class debate practice both aids students in achieving the best goals of college and university education, and serves as an unmatched practice for creating thoughtful, engaged, open-minded and self-critical students who are open to the possibilities of meaningful political engagement and new articulations of democratic life. Expanding this practice is crucial, if only because the more we produce citizens that can actively and effectively engage the political process, the more likely we are to produce revisions of democratic life that are necessary if democracy is not only to survive, but to thrive. Democracy faces a myriad of challenges, including: domestic and international issues of class, gender, and racial justice; wholesale environmental destruction and the potential for rapid climate change; emerging threats to international stability in the form of terrorism, intervention and new possibilities for great power conflict; and increasing challenges of rapid globalization including an increasingly volatile global economic structure. More than any specific policy or proposal, an informed and active citizenry that deliberates with greater skill and sensitivity provides one of the best hopes for responsive and effective democratic governance, and by extension, one of the last best hopes for dealing with the existential challenges to democracy in an increasingly complex world. 

2. Critical Activism

The 1AC is an activist message that lacks a coherent politics and instead showcases non-strategic, non-instrumental protest. Chandler 10
David Chandler is Professor of International Relations at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster – This card internally quotes Jodi Dean, Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, 'No Communicating Left' (review article), Radical Philosophy, No. 160 (March/April 2010), pp.53-55. ISSN 0300 211X

Dean pulls few punches in her devastating critique of the American left for its complacency, its limited capacity, and even its lack of awareness of the need to offer a stand of political resistance to power. This is how she concludes her book: The eight years of the Bush administration were a diversion. Intoxicated with a sense of purpose, we could oppose war, torture, indefinite detention, warrant less wiretapping, a seemingly endless series of real crimes… such opposition keeps us feeling like we matter… We have an ethical sense. But we lack a coherent politics. (p.175) Dean highlights clearly the disintegration of the collective left and its simulacra in the individuated life-style politics of today’s depoliticized radicalism, where it appears that particular individual demands and identities are to be respected but there is no possibility of universalising them into a collective challenge to the system: no possibility of a left which stands for something beyond itself. She argues that, rather than confront this problem, the left take refuge in the fantasy that technology will overcome their inability to engage and that the circulation of ideas and information on the internet will construct the collectivities and communities of interest, which are lacking in reality. For Dean, this ‘technology fetishism’ marks the left’s failure: its ‘abandonment of workers and the poor; its retreat from the state and repudiation of collective action; and its acceptance of the neoliberal economy as the “only game in town”’ (p.33). In fact, she uncovers the gaping hole at the heart of the left, highlighting that radicalism appears to be based less on changing the world than on the articulation of an alternative oppositionalist identity: a non-strategic, non-instrumental, articulation of a protest against power. In a nutshell, the left are too busy providing alternative voices, spaces and forums to think about engaging with mass society in an organised, collective, attempt to achieve societal transformation. For Dean, this is fake or hollow political activity, pursued more for its own sake than for future political ends. This is a politics of ethical distancing, of self flattery and narcissism, which excuses or even celebrates the self-marginalization of the left: as either the result of the overwhelming capacity of neoliberal power to act, to control, and to regulate; or as the result of the apathy, stupidity, or laziness of the masses - or the ‘sheeple’ (p.171) - for their failure to join the radical cause. Dean suggests that the left needs to rethink its values and approaches and her book is intended to be a wake-up call to abandon narcissistic complacency. In doing this, she highlights a range of problems connected around the thematic of the left’s defence of democracy in an age of communicative capitalism. She argues that the left’s focus on extending or defending democracy by asserting their role in giving voice and creating spaces merely reproduces the domination of communicative capitalism, where there is no shared space of debate and disagreement but the proliferation of mediums and messages without the responsibility to develop and defend positions or to engage and no external measure of accountability. Communicative capitalism is held to thrive on this fragmented, atomizing, and individuated, framework of communication, which gives the impression of a shared discourse, community, or movement but leaves reality just as it is, with neoliberal frameworks of domination, inequality, and destruction continuing unopposed (pp.162-75).

Debate about specific policy scenarios is key to both self determination in relation to broader society, but also refining reformist or revolutionary projects – our interp controls the internal link to your solvency. Youniss et al. 97
James Youniss, Jeffrey A. McLellan,  and Miranda Yates, What We Know About Engendering Civic Identity, The American Behavioral Scientist March/April 1997

The top-down analysis of civil society moving from a macrosocial structure down to civic behaviors leaves us with the sense that great social forces have altered the course of America’s civil orientation. The search for causes puts us in a state of rumination and brooding. If macroforces have led us to become a nation of individualism or materialists (Bellah. Madsen. Sullivan. Swidler. and ‘Iipton, I985; Btzioni. 1995). what options are we left with to confront this unsatisfactory situation? Even if the causes could be identi fied. we would know little about the processes by which civil society is formed and could be reconstituted. We propose that a developmental analysis is more useful. We have cited studies that show how individuals acquire practices that are constitutive of civic identities. Participation in organizations and movements provides experience with normative civic practices and ideologies. and shapes youth’s emerging identities in a long-lasting form. Participating in high school government and partaking in social-political reform share in starting youth on a developmental path toward constructive citizenship. These findings allow us to set aside the rhetorical question of how civil society disappeared for the more generative inquiry of how we can enhance youth’s opportunities for active participation in the reform and renewal of contemporary society. Numerous models are available. including mandatory military service. as in Israel or My. and voluntary service directed to com- munity problems. By offering youth meaningful participatory experiences. we allow them to discover their potency. assess their responsibility. acquire a sense of political processes. and commit to a moral-ethical ideology. Toren (1993) argues that it is each generation's task to make sense of the conditions in which they find society. This is true for youth and for adults. Each generation must take up the burden of renewing society and making history. Flack: (I988) has bemoaned the fact that contemporary youth seem to have shirked their generational obligation. Rather than work at making history. This generation eems coth to take the rewards that prior generations have earned. leaving the future in the hands of the few leaders. Clearly. there is a tendency to blame contemporary youth. even to demonize them (Ghoua. 1996) for the state of civil society. We believe that a more productive approach recognizes the older generation's duty to attend to youth's quest for identity. Youth seek transcendent meaning. which entails locating themselves in history by adopting ideological traditions that older generations have sustained and still merit respect. Contrary to popular psychology’s image of identity as a private existential struggle. youth make identities byjoining with others in respectable muses. Adults' duty in this process is to offer participatory experiences so that youth can join them in re- newing civil society. Identity is not given but must be constructed. in our pluralistic society. this entails making sense of contradictory options and resolving difficult tensions (Calhoun. 994). We recognize that a civic identity may orient individuals toward sustaining society as it is, or it may encourage challenges to the status quo in the spirit of reform (Foley and Edwards. 1996). Our goal was not to assess which kinds of experiences lead to which of these outcomes. Rather. it was to outline a developmental process in which the construction of individuality and society are complementary so that citizenship is built into the self 's very definition. 

3. T Version of the Aff

Climate Chaos solves their offense. Warming specific queer discourse is key to address queer futurism. Hall 14.
Kim Hall, No Failure: Climate Change, Radical Hope, and Queer Crip Feminist Eco-Futures, 2014 VC
Poor people are the most harmed by anthropogenic climate change and the least responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. Greenhouse gases are produced by consumption of fossil fuels, which is an indicator of affluence. The United States is the largest per capita consumer of fossil fuels, and thus it produces the largest per capita emission of greenhouse gases. Given the unpredictable but severe and long-term consequences of anthropogenic climate change, some believe the term “climate chaos” is a more apt characterization of the problem.69 Climate chaos has developed in a context of global inequality, and it exacerbates inequality. Climate chaos raises many questions about global injustice, questions with which any radical queer crip feminist critique must be concerned. And despite my appreciation for much of the queer battle cry of “No future,” one concern I think we cannot overlook, in the context of climate chaos and global injustice, is the question of what it means, as we ponder the relationship between queerness and the future, to be responsive to the futures that present action and inaction bring into existence. Of course, the harms of climate chaos are already disproportionately experienced by women, people of color, and disabled and poor people. According to a World Health Organization estimate in 2005, climate change-related events contribute to 150,000 human deaths each year.70 In addition, given that some greenhouse gases can remain in the atmosphere for between thirty and one thousand years, it is clear that climate change related harms experienced in the present are the result of past emissions.71 Furthermore, given the ever-increasing consumption of fossil fuels, the harmful effects of the greater amount of greenhouse gas emissions at present will be experienced by human and nonhuman beings in the future. Thus, while present generations may not be directly harmed by current greenhouse gas emissions,72 future generations will be. More sobering still, even if all wealthy nations ceased fossil fuel consumption today, we would still be committed to a certain amount of climate change in the future as a result of greenhouse gas emissions already present in the Earth’s atmosphere. As a result, most policy discussions are about whether to adopt a strategy of mitigation, adaptation, or some combination; prevention is no longer a viable strategy.73 Sadly, we are past the time for climate change prevention because climate change is already here, as evidenced by disappearing glaciers, and we’re committed to more in the future. There is, however, still a window for influencing how much more climate change the future will see, an issue that involves commitments to living and thinking otherwise.74 In my view, queer theories have much to offer the search for alternative ways of living and different values in the context of climate change. However, to do so, queer critique must be oriented toward, not away from or against, the future. And that future need not be inescapably heteronormative, ablebodied, rehabilitative, or reproductive. In working toward what McRuer describes as the “necessarily disabled” and, thus, “sustainable” world,76 queer theorists must adopt political commitments in the present that are oriented toward the future, an orientation that includes critical attunement toward nonhuman worlds and planetary systems. In fact, sustainability is a concept that implies an orientation to the future.77 But it need not—and indeed should not—be a concept tethered to the future of the Child.

Voter: Drop the debater on T 

Theory is an issue of competing interpretations

Tournament: St Marks | Round: 3 | Opponent: Apple Valley JB | Judge: Rodrigo Paramo
Interpretation - The AFF may only garner offense from hypothetical enactment of the resolution 

Resolved reflects policy passage before a legislative body.  Parcher 01
(Jeff, Fmr. Debate Coach at Georgetown University, February, http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200102/0790.html)

(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:  

 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

It’s key to long term activism which turns case and outweighs because of existential threats. Lundberg 10

Christian O. Lundberg 10 Professor of Communications @ University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “Tradition of Debate in North Carolina” in Navigating Opportunity: Policy Debate in the 21st Century By Allan D. Louden, p. 311

The second major problem with the critique that identifies a naivety in articulating debate and democracy is that it presumes that the primary pedagogical outcome of debate is speech capacities. But the democratic capacities built by debate are not limited to speech—as indicated earlier, debate builds capacity for critical thinking, analysis of public claims, informed decision making, and better public judgment. If the picture of modem political life that underwrites this critique of debate is a pessimistic view of increasingly labyrinthine and bureaucratic administrative politics, rapid scientific and technological change outpacing the capacities of the citizenry to comprehend them, and ever-expanding insular special-interest- and money-driven politics, it is a puzzling solution, at best, to argue that these conditions warrant giving up on debate. If democracy is open to rearticulation, it is open to rearticulation precisely because as the challenges of modern political life proliferate, the citizenry's capacities can change, which is one of the primary reasons that theorists of democracy such as Ocwey in The Public awl Its Problems place such a high premium on education (Dewey 1988,63, 154). Debate provides an indispensible form of education in the modem articulation of democracy because it builds precisely the skills that allow the citizenry to research and be informed about policy decisions that impact them, to sort through and evaluate the evidence for and relative merits of arguments for and against a policy in an increasingly information-rich environment, and to prioritize their time and political energies toward policies that matter the most to them. The merits of debate as a tool for building democratic capacity-building take on a special significance in the context of information literacy. John Larkin (2005, HO) argues that one of the primary failings of modern colleges and universities is that they have not changed curriculum to match with the challenges of a new information environment. This is a problem for the course of academic study in our current context, but perhaps more important, argues Larkin, for the future of a citizenry that will need to make evaluative choices against an increasingly complex and multimediated information environment (ibid-). Larkin's study tested the benefits of debate participation on information-literacy skills and concluded that in-class debate participants reported significantly higher self-efficacy ratings of their ability to navigate academic search databases and to effectively search and use other Web resources: To analyze the self-report ratings of the instructional and control group students, we first conducted a multivariate analysis of variance on all of the ratings, looking jointly at the effect of instmction/no instruction and debate topic . . . that it did not matter which topic students had been assigned . . . students in the Instnictional debate) group were significantly more confident in their ability to access information and less likely to feel that they needed help to do so----These findings clearly indicate greater self-efficacy for online searching among students who participated in (debate).... These results constitute strong support for the effectiveness of the project on students' self-efficacy for online searching in the academic databases. There was an unintended effect, however: After doing ... the project, instructional group students also felt more confident than the other students in their ability to get good information from Yahoo and Google. It may be that the library research experience increased self-efficacy for any searching, not just in academic databases. (Larkin 2005, 144) Larkin's study substantiates Thomas Worthcn and Gaylcn Pack's (1992, 3) claim that debate in the college classroom plays a critical role in fostering the kind of problem-solving skills demanded by the increasingly rich media and information environment of modernity. Though their essay was written in 1992 on the cusp of the eventual explosion of the Internet as a medium, Worthcn and Pack's framing of the issue was prescient: the primary question facing today's student has changed from how to best research a topic to the crucial question of learning how to best evaluate which arguments to cite and rely upon from an easily accessible and veritable cornucopia of materials. There are, without a doubt, a number of important criticisms of employing debate as a model for democratic deliberation. But cumulatively, the evidence presented here warrants strong support for expanding debate practice in the classroom as a technology for enhancing democratic deliberative capacities. The unique combination of critical thinking skills, research and information processing skills, oral communication skills, and capacities for listening and thoughtful, open engagement with hotly contested issues argues for debate as a crucial component of a rich and vital democratic life. In-class debate practice both aids students in achieving the best goals of college and university education, and serves as an unmatched practice for creating thoughtful, engaged, open-minded and self-critical students who are open to the possibilities of meaningful political engagement and new articulations of democratic life. Expanding this practice is crucial, if only because the more we produce citizens that can actively and effectively engage the political process, the more likely we are to produce revisions of democratic life that are necessary if democracy is not only to survive, but to thrive. Democracy faces a myriad of challenges, including: domestic and international issues of class, gender, and racial justice; wholesale environmental destruction and the potential for rapid climate change; emerging threats to international stability in the form of terrorism, intervention and new possibilities for great power conflict; and increasing challenges of rapid globalization including an increasingly volatile global economic structure. More than any specific policy or proposal, an informed and active citizenry that deliberates with greater skill and sensitivity provides one of the best hopes for responsive and effective democratic governance, and by extension, one of the last best hopes for dealing with the existential challenges to democracy in an increasingly complex world. 

2.  Procedural Fairness
This is an independent voting issue which outweighs:

A.  Evaluation
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.

3. Performative Contradiction - Voting aff necessitates utilizing every procedure they critique-~--evaluating the debate requires an inter-subjective frame for language, some rational standard for what arguments are better, etc-~--only making these procedures clear up front can allow for fruitful discussion, while the aff insidiously re-creates them POST-HOC which links to all of their offense but can’t solve any of ours – if fairness is bad and the aff wins, vote neg because that’s unfair. Friedrich 11
Rainer Friedrich 11, Department of Classics, Dalhousie University, The Enlightenment Gone Mad (I) The Dismal Discourse of Postmodernism’s Grand Narratives, http://www.bu.edu/arion/the-enlightenment-gone-mad-i-the-dismal-discourse-of-postmodernisms-grand-narratives/

 
Yet the sweeping proclamation of the death of all metanarratives is itself a totalizing metanarrative. It connotes all the postmodern death certificates, each of which is a grand récit in its own right. In their ensemble, they amount to postmodernism’s overarching metanarrative totally contesting Western civilization. In current philosophical parlance, this is known by the somewhat unwieldy term, performative self-refutation. Its ancestry reaches back to the notorious Cretan’s proposition that all Cretans are liars. Performative self-refutation occurs when an argument undercuts itself in the very act of its enunciation, by the form and means through which it is performed. In the attempt to abolish it, Lyotard’s postmodernism is itself practicing the discourse of the grand narrative.¶ Yet the grand narrative of the end of the metanarrative is not the only one of Lyotard’s grands récits. Libidinal Economy, the most Sadean of Lyotard’s books, offers the grand narrative of libidinous intensity as an ubiquitous universal force. Here the dismal science and the dismal discourse converge: “every political economy is libidinal.” Its totalizing Sadean mechanism is patent when dealing with the early industrial proletariat’s conditions of extreme misery, once described in all their horror in Friedrich Engels’ classic, The Condition of the Working Class in England. It translates this misery into erotic jouissance: the proletariat is alleged to have wished, willed, and desired the ruin of its health in the hell of mines, foundries, and factories, along with the disintegration of personal identity in anonymous slums, because it experienced all this as the gratification of masochistic desire. It was only when its libidinous intensity grew too strong and thus became unbearable, that the proletariat turned to revolt.22 Libidinal Economy amounts to a bizarre metaphysics of libido, a totalizing metanarrative involving emancipation: the liberation of Desire as the marginalized and suppressed Other.23¶ Yet this is not all. Confronted, after his verdict on grand narratives, with a triumphalist capitalism acting out its grand narrative of market-fundamentalism, Lyotard changed register. Capitalism’s triumph became part of a narrative he dubbed a “postmodern fable” (moralité).24 This tells the story of energy from the beginning of life on earth to the ineluctable disappearance of the solar system, and beyond. Spanning nine billion years of development, of which capitalism’s rise to an unrivaled global system is but a tiny subdivision, it grows into the grand narrative of entropy and negentropy. Negentropy denotes the force counteracting entropy through the organization of energy into ever more complex systems, ultimately enabling mankind, according to Lyotard, to “elude the catastrophe by abandoning its cosmic site, the solar system.” The catastrophe is entropy—“a tragedy about energy. Like Oedipus Rex, it ends badly. Like Oedipus at Colonus, it admits a final remission.”¶ Lyotard does his level best in trying to present his postmodern fable as a non-metanarrative. He insists that it is not a narrative of emancipation, for there is no human subject to be emancipated: “humans are an invention of development. The hero of the fable is not the human species, but energy.” The human species, in his fable, “is taken for a complex material system; consciousness, for an effect of language; and language, for a highly complex material system.” Humankind is presented as the effect of the development of energy: it will, if all goes well, develop into “the negentropic system” that will make possible “the final exodus . . . far from the Earth.” One discerns the usual suspects: postmodern anti-subjectivism asserting a process without a subject; postmodern anti-humanism reducing humanity to an effect of such a process, the outcome of which is not the rescue of an emancipated humankind, but “the rescue of a very differentiated system, a kind of super-brain”; and post-modernity’s linguistic-textualist ontology that turnsall andeverything into the effects of language. The fable’s lack of finality, the absence of a promise of,or the hope for, a “final perfection,”Lyotard claims, are proof that his postmodern fable is not a totalizing metanarrative.25 It ends with a Nietzschean flourish, echoing the amorality of Libidinous Economy: “the fable is unaware of good and evil.”¶ It’s a nice try, and a very elegant one at that, a far cry from the feverish rhetoric of Libidinal Economy. But Lyotard is protesting too much. Calling it a fable—that is, a petit récit—cannot conceal that its content is that of a grand récit, and one of emancipation to boot.26 For all the post-structuralist spin that Lyotard puts on his moralité of entropy and negentropy, the fact remains that it is the human brain—unmaking and remaking itself to strive for ever-increasing complexity—that becomes the motor and the agency of the process. In Lyotard’s grand narrative, the human brain may have originally been the effect of development; but once it has attained the capability of self-consciousness, self-reference, and self-critique, it takes charge of the process as its chief agent. In short, the Lyotardian fable of mankind’s escape from the doom of entropy surpasses in scope all known metanarratives as the grand narrative of human self-emancipation from its ties to a doomed earth. So much for his incredulity towards metanarratives!¶ As for performative self-refutation: at the height of his insouciance, Lyotard offers, as another definition of post-modernity, its ready acceptance of paradox coupled with disdain for coherence. “Post-modern science,” he says, “is theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, non-rectifiable and paradoxical”—with the consequence, it would seem, that one does not abjure reason and its principles with impunity, and that goofing and screw-ups are the price one pays. Thus postmodern discourses, when critically analyzed, emerge as pitted against themselves and become the opposite of what they claim to be.¶ The mother of all postmodern performative self-refutations, their archetype as it were, is found in deconstruction’s totalizing critique of logocentric reason. Jacques Derrida himself gives it its most pronounced expression:¶ The unsurpassable, unique, and imperial grandeur of the order of reason . . . is that one cannot speak out against it except by being for it, that one can protest it only from within it; and within its domain, Reason leaves us only the recourse to stratagems and strategies. The revolution against reason . . . can be made only within it.27¶¶ In order to dismantle logocentric reason, deconstruction is bound to have recourse to—logocentric reason! It has to reason against reason. Thus Deconstruction remains inescapably trapped in the “unsurpassable, unique, and imperial grandeur” of reason’s order; and it is to Derrida’s credit that he, unlike his fellow post-structuralists, is fully aware of it. To try to escape it, Derrida would have to resort, as he does elsewhere with other terms, to the procedure of putting “under erasure” (sous rature), i.e., of crossing through in the cited passage that which he is forced to use and practice, but aims to deconstruct: Reason. Crossing through, not crossing out: it could not be crossed out because reason, while being deconstructed, is nevertheless operative as the indispensable framework and vehicle of its deconstruction. But to no avail. This elegant sophistic trick of having it both ways, inherited from Heidegger,28 would simply highlight deconstruction’s fatal flaw: that it has to feed on, and is thus parasitically dependent on, what it endeavors to dismantle. Invisible erasures perforce accompany all operations of deconstruction, using the panoply of LOGOS (reason) to dislodge and dismantle logos and truth, and implicitly making truth-claims for deconstructive tenets. Thus, far from being able to demolish the logos, it confirms its ineluctability. Through its parasitic dependency on the very logos that it tries to deconstruct, Deconstruction deconstructs itself by revealing itself as a latent logocentrism.¶The same parasitic dependence on the object of their attempted destruction obtains in the Nietzschean and Heideggerian project of the “destruction of metaphysics” and its modern derivation, enlightenment reason. Here is Derridaon the Nietzschean and Heideggerian anti-metaphysical discourses:¶ Derrida Quote Begins But all these discourses and all their analogues are trapped in a kind of circle. This circle is unique. It describes the form of the relation between the history of metaphysics and the destruction of the history of metaphysics. There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics. We have no language—no syntax and no lexicon—which is foreign to this history; we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.29¶ Derrida Quote Ends Postmodernism’s wholesale critique of enlightenment reason, arising from these roots, faces a similar dilemma. It implicates itself in the most virulent performative self-refutation, as Habermas has demonstrated.30 In fact, the whole development from Nietzschevia decisionism to post-structuralism appears to be one colossal performative self-refutation. The postmodern enterprise of enlightenment-bashing from Nietzsche to Foucault and Derrida is predicated on the enlightenment (“the implicit postulation of precisely what it seeks to contest”). Or rather, the postmodern enterprise is itself enlightenment: what has started in Nietzsche’s critical thinking, and continues in the postmodern discourses, is the attempt to enlighten the enlightenment about itself and its perceived evils. The Nietzschean and postmodern critique of enlightenment reason is essentially the application of enlightenment reason’s own principle, critical reflection, to itself. Kant had done this, aiming at circumscribing the legitimate realm of pure reason; his critique was, in fact, reason’s self-critique, the only possible form of Vernunftkritik. But the totalizing nature of the Nietzschean and postmodern critique of enlightenment reason—critique of reason tout court—aiming, as it does (unlike the Kantian) not at its delimitation, but at its destruction, gives rise to nothing less than reason’s self-cannibalization—just like that of Appetite in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida: “And Appetite, an universal wolf / (so doubly seconded by will and power) / must make perforce an universal prey / and last eat up himself.”31 This can only result in a dreadful irrationalism. It is this, in Stanley Rosen’s striking aphorism, that renders postmodernism “the enlightenment gone mad.”¶

4.  T version of the AFF is defending a policy action

Voter: Drop the debater on T 

Theory is an issue of competing interpretations

Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 5 | Opponent: Lake Highland Prep AA | Judge: Chris Castillo
Interpretation - The AFF may only garner offense from hypothetical enactment of the resolution
Resolved reflects policy passage before a legislative body.  Parcher 01
(Jeff, Fmr. Debate Coach at Georgetown University, February, http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200102/0790.html)

(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.

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.

Violation: 

They defend the resolution as a general principle 

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 statement. 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 objective 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 decisions, 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 example, claims are presented and supported within speeches, editorials, and advertisements even without opposing or refutational response. Argumentation occurs in a range of settings from informal to formal, and may not call upon an audience or judge to make a forced choice among competing claims. Informal discourse 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) argumentation calling upon their audience or adjudicator to decide. The proposition provides 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 identify 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 academic 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 terrible job! They' are overcrowded, and many teachers are poorly qualified in their subject areas. Even the best teachers can do little more than struggle to maintain order in their classrooms." That same concerned citizen, facing a complex range of issues, might arrive at an unhelpful decision, such as "We ought to do something about this” or, worse, “It’s too complicated a problem to deal with." Groups of concerned citizens worried about the state of public education could join together to express their frustrations, anger, disillusionment, and emotions regarding the schools, but without a focus for their discussions, they could easily agree about the sorry state of education without finding points of clarity or potential solutions. A gripe session would follow. But if a precise question is posed—such as “What can be done to improve public education?”—then a more profitable area of discussion is opened up simply by placing a focus on the search for a concrete solution step. One or more judgments can be phrased in the form of debate propositions, motions for parliamentary debate, or bills for legislative assemblies, The statements "Resolved: That the federal government should implement a program of charter schools in at-risk communities” and “Resolved; That the state of Florida should adopt a school voucher program" more clearly identify specific ways of dealing with educational problems in a manageable form, suitable for debate. They provide specific policies to be investigated and aid discussants in identifying points of difference. This focus contributes to better and more informed decision making with the potential for better results. In academic debate, it provides better depth of argumentation and enhanced opportunity 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 ‘"homelessness,” 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 argumentation. If we take this statement to mean Iliad the written word is more effective than physical force for some purposes, we can identify a problem area: the comparative effectiveness of writing or physical force for a specific purpose, 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, website 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 advocates, or that good debates cannot occur over competing interpretations of the controversy; in fact, these sorts of debates may be very engaging. The point is that debate is best facilitated by the guidance provided

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.  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 the aff 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.
C.  It’s key to long term activism which turns case and outweighs because of existential threats. Lundberg 10

Christian O. Lundberg 10 Professor of Communications @ University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “Tradition of Debate in North Carolina” in Navigating Opportunity: Policy Debate in the 21st Century By Allan D. Louden, p. 311

The second major problem with the critique that identifies a naivety in articulating debate and democracy is that it presumes that the primary pedagogical outcome of debate is speech capacities. But the democratic capacities built by debate are not limited to speech—as indicated earlier, debate builds capacity for critical thinking, analysis of public claims, informed decision making, and better public judgment. If the picture of modem political life that underwrites this critique of debate is a pessimistic view of increasingly labyrinthine and bureaucratic administrative politics, rapid scientific and technological change outpacing the capacities of the citizenry to comprehend them, and ever-expanding insular special-interest- and money-driven politics, it is a puzzling solution, at best, to argue that these conditions warrant giving up on debate. If democracy is open to rearticulation, it is open to rearticulation precisely because as the challenges of modern political life proliferate, the citizenry's capacities can change, which is one of the primary reasons that theorists of democracy such as Ocwey in The Public awl Its Problems place such a high premium on education (Dewey 1988,63, 154). Debate provides an indispensible form of education in the modem articulation of democracy because it builds precisely the skills that allow the citizenry to research and be informed about policy decisions that impact them, to sort through and evaluate the evidence for and relative merits of arguments for and against a policy in an increasingly information-rich environment, and to prioritize their time and political energies toward policies that matter the most to them. The merits of debate as a tool for building democratic capacity-building take on a special significance in the context of information literacy. John Larkin (2005, HO) argues that one of the primary failings of modern colleges and universities is that they have not changed curriculum to match with the challenges of a new information environment. This is a problem for the course of academic study in our current context, but perhaps more important, argues Larkin, for the future of a citizenry that will need to make evaluative choices against an increasingly complex and multimediated information environment (ibid-). Larkin's study tested the benefits of debate participation on information-literacy skills and concluded that in-class debate participants reported significantly higher self-efficacy ratings of their ability to navigate academic search databases and to effectively search and use other Web resources: To analyze the self-report ratings of the instructional and control group students, we first conducted a multivariate analysis of variance on all of the ratings, looking jointly at the effect of instmction/no instruction and debate topic . . . that it did not matter which topic students had been assigned . . . students in the Instnictional debate) group were significantly more confident in their ability to access information and less likely to feel that they needed help to do so----These findings clearly indicate greater self-efficacy for online searching among students who participated in (debate).... These results constitute strong support for the effectiveness of the project on students' self-efficacy for online searching in the academic databases. There was an unintended effect, however: After doing ... the project, instructional group students also felt more confident than the other students in their ability to get good information from Yahoo and Google. It may be that the library research experience increased self-efficacy for any searching, not just in academic databases. (Larkin 2005, 144) Larkin's study substantiates Thomas Worthcn and Gaylcn Pack's (1992, 3) claim that debate in the college classroom plays a critical role in fostering the kind of problem-solving skills demanded by the increasingly rich media and information environment of modernity. Though their essay was written in 1992 on the cusp of the eventual explosion of the Internet as a medium, Worthcn and Pack's framing of the issue was prescient: the primary question facing today's student has changed from how to best research a topic to the crucial question of learning how to best evaluate which arguments to cite and rely upon from an easily accessible and veritable cornucopia of materials. There are, without a doubt, a number of important criticisms of employing debate as a model for democratic deliberation. But cumulatively, the evidence presented here warrants strong support for expanding debate practice in the classroom as a technology for enhancing democratic deliberative capacities. The unique combination of critical thinking skills, research and information processing skills, oral communication skills, and capacities for listening and thoughtful, open engagement with hotly contested issues argues for debate as a crucial component of a rich and vital democratic life. In-class debate practice both aids students in achieving the best goals of college and university education, and serves as an unmatched practice for creating thoughtful, engaged, open-minded and self-critical students who are open to the possibilities of meaningful political engagement and new articulations of democratic life. Expanding this practice is crucial, if only because the more we produce citizens that can actively and effectively engage the political process, the more likely we are to produce revisions of democratic life that are necessary if democracy is not only to survive, but to thrive. Democracy faces a myriad of challenges, including: domestic and international issues of class, gender, and racial justice; wholesale environmental destruction and the potential for rapid climate change; emerging threats to international stability in the form of terrorism, intervention and new possibilities for great power conflict; and increasing challenges of rapid globalization including an increasingly volatile global economic structure. More than any specific policy or proposal, an informed and active citizenry that deliberates with greater skill and sensitivity provides one of the best hopes for responsive and effective democratic governance, and by extension, one of the last best hopes for dealing with the existential challenges to democracy in an increasingly complex world. 

2. Critical Activism
The aff overemphasizes the self, that demolishes collective political action and devolves into unproductive me-search-- Ethical projects of self-creation must be tethered from the outset to advocacy for institutional change. Meyers 13
Ella Myers 13, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies at the University of Utah, 2013, Worldly Ethics: Democratic Politics and Care for the World, p. 44-45

Unfortunately, Connolly is inconsistent in this regard, for he also positions Foucauldian self- artistry as an “essential preliminary to,” and even the necessary “condition of,” change at the macropolitical level.104 That is, although Connolly claims that micropolitics and political movements work “in tandem,” each producing effects on the other,105 he sometimes privileges “action by the self on itself” as a starting point and necessary prelude to macropolitical change. This approach not only avoids the question of the genesis of such reflexive action and its possible harmful effects but also indicates that collective efforts to alter social conditions actually await proper techniques of the self. For example, in a rich discussion of criminal punishment in the United States, Connolly contends that “today the micropolitics of desire in the domain of criminal violence has become a condition for a macropolitics that reconfigures existing relations between class, race, crime and punishment.”106 Here and elsewhere in Connolly’s writing the sequencing renders these activities primary and secondary rather than mutually inspiring and reinforcing.107 It is a mistake to grant chronological primacy to ethical self-intervention, however. How, after all, is such intervention, credited with producing salient effects at the macropolitical level, going to get off the ground, so to speak, or assuredly move in the direction of democratic engagement (rather than withdrawal, for example) if it is not tethered, from the beginning, to public claims that direct attention to a specific problem, defined as publicly significant and changeable? How and why would an individual take up reflexive work on the desire to punish if she were not already attuned, at least partially, to problems afflicting current criminal punishment practices? And that attunement is fostered, crucially, by the macropolitical efforts of democratic actors who define a public matter of concern and elicit the attention of other citizens.108 For reflexive self- care to be democratically significant, it must be inspired by and continually connected to larger political mobilizations. Connolly sometimes acknowledges that the arts of the self he celebrates are not themselves the starting point of collaborative action but instead exist in a dynamic, reciprocal relation with cooperative and antagonistic efforts to shape collective arrangements. Yet the self’s relation with itself is also treated as a privileged site, the very source of democratic spirit and action. This tendency to prioritize the self’s reflexive relationship over other modes of relation defines the therapeutic ethics that ultimately emerges out of Foucault’s and, to a lesser degree, Connolly’s work. This ethics not only elides differences between caring for oneself and caring for conditions but also celebrates the former as primary or, as Foucault says, “ontologically prior.” An ethics centered on the self’s engagement with itself may have value, but it is not an ethics fit for democracy.
Debate about specific policy scenarios is key to both self determination in relation to broader society, but also refining reformist or revolutionary projects – our interp controls the internal link to your solvency. Youniss et al. 97
James Youniss, Jeffrey A. McLellan,  and Miranda Yates, What We Know About Engendering Civic Identity, The American Behavioral Scientist March/April 1997

The top-down analysis of civil society moving from a macrosocial structure down to civic behaviors leaves us with the sense that great social forces have altered the course of America’s civil orientation. The search for causes puts us in a state of rumination and brooding. If macroforces have led us to become a nation of individualism or materialists (Bellah. Madsen. Sullivan. Swidler. and ‘Iipton, I985; Btzioni. 1995). what options are we left with to confront this unsatisfactory situation? Even if the causes could be identified. we would know little about the processes by which civil society is formed and could be reconstituted. We propose that a developmental analysis is more useful. We have cited studies that show how individuals acquire practices that are constitutive of civic identities. Participation in organizations and movements provides experience with normative civic practices and ideologies. and shapes youth’s emerging identities in a long-lasting form. Participating in high school government and partaking in social-political reform share in starting youth on a developmental path toward constructive citizenship. These findings allow us to set aside the rhetorical question of how civil society disappeared for the more generative inquiry of how we can enhance youth’s opportunities for active participation in the reform and renewal of contemporary society. Numerous models are available. including mandatory military service. as in Israel or My. and voluntary service directed to com- munity problems. By offering youth meaningful participatory experiences. we allow them to discover their potency. assess their responsibility. acquire a sense of political processes. and commit to a moral-ethical ideology. Toren (1993) argues that it is each generation's task to make sense of the conditions in which they find society. This is true for youth and for adults. Each generation must take up the burden of renewing society and making history. Flack: (I988) has bemoaned the fact that contemporary youth seem to have shirked their generational obligation. Rather than work at making history. This generation eems coth to take the rewards that prior generations have earned. leaving the future in the hands of the few leaders. Clearly. there is a tendency to blame contemporary youth. even to demonize them (Ghoua. 1996) for the state of civil society. We believe that a more productive approach recognizes the older generation's duty to attend to youth's quest for identity. Youth seek transcendent meaning. which entails locating themselves in history by adopting ideological traditions that older generations have sustained and still merit respect. Contrary to popular psychology’s image of identity as a private existential struggle. youth make identities byjoining with others in respectable muses. Adults' duty in this process is to offer participatory experiences so that youth can join them in re- newing civil society. Identity is not given but must be constructed. in our pluralistic society. this entails making sense of contradictory options and resolving difficult tensions (Calhoun. 994). We recognize that a civic identity may orient individuals toward sustaining society as it is, or it may encourage challenges to the status quo in the spirit of reform (Foley and Edwards. 1996). Our goal was not to assess which kinds of experiences lead to which of these outcomes. Rather. it was to outline a developmental process in which the construction of individuality and society are complementary so that citizenship is built into the self 's very definition. 

3. Procedural Fairness  - Non topical advocacies mean they can defend anything outside the resolution which is unpredictable, and also defend uncontestable offense like “racism is bad”. This kills NEG ground and thus equal access to the ballot.

This is an independent voting issue which outweighs:
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.
4.  T version of the AFF is just defending implementation

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

Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: Semis | Opponent: Stuyvesant KF | Judge: Panel
Interpretation - The AFF may only garner offense from hypothetical enactment of the resolution 

Resolved reflects policy passage before a legislative body.  Parcher 01
(Jeff, Fmr. Debate Coach at Georgetown University, February, http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200102/0790.html)

(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.

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.

Violation: 

They defend  which isn’t the topic.  

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 statement. 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 objective 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 decisions, 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 example, claims are presented and supported within speeches, editorials, and advertisements even without opposing or refutational response. Argumentation occurs in a range of settings from informal to formal, and may not call upon an audience or judge to make a forced choice among competing claims. Informal discourse 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) argumentation calling upon their audience or adjudicator to decide. The proposition provides 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 identify 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 academic 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 terrible job! They' are overcrowded, and many teachers are poorly qualified in their subject areas. Even the best teachers can do little more than struggle to maintain order in their classrooms." That same concerned citizen, facing a complex range of issues, might arrive at an unhelpful decision, such as "We ought to do something about this” or, worse, “It’s too complicated a problem to deal with." Groups of concerned citizens worried about the state of public education could join together to express their frustrations, anger, disillusionment, and emotions regarding the schools, but without a focus for their discussions, they could easily agree about the sorry state of education without finding points of clarity or potential solutions. A gripe session would follow. But if a precise question is posed—such as “What can be done to improve public education?”—then a more profitable area of discussion is opened up simply by placing a focus on the search for a concrete solution step. One or more judgments can be phrased in the form of debate propositions, motions for parliamentary debate, or bills for legislative assemblies, The statements "Resolved: That the federal government should implement a program of charter schools in at-risk communities” and “Resolved; That the state of Florida should adopt a school voucher program" more clearly identify specific ways of dealing with educational problems in a manageable form, suitable for debate. They provide specific policies to be investigated and aid discussants in identifying points of difference. This focus contributes to better and more informed decision making with the potential for better results. In academic debate, it provides better depth of argumentation and enhanced opportunity 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 ‘"homelessness,” 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 argumentation. If we take this statement to mean Iliad the written word is more effective than physical force for some purposes, we can identify a problem area: the comparative effectiveness of writing or physical force for a specific purpose, 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, website 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 advocates, or that good debates cannot occur over competing interpretations of the controversy; in fact, these sorts of debates may be very engaging. The point is that debate is best facilitated by the guidance provided

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.
E.  It’s key to long term activism which turns case and outweighs because of existential threats. Lundberg 10

Christian O. Lundberg 10 Professor of Communications @ University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “Tradition of Debate in North Carolina” in Navigating Opportunity: Policy Debate in the 21st Century By Allan D. Louden, p. 311

The second major problem with the critique that identifies a naivety in articulating debate and democracy is that it presumes that the primary pedagogical outcome of debate is speech capacities. But the democratic capacities built by debate are not limited to speech—as indicated earlier, debate builds capacity for critical thinking, analysis of public claims, informed decision making, and better public judgment. If the picture of modem political life that underwrites this critique of debate is a pessimistic view of increasingly labyrinthine and bureaucratic administrative politics, rapid scientific and technological change outpacing the capacities of the citizenry to comprehend them, and ever-expanding insular special-interest- and money-driven politics, it is a puzzling solution, at best, to argue that these conditions warrant giving up on debate. If democracy is open to rearticulation, it is open to rearticulation precisely because as the challenges of modern political life proliferate, the citizenry's capacities can change, which is one of the primary reasons that theorists of democracy such as Ocwey in The Public awl Its Problems place such a high premium on education (Dewey 1988,63, 154). Debate provides an indispensible form of education in the modem articulation of democracy because it builds precisely the skills that allow the citizenry to research and be informed about policy decisions that impact them, to sort through and evaluate the evidence for and relative merits of arguments for and against a policy in an increasingly information-rich environment, and to prioritize their time and political energies toward policies that matter the most to them. The merits of debate as a tool for building democratic capacity-building take on a special significance in the context of information literacy. John Larkin (2005, HO) argues that one of the primary failings of modern colleges and universities is that they have not changed curriculum to match with the challenges of a new information environment. This is a problem for the course of academic study in our current context, but perhaps more important, argues Larkin, for the future of a citizenry that will need to make evaluative choices against an increasingly complex and multimediated information environment (ibid-). Larkin's study tested the benefits of debate participation on information-literacy skills and concluded that in-class debate participants reported significantly higher self-efficacy ratings of their ability to navigate academic search databases and to effectively search and use other Web resources: To analyze the self-report ratings of the instructional and control group students, we first conducted a multivariate analysis of variance on all of the ratings, looking jointly at the effect of instmction/no instruction and debate topic . . . that it did not matter which topic students had been assigned . . . students in the Instnictional debate) group were significantly more confident in their ability to access information and less likely to feel that they needed help to do so----These findings clearly indicate greater self-efficacy for online searching among students who participated in (debate).... These results constitute strong support for the effectiveness of the project on students' self-efficacy for online searching in the academic databases. There was an unintended effect, however: After doing ... the project, instructional group students also felt more confident than the other students in their ability to get good information from Yahoo and Google. It may be that the library research experience increased self-efficacy for any searching, not just in academic databases. (Larkin 2005, 144) Larkin's study substantiates Thomas Worthcn and Gaylcn Pack's (1992, 3) claim that debate in the college classroom plays a critical role in fostering the kind of problem-solving skills demanded by the increasingly rich media and information environment of modernity. Though their essay was written in 1992 on the cusp of the eventual explosion of the Internet as a medium, Worthcn and Pack's framing of the issue was prescient: the primary question facing today's student has changed from how to best research a topic to the crucial question of learning how to best evaluate which arguments to cite and rely upon from an easily accessible and veritable cornucopia of materials. There are, without a doubt, a number of important criticisms of employing debate as a model for democratic deliberation. But cumulatively, the evidence presented here warrants strong support for expanding debate practice in the classroom as a technology for enhancing democratic deliberative capacities. The unique combination of critical thinking skills, research and information processing skills, oral communication skills, and capacities for listening and thoughtful, open engagement with hotly contested issues argues for debate as a crucial component of a rich and vital democratic life. In-class debate practice both aids students in achieving the best goals of college and university education, and serves as an unmatched practice for creating thoughtful, engaged, open-minded and self-critical students who are open to the possibilities of meaningful political engagement and new articulations of democratic life. Expanding this practice is crucial, if only because the more we produce citizens that can actively and effectively engage the political process, the more likely we are to produce revisions of democratic life that are necessary if democracy is not only to survive, but to thrive. Democracy faces a myriad of challenges, including: domestic and international issues of class, gender, and racial justice; wholesale environmental destruction and the potential for rapid climate change; emerging threats to international stability in the form of terrorism, intervention and new possibilities for great power conflict; and increasing challenges of rapid globalization including an increasingly volatile global economic structure. More than any specific policy or proposal, an informed and active citizenry that deliberates with greater skill and sensitivity provides one of the best hopes for responsive and effective democratic governance, and by extension, one of the last best hopes for dealing with the existential challenges to democracy in an increasingly complex world. 

Discussion of racial policy making is more productive and outweighs their 1AC impacts. Reed 97
Reed, Prof of African American Studies and Poli Sci @ Uchicago, 97
(Adolph Jr, the Progressive Dec. 1997, Yackety-yak about race) EE from file

So what the heck is a "national conversation on race," anyway? Like so much in what passes for public discussion in America these days, the notion soothes and reassures, conveying a sense of gravitas, while at the same time having no clear, practical meaning whatsoever. I remember hearing calls for this conversation a few years ago, first from former University of Pennsylvania President Sheldon Hackney, then from Lani Guinier and performance artist Anna Deveare Smith. At the time, it seemed to be just a well-intentioned soundbite, a way to express in newschat a concern with racial injustice and anger. As a mass-media metaphor, it seemed harmless enough: a way to evoke a national commitment to honesty and democracy. I couldn't imagine how this call could possibly translate into anything concrete, though. Who would participate in this conversation? Where would it be held? What would the ground rules be? And to what end? I certainly didn't suspect that the notion would go anywhere; I presumed that it would have the shelf life of slogans from political ads. You know, like "Where's the beef?" or "It takes a village . . ." Well, I didn't take into account the significance of a New South, psychobabbling baby boomer whose political opportunism comes with cybertechie, New Age flourishes. As it turns out, this national-conversation idea is just Bill Clinton's cup of herbal tea. Now that Clinton has glommed onto the national conversation, it won't just dissipate through the airwaves over time. He has decided to keep this strange idea alive by formalizing it into a Presidential race-relations advisory board. It just goes to show that Bipartisan Bill has the soul of a talk-show host. But the "conversation" also highlights the profound shift over the last generation in American liberals' ways of talking about racial inequality. It's impossible, for instance, to imagine Lyndon Johnson using the Presidential bully pulpit to call for a national conversation on race in 1964 or 1965. For all his limitations--the Vietnam War chief among them--Johnson understood that the point in pursuing racial justice is not to stimulate conversation. When people like Everett Dirksen protested that the struggle for black civil rights should rely on efforts to change whites' individual attitudes rather than on changing laws. Johnson made it clear that he was less interested in changing people's hearts than their public behavior. Johnson understood that assertive government action can define acceptable practices and behavior, and ultimately change the world in which attitudes are formed. The transformation of the South's racial politics has been incomplete, as the electoral success of governors Kirk Fordice in Mississippi and Fob James in Alabama demonstrate. The region nonetheless has undergone changes that would have seemed unimaginable thirty years ago. Blacks and whites can share public space more or less routinely, interact publicly in ways marked by the civility that presumes social equality, share work stations, and maintain the casual conviviality that normally pertains among co-workers. More than at any point in this century, white elites take for granted the need to take some notion of black interests into account when making public policy. What made these changes possible was civil-rights law, not attitude adjustment. Presenting white Southerners with a fait accompli was the only way to counter the cultural force of white-supremacist ideology. Prohibiting discrimination by law not only enforced blacks' civil and citizenship rights, though that certainly was its intent and most important consequence. It was also the only way to create an environment in which casual contact would occur between blacks and whites as presumptive equals. This interaction has begun to erode racist stereotypes and bigotry by establishing the basis for a shared mundane humanity in workplaces, schools, and other public venues. In the current anti-statist, market-worshipping climate, it is fashionable to deny that public authority can influence behavior and attitudes. Economists and others who worship market theology contend that slavery and racial discrimination would have been eliminated by the natural workings of the market if abolitionists and civil-rights activists had just been a little more patient. Some even blame attempts to preempt those market forces--through the Civil War and Reconstruction Amendments and 1964 Civil Rights Law and 1965 Voting Rights Law--for creating racism. Public intervention inevitably fails, so this twisted reasoning goes, because its artificiality breeds resentment. Civil-rights laws, and affirmative action in particular. just stir up white hostility, since they are coercive, and an affront to properly market-based notions of justice and equity. Besides (and here's where this sophistry most clearly approximates religion), the white South would eventually have eliminated slavery on its own because the system was irrational economically. Segregation and other forms of discrimination were already on the decline after World War II for the same reason, say the market moralists. Their argument boils down to this: Had there been no legal abolition of slavery, there would have been no white-supremacist restoration in the South, and had there been no civil-rights legislation, there would be no white racism. If exuberant reformers hadn't gone mucking around with the larger rationality of the system of individual choices and transactions that drive market forces, everything would have turned out fine. Never mind that the Confederacy fought tooth and nail to preserve slavery and that white southerners fought nearly as hard to maintain Jim Crow. A climate in which this kind of thought is credible makes twaddle like the need for a national conversation about race seem to make sense. It's the norm these days to make public issues a matter of personal feelings, and to separate beliefs from their social context. It is this climate that makes it possible for a supposedly progressive magazine like Mother Jones not only to attack affirmative action as divisive, but to call for its demise in order to "reestablish racial healing as a national priority." This brings us back to Bipartisan Bill s attraction to the conversation. It's an ideal vehicle for him to express his concerns about race, because it's not connected to any real substance. It's just part of the fundamentally empty rhetoric of multiculturalism: diversity, mutual awareness, respect for difference, hearing different voices. and the like. None of these notions is objectionable on its face, but that's partly because none of them means anything in particular. Several Southern state governments have embraced a brand of multiculturalism that treats foes and advocates of white supremacy as equivalent "voices" equally deserving of respect. So they grant state employees the option to choose either Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday or Robert E. Lee's as a mid-January holiday. We should accept the equal humanity of those who support Operation Rescue. the Promise Keepers, the Christian Coalition, or the militia movement, but that cannot mean that we grant the legitimacy of their reactionary political programs. And whether or not we are willing to talk with them about our differences is less important than that we defeat their political objectives and repudiate the larger social vision from which those objectives derive. No doubt Hackney and Guinier and others calling for this national conversation are well-intentioned. But that doesn't mean the idea is any less vapid--or potentially destructive. As we've seen, opponents of affirmative action also base their argument on their desire to stamp out "racial division." A generation ago, segregationists charged civil-rights activists with creating racial divisiveness. A century earlier, opponents of Reconstruction made the same claim against people who supported black citizenship. The saccharine language of multiculturalism and respect, diversity, awareness, and healing is wonderfully evanescent; it amounts to a kind of racial-equality lite. Ironically, the "conversation" also reinforces a fundamentally racist assumption: the idea that individuals automatically can articulate the mindset of a group is a vestige of Victorian notions of racial temperament. The problem isn't racial division or a need for healing. It is racial inequality and injustice. And the remedy isn't an elaborately choreographed pageantry of essentializing yackety-yak about group experience, cultural difference, pain, and the inevitable platitudes about understanding. Rather, we need a clear commitment by the federal government to preserve, buttress, and extend civil rights, and to use the office of the Presidency to indicate that commitment forcefully and unambiguously. As the lesson of the past three decades in the South makes clear, this is the only effective way to change racist attitudes and beliefs. Bill Clinton has absolutely no interest in that kind of talk, however, and it's easy to understand why. If he did, he'd have to explain why he and his Administration have repeatedly pandered to the resurgent racist tendencies he purports to bemoan. He'd have to explain why he made a central prop in his 1992 campaign an element of the lexicon of coded racism--his pledge to "end welfare as we know it" and his constant harping on an invidious distinction between those who supposedly "play by the rules" and those who supposedly don't. He'd have to explain his own half-hearted stand on affirmative action ("mend it, don't end it") and why he refused to provide any support for the mobilization against California's hideous Proposition 209. He'd have to explain why he proposed and pushed through a draconian crime bill that not only trades on the coded racist rhetoric of the anti crime hysteria but also disproportionately targets inner-city minorities. (Take, for example, the outrageous disparity in sentencing for possession of crack and powder cocaine. The only difference between the two forms of the drug is the racial breakdown of users.) He'd have to explain why he signed and supported the odious welfare-reform bill. He'd have to explain why his Administration resorts to the racialized language of inner-city pathology to justify its attack on the principle of providing public housing for poor people. It doesn't make sense to feel betrayed by Clinton, however. He's only doing what comes naturally. If progressives don't begin thinking in a more rigorous way about this kind of charade, we'll never stop talking in circles.

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.

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.

Tournament: Alta | Round: Finals | Opponent: Palo Alto BH | Judge: Panl
Interpretation - The AFF may only garner offense from hypothetical enactment of the resolution 

Resolved reflects policy passage before a legislative body.  Parcher 01
(Jeff, Fmr. Debate Coach at Georgetown University, February, http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200102/0790.html)

(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.

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.

Violation: 

They defend  which isn’t the topic.  

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 statement. 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 objective 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 decisions, 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 example, claims are presented and supported within speeches, editorials, and advertisements even without opposing or refutational response. Argumentation occurs in a range of settings from informal to formal, and may not call upon an audience or judge to make a forced choice among competing claims. Informal discourse 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) argumentation calling upon their audience or adjudicator to decide. The proposition provides 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 identify 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 academic 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 terrible job! They' are overcrowded, and many teachers are poorly qualified in their subject areas. Even the best teachers can do little more than struggle to maintain order in their classrooms." That same concerned citizen, facing a complex range of issues, might arrive at an unhelpful decision, such as "We ought to do something about this” or, worse, “It’s too complicated a problem to deal with." Groups of concerned citizens worried about the state of public education could join together to express their frustrations, anger, disillusionment, and emotions regarding the schools, but without a focus for their discussions, they could easily agree about the sorry state of education without finding points of clarity or potential solutions. A gripe session would follow. But if a precise question is posed—such as “What can be done to improve public education?”—then a more profitable area of discussion is opened up simply by placing a focus on the search for a concrete solution step. One or more judgments can be phrased in the form of debate propositions, motions for parliamentary debate, or bills for legislative assemblies, The statements "Resolved: That the federal government should implement a program of charter schools in at-risk communities” and “Resolved; That the state of Florida should adopt a school voucher program" more clearly identify specific ways of dealing with educational problems in a manageable form, suitable for debate. They provide specific policies to be investigated and aid discussants in identifying points of difference. This focus contributes to better and more informed decision making with the potential for better results. In academic debate, it provides better depth of argumentation and enhanced opportunity 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 ‘"homelessness,” 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 argumentation. If we take this statement to mean Iliad the written word is more effective than physical force for some purposes, we can identify a problem area: the comparative effectiveness of writing or physical force for a specific purpose, 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, website 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 advocates, or that good debates cannot occur over competing interpretations of the controversy; in fact, these sorts of debates may be very engaging. The point is that debate is best facilitated by the guidance provided

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.  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.
C.  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.
D.  It’s key to long term activism which turns case and outweighs because of existential threats. Lundberg 10

Christian O. Lundberg 10 Professor of Communications @ University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “Tradition of Debate in North Carolina” in Navigating Opportunity: Policy Debate in the 21st Century By Allan D. Louden, p. 311

The second major problem with the critique that identifies a naivety in articulating debate and democracy is that it presumes that the primary pedagogical outcome of debate is speech capacities. But the democratic capacities built by debate are not limited to speech—as indicated earlier, debate builds capacity for critical thinking, analysis of public claims, informed decision making, and better public judgment. If the picture of modem political life that underwrites this critique of debate is a pessimistic view of increasingly labyrinthine and bureaucratic administrative politics, rapid scientific and technological change outpacing the capacities of the citizenry to comprehend them, and ever-expanding insular special-interest- and money-driven politics, it is a puzzling solution, at best, to argue that these conditions warrant giving up on debate. If democracy is open to rearticulation, it is open to rearticulation precisely because as the challenges of modern political life proliferate, the citizenry's capacities can change, which is one of the primary reasons that theorists of democracy such as Ocwey in The Public awl Its Problems place such a high premium on education (Dewey 1988,63, 154). Debate provides an indispensible form of education in the modem articulation of democracy because it builds precisely the skills that allow the citizenry to research and be informed about policy decisions that impact them, to sort through and evaluate the evidence for and relative merits of arguments for and against a policy in an increasingly information-rich environment, and to prioritize their time and political energies toward policies that matter the most to them. The merits of debate as a tool for building democratic capacity-building take on a special significance in the context of information literacy. John Larkin (2005, HO) argues that one of the primary failings of modern colleges and universities is that they have not changed curriculum to match with the challenges of a new information environment. This is a problem for the course of academic study in our current context, but perhaps more important, argues Larkin, for the future of a citizenry that will need to make evaluative choices against an increasingly complex and multimediated information environment (ibid-). Larkin's study tested the benefits of debate participation on information-literacy skills and concluded that in-class debate participants reported significantly higher self-efficacy ratings of their ability to navigate academic search databases and to effectively search and use other Web resources: To analyze the self-report ratings of the instructional and control group students, we first conducted a multivariate analysis of variance on all of the ratings, looking jointly at the effect of instmction/no instruction and debate topic . . . that it did not matter which topic students had been assigned . . . students in the Instnictional debate) group were significantly more confident in their ability to access information and less likely to feel that they needed help to do so----These findings clearly indicate greater self-efficacy for online searching among students who participated in (debate).... These results constitute strong support for the effectiveness of the project on students' self-efficacy for online searching in the academic databases. There was an unintended effect, however: After doing ... the project, instructional group students also felt more confident than the other students in their ability to get good information from Yahoo and Google. It may be that the library research experience increased self-efficacy for any searching, not just in academic databases. (Larkin 2005, 144) Larkin's study substantiates Thomas Worthcn and Gaylcn Pack's (1992, 3) claim that debate in the college classroom plays a critical role in fostering the kind of problem-solving skills demanded by the increasingly rich media and information environment of modernity. Though their essay was written in 1992 on the cusp of the eventual explosion of the Internet as a medium, Worthcn and Pack's framing of the issue was prescient: the primary question facing today's student has changed from how to best research a topic to the crucial question of learning how to best evaluate which arguments to cite and rely upon from an easily accessible and veritable cornucopia of materials. There are, without a doubt, a number of important criticisms of employing debate as a model for democratic deliberation. But cumulatively, the evidence presented here warrants strong support for expanding debate practice in the classroom as a technology for enhancing democratic deliberative capacities. The unique combination of critical thinking skills, research and information processing skills, oral communication skills, and capacities for listening and thoughtful, open engagement with hotly contested issues argues for debate as a crucial component of a rich and vital democratic life. In-class debate practice both aids students in achieving the best goals of college and university education, and serves as an unmatched practice for creating thoughtful, engaged, open-minded and self-critical students who are open to the possibilities of meaningful political engagement and new articulations of democratic life. Expanding this practice is crucial, if only because the more we produce citizens that can actively and effectively engage the political process, the more likely we are to produce revisions of democratic life that are necessary if democracy is not only to survive, but to thrive. Democracy faces a myriad of challenges, including: domestic and international issues of class, gender, and racial justice; wholesale environmental destruction and the potential for rapid climate change; emerging threats to international stability in the form of terrorism, intervention and new possibilities for great power conflict; and increasing challenges of rapid globalization including an increasingly volatile global economic structure. More than any specific policy or proposal, an informed and active citizenry that deliberates with greater skill and sensitivity provides one of the best hopes for responsive and effective democratic governance, and by extension, one of the last best hopes for dealing with the existential challenges to democracy in an increasingly complex world. 

2. Critical Activism

Governement engagement is key to resolving the model minority myth. Lee 7/11

PAULA YOUNG LEE  “Solidarity with Black Lives Matter: Asian Americans speaking out against police brutality” MONDAY, JUL 11, 2016 http://www.salon.com/2016/07/11/solidarity_with_black_lives_matter_asian_americans_speaking_out_against_police_brutality/

Increasingly, Asian Americans refuse to be used as a wedge group simultaneously propping up racist institutional systems that too often target Black men as victims (read the storifyed tweets by Jeff Yang here). “It is too easy for us to be pitted against black and brown people as the Model Minority or even to just ignore current problems and be safe in the bubble of college-educated, suburban, professional, safe America,” notes blogger Grace Hwang Lynch, “not realizing what we are quietly sacrificing for this ‘comfort.’”¶ Crucially, the myth of the model minority obscures the struggles of working-class Asian Americans holding menial jobs who also face discrimination on socio-economic grounds. As blogger Jenn Fang writes, “Do we choose a society where the lives of Black and Brown people — including Black and Brown Asian Americans — has value? Or, do we continue to uphold a system that places no value in the lives of non-White people, including our own; and wherein only some can place their trust in our law enforcement?”¶ Alert to the reality that anti-Black narratives undermine solidarity among minority groups, young Asian Americans responded to the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile by putting together a crowdsourced open letter meant to explain #BlackLivesMatter to their traditionalist mothers, fathers, uncles, and aunties. Drafted by millennial Christina Xu, the letter has already been translated into dozens of languages including Punjabi, Benagli, and Urdu. The project, called “Letters for Black Lives,” went live this afternoon.¶ The fact that Jeronimo Yanez is not Chinese does not relieve Asian Americans of the moral and ethical responsibility of fighting for justice for Black lives, just as the fact that Yanez is Hispanic does not magically excuse white cops from being complicit in a system committed to preserving a racialized social hierarchy. Mere hours before Philando Castile died, Alton Sterling had been shot in the back by two white police officers, and 557 other individuals have been shot and killed by the police force this year. So far. Run by the Washington Post, the tally is live; the numbers rose as I watched. Numerically speaking, most of the victims (238) of police violence have been White, but Black Americans (123) and Natives are being disproportionately targeted at disproportionately high rates. Last year, the Washington Post’s analysis of police shootings in 2015 showed that black men were seven times more likely than white men to die by police gunfire while unarmed. Looking at data from 1980-2012, ProPublica found that young Black men were 21 times more likely to be shot by the police than their white counterparts.¶ To some, these same studies prove that Black men are forcing the police to shoot them at higher rates because they are prone to greater violence. It is here that stereotypes regarding “quiet” and “submissive” Asian Americans can help shift perceptions when police blame their victims.¶ In my various run-ins with law enforcement as an excitable preacher’s daughter, I have learned what not to do. Don’t move until the officers explicitly tell you to. Don’t protest. Don’t ask questions. Don’t claim you know your rights. Don’t try to be helpful by showing them documents they’ve demanded. (You have to wait for them to tell you to get them.) Use your words, but only to answer direct questions, preferably sticking to Yes or No. Don’t prattle on, because small talk makes cops think you’re nervous, and in cop-brain this means you’re hiding something. Try not to cry. It can be difficult when every action on their part is suffused with the assumption of your guilt, even if you’re just sitting in the park with a book, trying not to breathe more than your share of the free air. Race and gender may well account for the difference between getting singled out for harassment (small Asian woman), and being viewed as a threat to the social order (large Black man) that must be stopped by fatal means if necessary. However terrible it may feel, the first is a form of politically-sanctioned bullying. The latter is terrorism enacted against a specific community, whose abject dead bodies we now see practically every day on the news.¶ Over time, the asymmetrical imposition of state power on vulnerable bodies has imparted its lessons, and “good” Asian Americans are increasingly convinced that it’s impossible to be good enough to escape a hierarchical system that insists upon casting non-Whites as perpetually Other and alien. Real life means that we need police, and many officers are honorable people who do a tough and dangerous job. But respecting the work that individuals do doesn’t exempt the institution from criticism, and when power abets power, protecting wealth and property instead of serving the common cause of justice, you arrive quickly at a place where systemic abuse of the poor, the disenfranchised, and the powerless becomes the untenable new normal. Under the rubric of “public safety,” in too many sectors we’ve slowly allowed ourselves to become a police state where law enforcement is declaring itself immune from oversight, even as police interest groups actively undermine efforts to implement, as The Washington Post writes, “policy that would make it more difficult for police to kill people and get away with it.”¶ This is not only unhealthy for an ostensibly free and democratic society, it destroys all trust between law enforcement and their communities. That trust is the boundary between civilization and carnage. Asian Americans are a large, diverse, and increasingly politically conscious group. Standing in solidarity, this group is now saying in unison: Black Lives Matter.
 
Debate about specific policy scenarios is key to both self determination in relation to broader society, but also refining reformist or revolutionary projects – our interp controls the internal link to your solvency. Youniss et al. 97
James Youniss, Jeffrey A. McLellan,  and Miranda Yates, What We Know About Engendering Civic Identity, The American Behavioral Scientist March/April 1997

The top-down analysis of civil society moving from a macrosocial structure down to civic behaviors leaves us with the sense that great social forces have altered the course of America’s civil orientation. The search for causes puts us in a state of rumination and brooding. If macroforces have led us to become a nation of individualism or materialists (Bellah. Madsen. Sullivan. Swidler. and ‘Iipton, I985; Btzioni. 1995). what options are we left with to confront this unsatisfactory situation? Even if the causes could be identified. we would know little about the processes by which civil society is formed and could be reconstituted. We propose that a developmental analysis is more useful. We have cited studies that show how individuals acquire practices that are constitutive of civic identities. Participation in organizations and movements provides experience with normative civic practices and ideologies. and shapes youth’s emerging identities in a long-lasting form. Participating in high school government and partaking in social-political reform share in starting youth on a developmental path toward constructive citizenship. These findings allow us to set aside the rhetorical question of how civil society disappeared for the more generative inquiry of how we can enhance youth’s opportunities for active participation in the reform and renewal of contemporary society. Numerous models are available. including mandatory military service. as in Israel or My. and voluntary service directed to com- munity problems. By offering youth meaningful participatory experiences. we allow them to discover their potency. assess their responsibility. acquire a sense of political processes. and commit to a moral-ethical ideology. Toren (1993) argues that it is each generation's task to make sense of the conditions in which they find society. This is true for youth and for adults. Each generation must take up the burden of renewing society and making history. Flack: (I988) has bemoaned the fact that contemporary youth seem to have shirked their generational obligation. Rather than work at making history. This generation eems coth to take the rewards that prior generations have earned. leaving the future in the hands of the few leaders. Clearly. there is a tendency to blame contemporary youth. even to demonize them (Ghoua. 1996) for the state of civil society. We believe that a more productive approach recognizes the older generation's duty to attend to youth's quest for identity. Youth seek transcendent meaning. which entails locating themselves in history by adopting ideological traditions that older generations have sustained and still merit respect. Contrary to popular psychology’s image of identity as a private existential struggle. youth make identities byjoining with others in respectable muses. Adults' duty in this process is to offer participatory experiences so that youth can join them in re- newing civil society. Identity is not given but must be constructed. in our pluralistic society. this entails making sense of contradictory options and resolving difficult tensions (Calhoun. 994). We recognize that a civic identity may orient individuals toward sustaining society as it is, or it may encourage challenges to the status quo in the spirit of reform (Foley and Edwards. 1996). Our goal was not to assess which kinds of experiences lead to which of these outcomes. Rather. it was to outline a developmental process in which the construction of individuality and society are complementary so that citizenship is built into the self 's very definition. 

3. 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.

TVA

Voter: Drop the debater on T – our state good offense justifies a counter ROB which outweighs and turns theirs.  Also, 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.

Tournament: CPS | Round: 2 | Opponent: Palo Alto FZ | Judge: Felix Tan
Interpretation - The AFF may only garner offense from hypothetical enactment of the resolution
Resolved reflects policy passage before a legislative body.  Parcher 01
(Jeff, Fmr. Debate Coach at Georgetown University, February, http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200102/0790.html)

(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.

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.

Violation: 

They defend  which isn’t the topic.  

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 statement. 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 objective 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 decisions, 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 example, claims are presented and supported within speeches, editorials, and advertisements even without opposing or refutational response. Argumentation occurs in a range of settings from informal to formal, and may not call upon an audience or judge to make a forced choice among competing claims. Informal discourse 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) argumentation calling upon their audience or adjudicator to decide. The proposition provides 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 identify 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 academic 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 terrible job! They' are overcrowded, and many teachers are poorly qualified in their subject areas. Even the best teachers can do little more than struggle to maintain order in their classrooms." That same concerned citizen, facing a complex range of issues, might arrive at an unhelpful decision, such as "We ought to do something about this” or, worse, “It’s too complicated a problem to deal with." Groups of concerned citizens worried about the state of public education could join together to express their frustrations, anger, disillusionment, and emotions regarding the schools, but without a focus for their discussions, they could easily agree about the sorry state of education without finding points of clarity or potential solutions. A gripe session would follow. But if a precise question is posed—such as “What can be done to improve public education?”—then a more profitable area of discussion is opened up simply by placing a focus on the search for a concrete solution step. One or more judgments can be phrased in the form of debate propositions, motions for parliamentary debate, or bills for legislative assemblies, The statements "Resolved: That the federal government should implement a program of charter schools in at-risk communities” and “Resolved; That the state of Florida should adopt a school voucher program" more clearly identify specific ways of dealing with educational problems in a manageable form, suitable for debate. They provide specific policies to be investigated and aid discussants in identifying points of difference. This focus contributes to better and more informed decision making with the potential for better results. In academic debate, it provides better depth of argumentation and enhanced opportunity 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 ‘"homelessness,” 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 argumentation. If we take this statement to mean Iliad the written word is more effective than physical force for some purposes, we can identify a problem area: the comparative effectiveness of writing or physical force for a specific purpose, 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, website 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 advocates, or that good debates cannot occur over competing interpretations of the controversy; in fact, these sorts of debates may be very engaging. The point is that debate is best facilitated by the guidance provided

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.
E.  It’s key to long term activism which turns case and outweighs because of existential threats. Lundberg 10

Christian O. Lundberg 10 Professor of Communications @ University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “Tradition of Debate in North Carolina” in Navigating Opportunity: Policy Debate in the 21st Century By Allan D. Louden, p. 311

The second major problem with the critique that identifies a naivety in articulating debate and democracy is that it presumes that the primary pedagogical outcome of debate is speech capacities. But the democratic capacities built by debate are not limited to speech—as indicated earlier, debate builds capacity for critical thinking, analysis of public claims, informed decision making, and better public judgment. If the picture of modem political life that underwrites this critique of debate is a pessimistic view of increasingly labyrinthine and bureaucratic administrative politics, rapid scientific and technological change outpacing the capacities of the citizenry to comprehend them, and ever-expanding insular special-interest- and money-driven politics, it is a puzzling solution, at best, to argue that these conditions warrant giving up on debate. If democracy is open to rearticulation, it is open to rearticulation precisely because as the challenges of modern political life proliferate, the citizenry's capacities can change, which is one of the primary reasons that theorists of democracy such as Ocwey in The Public awl Its Problems place such a high premium on education (Dewey 1988,63, 154). Debate provides an indispensible form of education in the modem articulation of democracy because it builds precisely the skills that allow the citizenry to research and be informed about policy decisions that impact them, to sort through and evaluate the evidence for and relative merits of arguments for and against a policy in an increasingly information-rich environment, and to prioritize their time and political energies toward policies that matter the most to them. The merits of debate as a tool for building democratic capacity-building take on a special significance in the context of information literacy. John Larkin (2005, HO) argues that one of the primary failings of modern colleges and universities is that they have not changed curriculum to match with the challenges of a new information environment. This is a problem for the course of academic study in our current context, but perhaps more important, argues Larkin, for the future of a citizenry that will need to make evaluative choices against an increasingly complex and multimediated information environment (ibid-). Larkin's study tested the benefits of debate participation on information-literacy skills and concluded that in-class debate participants reported significantly higher self-efficacy ratings of their ability to navigate academic search databases and to effectively search and use other Web resources: To analyze the self-report ratings of the instructional and control group students, we first conducted a multivariate analysis of variance on all of the ratings, looking jointly at the effect of instmction/no instruction and debate topic . . . that it did not matter which topic students had been assigned . . . students in the Instnictional debate) group were significantly more confident in their ability to access information and less likely to feel that they needed help to do so----These findings clearly indicate greater self-efficacy for online searching among students who participated in (debate).... These results constitute strong support for the effectiveness of the project on students' self-efficacy for online searching in the academic databases. There was an unintended effect, however: After doing ... the project, instructional group students also felt more confident than the other students in their ability to get good information from Yahoo and Google. It may be that the library research experience increased self-efficacy for any searching, not just in academic databases. (Larkin 2005, 144) Larkin's study substantiates Thomas Worthcn and Gaylcn Pack's (1992, 3) claim that debate in the college classroom plays a critical role in fostering the kind of problem-solving skills demanded by the increasingly rich media and information environment of modernity. Though their essay was written in 1992 on the cusp of the eventual explosion of the Internet as a medium, Worthcn and Pack's framing of the issue was prescient: the primary question facing today's student has changed from how to best research a topic to the crucial question of learning how to best evaluate which arguments to cite and rely upon from an easily accessible and veritable cornucopia of materials. There are, without a doubt, a number of important criticisms of employing debate as a model for democratic deliberation. But cumulatively, the evidence presented here warrants strong support for expanding debate practice in the classroom as a technology for enhancing democratic deliberative capacities. The unique combination of critical thinking skills, research and information processing skills, oral communication skills, and capacities for listening and thoughtful, open engagement with hotly contested issues argues for debate as a crucial component of a rich and vital democratic life. In-class debate practice both aids students in achieving the best goals of college and university education, and serves as an unmatched practice for creating thoughtful, engaged, open-minded and self-critical students who are open to the possibilities of meaningful political engagement and new articulations of democratic life. Expanding this practice is crucial, if only because the more we produce citizens that can actively and effectively engage the political process, the more likely we are to produce revisions of democratic life that are necessary if democracy is not only to survive, but to thrive. Democracy faces a myriad of challenges, including: domestic and international issues of class, gender, and racial justice; wholesale environmental destruction and the potential for rapid climate change; emerging threats to international stability in the form of terrorism, intervention and new possibilities for great power conflict; and increasing challenges of rapid globalization including an increasingly volatile global economic structure. More than any specific policy or proposal, an informed and active citizenry that deliberates with greater skill and sensitivity provides one of the best hopes for responsive and effective democratic governance, and by extension, one of the last best hopes for dealing with the existential challenges to democracy in an increasingly complex world. 

2. Voting aff necessitates utilizing every procedure they critique---evaluating the debate requires an inter-subjective frame for language, some rational standard for what arguments are better, etc---only making these procedures clear up front can allow for fruitful discussion, while the aff insidiously re-creates them POST-HOC which links to all of their offense but can’t solve any of ours – if fairness is bad and the aff wins, vote neg because that’s unfair. Friedrich 11
Rainer Friedrich 11, Department of Classics, Dalhousie University, The Enlightenment Gone Mad (I) The Dismal Discourse of Postmodernism’s Grand Narratives, http://www.bu.edu/arion/the-enlightenment-gone-mad-i-the-dismal-discourse-of-postmodernisms-grand-narratives/

 
Yet the sweeping proclamation of the death of all metanarratives is itself a totalizing metanarrative. It connotes all the postmodern death certificates, each of which is a grand récit in its own right. In their ensemble, they amount to postmodernism’s overarching metanarrative totally contesting Western civilization. In current philosophical parlance, this is known by the somewhat unwieldy term, performative self-refutation. Its ancestry reaches back to the notorious Cretan’s proposition that all Cretans are liars. Performative self-refutation occurs when an argument undercuts itself in the very act of its enunciation, by the form and means through which it is performed. In the attempt to abolish it, Lyotard’s postmodernism is itself practicing the discourse of the grand narrative.¶ Yet the grand narrative of the end of the metanarrative is not the only one of Lyotard’s grands récits. Libidinal Economy, the most Sadean of Lyotard’s books, offers the grand narrative of libidinous intensity as an ubiquitous universal force. Here the dismal science and the dismal discourse converge: “every political economy is libidinal.” Its totalizing Sadean mechanism is patent when dealing with the early industrial proletariat’s conditions of extreme misery, once described in all their horror in Friedrich Engels’ classic, The Condition of the Working Class in England. It translates this misery into erotic jouissance: the proletariat is alleged to have wished, willed, and desired the ruin of its health in the hell of mines, foundries, and factories, along with the disintegration of personal identity in anonymous slums, because it experienced all this as the gratification of masochistic desire. It was only when its libidinous intensity grew too strong and thus became unbearable, that the proletariat turned to revolt.22 Libidinal Economy amounts to a bizarre metaphysics of libido, a totalizing metanarrative involving emancipation: the liberation of Desire as the marginalized and suppressed Other.23¶ Yet this is not all. Confronted, after his verdict on grand narratives, with a triumphalist capitalism acting out its grand narrative of market-fundamentalism, Lyotard changed register. Capitalism’s triumph became part of a narrative he dubbed a “postmodern fable” (moralité).24 This tells the story of energy from the beginning of life on earth to the ineluctable disappearance of the solar system, and beyond. Spanning nine billion years of development, of which capitalism’s rise to an unrivaled global system is but a tiny subdivision, it grows into the grand narrative of entropy and negentropy. Negentropy denotes the force counteracting entropy through the organization of energy into ever more complex systems, ultimately enabling mankind, according to Lyotard, to “elude the catastrophe by abandoning its cosmic site, the solar system.” The catastrophe is entropy—“a tragedy about energy. Like Oedipus Rex, it ends badly. Like Oedipus at Colonus, it admits a final remission.”¶ Lyotard does his level best in trying to present his postmodern fable as a non-metanarrative. He insists that it is not a narrative of emancipation, for there is no human subject to be emancipated: “humans are an invention of development. The hero of the fable is not the human species, but energy.” The human species, in his fable, “is taken for a complex material system; consciousness, for an effect of language; and language, for a highly complex material system.” Humankind is presented as the effect of the development of energy: it will, if all goes well, develop into “the negentropic system” that will make possible “the final exodus . . . far from the Earth.” One discerns the usual suspects: postmodern anti-subjectivism asserting a process without a subject; postmodern anti-humanism reducing humanity to an effect of such a process, the outcome of which is not the rescue of an emancipated humankind, but “the rescue of a very differentiated system, a kind of super-brain”; and post-modernity’s linguistic-textualist ontology that turnsall andeverything into the effects of language. The fable’s lack of finality, the absence of a promise of,or the hope for, a “final perfection,”Lyotard claims, are proof that his postmodern fable is not a totalizing metanarrative.25 It ends with a Nietzschean flourish, echoing the amorality of Libidinous Economy: “the fable is unaware of good and evil.”¶ It’s a nice try, and a very elegant one at that, a far cry from the feverish rhetoric of Libidinal Economy. But Lyotard is protesting too much. Calling it a fable—that is, a petit récit—cannot conceal that its content is that of a grand récit, and one of emancipation to boot.26 For all the post-structuralist spin that Lyotard puts on his moralité of entropy and negentropy, the fact remains that it is the human brain—unmaking and remaking itself to strive for ever-increasing complexity—that becomes the motor and the agency of the process. In Lyotard’s grand narrative, the human brain may have originally been the effect of development; but once it has attained the capability of self-consciousness, self-reference, and self-critique, it takes charge of the process as its chief agent. In short, the Lyotardian fable of mankind’s escape from the doom of entropy surpasses in scope all known metanarratives as the grand narrative of human self-emancipation from its ties to a doomed earth. So much for his incredulity towards metanarratives!¶ As for performative self-refutation: at the height of his insouciance, Lyotard offers, as another definition of post-modernity, its ready acceptance of paradox coupled with disdain for coherence. “Post-modern science,” he says, “is theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, non-rectifiable and paradoxical”—with the consequence, it would seem, that one does not abjure reason and its principles with impunity, and that goofing and screw-ups are the price one pays. Thus postmodern discourses, when critically analyzed, emerge as pitted against themselves and become the opposite of what they claim to be.¶ The mother of all postmodern performative self-refutations, their archetype as it were, is found in deconstruction’s totalizing critique of logocentric reason. Jacques Derrida himself gives it its most pronounced expression:¶ The unsurpassable, unique, and imperial grandeur of the order of reason . . . is that one cannot speak out against it except by being for it, that one can protest it only from within it; and within its domain, Reason leaves us only the recourse to stratagems and strategies. The revolution against reason . . . can be made only within it.27¶¶ In order to dismantle logocentric reason, deconstruction is bound to have recourse to—logocentric reason! It has to reason against reason. Thus Deconstruction remains inescapably trapped in the “unsurpassable, unique, and imperial grandeur” of reason’s order; and it is to Derrida’s credit that he, unlike his fellow post-structuralists, is fully aware of it. To try to escape it, Derrida would have to resort, as he does elsewhere with other terms, to the procedure of putting “under erasure” (sous rature), i.e., of crossing through in the cited passage that which he is forced to use and practice, but aims to deconstruct: Reason. Crossing through, not crossing out: it could not be crossed out because reason, while being deconstructed, is nevertheless operative as the indispensable framework and vehicle of its deconstruction. But to no avail. This elegant sophistic trick of having it both ways, inherited from Heidegger,28 would simply highlight deconstruction’s fatal flaw: that it has to feed on, and is thus parasitically dependent on, what it endeavors to dismantle. Invisible erasures perforce accompany all operations of deconstruction, using the panoply of LOGOS (reason) to dislodge and dismantle logos and truth, and implicitly making truth-claims for deconstructive tenets. Thus, far from being able to demolish the logos, it confirms its ineluctability. Through its parasitic dependency on the very logos that it tries to deconstruct, Deconstruction deconstructs itself by revealing itself as a latent logocentrism.¶The same parasitic dependence on the object of their attempted destruction obtains in the Nietzschean and Heideggerian project of the “destruction of metaphysics” and its modern derivation, enlightenment reason. Here is Derridaon the Nietzschean and Heideggerian anti-metaphysical discourses:¶ Derrida Quote Begins But all these discourses and all their analogues are trapped in a kind of circle. This circle is unique. It describes the form of the relation between the history of metaphysics and the destruction of the history of metaphysics. There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics. We have no language—no syntax and no lexicon—which is foreign to this history; we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.29¶ Derrida Quote Ends Postmodernism’s wholesale critique of enlightenment reason, arising from these roots, faces a similar dilemma. It implicates itself in the most virulent performative self-refutation, as Habermas has demonstrated.30 In fact, the whole development from Nietzschevia decisionism to post-structuralism appears to be one colossal performative self-refutation. The postmodern enterprise of enlightenment-bashing from Nietzsche to Foucault and Derrida is predicated on the enlightenment (“the implicit postulation of precisely what it seeks to contest”). Or rather, the postmodern enterprise is itself enlightenment: what has started in Nietzsche’s critical thinking, and continues in the postmodern discourses, is the attempt to enlighten the enlightenment about itself and its perceived evils. The Nietzschean and postmodern critique of enlightenment reason is essentially the application of enlightenment reason’s own principle, critical reflection, to itself. Kant had done this, aiming at circumscribing the legitimate realm of pure reason; his critique was, in fact, reason’s self-critique, the only possible form of Vernunftkritik. But the totalizing nature of the Nietzschean and postmodern critique of enlightenment reason—critique of reason tout court—aiming, as it does (unlike the Kantian) not at its delimitation, but at its destruction, gives rise to nothing less than reason’s self-cannibalization—just like that of Appetite in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida: “And Appetite, an universal wolf / (so doubly seconded by will and power) / must make perforce an universal prey / and last eat up himself.”31 This can only result in a dreadful irrationalism. It is this, in Stanley Rosen’s striking aphorism, that renders postmodernism “the enlightenment gone mad.”¶
Process is more important than product – policy scenarios give us the best decision making skills.  Hanghoj 08

Hanghoj 08 Thorkild Hanghøj, Copenhagen, 2008 Since this PhD project began in 2004, the present author has been affiliated with DREAM (Danish Research Centre on Education and Advanced Media Materials), which is located at the Institute of Literature, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. Research visits have taken place at the Centre for Learning, Knowledge, and Interactive Technologies (L-KIT), the Institute of Education at the University of Bristol and the institute formerly known as Learning Lab Denmark at the School of Education, University of Aarhus, where I currently work as an assistant professor. http://static.sdu.dk/mediafiles/Files/Information_til/Studerende_ved_SDU/Din_uddannelse/phd_hum/afhandlinger/2009/ThorkilHanghoej.pdf

Joas’ re-interpretation of Dewey’s pragmatism as a “theory of situated creativity” raises a critique of humans as purely rational agents that navigate instrumentally through meansends- schemes (Joas, 1996: 133f). This critique is particularly important when trying to understand how games are enacted and validated within the realm of educational institutions that by definition are inscribed in the great modernistic narrative of “progress” where nation states, teachers and parents expect students to acquire specific skills and competencies (Popkewitz, 1998; cf. chapter 3). However, as Dewey argues, the actual doings of educational gaming cannot be reduced to rational means-ends schemes. Instead, the situated interaction between teachers, students, and learning resources are played out as contingent re-distributions of means, ends and ends in view, which often make classroom contexts seem “messy” from an outsider’s perspective (Barab and Squire, 2004). 4.2.3. Dramatic rehearsal The two preceding sections discussed how Dewey views play as an imaginative activity of educational value, and how his assumptions on creativity and playful actions represent a critique of rational means-end schemes. For now, I will turn to Dewey’s concept of dramatic rehearsal, which assumes that social actors deliberate by projecting and choosing between various scenarios for future action. Dewey uses the concept dramatic rehearsal several times in his work but presents the most extensive elaboration in Human Nature and Conduct: Deliberation is a dramatic rehearsal (in imagination) of various competing possible lines of action… It is an experiment in finding out what the various lines of possible action are really like (...) Thought runs ahead and foresees outcomes, and thereby avoids having to await the instruction of actual failure and disaster. An act overtly tried out is irrevocable, its consequences cannot be blotted out. An act tried out in imagination is not final or fatal. It is retrievable (Dewey, 1922: 132-3).    This excerpt illustrates how Dewey views the process of decision making (deliberation) through the lens of an imaginative drama metaphor. Thus, decisions are made through the imaginative projection of outcomes, where the “possible competing lines of action” are resolved through a thought experiment. Moreover, Dewey’s compelling use of the drama metaphor also implies that decisions cannot be reduced to utilitarian, rational or mechanical exercises, but that they have emotional, creative and personal qualities as well. Interestingly, there are relatively few discussions within the vast research literature on Dewey of his concept of dramatic rehearsal. A notable exception is the phenomenologist Alfred Schütz, who praises Dewey’s concept as a “fortunate image” for understanding everyday rationality (Schütz, 1943: 140). Other attempts are primarily related to overall discussions on moral or ethical deliberation (Caspary, 1991, 2000, 2006; Fesmire, 1995, 2003; Rönssön, 2003; McVea, 2006). As Fesmire points out, dramatic rehearsal is intended to describe an important phase of deliberation that does not characterise the whole process of making moral decisions, which includes “duties and contractual obligations, short and long-term consequences, traits of character to be affected, and rights” (Fesmire, 2003: 70). Instead, dramatic rehearsal should be seen as the process of “crystallizing possibilities and transforming them into directive hypotheses” (Fesmire, 2003: 70). Thus, deliberation can in no way guarantee that the response of a “thought experiment” will be successful. But what it can do is make the process of choosing more intelligent than would be the case with “blind” trial-and-error (Biesta, 2006: 8). The notion of dramatic rehearsal provides a valuable perspective for understanding educational gaming as a simultaneously real and imagined inquiry into domain-specific scenarios. Dewey defines dramatic rehearsal as the capacity to stage and evaluate “acts”, which implies an “irrevocable” difference between acts that are “tried out in imagination” and acts that are “overtly tried out” with real-life consequences (Dewey, 1922: 132-3). This description shares obvious similarities with games as they require participants to inquire into and resolve scenario-specific problems (cf. chapter 2). On the other hand, there is also a striking difference between moral deliberation and educational game activities in terms of the actual consequences that follow particular actions. Thus, when it comes to educational games, acts are both imagined and tried out, but without all the real-life consequences of the practices, knowledge forms and outcomes that are being simulated in the game world. Simply put, there is a difference in realism between the dramatic rehearsals of everyday life and in games, which only “play at” or simulate the stakes and   risks that characterise the “serious” nature of moral deliberation, i.e. a real-life politician trying to win a parliamentary election experiences more personal and emotional risk than students trying to win the election scenario of The Power Game. At the same time, the lack of real-life consequences in educational games makes it possible to design a relatively safe learning environment, where teachers can stage particular game scenarios to be enacted and validated for educational purposes. In this sense, educational games are able to provide a safe but meaningful way of letting teachers and students make mistakes (e.g. by giving a poor political presentation) and dramatically rehearse particular “competing possible lines of action” that are relevant to particular educational goals (Dewey, 1922: 132). Seen from this pragmatist perspective, the educational value of games is not so much a question of learning facts or giving the “right” answers, but more a question of exploring the contingent outcomes and domain-specific processes of problem-based scenarios.  

3.  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.

Tournament: Loyola | Round: 2 | Opponent: Mountain View DZ | Judge: Felix Tan
A focus on a priori reason and conceptual abstraction forces oppressed people to divorce themselves from the material conditions caused by whiteness and imagine a world in which whiteness is good.  Curry 13

Dr. Tommy Curry, In the Fiat of Dreams: The Delusional Allure of Hope, the Reality of Anti-Black Violence and the Demands of the Anti-Ethical, Academia.edu, 2013.  NS

The potentiality of whiteness—the proleptic call of white anti-racist consciousness— is nothing more than the fiat of an ahistorical dream. A command ushered before thought engages racism, before awareness of the world becomes aware of what is actual. This is forced upon accounts of racism where whiteness is morally obscured from being seen as is.  Whiteness as is partly determined by what could be, since what is was a past potentiality—a could be. The appeal to the sentimentality, morality, the moral abstraction/distraction of equality—both as a political command and its anthropological requisite—complicate the most obvious consequence of anti-Black racism, namely violence. This moral apriorism urges the Black thinker to conceptualize racism as an activist project rooted in the potential of a world filled with non-racists, a world where the white racist is transformed by Black activity into the white anti-racist.  But this project supposes an erroneous view of the white racist which occludes the reality of white supremacy and anti-Black racism. As Robert F. Williams argues in Negroes with Guns, “the racist is a man crazed by hysteria at the idea of coming into equal contact with Negroes. And this mass mental illness called racism is very much a part of the ‘American way of Life.’” The white racist is not seen as the delusional individual ostracized from society as a result of their abhorrent social pathologies of racist hate. Rather the white racist is normal—the extended family, the spouse, the sibling, the friend of the white individual—the very same entities upon which the inter/intrasubjectivity nexus of the white self is founded. The white he experiences no punishment for his longing for Black servitude and his need to exploit and divest the Black worker here and then of his wealth. The white she has no uneasiness about her raping of—the destruction of generations of Black selves—mothers, children, and men—and today usurps the historical imagery of “the nigger,” to politically vacate Blackness and demonize niggers as beyond political consideration. She rewrites history, pens morality, and embodies the post-racial civil rights subject. As such, racism, the milieu of the white racist is not the exposed pathological existence of the white race, but rather valorized in white individuality, the individuality that conceptualizes their racism as a normative aspiration of what the world should look like, and even more damning, an aspiration that can be supported and propagated in the world. The white racist recognizes the deliberateness of the structures, relations, and systems in a white supremacist society and seeks like their colonial foreparents to claim them as their own. 

And, we should be having a debate about what to do about oppression, not what constitutes oppression – debates are 45 minutes long so endless academic moralizing is circular and gets no where, forgoing the opportunity for real world solutions.
Kant’s transcendental system, not only his personal view, is anti-Black racism.  Black people they lack moral worth in Kant’s critical philosophy which recreates white supremacy.  Eze 97

Eze—1997 (Emmanuel, Professor of Philosophy @DePaul University, “The Color of Reason” in PostColonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader Cambridge: Blackwell Publishing, 1997, 103-131.  NS from file

Over and beyond Buffon or Linnaeus, Kant, in his transcendental philosophy (e.g., Critique of Pure Reason), describes ways of orienting oneself geographically in space, mathematically in space and time, and, logically, in the construction of both categories into other sorts of consistent whole. In the Observations on the Feeling o/the Beautiful and Sublime, a work which ought to be considered as primarily anthropological, Kant shows the theoretic transcendental philosophical position at work when he attempts to work out and establish how a particular (moral) feeling relates to humans generally, and how it differs between men and women, and among different races. For example, "feeling" as it appears in the title of the work refers to a specific refinement of character which is universally properly human: that is, belonging to human nature as such. And we recall that for Kant "human nature" resides in the developmental expression of rational-moral "character." Since it is character that constitutes the specificity of human nature, "human nature proper," then whatever dignity or moral worth the individual" may have is derived from the fact that one has struggled to develop one's character, or one's humanity, as universal. Kant states: In order to assign man into a system of living nature, and thus to characterize him, no other alternative is left than this: that he has a character which he himself creates by being capable of perfecting himself after the purposes chosen by himself. Through this, he, as an animal endowed with reason (animale rationabile) can make out of himself a rational animal (animale rationale). "Character," as the moral formation of personality, seems to be that on which basis humans have worth and dignity, and one consequence of this is that those peoples and "races" to whom Kant assigns minimal or pseudo rational-moral capacity - either because of their non-"white" skin color (evidence of lack of "true talent") or because of the presence of phlogiston in their blood or both - are seriously naturally or inherently inferior to those who have the "gift" of higher rational attainments, evidence of which is seen in their superior "white" skin color, the absence of phlogiston in their blood, and the superior European civilization While the non-European may have "value," it is not certain that he or she has true "worth." According to Kant: everything has either a value or a worth. What has value has a substitute which can replace it as its equivalent; but whatever is, on the other hand, exalted above all values, and thus lacks an equivalent ... has no merely relative value, that is, a price, but rather an inner worth,. that is dignity ... Hence morality, and humanity, in so far as it is capable of morality, can alone possess dignity. If non-white peoples lack "true" rational character (Kant believes, for example, that the character of the Mohr is made up of imagination rather than reason) and therefore lack "true" feeling and moral sense, then they do not have "true" worth, or dignity. The black person, for example, can accordingly be denied full humanity, since full and "true" humanity accrues only to the white European. For Kant European humanity is the humanity par excellence.
The alternative is anti ethics –a rupture of ideal theory, western conceptions of man and moral abstraction.  Curry 13

Dr. Tommy Curry, In the Fiat of Dreams: The Delusional Allure of Hope, the Reality of Anti-Black Violence and the Demands of the Anti-Ethical, Academia.edu, 2013.  NS

Anti-ethics; the call to demystify the present concept of man as illusion, as delusion, and as stratagem, is the axiomatic rupture of white existence and the multiple global oppressions like capitalism, militarism, genocide, and globalization, that formed the evaluative nexus which allows whites to claim they are the civilized guardians of the world’s darker races. It is the rejection of white virtue, the white’s axiomatic claim to humanity that allows the Black, the darker world to sow the seeds of consciousness towards liberation from oppression. When white (in)humanity is no longer an obstacle weighed against the means for liberation from racism, the oppressed are free to overthrow the principles that suggest their paths to liberation are immoral and hence not possible. To accept the oppressor as is, the white made manifest in empire, is to transform white western (hu)man from semi-deitous sovereign citizen to contingent, mortal, and un-otherable. Exposing the inhumanity of white humanity is the destruction/refusal of the disciplinary imperative for liberal reformism and dialogue as well as a rejection of the social conventions that dictate speaking as if this white person, the white person and her white people before you are in fact not racist white people, but tolerable—not like the racist white people abstracted from reality, but really spoken of in conversations about racism. The revelatory call, the coercively silenced but intuitive yearning to describe the actual reality set before Black people in an anti-Black society, is to simply say there is no negotiating the boundaries of anti-Blackness or the horizons of white supremacy. Racism, the debasement of melaninated bodies and nigger-souls, is totalizing. 

Solves case – the reason unethical things happen is that people are devalued as humans – solving racism is at the heart of that.

The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater who best methodologically resists oppression by rejecting philosophical abstraction and racist thought.  Smith 13 

Elijah Smith, A Conversation in Ruins: Race and Black Participation in Lincoln Douglas Debate, Vbriefly, 2013.  NS

It will be uncomfortable, it will be hard, and it will require continued effort but the necessary step in fixing this problem, like all problems, is the community as a whole admitting that such a problem with many “socially acceptable” choices exists in the first place. Like all systems of social control, the reality of racism in debate is constituted by the singular choices that institutions, coaches, and students make on a weekly basis. I have watched countless rounds where competitors attempt to win by rushing to abstractions to distance the conversation from the material reality that black debaters are forced to deal with every day. One of the students I coached, who has since graduated after leaving debate, had an adult judge write out a ballot that concluded by “hypothetically” defending my student being lynched at the tournament. Another debate concluded with a young man defending that we can kill animals humanely, “just like we did that guy Troy Davis”. Community norms would have competitors do intellectual gymnastics or make up rules to accuse black debaters of breaking to escape hard conversations but as someone who understands that experience, the only constructive strategy is to acknowledge the reality of the oppressed, engage the discussion from the perspective of authors who are black and brown, and then find strategies to deal with the issues at hand. It hurts to see competitive seasons come and go and have high school students and judges spew the same hateful things you expect to hear at a Klan rally. A student should not, when presenting an advocacy that aligns them with the oppressed, have to justify why oppression is bad. Debate is not just a game, but a learning environment with liberatory potential. Even if the form debate gives to a conversation is not the same you would use to discuss race in general conversation with Bayard Rustin or Fannie Lou Hamer, that is not a reason we have to strip that conversation of its connection to a reality that black students cannot escape.

Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 3 | Opponent: Valley SC | Judge: Lawrence Zhao
We exist in the Anthropocene, the era of environmental destruction and climate change brought about by human consumption, which changes the political stakes of the ballot - the magnitude of its implications must unite all people at an existential level for a macro political response.

The role of the ballot is to endorse the best method for combatting the Anthropocene

Institutional solutions through policy are required – localism and rejecting the state prevent collective political organizing against ecological destruction. Localism isn’t mutually exclusive with macro-political solutions, but it can’t effectively respond to the Anthropocene—prioritizing policy is the only option. Biermann 14

- two links – local politics and not using the state

Biermann 14—Environmental Policy Analysis, VU University
(Frank, “The Anthropocene: A governance perspective”, The Anthropocene Review 2014 1: 57, dml)

The classification of a new epoch in planetary history as the ‘Anthropocene’ is fundamentally changing how we understand our political systems. The transition from the Holocene to an Anthropocene signifies a new role for humankind: from a species that had to adapt to changes in their natural environment to one that has become a driving force in the planetary system (Steffen et al., 2011; Zalasiewicz et al., 2011). Yet the human species, as the defining element of this notion of an Anthropocene, remains a highly abstract concept. It masks the multitude and variety of human agency, the differences in human resources and the diversity of human desires. It masks, in particular, the political nature of human society. Following Aristotle, humans are a zoon politikon, a ‘political animal’ that distinguishes itself from other species by its capacity to collectively organize its affairs through joint institutions. This political characteristic of humans is fundamental also for the notion of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is political; it has to be understood as a global political phenomenon (see, in more detail, Biermann, forthcoming). To start with, the Anthropocene creates, changes or reinforces multiple interdependence relations within and among human societies. For one thing, it creates new forms and degrees of interdependence among the more than 190 formally sovereign countries and their national jurisdictions. Some of these new interdependencies emerge from functions of the Earth System that transform local pollution into changes of the global system that affect other places that have (much) less contributed to the problem, with examples being climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion, the global distribution of persistent organic pollutants and the global spread of species with potential harm for local ecosystems. Countries are also becoming more interdependent when local environmental degradation leads to transregional or global social, economic and political crises, for instance through decreases in food production that raise global food demand and prices. In short, the Anthropocene creates a new dependence of states, even the most powerful ones, on the community of all other nations. This is a defining characteristic as well as a key challenge that requires an effective institutional framework for global cooperation. Second, the Anthropocene increases the functional interdependence of human societies. For example, political response strategies in one economic sector are likely to have repercussions for many others. Functional interdependence also relates to the mutual substitutability of response options, which poses special problems of international allocation. In climate governance, for example, for every global policy target there are an unlimited number of possible combinations of local responses across nations and time frames with equal degrees of effectiveness. In short, increased functional interdependence in the Anthropocene requires new degrees of effective policy coordination and integration, from local to global levels. Third, the Anthropocene creates new intergenerational dependencies that pose novel political challenges. Causation and effect of transformations of the Earth System are usually separated by (often several) generations. Sea-level rise, for example, is expected within a time-range of 100 years and more. Such planning horizons exceed the tenure and often the lifetime of present political leaders. Among other things, this poses the questions of international credibility and trust that future governments will reciprocate and comply with international rules, and the problem of democratic legitimacy of policies in the intergenerational context. What rights and responsibilities do present generations – and their representatives in parliament – owe to their unborn successors? And to what extent can present generations be held accountable for activities of their ancestors, for instance regarding the burning of fossil fuels in Europe before the greenhouse effect became more widely known in the 1990s? Fourth, the Anthropocene comes with persistent uncertainty about the causes of Earth System transformation, its impacts, the links between various causes and response options, and the broader effects of policies. Most transformations, such as global climate change, are non-linear and might accelerate, or slow down, at any time. Surprises in system behaviour can be expected, but are by definition unforeseeable. This creates a new political context, as exemplified by Ulrich Beck’s notion of a global ‘risk society’. Finally, the Anthropocene is an epoch that sees the human species with extreme variations in wealth, health, living standards, education and most other indicators that define wellbeing. According to the World Bank, the richest 20 of humanity account for 76.6 of the world’s total private consumption. The poorest 20, on their part, account for just 1.5 of global wealth. Almost half of humanity – roughly, 3 billion people – lives on less than US$2.5 per day (Chen and Ravallion, 2008). 850 million people lack sufficient food. The poorest 25 of humanity still has no access to electricity (United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 2007). About one-third of all children in developing countries are underweight, and every day, 20,000 children die of poverty (United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 2004). Today, 1 billion people lack sufficient access to water, and 2.6 billion have no basic sanitation (UNDP, 2006). Politics in the Anthropocene has to operate in this global situation of large inequalities in resources and entitlements. All these developments call for a new perspective also in political science. One such new perspective is a newly emerging paradigm in the social sciences, ‘Earth System’governance (Biermann, 2007; Biermann et al., 2009). The Earth System governance paradigm is a response and a reaction in the social sciences to the notion of an Anthropocene (and related concepts such as Earth System analysis). It accepts the core tenet of the Anthropocene, that is, the understanding of the Earth as an integrated, interdependent system transformed by the interplay of human and non-human agency. The focus of Earth System governance is not ‘governing the Earth’, or the management of the entire process of planetary evolution. Instead, Earth System governance is about the human impact on planetary systems. It is about the societal steering of human activities with regard to the longterm stability of geobiophysical systems. The notion of Earth System governance now underpins a 10-year global research initiative under the auspices of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change. This initiative – the Earth System Governance Project – was launched in 2009 and has evolved into a broad, vibrant and global community of researchers who share an interest in the analysis of Earth System governance and in the exploration of how to reform the ways in which human societies (fail to) steer their co-evolution with nature at the planetary scale. More than 2500 colleagues are subscribed to the Earth System Governance newsletter, and about 250 researchers belong to the group of lead faculty and research fellows closely affiliated with the Project. The term ‘Earth System governance’ already generates about 450,000 Google hits daily. Research on Earth System governance needs to address both analytical and normative questions. The analytical theory of Earth System governance studies the emerging phenomenon of Earth System governance as it is expressed in hundreds of international regimes, international bureaucracies, national agencies, local and transnational activist groups, expert networks, etc. The analytical perspective is, in short, about how the current governance system functions. The normative theory of Earth System governance is the critique of the existing systems of governance in light of the exigencies of Earth System transformation in the Anthropocene. The normative theory understands Earth System governance as a political reform programme that will benefit from both evidence-based policy research and more fundamental social science critiques of underlying systemic driving forces. Such critiques are surely needed, given that – to name one example – after 20 years of global negotiations and national policies, carbon dioxide emissions in 2010 still grew by 5.9 to a new record high (Peters et al., 2012). In the academic community, pleas for drastic change in global governance are becoming a frequent feature of scientific gatherings. For example, the 2011 Nobel Laureate Symposium on Global Sustainability called in its Stockholm Memorandum for ‘strengthening Earth System Governance’ as one of eight priorities for coherent global action (Third Nobel Laureate Symposium on Global Sustainability, 2011). One year later, the 2012 State of the Planet Declaration, supported by various global change programs and international agencies, called for ‘fundamental reorientation and restructuring of national and international institutions’. It is fundamental, the Declaration continues, ‘to overcome barriers to progress and to move to effective Earth-system governance. Governments must take action to support institutions and mechanisms that will improve coherence, as well as bring about integrated policy and action across the social, economic and environmental pillars’ (Co-chairs of the Planet under Pressure Conference, 2012: C1). A press release preceding this Declaration, supported by the International Council for Science and others, even requests governments to fundamentally ‘overhaul’ the entire UN system (Planet Under Pressure Conference, 2012). In the preparation to the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development, members of the Earth System Governance research alliance had advanced a number of proposals for such an overhaul of the UN system, for example to create a new World Environment Organization and a UN Sustainable Development Council; to better monitor and support private governance mechanisms; to strengthen the involvement of civil society in international institutions; and to more often rely on qualified majority-voting as opposed to the more common system of consensus-based decision-making (Biermann et al., 2012). Yet Earth System governance is not only about strengthening global institutions, which are merely part of the entire effort. Notably, also technological change and incremental policies at local and national levels will remain a driving force of progress in Earth System governance. For instance, just cutting down the emissions of black carbon and methane – which is a precursor of tropospheric ozone – could be a win-win solution by reducing global mean warming by around 0.5°C by the middle of the 21st century (Shindell et al., 2012). Incremental change by national and regional policies is possible, too. For example, a mix of technological change and climate change policy has allowed the European Union member countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 18 from 1990 while growing their economies at the same time by 48 (European Commission, 2013). Transformations in social behaviour are crucial as well, moving from a focus on mere cooperation and efficiency to broader notions of ‘sufficiency’ (Princen, 2003). Large-scale changes of lifestyles are likely to be non-linear and might depend on ‘social tipping points’ (Lenton et al., 2008: 1792). There is ample historic precedence of drastic changes in perceptions of good and appropriate lifestyles, often motivated by religion, national renaissance (for example, Gandhism) or philosophy. Environment-related changes in public perceptions of good and appropriate living include the public ban on smoking as inappropriate behaviour for movie actors, politicians and other perceived role models; the change in perception of whale-meat consumption that is hardly affected by a recovery in some species stocks; and the rising social movement of vegetarianism. Another example is the increasing acceptance of bicycles as default vehicle of transportation in cities. In October 2013, 70 top managers of Dutch companies publicly left their chauffeur-driven cars behind in support of a week-long national ‘Low Car Diet’ campaign, thus accepting a partial redefinition of the appropriate lifestyle in the most affluent segments of society (Takken, 2013). The branding of bicycle transportation as the ‘new normality’ is also rapidly taking off in parts of North America. New York City, for instance, has, in recent years, increased its network of bicycle lanes by 700 km and counts today 73,000 members in its bicycle sharing programme, with 35,000 rides per day (Kuin, 2013). However, it would mean throwing out the baby with the bathwater if intergovernmental institutions were discarded. The UN system and international negotiations do not stand in an antagonistic relationship with local action and non-state movements. The one needs the other. In a world of over 190 independent nation states, there is no way around strong and effective international cooperation. Effective international cooperation must be a basis for Earth System governance in the Anthropocene. A concerted effort is needed to bring these institutions in line with the exigencies of the changed political context of Earth System transformation. In sum, in the course of the 21st century the Anthropocene is likely to change the way we understand political systems both analytically and normatively, from the village level up to the United Nations. This makes the Anthropocene one of the most demanding, and most interesting, research topics also for the field of political science, which has to develop novel, more effective and more equitable governance systems to cope with the challenges of Earth System transformation.

Climate change disproportionately affects the most marginalized.  Pellow 12

David Naguib Pellow 12, Ph.D. Professor, Don Martindale Endowed Chair – University of Minnesota, “Climate Disruption in the Global South and in African American Communities: Key Issues, Frameworks, and Possibilities for Climate Justice,” February 2012, http://www.jointcenter.org/sites/default/files/upload/research/files/White_Paper_Climate_Disruption_final.pdf

It is now known unequivocally that significant warming of the  atmosphere is occurring, coinciding with increasing levels of  atmospheric CO2. Dr. John Holdren, Director of the White House  Office of Science and Technology Policy, prefers the term “global climate disruption” to “climate change” because it more fully captures the harm being done to the planet (Holdren 2007). The term “climate change” infers a naturally occurring process rather than a disruption created by specific human activity. Moreover, the terms “global warming” and “climate change” might be construed as occurring in a uniform, even, gradual, and benign fashion, none of which is true. One solid indicator of Holdren’s point is the fact that climate disruptions affect communities, nations, and regions of the globe in vastly different ways. While contributing the least of anyone to the causes of climate disruption, people of color, women, indigenous communities, and global South nations often bear the brunt of climate disruption in terms of ecological, economic, and health burdens—thereby giving rise to the concept of climate injustice (Roberts and Parks 2007). These communities are among the first to experience the effects of climate disruption, which can include “natural” disasters, rising levels of respiratory illness and infectious disease, heat-related morbidity and mortality, and large increases in energy costs. They also bear the burdens created by ill-conceived policies designed to prevent climate disruption. The effects of climate injustice have been evident for years. Flooding from severe storms, rising sea levels and melting glaciers affect millions in Asia and Latin America, while sub-Saharan Africa is experiencing sustained droughts. Consider that nearly 75 percent the world’s annual CO2 emissions come from the global North, where only 15 percent of the global population resides. If historic responsibility for climate change is taken into account, global North nations have consumed more than three times their share of the atmosphere (in terms of the amount of emissions that we can safely put into the atmosphere) while the poorest 10 percent of the world’s population has contributed less than 1 percent of carbon emissions. Thus the struggle for racial, gender, and economic justice is inseparable from any effort to combat climate disruption. Climate justice is a vision aimed at dissolving and alleviating the unequal burdens created by climate change. The topic of climate justice is a major point of tension in both U.S. and international policy efforts to address climate disruption because it would require wealthy nations that have contributed the most to the problem to take on greater responsibilities for solutions. For many observers, the path is clear: for humanity’s survival, for justice, and for sustainability, they maintain that we must reduce our emissions  and consumption here at home in the global North.

The external impact outweighs - the Anthropocene causes massive death and exacerbates every form of oppression. The alternative is using the state strategically to combat the anthropocene – we don’t say “state’s always good” but that the question of how to engage can’t be ignored.  Rowan 14

 - extinction impact
 - poverty/starvation impact
 - cede the political/authoritarian control impact

Rowan 14—Wageningen University
(Rory, “Notes on politics after the Anthropocene”, from After the Anthropocene: Politics and geographic inquiry for a new epoch, Prog Hum Geogr February 7, 2014, dml)

The recent popularity of the Anthropocene within the social sciences, humanities, and arts relies in part on the fact that it answers a certain subterranean yearning for a framework in which to address macro-scale concerns after the eclipse of ‘globalization’, a term that seemed to slip off the critical agenda as it sank into the sediment of our political unconscious. The Anthropocene hence presents an opportunity for critical thinking to reconnect with macroscalar concerns in a way that escapes the ideological over-determinations of globalization while engaging with the deep ramifications of anthropogenic environmental change through an examination of the planet’s material processes. Whereas ‘the global’ suggests a relatively flat, anthropocentric conception of the Earth focused on the construction of social relations on the surface, ‘the planetary’, by contrast, points to a more complex, volumic, stratified understanding of an Earth constituted through dynamic geo-social entanglements. Accordingly, the Anthropocene creates opportunities to cast the planet itself as a key player in the drama of human politics rather than simply its stage. This raises the question of what consequences an engagement with the planet has for political thought. What challenges might the Anthropocene present to political thought, and what forms of politics might be adequate to face them? In the space remaining I examine these questions with regard to three broad areas: the relationship between the scale and form of politics; the subject of the Anthropocene; and the relationship between technology and politics. First, while it seems clear that the Anthropocene calls for thinking through the relationship between politics and the planet, it is important not to assume that a certain scale of politics maps naturally against a certain form of politics. More precisely, thinking about politics in planetary terms does not require a totalizing understanding of politics confined to technocratic dreams of a World State or reactionary Big Space geopolitics. How a planetary politics might be understood depends not simply on questions of scale (itself a social constituted and politically contestable concept) but on how the political is conceived. Hence, the Anthropocene marks an occasion to return to fundamental questions of political thought, but within an expanded conceptual horizon produced by a new planetary circumstance. To my mind the political is best understood as a terrain of contestation in which struggles take place on numerous fronts, across different geographic and temporal scales, the chance of successfully shaping social forces being increased if hegemonic alliances can be built across struggles. The Anthropocene potentially widens the scope of the political because understanding social forces as embedded in a dynamic relationship with geophysical forces opens up both as potential objects and sites of political struggle. However, this is not to suggest that the scale of the challenges raised by the Anthropocene has no implication for the form of politics that might take shape in its wake. Indeed, the Anthropocene raises concerns of such vast geographic and temporal scope and depth that any response must involve questions of long-term planning, sustained funding, and significant transnational cooperation and collective organization that effectively render certain forms of politics inadequate. This is especially, perhaps uncomfortably, true of conceptions of politics widely celebrated on the critical Left that emphasize temporary occupations, local direct action, or horizontal and non-representational modes of organization. Yet the Anthropocene seems to demand that some of the problems the critical Left prefers to shy away from, such as representation and institutionalized power, need to be faced anew unless the future is to be ceded to ever more intensive forms of capitalist exploitation, environmental degradation, and the possibility of mass unemployment, escalating food insecurity, resource wars, and increasingly reactionary forms of identity politics. This is not to claim that politics should be constituted around macro-scale concerns alone, but that these must make up a key element of any politics that recognizes the significance of the Anthropocene. Second, there is the question of the subject of the Anthropocene and its implications for politics, already the topic of heated debate. Some have advanced the term Capitalocene as an alternative to Anthropocene on the grounds that the historically specific set of social relations structured around capital accumulation mark a more accurate genesis of global climate change than the activity of a singular, universal humanity, or anthropos. This argument has much to commend it, at once insisting that the Anthropocene not become a depoliticizing meta-abstraction that conceals the constitutive fractures of sociopolitical relations and highlighting the dominant role that the historical development of the capitalist world economy has had in producing it. I am, nonetheless, apprehensive for two reasons. First, the concept of the Capitalocene seems to emphasize social relations internal to the human sphere when perhaps the most important aspect of the Anthropocene is that it allows the distinction between the social and the natural, the human and the inhuman to be muddied by way of their mutually constitutive intrusions. Second, even if it can be granted that capitalist social relations created the conditions for the Anthropocene, the Anthropocene’s effects will be universal, shaping all future human communities (although unevenly) regardless of what new forms of social relations may replace capitalism. Even if we regard the Anthropocene to be capitalogenic it has something of a universal address, affecting the lives of everyone even if ‘all’ are not responsible for it equally. In this light, anthropos can be understood not as a pre-constituted identity but rather as the object of political contestation in the struggle to define the terms of future human existence on the planet. In signalling a crisis in our fundamental conceptual categories and our relation to the planet, the Anthropocene appears to raise that old political question: what is to be done? However, it also complicates this question, throwing ideas of agency into a new, problematic light. The question of what then is coupled with its more difficult, demanding twin: how is it to be done? This brings me to the third area of concern: technology. Any attempt to address the long-term, macro-scalar challenges that the Anthropocene presents must be willing to engage with the question of the relationship between politics and technology. This is not to evoke a simple means-ends discussion but to recognize that socio-political formations are bound up with specific technological platforms and energy regimes, so that any alternative future politics must make technology not only a tool but a crucial terrain of struggle. Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, authors of the recent #Accelerate manifesto, have been germane in questioning the critical Left’s knee-jerk reaction to the question of technology and the ease with which discussions slip into well-worn critiques of ‘enframing’, ‘instrumental reason’, and ‘apparatuses’ that exclusively address technology’s ‘great danger’ rather than its ‘saving power’ (Srnicek and Williams, 2013). The Anthropocene should not lead us to simply recoil in horror at the effects of industrialization or remain paralysed by the sense that technological progress can only make things worse. A more open debate about technology and climate politics does of course not mean cultivating a naive technophilia or uncritically accepting geo-engineering’s promise of sublime technical fixes, but rather acknowledging the key role technology must play in any attempt to secure a more socially just and ecologically sound future within the horizon of the Anthropocene. Facing trenchant socioecological challenges that afford neither clear exits nor ‘pure’ positions means jettisoning perspectives that reject technological intervention into complex environments in principle. The question then is not one of abandoning the critique of technology as such, or ignoring the interests served by particular technologies, but rather of making the subjectivities, relations, and forms of life that they might open or foreclose, produce, or negate, sites of political struggle. For example, a ‘progressive’ Leftist approach to the question of ‘climate technologies’ might require a program to establish rigorous institutional norms to effectively govern their use and a radical pluralization of the sites of decision-making and subjects empowered to decide – a difficult labour indeed. Yet the central point remains: political struggles need to be fought over technology rather than against technology. If technology is rejected or neglected as the object of political struggles, then our fate is left to the nostalgia of localist escapisms, the passivity of Leftist melancholia or the reactionary psychosis of Right-wing identity politics, all wholly compatible with the enormous adaptive capacities and increasingly catastrophic trajectory of capitalist economics.

Using the state strategically still allows us to critique it and doesn’t moralize it. Zanotti 14

Dr. Laura Zanotti is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech.  Her research and teaching include critical political theory as well as international organizations, UN peacekeeping, democratization and the role of NGOs in post-conflict governance.“Governmentality, Ontology, Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the Global World” – Alternatives: Global, Local, Political – vol 38(4):p. 288-304,. A little unclear if this is late 2013 or early 2014 – The Stated “Version of Record” is Feb 20, 2014, but was originally published online on December 30th, 2013. Obtained via Sage Database. 

While there are important variations in the way international relations scholars use governmentality theory, for the purpose of my argument I identify two broad trajectories.2 One body of scholarship uses governmentality as a heuristic tool to explore modalities of local and international government and to assess their effects in the contexts where they are deployed; the other adopts this notion as a descriptive tool to theorize the globally oppressive features of international liberalism. Scholars who use governmentality as a heuristic tool tend to conduct inquiries based upon analyses of practices of government and resistance. These scholars rely on ethnographic inquiries, emphasizes the multifarious ways government works in practice (to include its oppressive trajectories) and the ways uneven interactions of governmental strategies and resistance are contingently enacted. As examples, Didier Bigo, building upon Pierre Bourdieu, has encouraged a research methodology that privileges a relational approach and focuses on practice;3 William Walters has advocated considering governmentality as a research program rather than as a ‘‘depiction of discrete systems of power;’’4 and Michael Merlingen has criticized the downplaying of resistance and the use of ‘‘governmentality’’ as interchangeable with liberalism.5 Many other scholars have engaged in contextualized analyses of governmental tactics and resistance. Oded Lowenheim has shown how ‘‘responsibilization’’ has become an instrument for governing individual travelers through ‘‘travel warnings’’ as well as for ‘‘developing states’’ through performance indicators;6 Wendy Larner and William Walters have questioned accounts of globalization as an ontological dimension of the present and advocated less substantialized accounts that focus on studying the discourses, processes and practices through which globalization is made as a space and a political economy;7 Ronnie D. Lipschutz and James K. Rowe have looked at how localized practices of resistance may engage and transform power relations;8 and in my own work, I have studied the deployment of disciplinary and governmental tools for reforming governments in peacekeeping operations and how these practices were hijacked and resisted and by their targets. Scholars who use governmentality as a descriptive tool focus instead on one particular trajectory of global liberalism, that is on the convergence of knowledge and scrutiny of life processes (or biopolitics) and violence and theorize global liberalism as an extremely effective formation, a coherent and powerful Leviathan, where biopolitical tools and violence come together to serve dominant classes or states’ political agendas. As I will show, Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and Sergei Prozorov tend to embrace this position.10 The distinction between governmentality as a heuristic and governmentality as a descriptive tool is central for debating political agency. I argue that, notwithstanding their critique of liberalism, scholars who use governmentality as a descriptive tool rely on the same ontological assumptions as the liberal order they criticize and do move away from Foucault’s focus on historical practices in order to privilege abstract theorizations. By using governmentality as a description of ‘‘liberalism’’ or ‘‘capitalism’’ instead of as a methodology of inquiry on power’s contingent modalities and technologies, these scholars tend to reify a substantialist ontology that ultimately reinforces a liberal conceptualization of subjects and power as standing in a relation of externality and stifles the possibility of reimagining political agency on different grounds. ‘‘Descriptive governmentality’’ constructs a critique of the liberal international order based upon an ontological framework that presupposes that power and subjects are entities possessing qualities that preexist relations. Power is imagined as a ‘‘mighty totality,’’ and subjects as monads endowed with potentia. As a result, the problematique of political agency is portrayed as a quest for the ‘‘liberation’’ of a subject ontologically gifted with a freedom that power inevitably oppresses. In this way, the conceptualization of political agency remains confined within the liberal struggle of ‘‘freedom’’ and ‘‘oppression.’’ Even researchers who adopt a Foucauldian vocabulary end up falling into what Bigo has identified as ‘‘traps’’ of political science and international relations theorizing, specifically essentialization and ahistoricism. I argue here that in order to reimagine political agency an ontological and epistemological turn is necessary, one that relies upon a relational ontology. Relational ontological positions question adopting abstract stable entities, such as ‘‘structures,’’ ‘‘power,’’ or ‘‘subjects,’’ as explanations for what happens. Instead, they explore how these pillar concepts of the Western political thought came to being, what kind of practices they facilitate, consolidate and result from, what ambiguities and aporias they contain, and how they are transformed.12 Relational ontologies nurture ‘‘modest’’ conceptualizations of political agency and also question the overwhelming stability of ‘‘mighty totalities,’’ such as for instance the international liberal order or the state. In this framework, political action has more to do with playing with the cards that are dealt to us to produce practical effects in specific contexts than with building idealized ‘‘new totalities’’ where perfect conditions might exist. The political ethics that results from non-substantialist ontological positions is one that privileges ‘‘modest’’ engagements and weights political choices with regard to the consequences and distributive effects they may produce in the context where they are made rather than based upon their universal normative aspirations.13

Tournament: St Marks | Round: Semis | Opponent: Montgomery WP | Judge: Panel
Expenditure as a strategy can't cope with the changing face of capitalism- it sanitizes neoliberalism
GOUX , PhD, 90
(JEAN-JOSEPH,  Laurence H. Favrot Professor Emeritus of French Studies  @ Rice Yale French Studies, No. 78, On Bataille (1990), pp. 206-224)
Everything suggests that Bataille was unable to articulate the my- stical tension toward sovereign self-consciousness "without form and mode," "pure expenditure" (224) with a utopia of social life that would make it possible, nor to explain in a developed capitalist soci- ety the consumption of the surplus beyond its reinvestment in pro- duction. Now it is quite clear that today's capitalism has come a long way from the Calvinist ethic that presided at its beginning. The val- ues of thrift, sobriety and asceticism no longer have the place that they held when Balzac could caricature the dominant bourgeois men- tality with the characters of pere Grandet or the usurer Gobseck. It is doubtful that the spirit of capitalism, which according to Weber is  expressed with an almost classical purity in Benjamin Franklin's principles ("he who kills a five shilling coin assassinates all that it could have produced: entire stacks of sterling pounds") cited by Bataille, 163, could today be considered the spirit of the times. Un- doubtedly, the pace at which all residual sacred elements inherited from feudalism are eliminated has quickened. But hasn't contempo- rary society undergone a transformation of the ethic of consumption, desire, and pleasure that renders the classical (Weberian) analyses of the spirit of capitalism (to which Bataille subscribes) inadequate? If the great opposition between the sacred and the profane no longer structures social life, if communal, sacrificial, and glorious expendi- ture has been replaced by private expenditure, it is no less true that advanced capitalism seems to exceed the principle of restricted econ- omy and utility that presided at its beginning. No society has "wasted" as much as contemporary capitalism. What is the form of this waste, of this excess? These questions strike directly at the historical situation and philosophical signification of Bataille's thought. Is it not clear that his passion for the "notion of expenditure,"-which, beginning in 1933, is the matrix of all his economic reflections to come-emerge precisely at a turning point in the history of capitalism, in the 1920s and 1930s, which also saw the appearance of Lukacs and Heidegger?2 Can we not perceive within the principles of secularization and re- stricted economics that were the strength of early capitalism an inter- nal conflict that undermines them, and puts capitalism in contradic- tion with itself ? (209-210)

The critique is ivory tower elitism – only the rich and powerful can afford to expend without reserve.
Wolin, PhD, 04
(Richard,  Left Fascism: Georges Bataille and the German Ideology in  The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism )
One could raise an analogous criticism of Bataille's treatment of potlatch—the public, demonstrative destruction of wealth—as well end page 170 as gift-giving. In truth, only those who possess great wealth can afford to destroy it. Consequently, the option to engage in potlatch does not exist for society's lower classes. 56 Like sacrifice, potlatch is implicated in the reproduction of social hierarchy. Such acts reinforce the status and prestige of those who destroy their wealth. In nearly every case, the practitioners of potlatch belong to the upper strata of society. Those who are forced to passively endure the potlatch are in effect humiliated. Through such acts, their lowly social rank is reaffirmed.(170-1)

Post-date on Bataille matters-capitalism has shifted and outflanked his expenditure theory
Yang  Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara , 00
(Mayfair Mei‐hui  Putting Global Capitalism in Its Place Economic Hybridity, Bataille, and Ritual Expenditure1  Current Anthropology  Vol. 41, No. 4, August/October )
Scholars such as Jean‐Joseph Goux (1998) have pointed to a troubling overlap between Bataille’s views on luxury and sacrificial expenditure and postmodern consumer capitalism. Consumer capitalism is also predicated on massive consumption and waste rather than on the thrift, asceticism, and accumulation against which Bataille directed his theory of expenditure. It exhibits potlatch features in the tendency for businesses to give goods away in the hope that “supply creates its own demand”; it collapses the distinction between luxury and useful goods and between need and desire (Goux 1998). Unlike modernist capitalism, postmodern consumer capitalism is driven by consumption rather than production. Thus, Bataille’s vision of the ritual destruction of wealth as defying the principles of accumulative and productive capitalism does not address this different phase of consumer capitalism, whose contours have only become clear since his death in 1962. 

This isn't a random missed prediction- Bataille's failure to anticipate hedonistic capitalism invalidates his entire sociology
GOUX , PhD, 90
(JEAN-JOSEPH,  Laurence H. Favrot Professor Emeritus of French Studies  @ Rice Yale French Studies, No. 78, On Bataille (1990), pp. 206-224)
Along with this "postbourgeois" capitalism that at once contra- dicts Bataille's sociological interpretation and confirms his on- tological vision, explode the sociocultural contradictions of cap- italism. Daniel Bell has convincingly shown that with the develop- ment of mass consumption and mass credit (which he situates in the 1930s) the puritan ideology of early capitalism entered into contra- diction with an increasingly hedonist mode of consumption favored by capitalism. The entrepreneur's need to revive seduction, to re- spond to competition with promises of evermore complex pleasures, inscribes him in a consumerist ideology directly at odds with the "bourgeois" virtues of sobriety, thrift, and hard work that had assured  the development of production. In this way, the strict moral confines necessary for production enter into contradiction with the ethical liberation (even moral license) necessary to consumption.8 Bataille does not seem to have foreseen this conflict born of abundance and the extraordinary sophistication of production. The Weberian image of capitalism that he maintains, the slightly obsolete conviction that Franklin's precepts of economy and sobriety represent capitalism's morals in its pure state, seem to indicate that Bataille did not imagine the paradoxical situation of postindustrial capitalism where only the appeal to compete infinitely in unproductive consumption (through comfort, luxury, technical refinement, the superfluous) allows for the development of production. (218-9)

The impact is extinction—short term reforms aimed at stabilizing the system only cause harder landing
Robinson 14—professor of sociology, global and international studies, and Latin American studies, at the University of California-Santa Barbara
(William, “Global Capitalism: Crisis of Humanity and the Specter of 21st Century Fascism”, The World Financial Review, May-June 2014, dml)
 
The system-wide crisis we face is not a repeat of earlier such episodes such as that of the the 1930s or the 1970s precisely because capitalism is fundamentally different in the 21st century. Globalisation constitutes a qualitatively new epoch in the ongoing and open-ended evolution of world capitalism, marked by a number of qualitative shifts in the capitalist system and by novel articulations of social power. I highlight four aspects unique to this epoch.1
First is the rise of truly transnational capital and a new global production and financial system into which all nations and much of humanity has been integrated, either directly or indirectly. We have gone from a world economy, in which countries and regions were linked to each other via trade and financial flows in an integrated international market, to a global economy, in which nations are linked to each more organically through the transnationalisation of the production process, of finance, and of the circuits of capital accumulation. No single nation-state can remain insulated from the global economy or prevent the penetration of the social, political, and cultural superstructure of global capitalism. Second is the rise of a Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC), a class group that has drawn in contingents from most countries around the world, North and South, and has attempted to position itself as a global ruling class. This TCC is the hegemonic fraction of capital on a world scale. Third is the rise of Transnational State (TNS) apparatuses. The TNS is constituted as a loose network made up of trans-, and supranational organisations together with national states. It functions to organise the conditions for transnational accumulation. The TCC attempts to organise and institutionally exercise its class power through TNS apparatuses. Fourth are novel relations of inequality, domination and exploitation in global society, including an increasing importance of transnational social and class inequalities relative to North-South inequalities.
Cyclical, Structural, and Systemic Crises
Most commentators on the contemporary crisis refer to the “Great Recession” of 2008 and its aftermath. Yet the causal origins of global crisis are to be found in over-accumulation and also in contradictions of state power, or in what Marxists call the internal contradictions of the capitalist system. Moreover, because the system is now global, crisis in any one place tends to represent crisis for the system as a whole. The system cannot expand because the marginalisation of a significant portion of humanity from direct productive participation, the downward pressure on wages and popular consumption worldwide, and the polarisation of income, has reduced the ability of the world market to absorb world output. At the same time, given the particular configuration of social and class forces and the correlation of these forces worldwide, national states are hard-pressed to regulate transnational circuits of accumulation and offset the explosive contradictions built into the system.
Is this crisis cyclical, structural, or systemic? Cyclical crises are recurrent to capitalism about once every 10 years and involve recessions that act as self-correcting mechanisms without any major restructuring of the system. The recessions of the early 1980s, the early 1990s, and of 2001 were cyclical crises. In contrast, the 2008 crisis signaled the slide into a structural crisis. Structural crises reflect deeper contradictions that can only be resolved by a major restructuring of the system. The structural crisis of the 1970s was resolved through capitalist globalisation. Prior to that, the structural crisis of the 1930s was resolved through the creation of a new model of redistributive capitalism, and prior to that the structural crisis of the 1870s resulted in the development of corporate capitalism. A systemic crisis involves the replacement of a system by an entirely new system or by an outright collapse. A structural crisis opens up the possibility for a systemic crisis. But if it actually snowballs into a systemic crisis – in this case, if it gives way either to capitalism being superseded or to a breakdown of global civilisation – is not predetermined and depends entirely on the response of social and political forces to the crisis and on historical contingencies that are not easy to forecast. This is an historic moment of extreme uncertainty, in which collective responses from distinct social and class forces to the crisis are in great flux.
Hence my concept of global crisis is broader than financial. There are multiple and mutually constitutive dimensions – economic, social, political, cultural, ideological and ecological, not to mention the existential crisis of our consciousness, values and very being. There is a crisis of social polarisation, that is, of social reproduction. The system cannot meet the needs or assure the survival of millions of people, perhaps a majority of humanity. There are crises of state legitimacy and political authority, or of hegemony and domination. National states face spiraling crises of legitimacy as they fail to meet the social grievances of local working and popular classes experiencing downward mobility, unemployment, heightened insecurity and greater hardships. The legitimacy of the system has increasingly been called into question by millions, perhaps even billions, of people around the world, and is facing expanded counter-hegemonic challenges. Global elites have been unable counter this erosion of the system’s authority in the face of worldwide pressures for a global moral economy. And a canopy that envelops all these dimensions is a crisis of sustainability rooted in an ecological holocaust that has already begun, expressed in climate change and the impending collapse of centralised agricultural systems in several regions of the world, among other indicators. By a crisis of humanity I mean a crisis that is approaching systemic proportions, threatening the ability of billions of people to survive, and raising the specter of a collapse of world civilisation and degeneration into a new “Dark Ages.”2
This crisis of humanity shares a number of aspects with earlier structural crises but there are also several features unique to the present:

1. The system is fast reaching the ecological limits of its reproduction. Global capitalism now couples human and natural history in such a way as to threaten to bring about what would be the sixth mass extinction in the known history of life on earth.3 This mass extinction would be caused not by a natural catastrophe such as a meteor impact or by evolutionary changes such as the end of an ice age but by purposive human activity. According to leading environmental scientists there are nine “planetary boundaries” crucial to maintaining an earth system environment in which humans can exist, four of which are experiencing at this time the onset of irreversible environmental degradation and three of which (climate change, the nitrogen cycle, and biodiversity loss) are at “tipping points,” meaning that these processes have already crossed their planetary boundaries.
   2. The magnitude of the means of violence and social control is unprecedented, as is the concentration of the means of global communication and symbolic production and circulation in the hands of a very few powerful groups. Computerised wars, drones, bunker-buster bombs, star wars, and so forth, have changed the face of warfare. Warfare has become normalised and sanitised for those not directly at the receiving end of armed aggression. At the same time we have arrived at the panoptical surveillance society and the age of thought control by those who control global flows of communication, images and symbolic production. The world of Edward Snowden is the world of George Orwell; 1984 has arrived;
   3. Capitalism is reaching apparent limits to its extensive expansion. There are no longer any new territories of significance that can be integrated into world capitalism, de-ruralisation is now well advanced, and the commodification of the countryside and of preand non-capitalist spaces has intensified, that is, converted in hot-house fashion into spaces of capital, so that intensive expansion is reaching depths never before seen. Capitalism must continually expand or collapse. How or where will it now expand?
   4. There is the rise of a vast surplus population inhabiting a “planet of slums,”4 alienated from the productive economy, thrown into the margins, and subject to sophisticated systems of social control and to destruction to a mortal cycle of dispossession-exploitation-exclusion. This includes prison-industrial and immigrant-detention complexes, omnipresent policing, militarised gentrification, and so on;
   5. There is a disjuncture between a globalising economy and a nation-state based system of political authority. Transnational state apparatuses are incipient and have not been able to play the role of what social scientists refer to as a “hegemon,” or a leading nation-state that has enough power and authority to organise and stabilise the system. The spread of weapons of mass destruction and the unprecedented militarisation of social life and conflict across the globe makes it hard to imagine that the system can come under any stable political authority that assures its reproduction.
   Global Police State
   How have social and political forces worldwide responded to crisis? The crisis has resulted in a rapid political polarisation in global society. Both right and left-wing forces are ascendant. Three responses seem to be in dispute.
   One is what we could call “reformism from above.” This elite reformism is aimed at stabilising the system, at saving the system from itself and from more radical responses from below. Nonetheless, in the years following the 2008 collapse of the global financial system it seems these reformers are unable (or unwilling) to prevail over the power of transnational financial capital. A second response is popular, grassroots and leftist resistance from below. As social and political conflict escalates around the world there appears to be a mounting global revolt. While such resistance appears insurgent in the wake of 2008 it is spread very unevenly across countries and regions and facing many problems and challenges.
   Yet another response is that I term 21st century fascism.5 The ultra-right is an insurgent force in many countries. In broad strokes, this project seeks to fuse reactionary political power with transnational capital and to organise a mass base among historically privileged sectors of the global working class – such as white workers in the North and middle layers in the South – that are now experiencing heightened insecurity and the specter of downward mobility. It involves militarism, extreme masculinisation, homophobia, racism and racist mobilisations, including the search for scapegoats, such as immigrant workers and, in the West, Muslims. Twenty-first century fascism evokes mystifying ideologies, often involving race/culture supremacy and xenophobia, embracing an idealised and mythical past. Neo-fascist culture normalises and glamorises warfare and social violence, indeed, generates a fascination with domination that is portrayed even as heroic.
   The need for dominant groups around the world to secure widespread, organised mass social control of the world’s surplus population and rebellious forces from below gives a powerful impulse to projects of 21st century fascism. Simply put, the immense structural inequalities of the global political economy cannot easily be contained through consensual mechanisms of social control. We have been witnessing transitions from social welfare to social control states around the world. We have entered a period of great upheavals, momentous changes and uncertainties. The only viable solution to the crisis of global capitalism is a massive redistribution of wealth and power downward towards the poor majority of humanity along the lines of a 21st century democratic socialism, in which humanity is no longer at war with itself and with nature.

Vote neg to express political dissent beyond the grasp of globalization’s regulatory framework—the act of criticism is what makes democracy effective. This fits within his framework of critical educator
Roland Bleiker 2, professor of international relations at the University of Queensland, Politics After Seattle: Dilemmas of the Anti-Globalisation Movement, conflits.revues.org/1057 

46 While engendering a series of problematic processes, globalisation has also increased the possibility to engage political issues. Before the advent of speed, for instance, a protest event was a mostly local issue. But the presence of global media networks has fundamentally changed the dynamics and terrains of dissent. Political activism no longer takes place solely in the streets of Prague, Seoul or Asuncion. The Battle for Seattle, for instance, was above all a media spectacle, a battle for the hearts and minds of global television audiences. Political activism, wherever it occurs and whatever form it takes, has become intrinsically linked with the non-spatial logic of speed. It has turned into a significant transnational phenomena.¶ 47With the exploration of new terrains of dissent, global activists also face a series of political dilemmas. This essay has addressed two of them : the tension between violent and nonviolent means of resistance, and the issue of unequal representation, the question of who can speak for whom. Rather than suggesting that these issues can be understood and solved by applying a pre-existing body of universal norms and principles, the essay has drawn attention to the open-ended and contingent nature of the puzzles in question. Protest acts against the key multilateral institutions of the world economy will continue, and so will debates about the nature of globalisation and the methods of interfering with its governance. Keeping these debates alive, and seeking to include as many voices, perspectives and constituencies as possible, is a first step towards something that may one day resemble globalisation with a human face.¶ 48But making global governance more humane, more transparent and more democratic is no easy task. Principles of transparency and democracy have historically been confined to the territorial boundaries of the sovereign nation state. Within these boundaries there is the possibility for order and the rule of law. But the space beyond is seen as threatening and anarchical - that is, lacking a central regulatory institution. The standard realist response to these perceptions is well know : protect sovereignty, order and civility at the domestic level by promoting policies that maximise the state's military capacity and, so it is assumed, its security.68 It is questionable to what extent realist policies remain adequate - and ethical for that matter - at a time when process of globalisation have lead to a fundamental transformation of political dynamics.¶ 49The Battle for Seattle, and the media spectacle that issued form it, may well demonstrate that the struggle for power takes place in a realm that lacks a central regulatory institution. But realist interpretations make the mistake of embarking on a fatalistic interpretation of this political realm, constituting conflict as an inevitable element of the system's structure. It may be more adequate - and certainly more productive - to characterise the international system in the age of globalisation and transnational dynamics not as anarchical, but as rhizomatic. For Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari a rhizome is a multiplicity that has no coherent and bounded whole, no beginning or end, only a middle from where it expands and overspills. Any point of the rhizome is connected to any other. It has no fixed points to anchor thought, only lines, magnitudes, dimensions, plateaus, and they are always in motion.69 How, then, is one to reach a moral position in a world of webs, multitudes and multiplicities ? Are the lines, dimensions and plateaus of the rhizome so randomly arranged that we are no longer able to generate the kind of stable knowledge that is necessary to advance critique and, indeed, dissent ? Is the very notion of political foundations still possible at a time when social consciousness gushes out of five-second sound-bites and the corresponding hyperreal images that flicker over our television screens ? Are there alternatives to realist approaches that protect domestic order by warding off everything that threatens it from the outside ? Answers to such questions do, of course, not come easy. And they may not be uniform either. But an adequate response will need to engage in one way or another with the search for political engagements beyond the territorial boundaries of the nation state.¶ 50 An extension of democratic principles into the more ambiguous international realm is as essential as it is difficult. It will need to be based on a commitment to democracy that goes beyond the establishment of legal and institutional procedures. William Connolly has pointed in the right direction when arguing for a democratic ethos. The key to such cultural democratisation, he believes, "is that it embodies a productive ambiguity at its very centre, always resisting attempts to allow one side or the other to achieve final victory."70 Such a model is, of course, the antithesis of prevailing realist wisdom, and perhaps of modern attitudes in general, which seek to achieve security and democracy through the establishment of order and the repression of all ambiguity.71¶ 51Rather than posing a threat to human security, the rhizomatic dimension of the international system may well be a crucial element in the attempt to establish a democratic ethos that can keep up with the pace of globalisation. Some aspects of democratic participation can never be institutionalised. Any political system, no matter how just and refined, rests on a structure of exclusion. It has to separate right from wrong, good from evil, moral from immoral. This separation is both inevitable and desirable. But to remain legitimate the respective political foundations need to be submitted to periodic scrutiny. They require constant readjustments in order to remain adequate and fair. It is in the struggle for fairness, in the attempt to question established norms and procedures, that global protest movements, problematic as they are at times, make an indispensable contribution to democratic politics.¶ 52 The political significance of protest movments is located precisely in the fact that they cannot be controlled by a central regulatory force or an institutional framework. They open up possibilities for social change that are absent within the context of the established legal and political system.72 The various movements themselves are, of course, far from unproblematic. The violent nature of recent actions against neo-liberal governance may well point towards the need for greater political awareness among activists. But such awareness can neither be imposed by legal norms or political procedures. It needs to emerge from the struggle over values that takes place in civil society. The fact that this struggle is ongoing does not detract from the positive potential that is hidden in the movement's rhizomatic nature. These elements embody the very ideal of productive ambiguity that may well be essential for the long-term survival of democracy.

Giroux votes neg
Giroux 13—Professor, English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University, Ontario
(Henry, “Radical Democracy Against Cultures of Violence”, http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/20669-radical-democracy-against-cultures-of-violence, dml)

Casino capitalism's paranoiac and increasingly repressive institutional and ideological apparatuses live in fear of dissent, critical rationality and the possibility of collective struggles moved by the desire for justice and a radical democracy. This is precisely where questions about education and resistance connect to broader debates about producing critical agents capable of acting as engaged and responsible citizens in a substantive democracy. Education matters not simply as a space where students can learn to read texts critically or cite the latest fashionable theorists but where they are taught to actually think critically and connect what they learn to the belief that democracy is desirable, possible and has to be defended and constantly renewed.  And it is precisely this struggle over ideologies, modes of governance, and social relations that necessitates that educators, workers, young people, intellectuals, artists, journalists and others make clear that any attempt to develop a radical notion of democracy must be inextricably tied to a defense of those institutions where critical thinking, informed dialogue and the resurrection of critical agency become possible. It must also be seen as a site of constant struggle.
As Chantal Mouffe argues: "Democracy is something uncertain and improbable and must never be taken for granted. It is an always fragile conquest that needs to be defended as well as deepened. There is no threshold of democracy that, once reached, will guarantee its continued existence."17 In the current historical moment, democracy is not in peril because it has been taken for granted, but because under the various regimes of neoliberalism it is viewed as an excess, a burden, a pathology and a potential threat to the corporate and financial elite. Democracy harbors a political antibody to the concentration of power that now abhors its ideals and discourse of equality, justice, and freedom - made evident in the various revolts and insurrections among young people, workers, and others taking place all over the globe.     
Given the current crisis, educators, artists, intellectuals, youth and workers need a new political and pedagogical language for addressing the changing contexts and issues facing a world in which capital draws upon an unprecedented, ruthless appropriation of resources - financial, cultural, political, economic, scientific, military and technological -to exercise powerful and diverse forms of control. Theorists such as Stanley Aronowitz, Angela Davis, Michael Albert, Michael Yates, Richard Wolff, Bill McKibben, Dorothy Roberts, Michelle Alexander and Michael Lerner have made invaluable contributions toward rethinking the role of labor, abolishing the prison-industrial complex, decoupling capitalism from the war machine, abolishing the world-wide gap between the rich and the poor, addressing ecological sustainability, championing women's rights and the need for a new Marshall Plan. All of these theorists share a recognition that democracy is under siege all over the globe by the forces of neoliberalism and that it is time to reclaim its most noble and promising ideals and practices. All of them have suggested a need to reclaim democracy as a radical rather than liberal ideology, mode of governance, and set of policies. C. Douglas Lummis is right in arguing that "Democracy was once a word of the people, a critical word, a revolutionary word. It has been stolen by those who would rule over the people, to add legitimacy to their rule. It is time to take it back."18
If educators and others are to counter global capitalism's increased efforts to eviscerate democracy as a result of separating the traditional sphere of politics from the now transnational reach of power, it is crucial for them and other cultural workers to develop a political language and educational approaches that reject a collapse of the distinction between market liberties and civil liberties, a market economy and a market society. This suggests developing public spheres capable of constructing forms of moral and political agency willing to challenge neoliberalism and other antidemocratic traditions, including the increasing criminalization of social problems such as homelessness, while resurrecting a radical democratic project that provides the basis for imagining a life beyond the dream-world of capitalism.
Once again, under such circumstances, education becomes more than a business, an obsession with accountability schemes, measurable utility, authoritarian governing structures, a crude empiricism for defining what counts as research, and a site for simply delineating students as consumers and training them for the workforce.  At stake here is the need to recognize and assert the power of schooling, public pedagogy, and the educational influence of the alternative public spheres. Such educational forces are crucial to produce the formative cultures capable of producing the subjectivities, identities, dispositions and capacities necessary to both challenge the various threats being mobilized against the very idea of justice and democracy while also fighting for those ideals, values and policies that offer alternative modes of identity, social relations and politics. More specifically, any viable vision of radical democracy must acknowledge that the foundation for a radical democracy is rooted not merely in economics but in the realm of beliefs, without which there is neither a discourse of critique nor a sense of utopian possibility.
One starting point for addressing the necessity of a radical democracy might be an international movement for the defense of public goods, especially higher education. As such, higher education would be reclaimed and defended as a democratic public sphere and public good rather than a privilege or private right. Such an education should be financed by public funds, committed to pedagogy as the practice of freedom, governed in a democratic fashion, defined as a center of critique, and dedicated to teaching students how to write, learn important skills and think critically. It should also immerse students in those archives of knowledge that enable the full development of the capacities essential to be thoughtfully engaged and socially responsible citizens of the world.
A radical democracy implies a politics, consciousness and ethical commitment that takes seriously a level of shared beliefs, a respect for the commons, and practices that allow the fullest application of the principles of equality, freedom, justice and popular control.19 Radical democracy is not strictly about matters of process, representation, political, and personal rights. It is also about the development of a radical consciousness along with an investment in economic and social rights -b those social and economic provisions that enable people to be free from the deprivations of hunger, shelter, unemployment, and inadequate health care, among others. The very idea of a radical democracy is impossible without the existence of a radical imagination and public vision in which it becomes possible to envision conditions in which people participate in and shape all levels of power and decision making. That is, as Stanley Aronowitz puts it, "in which decisions are lodged with those directly affected by them, a realignment of economy and the polity entailing the reintegration of various aspects of life with smaller regional economic and social units."20
In this instance, radical democracy both registers the need for a critical consciousness as the precondition for people to exercise power in all spheres of life in which power shapes the economic, political and social conditions of their everyday lives and accentuates the need to provide a "critique of centralized power of every sort - charismatic, bureaucratic, class, military, corporate, party, union and technocratic."21  Power and politics in this instance, are about more than economics; they are also about and constitutive of how ideas, hegemony, and those cultural apparatuses engaged in forms of public pedagogy shape desires, needs, values, identities and modes of agency.22  At the same time, it must be recognized that political democracy cannot exist without economic democracy.
A radical democracy is also grounded in a revolutionizing logic in which the conditions for its fulfillment are always under question and indeed have no final or complete end point. Hence, a radical democracy must be viewed as "stubbornly incomplete and the human condition underdetermined."23 Jean-Luc Nancy is right in arguing that a radical democracy is a space of endless determinations,24 which suggests the need to allow differences to emerge peacefully as a central element of critical exchange, dialogue and thoughtfulness.  At stake here is the need to adjudicate conflict thoughtfully without violence and to respond to the myriad forms of "powerlessness that affect citizens of all class and social strata."25 Radical democracy must resist all closure while at the same time arguing for those principles and institutions "in which the democratic ideals of equality, freedom and popular control are allowed their most complete sway and fullest application."26  In defense of such a position, Jacques Derrida points out convincingly that radical democracy is a "democracy to come - because it is the only name for a political regime which declares its historicity and its imperfectability."27  For Derrida, it is "something that has never existed in a satisfactory way and remains to come.28 Democracy is a politics and mode of governance that must always put itself at issue, calling into question the consequences of its regulative principles, while repeatedly assessing the reality of existing institutions against the need for more justice, freedom and equality. This is not a call for endless purification, which can only lead to violence,29 but the call for a society in which democracy becomes synonymous with power for and by the people so as to expand the parameters of justice, dignity and compassion for all people.

Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: Finals | Opponent: Cambridge Rindge OS | Judge: Panel
We should be having a debate about what to do about oppression, not what constitutes oppression – debates are 45 minutes long so endless academic moralizing is circular and gets no where, forgoing the opportunity for real world solutions.
Their philosophy preaches that everyone is equal – this colorblind ideology perpetuates anti blackness under the myth of American liberalism.  Curry 13

Dr. Tommy Curry, In the Fiat of Dreams: The Delusional Allure of Hope, the Reality of Anti-Black Violence and the Demands of the Anti-Ethical, Academia.edu, 2013.  NS

Despite the rhetorical strategies adopted by both Black and white political theorists which urge Blacks and whites alike to demand Americans to continue their allegiance to the foundational de-racialized ethos of the post-Civil Rights era, the reality of the American racism—its sheer recurring violence against Black people—demands more than symbolic rhetorical allusion. To seriously grasp the reality of racist oppression and the sempiternal machinations of anti-Blackness throughout American society be it in its institutions like the prison industrial complex, its policies like Affirmative action, or its manipulation of Black social degradation and economic disadvantage to support pathological theses about disasters like Katrina or cultural deviance as in the death of Trayvon Martin, Darius Simmons, or Jordan Davis, the study of the matter itself—racism—must be a study of a conceptual disengagement with the myth of racial equality and the “automatic progressivism” of the American liberal project. This disengagement is not simply the refusal to accept the idealism of civil rights myth held beyond the realm of fact, but the disengagement with the illusions of democracy and equality that continue to ignore the role that violence has played and continues to play in the subjugation, incarceration, and vilification of Black life. As Dr. A.J. William Myers reveals in his work groundbreaking work entitled Destructive Impulses, ¶ Until at such time white America (and Black America) is openly willing to confront a historical legacy of its own violence (perpetrated against an American people of color), any venture into and/ or expository on race relations becomes an exercise in futility…As a result, therefore, white violence, confined to the subliminal recesses of the American psyche, continues to prevent the transition necessary for the country to move beyond the idea of race. ¶ In America, Blackness and the racism that continues to condemn those historical racialized peoples is violence—it is the forceful and coercion enclosing of human beings to an inferior social, political, and economic status of which their own humanity exceeds. This dehumanizing relegation of the raced citizen is not a gradual or incremental debasement, but rather the historically immediate condition of inferiority that presents progress to be attainable by the cyclical degrees of physical violence against the racialized population. For these racially oppressed peoples, violence is the permanent fixture of existence in America, since it is the vitiation of their humanity that rationalizes the varying techniques of their cultural erasure, birthing the emergent symbolic associations of degradation that replace their invisibility, and empowering the intentional enforcements of their societal exclusions. In fact, it is precisely this triumvirate that gauges what we take to be the negation of the necessity of revolutionary change--since the raced is taken to be present, as a result of a critical redefining of humanity, integrated into society.

The aff’s attempt to whitewash history by ignoring the racist foundations that underlie their theory allows for racial domination to remain invisible – you as a judge must reject the aff’s epistemology and acknowledge the reality of oppression. That’s a voting issue. Leonardo
Leonardo, Zeus. "The souls of white folk: Critical pedagogy, whiteness studies, and globalization discourse." Race, ethnicity and education 5.1 (2002): 29-50. CC

The fragmenting effects of the global economy work in tandem with the fragmenting tendencies of whiteness. As a perspective, whiteness is historicaly fractured in its apprehension of racial formations. In order to ‘see’ the formation in full view, whites have to mobilize a perspective that begins with racial privilege as a central unit of analysis. Since starting from this point would mean whites engage in a thorough historical understanding of ‘how they came to be’ in a position of power, most whites resist such an undertaking and instead focus on individual merit, exception- alism, or hard work. The act of interpreting the totality of racial formations is an apostasy that white students and educators must undertake but one which does not come easy or without costs. The costs are real because it means whites would have to acknowledge their unearned privileges and disinvest in them. This is a different tack from saying that whites benefit from renouncing their whiteness because it would increase their humanity. Whites would lose many of their perks and privileges. So, the realistic appraisal is that whites do have a lot to lose by committing race treason, not just something to gain by forsaking whiteness. This is the challenge. In his discussion of gender and race, Terry Eagleton (1996) provokes a distinction between identity politics and class relations. He calls class position relational in a way that gender and race are not, because possessing a certain skin color or body configuration does not prevent another person from owning such traits. By contrast, a landless laborer occupies a material position because the gentleman farmer owns the land or property. Eagleton goes on to say that being black does not mean one is of a different species from a white person. Pigmentation is not definitive of a general human experience in the same way that freckle-faced people do not constitute an essentialy different human category. In this, Eagleton exposes the racist and patriarchal imagination by highlighting its contradictions and ilogics. However, his analysis leaves out a more powerful explanation of how racism actualy works. Like most oppressive systems, racism functions through an illogical rationalization process. For instance, the one-drop rule, or the Rule of Hypodescent, demarcates blacks from whites by drawing an artiŽ cial and arbitrary line between them in order both to create more slaves and limit people’s power to achieve whiteness. Thus, the power of whiteness comes precisely from its ability to usurp reason and rational thought, and a purely rationalistic analysis limits our understanding of the way it functions. Despite its contradictions, the contours of racism can be mapped out and analyzed and this is what Cheryl Harris (1995) attempts when she compares whiteness to owning property. First, whiteness becomes property through the objectiŽ cation of African slaves, a process which set the precondition for ‘propertizing’ human life (Harris, 1995, p. 279). Whiteness takes the form of ownership, the deŽ ning attribute of free individ- uals which Africans did not own. Second, through the reification and subsequent hegemony of white people, whiteness is transformed into the common sense that becomes law. As a given right of the individual white person, whiteness can be enjoyed, like any property, by exercising and taking advantage of privileges co-extensive with whiteness. Third, like a house, whiteness can be demarcated and fenced off as a territory of white people which keeps Others out. Thus, caling a white person ‘black’ was enough reason, as late as 1957, to sue for character defamation; the same could not be said of a black person being mistaken for ‘white.’ This was a certain violation of property rights much like breaking into someone’s house. In al, whites became the subjects of property, with Others as its objects. As Charles Mils (1997) explains, the Racial Contract is an agreement to misinter- pret the world as it is. It is the implicit consensus that whites frequently enter into, which accounts for their fragmented understanding of the world as it is racialy structured. When confronted with the reality of racial oppression, according to Hurtado, whites respond with: I wil listen to you, sometimes for the Ž rst time, and wil seem engaged. At critical points in your analysis I wil claim I do not know what you are talking about and wil ask you to elaborate ad nauseam. I wil consistently subvert your efforts at dialogue by claiming ‘we do not speak the same language’. (cited in McLaren et al., 2001, pp. 211–212; italics in original) The frequent detours, evasions, and detractions from the circuits of whiteness cripple our understanding of the racio-economic essence of schools and society. It is a distortion of perfect communication in Habermas’s (1984) sense of it which creates what I cal an altogether ‘ideological speech situation.’ That is, communi- cation is ideological to the extent that the ‘ideal speech situation’ is systematicaly distorted, which is different from saying that it is always a bit distorted. As Hurtado plainly describes, radical communication about the Contract meets apathy and indifference, perhaps a bit predictably. Admitting the reality of white racism would force a river of centuries of pain, denial, and guilt that many people cannot assuage. In several instances, both in coleagues’ courses as wel as mine, white students have expressed their emotions and frustrations through tears when white privilege is confronted. In fact, Rains (1997) has described the same event occurring in her courses. Although it might seem cynical or unfeeling to analyze criticaly such an occurrence, it is important to deploy such a critique in the name of political and pedagogical clarity. It is imperative to address the local moment and ‘be there’ for al students but in slicing through the pathos, one also beneŽ ts from re ection on the moment in its larger, global signiŽ cance. The times when I have confronted this scenario can be described as the honest interrogation of racial power engaged by both white and non-white students. At certain moments, some anger has been expressed, sometimes frustration. In general, the milieu is emotional and politicaly charged. How can it not be? In one particular case, I witnessed a situation where a black student interrogated the issue of racial privilege and questioned a white coleague’s comments for failing to do the same. By the end of the exchange, the white student left the room crying and the discussion halted. In another case, an earnest discussion took place about racism and ways to address it in schools. A white student cried because she felt frustrated and a little helpless about how she comes into the fold of becoming an anti-racist educator. After a minute of pause, students of color returned to the discussion at hand, not breaking their stride. In a third instance, in the midst of discussing the importance of building solidarity between teachers against racism, a white student cries and asks her coleagues to remember that they must stay cohesive and support each other as comrades in struggle. A coleague reports a fourth instance where, during a dialogue about the experiences of women of color, a white woman repeatedly insisted that the real issue was class, not race, because her experiences as a woman were similar to the women of color. When a faculty of color informed her that she was monopolizing the discussion and in the process invalidated the voices of women of color, the white woman cried and was unable to continue. In al these cases, we observed the guilt of whiteness prompting the women to cry in shame. Made to recognize their unearned privileges and confronted in public, they react with tears of admission. Discussing (anti)racism is never easy and is frequently suppressed in mainstream classroom conditions. The establishment of the right conditions is precious but often precarious. In the Ž rst case, we must keep in mind that it was the black student who felt dehumanized and subsequently felt enough courage to express her anger about comments she perceived to be problematic. The act of crying by the white student immediately positioned the black student as the perpetrator of a hurt and erased/deraced the power of her charge. A reversal of sorts had just occurred. The white student earned the other students’ sympathy and the professor folowed her to the halway to comfort her white the black student nursed her anger by herself. Likewise, I could not help but feel for the white student. Upon re ection, an important difference needs to be discussed. In the act of crying, the student attenuated the centuries of hurt and oppression that the black student was trying to relay. In the act of crying, the student transformed racism into a local problem between two people. I couldn’t help feeling that other students in the class thought the black person was both wrong and racist, erasing/deracing the institutional basis of what she had to say. The room’s energy suddenly felt funneled to the white student. Clearly, there are more ‘harmonious’ ways of teaching the topic of race and racism. However, they also often forsake radical critique for feelings. Feelings have to be respected and educators can establish the conditions for radical empathy. That said, anger is also a valid and legitimate feeling; when complemented by clear thought, anger is frighteningly lucid. Thus, a pedagogy of politeness only goes so far before it degrades into the paradox of liberal feel-good solidarity absent of dissent, without which any worthwhile pedagogy becomes a democracy of empty forms. White comfort zones are notorious for tolerating only smal, incremental dozes of racial confrontation (Hunter and Nettles, 1999). This does not suggest that educators procure a hostile environment, but a pedagogical situation that fails to address white racism is arguably already the conduit of hostility. It fragments students’ holistic understanding of their identity development through the ability of whiteness to deform our complete picture of the racial formation. It practices violence on the racialized Other in the name of civility and as long as this is the case, racial progress wil proceed at the snail pace of white racial consciousness. White race traitors and progressive Others shal piece together a whole from the fragmentary pieces that whiteness has created out of this world. The Contract challenges educators of the new millennium to explain the untruth of white perspectives on race, even a century after Du Bois’s initial chalenge. Obviously, this does not mean that whites cannot grasp the Contract; many do, but they cannot accomplish this from the white point of view, a world-view which, according to Gibson, projects a ‘delusional world,’ ‘a racial fantasyland,’ and ‘a consensual halucination’ (cited in Mils, 1997, p. 18). With the rise of globalization, education—which prides itself for inculcating into students knowledge about the real world—struggles to represent the world in the most real way possible. White epistemology can be characterized as fragmentary and fleeting because white liveli- hood depends on this double helix. It is fragmentary because in order for whiteness to maintain its invisibility, or its unmarked status, it must by necessity mistake the world as non-relational or partitioned (Dwyer and Jones, III, 2000). This allows the white psyche to speak of slavery as ‘long ago,’ rather than as a legacy which lives today; it minimizes racism toward non-white immigrants today through a convenient and problematic comparison with white immigrants, like the Irish or Jews. It is also fleeting because it must deny the history of its own genesis and the creation of the Other. It can only be concerned with ‘how things are and not how they got to be that way.’ As a socio-spatial epistemology, whiteness sees the world upside-down. Mils (1997) and I agree when he says: Thus on matters related to race, the Racial Contract prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologicaly and socialy functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites wil in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made. (p. 18; italics in original) According to Mils, whiteness concerns itself with racial details and misses the totality of the Racial Contract. Like the way it partitions the world according to its own image, whiteness constructs history as separate racial details without coherence. As a result, it fails to provide our students the language to link together California’s Proposition 187 (anti-immigrant), 209 (anti-afŽ rmative action), and 227 (anti-bilin- gualism) as related to white hegemony. With the exception of particular Asian ethnic groups (to which I wil return later), al three legislations limit the rights of students of color. Fortunately, white and non-white activists have countered such measures with unrelenting protests and public organizing because, as Hopson et al. (1998) remind us, ‘Recognizing and valuing language varieties and multiple ways of speaking among students is a precondition to understanding how to teach them’ (p. 5). As a racial epistemology, whiteness is necessarily idealist in order to construct the Other as abstract, rather than concrete. Enslavement, discrimination, and marginalization of the Other work most efficiently when they are constructed as an idea rather than a people. They can be more easily controled, aggregated as the same, or marked as unchanging and constant when textbooks idealize them as inconse- quential to the history and evolution of humankind. In effect, whiteness eggs us on to yoke together different peoples around the globe under the sign of sameness.

Tournament: Loyola | Round: 2 | Opponent: Mountain View DZ | Judge: Felix Tan
Their ethics ignores the social position of different people and treats all exactly the same. That form of colorblindness is active racism – it shuts off conversations about oppression and only allows white voices to be heard.  Williams 11

Monica Williams, "Colorblind Ideology Is a Form of Racism," Psychology Today http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/colorblind/201112/colorblind-ideology-is-form-racism, December 27, 2011. 

Racial issues are often uncomfortable to discuss and rife with stress and controversy. Many ideas have been advanced to address this sore spot in the American psyche. Currently, the most pervasive approach is known as colorblindness. Colorblindness is the racial ideology that posits the best way to end discrimination is by treating individuals as equally as possible, without regard to race, culture, or ethnicity. At its face value, colorblindness seems like a good thing — really taking MLK seriously on his call to judge people on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. It focuses on commonalities between people, such as their shared humanity. However, colorblindness alone is not sufficient to heal racial wounds on a national or personal level. It is only a half-measure that in the end operates as a form of racism. Problems with the colorblind approach Racism? Strong words, yes, but let's look the issue straight in its partially unseeing eye. In a colorblind society, White people, who are unlikely to experience disadvantages due to race, can effectively ignore racism in American life, justify the current social order, and feel more comfortable with their relatively privileged standing in society (Fryberg, 2010). Most minorities, however, who regularly encounter difficulties due to race, experience colorblind ideologies quite differently. Colorblindness creates a society that denies their negative racial experiences, rejects their cultural heritage, and invalidates their unique perspectives. Let's break it down into simple terms: Color-Blind = "People of color — we don't see you (at least not that bad ‘colored' part)." As a person of color, I like who I am, and I don't want any aspect of that to be unseen or invisible. The need for colorblindness implies there is something shameful about the way God made me and the culture I was born into that we shouldn't talk about. Thus, colorblindness has helped make race into a taboo topic that polite people cannot openly discuss. And if you can't talk about it, you can't understand it, much less fix the racial problems that plague our society. Colorblindness is not the answer Many Americans view colorblindness as helpful to people of color by asserting that race does not matter (Tarca, 2005). But in America, most underrepresented minorities will explain that race does matter, as it affects opportunities, perceptions, income, and so much more. When race-related problems arise, colorblindness tends to individualize conflicts and shortcomings, rather than examining the larger picture with cultural differences, stereotypes, and values placed into context. Instead of resulting from an enlightened (albeit well-meaning) position, colorblindness comes from a lack of awareness of racial privilege conferred by Whiteness (Tarca, 2005). White people can guiltlessly subscribe to colorblindness because they are usually unaware of how race affects people of color and American society as a whole.

The aff’s attempt to whitewash history by ignoring the racist foundations that underlie their theory allows for racial domination to remain invisible – you as a judge must reject the aff’s epistemology and acknowledge the reality of oppression. That’s a voting issue. Leonardo
Leonardo, Zeus. "The souls of white folk: Critical pedagogy, whiteness studies, and globalization discourse." Race, ethnicity and education 5.1 (2002): 29-50. CC

The fragmenting effects of the global economy work in tandem with the fragmenting tendencies of whiteness. As a perspective, whiteness is historicaly fractured in its apprehension of racial formations. In order to ‘see’ the formation in full view, whites have to mobilize a perspective that begins with racial privilege as a central unit of analysis. Since starting from this point would mean whites engage in a thorough historical understanding of ‘how they came to be’ in a position of power, most whites resist such an undertaking and instead focus on individual merit, exception- alism, or hard work. The act of interpreting the totality of racial formations is an apostasy that white students and educators must undertake but one which does not come easy or without costs. The costs are real because it means whites would have to acknowledge their unearned privileges and disinvest in them. This is a different tack from saying that whites benefit from renouncing their whiteness because it would increase their humanity. Whites would lose many of their perks and privileges. So, the realistic appraisal is that whites do have a lot to lose by committing race treason, not just something to gain by forsaking whiteness. This is the challenge. In his discussion of gender and race, Terry Eagleton (1996) provokes a distinction between identity politics and class relations. He calls class position relational in a way that gender and race are not, because possessing a certain skin color or body configuration does not prevent another person from owning such traits. By contrast, a landless laborer occupies a material position because the gentleman farmer owns the land or property. Eagleton goes on to say that being black does not mean one is of a different species from a white person. Pigmentation is not definitive of a general human experience in the same way that freckle-faced people do not constitute an essentialy different human category. In this, Eagleton exposes the racist and patriarchal imagination by highlighting its contradictions and ilogics. However, his analysis leaves out a more powerful explanation of how racism actualy works. Like most oppressive systems, racism functions through an illogical rationalization process. For instance, the one-drop rule, or the Rule of Hypodescent, demarcates blacks from whites by drawing an artiŽ cial and arbitrary line between them in order both to create more slaves and limit people’s power to achieve whiteness. Thus, the power of whiteness comes precisely from its ability to usurp reason and rational thought, and a purely rationalistic analysis limits our understanding of the way it functions. Despite its contradictions, the contours of racism can be mapped out and analyzed and this is what Cheryl Harris (1995) attempts when she compares whiteness to owning property. First, whiteness becomes property through the objectiŽ cation of African slaves, a process which set the precondition for ‘propertizing’ human life (Harris, 1995, p. 279). Whiteness takes the form of ownership, the deŽ ning attribute of free individ- uals which Africans did not own. Second, through the reification and subsequent hegemony of white people, whiteness is transformed into the common sense that becomes law. As a given right of the individual white person, whiteness can be enjoyed, like any property, by exercising and taking advantage of privileges co-extensive with whiteness. Third, like a house, whiteness can be demarcated and fenced off as a territory of white people which keeps Others out. Thus, caling a white person ‘black’ was enough reason, as late as 1957, to sue for character defamation; the same could not be said of a black person being mistaken for ‘white.’ This was a certain violation of property rights much like breaking into someone’s house. In al, whites became the subjects of property, with Others as its objects. As Charles Mils (1997) explains, the Racial Contract is an agreement to misinter- pret the world as it is. It is the implicit consensus that whites frequently enter into, which accounts for their fragmented understanding of the world as it is racialy structured. When confronted with the reality of racial oppression, according to Hurtado, whites respond with: I wil listen to you, sometimes for the Ž rst time, and wil seem engaged. At critical points in your analysis I wil claim I do not know what you are talking about and wil ask you to elaborate ad nauseam. I wil consistently subvert your efforts at dialogue by claiming ‘we do not speak the same language’. (cited in McLaren et al., 2001, pp. 211–212; italics in original) The frequent detours, evasions, and detractions from the circuits of whiteness cripple our understanding of the racio-economic essence of schools and society. It is a distortion of perfect communication in Habermas’s (1984) sense of it which creates what I cal an altogether ‘ideological speech situation.’ That is, communi- cation is ideological to the extent that the ‘ideal speech situation’ is systematicaly distorted, which is different from saying that it is always a bit distorted. As Hurtado plainly describes, radical communication about the Contract meets apathy and indifference, perhaps a bit predictably. Admitting the reality of white racism would force a river of centuries of pain, denial, and guilt that many people cannot assuage. In several instances, both in coleagues’ courses as wel as mine, white students have expressed their emotions and frustrations through tears when white privilege is confronted. In fact, Rains (1997) has described the same event occurring in her courses. Although it might seem cynical or unfeeling to analyze criticaly such an occurrence, it is important to deploy such a critique in the name of political and pedagogical clarity. It is imperative to address the local moment and ‘be there’ for al students but in slicing through the pathos, one also beneŽ ts from re ection on the moment in its larger, global signiŽ cance. The times when I have confronted this scenario can be described as the honest interrogation of racial power engaged by both white and non-white students. At certain moments, some anger has been expressed, sometimes frustration. In general, the milieu is emotional and politicaly charged. How can it not be? In one particular case, I witnessed a situation where a black student interrogated the issue of racial privilege and questioned a white coleague’s comments for failing to do the same. By the end of the exchange, the white student left the room crying and the discussion halted. In another case, an earnest discussion took place about racism and ways to address it in schools. A white student cried because she felt frustrated and a little helpless about how she comes into the fold of becoming an anti-racist educator. After a minute of pause, students of color returned to the discussion at hand, not breaking their stride. In a third instance, in the midst of discussing the importance of building solidarity between teachers against racism, a white student cries and asks her coleagues to remember that they must stay cohesive and support each other as comrades in struggle. A coleague reports a fourth instance where, during a dialogue about the experiences of women of color, a white woman repeatedly insisted that the real issue was class, not race, because her experiences as a woman were similar to the women of color. When a faculty of color informed her that she was monopolizing the discussion and in the process invalidated the voices of women of color, the white woman cried and was unable to continue. In al these cases, we observed the guilt of whiteness prompting the women to cry in shame. Made to recognize their unearned privileges and confronted in public, they react with tears of admission. Discussing (anti)racism is never easy and is frequently suppressed in mainstream classroom conditions. The establishment of the right conditions is precious but often precarious. In the Ž rst case, we must keep in mind that it was the black student who felt dehumanized and subsequently felt enough courage to express her anger about comments she perceived to be problematic. The act of crying by the white student immediately positioned the black student as the perpetrator of a hurt and erased/deraced the power of her charge. A reversal of sorts had just occurred. The white student earned the other students’ sympathy and the professor folowed her to the halway to comfort her white the black student nursed her anger by herself. Likewise, I could not help but feel for the white student. Upon re ection, an important difference needs to be discussed. In the act of crying, the student attenuated the centuries of hurt and oppression that the black student was trying to relay. In the act of crying, the student transformed racism into a local problem between two people. I couldn’t help feeling that other students in the class thought the black person was both wrong and racist, erasing/deracing the institutional basis of what she had to say. The room’s energy suddenly felt funneled to the white student. Clearly, there are more ‘harmonious’ ways of teaching the topic of race and racism. However, they also often forsake radical critique for feelings. Feelings have to be respected and educators can establish the conditions for radical empathy. That said, anger is also a valid and legitimate feeling; when complemented by clear thought, anger is frighteningly lucid. Thus, a pedagogy of politeness only goes so far before it degrades into the paradox of liberal feel-good solidarity absent of dissent, without which any worthwhile pedagogy becomes a democracy of empty forms. White comfort zones are notorious for tolerating only smal, incremental dozes of racial confrontation (Hunter and Nettles, 1999). This does not suggest that educators procure a hostile environment, but a pedagogical situation that fails to address white racism is arguably already the conduit of hostility. It fragments students’ holistic understanding of their identity development through the ability of whiteness to deform our complete picture of the racial formation. It practices violence on the racialized Other in the name of civility and as long as this is the case, racial progress wil proceed at the snail pace of white racial consciousness. White race traitors and progressive Others shal piece together a whole from the fragmentary pieces that whiteness has created out of this world. The Contract challenges educators of the new millennium to explain the untruth of white perspectives on race, even a century after Du Bois’s initial chalenge. Obviously, this does not mean that whites cannot grasp the Contract; many do, but they cannot accomplish this from the white point of view, a world-view which, according to Gibson, projects a ‘delusional world,’ ‘a racial fantasyland,’ and ‘a consensual halucination’ (cited in Mils, 1997, p. 18). With the rise of globalization, education—which prides itself for inculcating into students knowledge about the real world—struggles to represent the world in the most real way possible. White epistemology can be characterized as fragmentary and fleeting because white liveli- hood depends on this double helix. It is fragmentary because in order for whiteness to maintain its invisibility, or its unmarked status, it must by necessity mistake the world as non-relational or partitioned (Dwyer and Jones, III, 2000). This allows the white psyche to speak of slavery as ‘long ago,’ rather than as a legacy which lives today; it minimizes racism toward non-white immigrants today through a convenient and problematic comparison with white immigrants, like the Irish or Jews. It is also fleeting because it must deny the history of its own genesis and the creation of the Other. It can only be concerned with ‘how things are and not how they got to be that way.’ As a socio-spatial epistemology, whiteness sees the world upside-down. Mils (1997) and I agree when he says: Thus on matters related to race, the Racial Contract prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologicaly and socialy functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites wil in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made. (p. 18; italics in original) According to Mils, whiteness concerns itself with racial details and misses the totality of the Racial Contract. Like the way it partitions the world according to its own image, whiteness constructs history as separate racial details without coherence. As a result, it fails to provide our students the language to link together California’s Proposition 187 (anti-immigrant), 209 (anti-afŽ rmative action), and 227 (anti-bilin- gualism) as related to white hegemony. With the exception of particular Asian ethnic groups (to which I wil return later), al three legislations limit the rights of students of color. Fortunately, white and non-white activists have countered such measures with unrelenting protests and public organizing because, as Hopson et al. (1998) remind us, ‘Recognizing and valuing language varieties and multiple ways of speaking among students is a precondition to understanding how to teach them’ (p. 5). As a racial epistemology, whiteness is necessarily idealist in order to construct the Other as abstract, rather than concrete. Enslavement, discrimination, and marginalization of the Other work most efficiently when they are constructed as an idea rather than a people. They can be more easily controled, aggregated as the same, or marked as unchanging and constant when textbooks idealize them as inconse- quential to the history and evolution of humankind. In effect, whiteness eggs us on to yoke together different peoples around the globe under the sign of sameness.

Tournament: Alta | Round: Finals | Opponent: Palo Alto BH | Judge: Panel
A. Historical Amnesia- their historiography totally ignores that class was the central element, historical, of the ascriptive hierarchies that marginalize Asian identity and experience
B. Intertextuality- their focus on linguistic critique/spoken word reinforces a postmodern strategy of obscuring materiality
C. Personal experience- individual oppression as a lens occludes class struggle.
San Juan Jr.PhD 91
 (E,  Beyond Identity Politics: The Predicament o f the Asian American Writer in Late Capitalism  American L ite ra r y H isto ry , Vol. 3, No. 3 (Autumn, 1991), pp. 542-565 )
With the presumed collapse of the transcendental grounds for universal standards of norms and values, proponents of the postmodern “revolution” in cultural studies in Europe and North America have celebrated differance, marginality, nomadic and decentered identities, indeterminacy, simulacra and the sublime, undecidability, ironic dissemination, textuality, and so forth. A multiplicity of power plays and language games supposedly abounds. The intertextuality of power, desire, and interest begets strategies of positionalities. So take your pick. Instead of the totalizing master narratives of Enlightenment progress, postmodern thinkers valorize the local, the heterogeneous, the contingent and conjunctural. Is it still meaningful to speak of truth? Are we still permitted to address issues of class, gender, and race? What are the implications of this postmodern “transvaluation” of paradigms for literary studies in general and minority/ ethnic writing in particular? One salutary repercussion has been the questioning of the Eurocentric canonical archive by feminists, peoples of color, dissenters inside and outside. The poststructuralist critique of the self-identical Subject (by convention white, bourgeois, patriarchal) has inspired a perspectivalist revision of various disciplinary approaches in history, comparative aesthetics, and others. To cite three inaugural examples: Houston Baker’s text-specific inventory of the black vernacular “blues” tradition presented in Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature (1984), Arnold Krupat’s foregrounding of oral tribal allegory in American Indian autobiographies enabled by a “materially situated historicism” in The Voice in the Margin (1989), and Ramon Saldivar’s dialectical assessment of Chicano narrative as an “oppositional articulation” of the gaps and silences in American literary history, a thesis vigor  ously argued in Chicano Narrative (1990). Premised on the notion that everything is socio-discursively constructed, these initiatives so far have not been paralleled by Asian American intellectuals. Who indeed will speak for this composite group? One would suspect that the rubric “Asian American,” itself an artificial hypostasis of unstable elements, would preemptively vitiate any unilateral program of systematization. In addition, Asian Americans’ being judged by media and government as a “model minority,” some allegedly whiter than whites (see Themstrom 252; Lee), makes their marginality quite problematic. Perhaps more than other peoples of color, Asian Americans find themselves trapped in a classic postmodern predicament: essentialized by the official pluralism as formerly the “Yellow Peril” and now the “Superminority,” they nevertheless seek to reaffirm their complex internal differences in projects of hybrid and syncretic genealogy. Objectified by state-ordained juridical exclusions (Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos share this historically unique commonality), they pursue particularistic agendas for economic and cultural autonomy. Given these antinomic forces at work, can Asian American writers collectively pursue a “molecular micropolitics” of marginality? What is at stake if a well-known authority on ethnic affairs like Ronald Takaki (whose recent book affords a point of departure for my metacommentary) tries to articulate the identity-in-difference of this fragmented and dispersed ensemble of ethnoP. (see Grigulevich and Kozlov 17-44). How does a postmodern politics of identity refract the innovative yet tradition-bound performances of the Chinese American Maxine Hong Kingston and the Filipino American Carlos Bulosan? Given the crisis of the postmodern politics of identity, can we legitimately propose an oppositional “emergency” strategy of writing whose historic agency is still on trial or, as it were, on reprieve? My inquiry begins with remarks on Asian American history’s textuality as prelude to its possible aesthetic inscription. In composing Strangers from a Different Shore in a period when the planet is beginning to be homogenized by a new pax EuroAmericana, a “New World Order” spawning (as I write) from the Persian Gulf, Takaki has performed for us the unprecedented task of unifying the rich, protean, intractable diversity of Asian lives in the US without erasing the specificities, the ramifying genealogies, the incommensurable repertoire of idiosyncrasies of each constituent group—a postmodern feat of reconciling incommensurables, to say the least. There are of course many discrete chronicles of each Asian community, mostly written by sympathetic Euro-American scholars before  Takaki’s work. But what distinguishes Takaki’s account, aside from his empathy with his subject and documentary trustworthiness, is its claim to represent the truth based on the prima facie experiences of individuals. At once we are confronted with the crucial problem plaguing such claims to veracity or authenticity: Can these subalterns represent themselves (to paraphrase Gayatri Spivak) as self-conscious members of a collectivityfor-itself? Or has Takaki mediated the immediacy of naive experience with a theory of representation that privileges the homo economicus as the founding subject of his discourse?1 No one should underestimate Takaki’s achievement here in challenging the tenability of the received dogma (espoused by Nathan Glazer and other neoconservative pundits) that the European immigrant model of successful assimilation applies to peoples of color in the US (see Takaki, “Reflections”). Europe’s Others, hitherto excluded from the canonical tradition, are beginning to speak and present themselves so as to rectify the mystifying re-presentation of themselves. In this light, Takaki is to be credited above all for giving Asian Americans a synoptic view of their deracinated lives by making them (as protagonists who discover their roles and destinies in the process) perform the drama of their diverse singularities. This is stage-managed within the framework of a chronological history of their ordeals in struggling to survive, adapt, and multiply in a hostile habitat, with their accompanying rage and grief and laughter. By a montage of personal testimony—anecdotes, letters, songs, telegrams, eyewitness reports, confessions, album photographs, quotidian fragments, cliches and banalities of everyday life—juxtaposed with statistics, official documents, reprise of punctual events, Takaki skillfully renders a complex drama of Asians enacting and living their own history. We can perhaps find our own lives already anticipated, pantomimed, rounded off, and judged in one of his varied “talk stories”—a case of life imitating the art of history. Granted the book’s “truth-effects,” I enter a caveat. For all its massive accumulation of raw data and plausible images of numerous protagonists and actions spanning more than a century of wars and revolutions, Takaki’s narrative leaves us wondering whether the collective life-trajectory of Asian Americans imitates the European immigrant success story, spiced with quaint “Oriental” twists—which he clearly implies at the end. If so, it is just one thread of the national fabric, no more tormented nor pacified than any other. If not, then this history is unique in some way that escapes the traditional emplotment of previous annals deriving from the master narrative of hu mankind’s continuous material improvement, self-emancipation, and techno-administrative mastery conceived by the philosophes of the European Enlightenment. Either way, there is no reason for Asian Americans to feel excluded from the grand March of Progress. Our puzzlement, however, is not clarified by the book’s concluding chapter, which exposes the myth of the “model minority” in an eloquent argument, assuring us that Asian Americans did not “let the course of their lives be determined completely by the ‘necessity’ of race and class” (473). In the same breath Takaki warns of a resurgent tide of racially motivated attacks against Asian Americans manifested in the media, in campus harassments, in the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin mistaken for a Japanese by unemployed Detroit autoworkers (and, I might add here, in the January 1989 massacre of Vietnamese and Cambodian schoolchildren in Stockton, California, by a man obsessed with hatred for Southeast Asian refugees). During this same period, in contrast, the judicial victory of the Japanese concentration camp internees’ demand for redress and reparations as well as the growing visibility of Asian American artists furnishes convincing proof that what David Harvey calls the post-Fordist post-Keynesian system (173-78) still allows dreams to come true, that is, allows Asian Americans the opportunity in particular “to help America accept and appreciate its diversity.” Calculating the losses and gains, Takaki prudentially opts for a meliorative closure. In retrospect, the telos of Strangers from a Different Shore can be thematized as the Asian immigrants’ almost miraculous struggle for survival and recognition of their desperately won middle-class status. What is sought is the redemption of individual sacrifices by way of conformity to the utilitarian, competitive ethos of a business society. Reversing the dismaying prospect for Asian Americans forecast in an earlier survey, American Racism (1970) by Roger Daniels and Harry Kitano, Takaki offers a balance sheet for general consumption: Asian Americans are no longer victimized by legislation denying them naturalized citizenship and landownership. They have begun to exercise their political voices and have representatives in both houses of Congress as well as in state legislatures and on city councils. They enjoy much of the protection of civil rights laws that outlaw racial discrimination in employment as well as housing and that provide for affirmative action for racial minorities. They have greater freedom than did the earlier immigrants to  embrace their own “diversity”—their own cultures as well as their own distinctive physical characteristics, such as their complexion and the shape of their eyes. (473-74) It now becomes clear that despite its encyclopedic scope and archival competence, Takaki’s somewhat premature synthesis is a learned endeavor to deploy a strategy of containment. His rhetoric activates a mode of comic emplotment where all problems are finally resolved through hard work and individual effort, inspired by past memories of clan solidarity and intuitive faith in a gradually improving future. What is this if not a refurbished version of the liberal ideology of a market-centered, pluralist society where all disparities in values and beliefs—nay, even the sharpest contradictions implicating race, class, and gender—can be harmonized within the prevailing structure of power relations? This is not to say that such attempts to empower disenfranchised nationalities are futile or deceptive. But what needs a more than gestural critique is the extent to which such reforms do not eliminate the rationale for the hierarchical, invidious categorizing of people by race (as well as by gender and class) and their subsequent deprivation. Lacking such self-reflection, unable to problematize his theoretical organon, Takaki has superbly accomplished the articulation of the hegemonic doctrine of acquisitive/possessive liberalism as the informing principle of Asian American lives. Whether this is an effect of postmodern tropology or a symptom of “bad faith” investing the logic of elite populism, I am not quite sure. My reservations are shared by other Asian American observers who detect an apologetic agenda in such liberal historiography. At best, Takaki’s text operates an ironic, if not duplicitous, strategy: to counter hegemonic Eurocentrism, which erases the Asian American presence, a positivist-empiricist valorization of “lived experience” is carried out within the master narrative of evolutionary, gradualist progress. The American “Dream of Success” is thereby ultimately vindicated. This is not to suggest that historians like Takaki have suddenly been afflicted with amnesia, forgetting that it is the totalizing state practice of this ideology of market liberalism that underlies, for one, the violent colonial domination of peoples of color and the rape of the land of such decolonizing territories as the Philippines (my country of origin) and Puerto Rico in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. It is the social practice of an expansive political economy which converts humans to exchangeable commodities (African chattel slavery in the South) and commodified labor power, thus requiring for its industrial take-off a huge supply of free labor—hence the need for European immigrants, especially after the Civil War, and the genocidal suppression of the American Indians. It is the expansion of this social formation that recruited Chinese coolies for railroad construction (the “fathers” poignantly described in Kingston’s China Men) and Japanese and Filipino labor (and Mexican braceros later) for agribusiness in Hawaii and California and for the canneries in Alaska. It is this same hegemonic worldview of free monopoly enterprise, also known as the “civilizing mission” of Eurocentric humanism, that forced the opening of the China market in the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century and the numerous military interventions in China and Indochina up to the Vietnam War and the coming of the “boat people.” Of course it is also the power/knowledge episteme of the modernization process in Kenya, South Korea, Mexico, Indonesia, Egypt, Grenada, and all the neocolonial or peripheral dependencies of the world-system named by Immanuel Wallerstein as “historical capitalism” (13-43; see Amin). It is now generally acknowledged that we cannot understand the situation of Asian Americans in the US today or in the past without a thorough comprehension of the global relations of power, the capitalist world-system that “pushed” populations from the colonies and dependencies and “pulled” them to terrain where a supply of cheap labor was needed. These relations of power broke up families, separating husbands from wives and parents from children; at present they motivate the “warm body export” of cheap labor from Thailand, the Philippines, and elsewhere. They legitimate the unregulated market for brides and hospitality girls, the free trade zones, and other postmodern schemes of capital accumulation in Third World countries. The discourse of the liberal free market underpins these power relations, constructing fluid georacial boundaries to guarantee the supply of cheap labor. Race acquires salience in this world-system when, according to John Rex, “the language of racial difference. . . becomes the means whereby men allocate each other to different social and economic positions. . . . The exploitation of clearly marked groups in a variety of different ways is integral to Capitalism.. . . Ethnic groups unite and act together because they have been subjected to distinct and differentiated types of exploitation” (406-07). The colonization and industrialization of the North American continent epitomize the asymmetrical power relations characteristic of this world-system. The sociocultural formation of global apartheid has been  long in the making. Studies like Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History (1982) or Richard Bamet and Ronald Muller’s Global Reach (1974), to mention only the elementary texts, show that the migration of peoples around the world, the displacement of refugees, or the forced expulsion and exile of individuals and whole groups (the Palestinian diaspora is the most flagrant) have occurred not by choice or accident but by the complex interaction of political, economic, and social forces from the period of mercantile capitalism to colonialism, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, continuing into the imperialism of the twentieth century. This genealogy of domination, the self-reproduction of its mechanisms and the sedimentation of its effects, is what is occluded in Takaki’s narrative (see Nakanishi). 

Capitalism is the root cause of oppression, especially contemporary racism – our kritik is a prerequisite to the aff
McLaren et al., 4 – Distinguished Professor, Critical Studies, Chapman University (Peter and Valerie Scatamburlo-D’Annibale, “Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the politics of ‘difference’,” Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 36, No. 2, April, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/10.1111/j.1469-5812.2004.00060.x/full)// JJN from file
For example, E. San Juan (2003) argues that race relations and race conflict are necessarily structured by the larger totality of the political economy of a given society, as well as by modifications in the structure of the world economy. He further notes that the capitalist mode of production has articulated ‘race’ with class in a peculiar way. He too is worth a substantial quotation: While the stagnation of rural life imposed a racial or castelike rigidity to the peasantry, the rapid accumulation of wealth through the ever more intensifying exploitation of labor by capital could not so easily ‘racialize’ the wage-workers of a particular nation, given the alienability of labor-power—unless certain physical or cultural characteristics can be utilized to divide the workers or render one group an outcast or pariah removed from the domain of ‘free labor.’ In the capitalist development of U.S. society, African, Mexican, and Asian bodies—more precisely, their labor power and its reproductive efficacy—were colonized and racialized; hence the idea of ‘internal colonialism’ retains explanatory validity. ‘Race’ is thus constructed out of raw materials furnished by class relations, the history of class conflicts, and the vicissitudes of colonial/capitalist expansion and the building of imperial hegemony. It is dialectically accented and operationalized not just to differentiate the price of wage labor within and outside the territory of the metropolitan power, but also to reproduce relations of domination–subordination invested with an aura of naturality and fatality. The refunctioning of physical or cultural traits as ideological and political signifiers of class identity reifies social relations. Such ‘racial’ markers enter the field of the alienated labor process, concealing the artificial nature of meanings and norms, and essentializing or naturalizing historical traditions and values which are contingent on mutable circumstances. For San Juan, racism and nationalism are modalities in which class struggles articulate themselves at strategic points in history. He argues that racism arose with the creation and expansion of the capitalist world economy. He maintains, rightly in our view, that racial or ethnic group solidarity is given ‘meaning and value in terms of their place within the social organization of production and reproduction of the ideological-political order; ideologies of racism as collective social evaluation of solidarities arise to reinforce structural constraints which preserve the exploited and oppressed position of these “racial” solidarities’. It is remarkable, in our opinion, that so much of contemporary social theory has largely abandoned the problems of labor, capitalist exploitation, and class analysis at a time when capitalism is becoming more universal, more ruthless and more deadly. The metaphor of a contemporary ‘tower of Babel’ seems appropriate here—academics striking radical poses in the seminar rooms while remaining oblivious to the possibility that their seemingly radical discursive maneuvers do nothing to further the struggles ‘against oppression and exploitation which continue to be real, material, and not merely “discursive” problems of the contemporary world’ (Dirlik, 1997, p. 176). Harvey (1998, pp. 29–31) indicts the new academic entrepreneurs, the ‘masters of theory-in-and-for-itself’ whose ‘discourse radicalism’ has deftly side-stepped ‘the enduring conundrums of class struggle’ and who have, against a ‘sobering background of cheapened discourse and opportunistic politics,’ been ‘stripped of their self-advertised radicalism.’ For years, they ‘contested socialism,’ ridiculed Marxists, and promoted ‘their own alternative theories of liberatory politics’ but now they have largely been ‘reduced to the role of supplicants in the most degraded form of pluralist politics imaginable.’ As they pursue the politics of difference, the ‘class war rages unabated’ and they seem ‘either unwilling or unable to focus on the unprecedented economic carnage occurring around the globe.’ Harvey's searing criticism suggests that post-Marxists have been busy fiddling while Rome burns and his comments echo those made by Marx (1978, p. 149) in his critique of the Young Hegelians who were, ‘in spite of their allegedly “world-shattering” statements, the staunchest conservatives.’ Marx lamented that the Young Hegelians were simply fighting ‘phrases’ and that they failed to acknowledge that in offering only counter-phrases, they were in no way ‘combating the real existing world’ but merely combating the phrases of the world. Taking a cue from Marx and substituting ‘phrases’ with ‘discourses’ or ‘resignifications’ we would contend that the practitioners of difference politics who operate within exaggerated culturalist frameworks that privilege the realm of representation as the primary arena of political struggle question some discourses of power while legitimating others. Moreover, because they lack a class perspective, their gestures of radicalism are belied by their own class positions.10 As Ahmad (1997a, p. 104) notes: One may speak of any number of disorientations and even oppressions, but one cultivates all kinds of politeness and indirection about the structure of capitalist class relations in which those oppressions are embedded. To speak of any of that directly and simply is to be ‘vulgar.’ In this climate of Aesopian languages it is absolutely essential to reiterate that most things are a matter of class. That kind of statement is … surprising only in a culture like that of the North American university … But it is precisely in that kind of culture that people need to hear such obvious truths. Ahmad's provocative observations imply that substantive analyses of the carnage wrought by ‘globalized’ class exploitation have, for the most part, been marginalized by the kind of radicalism that has been instituted among the academic Left in North America. He further suggests that while various post-Marxists have invited us to join their euphoric celebrations honoring the decentering of capitalism, the abandonment of class politics, and the decline of metanarratives (particularly those of Marxism and socialism), they have failed to see that the most ‘meta of all metanarratives of the past three centuries, the creeping annexation of the globe for the dominance of capital over laboring humanity has met, during those same decades, with stunning success’ (Ahmad, 1997b, p. 364). As such, Ahmad invites us to ask anew, the proverbial question: What, then, must be done? To this question we offer no simple theoretical, pedagogical or political prescriptions. Yet we would argue that if social change is the aim, progressive educators and theorists must cease displacing class analysis with the politics of difference. Conclusion … we will take our stand against the evils of capitalism, imperialism, and racism with a solidarity derived from a proletarian internationalism born of socialist idealism. —National Office of the Black Panther Party, February 1970 For well over two decades we have witnessed the jubilant liberal and conservative pronouncements of the demise of socialism. Concomitantly, history's presumed failure to defang existing capitalist relations has been read by many self-identified ‘radicals’ as an advertisement for capitalism's inevitability. As a result, the chorus refrain ‘There Is No Alternative’, sung by liberals and conservatives, has been buttressed by the symphony of post-Marxist voices recommending that we give socialism a decent burial and move on. Within this context, to speak of the promise of Marx and socialism may appear anachronistic, even naïve, especially since the post-al intellectual vanguard has presumably demonstrated the folly of doing so. Yet we stubbornly believe that the chants of T.I.N.A. must be combated for they offer as a fait accompli, something which progressive Leftists should refuse to accept—namely the triumph of capitalism and its political bedfellow neo-liberalism, which have worked together to naturalize suffering, undermine collective struggle, and obliterate hope. We concur with Amin (1998), who claims that such chants must be defied and revealed as absurd and criminal, and who puts the challenge we face in no uncertain terms: humanity may let itself be led by capitalism's logic to a fate of collective suicide or it may pave the way for an alternative humanist project of global socialism. The grosteque conditions that inspired Marx to pen his original critique of capitalism are present and flourishing. The inequalities of wealth and the gross imbalances of power that exist today are leading to abuses that exceed those encountered in Marx's day (Greider, 1998, p. 39). Global capitalism has paved the way for the obscene concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands and created a world increasingly divided between those who enjoy opulent affluence and those who languish in dehumanizing conditions and economic misery. In every corner of the globe, we are witnessing social disintegration as revealed by a rise in abject poverty and inequality. At the current historical juncture, the combined assets of the 225 richest people is roughly equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 percent of the world's population, while the combined assets of the three richest people exceed the combined GDP of the 48 poorest nations (CCPA, 2002, p. 3). Approximately 2.8 billion people—almost half of the world's population—struggle in desperation to live on less than two dollars a day (McQuaig, 2001, p. 27). As many as 250 million children are wage slaves and there are over a billion workers who are either un- or under-employed. These are the concrete realities of our time—realities that require a vigorous class analysis, an unrelenting critique of capitalism and an oppositional politics capable of confronting what Ahmad (1998, p. 2) refers to as ‘capitalist universality.’ They are realities that require something more than that which is offered by the prophets of ‘difference’ and post-Marxists who would have us relegate socialism to the scrapheap of history and mummify Marxism along with Lenin's corpse. Never before has a Marxian analysis of capitalism and class rule been so desperately needed. That is not to say that everything Marx said or anticipated has come true, for that is clearly not the case. Many critiques of Marx focus on his strategy for moving toward socialism, and with ample justification; nonetheless Marx did provide us with fundamental insights into class society that have held true to this day. Marx's enduring relevance lies in his indictment of capitalism which continues to wreak havoc in the lives of most. While capitalism's cheerleaders have attempted to hide its sordid underbelly, Marx's description of capitalism as the sorcerer's dark power is even more apt in light of contemporary historical and economic conditions. Rather than jettisoning Marx, decentering the role of capitalism, and discrediting class analysis, radical educators must continue to engage Marx's oeuvre and extrapolate from it that which is useful pedagogically, theoretically, and, most importantly, politically in light of the challenges that confront us.

Independently outweighs the case – cap is unsustainable and guarantees extinction. Farbod 15
 ( Faramarz Farbod , PhD Candidate @ Rutgers, Prof @ Moravian College, Monthly Review, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2015/farbod020615.html, 6-2)

Global capitalism is the 800-pound gorilla. The twin ecological and economic crises, militarism, the rise of the surveillance state, and a dysfunctional political system can all be traced to its normal operations. We need a transformative politics from below that can challenge the fundamentals of capitalism instead of today's politics that is content to treat its symptoms. The problems we face are linked to each other and to the way a capitalist society operates. We must make an effort to understand its real character. The fundamental question of our time is whether we can go beyond a system that is ravaging the Earth and secure a future with dignity for life and respect for the planet. What has capitalism done to us lately? The best science tells us that this is a do-or-die moment. We are now in the midst of the 6th mass extinction in the planetary history with 150 to 200 species going extinct every day, a pace 1,000 times greater than the 'natural' extinction rate.1 The Earth has been warming rapidly since the 1970s with the 10 warmest years on record all occurring since 1998.2 The planet has already warmed by 0.85 degree Celsius since the industrial revolution 150 years ago. An increase of 2° Celsius is the limit of what the planet can take before major catastrophic consequences. Limiting global warming to 2°C requires reducing global emissions by 6 per year. However, global carbon emissions from fossil fuels increased by about 1.5 times between 1990 and 2008.3 Capitalism has also led to explosive social inequalities. The global economic landscape is littered with rising concentration of wealth, debt, distress, and immiseration caused by the austerity-pushing elites. Take the US. The richest 20 persons have as much wealth as the bottom 150 million.4 Since 1973, the hourly wages of workers have lagged behind worker productivity rates by more than 800.5 It now takes the average family 47 years to make what a hedge fund manager makes in one hour.6 Just about a quarter of children under the age of 5 live in poverty.7 A majority of public school students are low-income.8 85 of workers feel stress on the job.9 Soon the only thing left of the American Dream will be a culture of hustling to survive. Take the global society. The world's billionaires control $7 trillion, a sum 77 times the debt owed by Greece to the European banks.10 The richest 80 possess more than the combined wealth of the bottom 50 of the global population (3.5 billion people).11 By 2016 the richest 1 will own a greater share of the global wealth than the rest of us combined.12 The top 200 global corporations wield twice the economic power of the bottom 80 of the global population.13 Instead of a global society capitalism is creating a global apartheid. What's the nature of the beast? Firstly, the "egotistical calculation" of commerce wins the day every time. Capital seeks maximum profitability as a matter of first priority. Evermore "accumulation of capital" is the system's bill of health; it is slowdowns or reversals that usher in crises and set off panic. Cancer-like hunger for endless growth is in the system's DNA and is what has set it on a tragic collision course with Nature, a finite category. Secondly, capitalism treats human labor as a cost. It therefore opposes labor capturing a fair share of the total economic value that it creates. Since labor stands for the majority and capital for a tiny minority, it follows that classism and class warfare are built into its DNA, which explains why the "middle class" is shrinking and its gains are never secure. Thirdly, private interests determine massive investments and make key decisions at the point of production guided by maximization of profits. That's why in the US the truck freight replaced the railroad freight, chemicals were used extensively in agriculture, public transport was gutted in favor of private cars, and big cars replaced small ones. What should political action aim for today? The political class has no good ideas about how to address the crises. One may even wonder whether it has a serious understanding of the system, or at least of ways to ameliorate its consequences. The range of solutions offered tends to be of a technical, legislative, or regulatory nature, promising at best temporary management of the deepening crises. The trajectory of the system, at any rate, precludes a return to its post-WWII regulatory phase. It's left to us as a society to think about what the real character of the system is, where we are going, and how we are going to deal with the trajectory of the system -- and act accordingly. The critical task ahead is to build a transformative politics capable of steering the system away from its destructive path. Given the system's DNA, such a politics from below must include efforts to challenge the system's fundamentals, namely, its private mode of decision-making about investments and about what and how to produce. Furthermore, it behooves us to heed the late environmentalist Barry Commoner's insistence on the efficacy of a strategy of prevention over a failed one of control or capture of pollutants. At a lecture in 1991, Commoner remarked: "Environmental pollution is an incurable disease; it can only be prevented"; and he proceeded to refer to "a law," namely: "if you don't put a pollutant in the environment it won't be there." What is nearly certain now is that without democratic control of wealth and social governance of the means of production, we will all be condemned to the labor of Sisyphus. Only we won't have to suffer for all eternity, as the degradation of life-enhancing natural and social systems will soon reach a point of no return. 

The alt is a class-based withdrawal from capitalism.  Herod 04

Herod, 04 (James, http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/GetFre/4thEd/4-index.htm, Getting Free, 4th EditionA sketch of an association of democratic, autonomous neighborhoods and how to create it, Fourth Edition, January 2004

It is time to try to describe, at first abstractly and later concretely, a strategy for destroying capitalism. This strategy, at its most basic, calls for pulling time, energy, and resources out of capitalist civilization and putting them into building a new civilization. The image then is one of emptying out capitalist structures, hollowing them out, by draining wealth, power, and meaning out of them until there is nothing left but shells.¶ This is definitely an aggressive strategy. It requires great militancy, and constitutes an attack on the existing order. The strategy clearly recognizes that capitalism is the enemy and must be destroyed, but it is not a frontal attack aimed at overthrowing the system, but an inside attack aimed at gutting it, while simultaneously replacing it with something better, something we want.¶ Thus capitalist structures (corporations, governments, banks, schools, etc.) are not seized so much as simply abandoned. Capitalist relations are not fought so much as they are simply rejected. We stop participating in activities that support (finance, condone) the capitalist world and start participating in activities that build a new world while simultaneously undermining the old. We create a new pattern of social relations alongside capitalist relations and then we continually build and strengthen our new pattern while doing every thing we can to weaken capitalist relations. In this way our new democratic, non-hierarchical, non-commodified relations can eventually overwhelm the capitalis relations t and force them out of existence.¶ This is how it has to be done. This is a plausible, realistic strategy. To think that we could create a whole new world of decent social arrangements overnight, in the midst of a crisis, during a so-called revolution, or during the collapse of capitalism, is foolhardy. Our new social world must grow within the old, and in opposition to it, until it is strong enough to dismantle and abolish capitalist relations. Such a revolution will never happen automatically, blindly, determinably, because of the inexorable, materialist laws of history. It will happen, and only happen, because we want it to, and because we know what we’re doing and know how we want to live, and know what obstacles have to be overcome before we can live that way, and know how to distinguish between our social patterns and theirs.  But we must not think that the capitalist world can simply be ignored, in a live and let live attitude, while we try to build new lives elsewhere. (There is no elsewhere.) There is at least one thing, wage-slavery, that we can’t simply stop participating in (but even here there are ways we can chip away at it). Capitalism must be explicitly refused and replaced by something else. This constitutes War, but it is not a war in the traditional sense of armies and tanks, but a war fought on a daily basis, on the level of everyday life, by millions of people. It is a war nevertheless because the accumulators of capital will use coercion, brutality, and murder, as they have always done in the past, to try to block any rejection of the system. They have always had to force compliance; they will not hesitate to continue doing so. Nevertheless, there are many concrete ways that individuals, groups, and neighborhoods can gut capitalism, which I will enumerate shortly.¶

Class politics is key to fight racism – we recognize materialism causes oppression and that structures subdivide that.  McLaren 04

Distinguished Fellow – Critical Studies @ Chapman U and UCLA urban schooling prof, and Scatamburlo-D’Annibale, associate professor of Communication – U Windsor,(Peter and Valerie, “Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the politics of ‘difference’,” Educational Philosophy and Theory Vol. 36, Issue 2, p. 183-199)

We have argued that it is virtually impossible to conceptualize class without attending to the forms and contents of difference, but we insist that this does not imply that class struggle is now outdated by the politics of difference. As Jameson (1998, p. 136) notes, we are now in the midst of returning to the ‘most fundamental form of class struggle’ in light of current global conditions. Today's climate suggests that class struggle is ‘not yet a thing of the past’ and that those who seek to undermine its centrality are not only ‘morally callous’ and ‘seriously out of touch with reality’ but also largely blind to the ‘needs of the large mass of people who are barely surviving capital's newly-honed mechanisms of globalized greed’ (Harvey, 1998, pp. 7–9). In our view, a more comprehensive and politically useful understanding of the contemporary historical juncture necessitates foregrounding class analysis and the primacy of the working class as the fundamental agent of change.8 This does not render as ‘secondary’ the concerns of those marginalized by race, ethnicity, etc. as is routinely charged by post-Marxists. It is often assumed that foregrounding capitalist social relations necessarily undermines the importance of attending to ‘difference’ and/or trivializes struggles against racism, etc., in favor of an abstractly defined class-based politics typically identified as ‘white.’ Yet, such formulations rest on a bizarre but generally unspoken logic that assumes that racial and ethnic ‘minorities’ are only conjuncturally related to the working class. This stance is patently absurd since the concept of the ‘working class’ is undoubtedly comprised of men and women of different races, ethnicities, etc. (Mitter, 1997). A good deal of post-Marxist critique is subtly racist (not to mention essentialist) insofar as it implies that ‘people of color’ could not possibly be concerned with issues beyond those related to their ‘racial’ or ‘ethnic’ ‘difference.’ This posits ‘people of color’ as single-minded, one-dimensional caricatures and assumes that their working lives are less crucial to their self-understanding (and survival) than is the case with their ‘white male’ counterparts.9 It also ignores ‘the fact that class is an ineradicable dimension of everybody's lives’ (Gimenez, 2001, p. 2) and that social oppression is much more than tangentially linked to class background and the exploitative relations of production. On this topic, Meyerson (2000) is worth quoting at length: Marxism properly interpreted emphasizes the primacy of class in a number of senses. One of course is the primacy of the working class as a revolutionary agent—a primacy which does not render women and people of color ‘secondary.’ This view assumes that ‘working class’ means white—this division between a white working class and all the others, whose identity (along with a corresponding social theory to explain that identity) is thereby viewed as either primarily one of gender and race or hybrid …The primacy of class means … that building a multiracial, multi-gendered international working-class organization or organizations should be the goal of any revolutionary movement so that the primacy of class puts the fight against racism and sexism at the center. The intelligibility of this position is rooted in the explanatory primacy of class analysis for understanding the structural determinants of race, gender, and class oppression. Oppression is multiple and intersecting but its causes are not. The cohesiveness of this position suggests that forms of exploitation and oppression are related internally to the extent that they are located in the same totality—one which is currently defined by capitalist class rule. Capitalism is an overarching totality that is, unfortunately, becoming increasingly invisible in post-Marxist ‘discursive’ narratives that valorize ‘difference’ as a primary explanatory construct. For example, E. San Juan (2003) argues that race relations and race conflict are necessarily structured by the larger totality of the political economy of a given society, as well as by modifications in the structure of the world economy. He further notes that the capitalist mode of production has articulated ‘race’ with class in a peculiar way. He too is worth a substantial quotation: While the stagnation of rural life imposed a racial or castelike rigidity to the peasantry, the rapid accumulation of wealth through the ever more intensifying exploitation of labor by capital could not so easily ‘racialize’ the wage-workers of a particular nation, given the alienability of labor-power—unless certain physical or cultural characteristics can be utilized to divide the workers or render one group an outcast or pariah removed from the domain of ‘free labor.’ In the capitalist development of U.S. society, African, Mexican, and Asian bodies—more precisely, their labor power and its reproductive efficacy—were colonized and racialized; hence the idea of ‘internal colonialism’ retains explanatory validity. ‘Race’ is thus constructed out of raw materials furnished by class relations, the history of class conflicts, and the vicissitudes of colonial/capitalist expansion and the building of imperial hegemony. It is dialectically accented and operationalized not just to differentiate the price of wage labor within and outside the territory of the metropolitan power, but also to reproduce relations of domination–subordination invested with an aura of naturality and fatality. The refunctioning of physical or cultural traits as ideological and political signifiers of class identity reifies social relations. Such ‘racial’ markers enter the field of the alienated labor process, concealing the artificial nature of meanings and norms, and essentializing or naturalizing historical traditions and values which are contingent on mutable circumstances. For San Juan, racism and nationalism are modalities in which class struggles articulate themselves at strategic points¶ in history. He argues that racism arose with the creation and expansion of the capitalist world economy. He maintains, rightly in our view, that racial or ethnic group solidarity is given ‘meaning and value in terms of their place within the social organization of production and reproduction of the ideological-political order; ideologies of racism as collective social evaluation of solidarities arise to reinforce structural constraints which preserve the exploited and oppressed position of these “racial” solidarities’. It is remarkable, in our opinion, that so much of contemporary social theory has largely abandoned the problems of labor, capitalist exploitation, and class analysis at a time when capitalism is becoming more universal, more ruthless and more deadly. The metaphor of a contemporary ‘tower of Babel’ seems appropriate here—academics striking radical poses in the seminar rooms while remaining oblivious to the possibility that their seemingly radical discursive maneuvers do nothing to further the struggles ‘against oppression and exploitation which continue to be real, material, and not merely “discursive” problems of the contemporary world’ (Dirlik, 1997, p. 176). Harvey (1998, pp. 29–31) indicts the new academic entrepreneurs, the ‘masters of theory-in-and-for-itself’ whose ‘discourse radicalism’ has deftly side-stepped ‘the enduring conundrums of class struggle’ and who have, against a ‘sobering background of cheapened discourse and opportunistic politics,’ been ‘stripped of their self-advertised radicalism.’ For years, they ‘contested socialism,’ ridiculed Marxists, and promoted ‘their own alternative theories of liberatory politics’ but now they have largely been ‘reduced to the role of supplicants in the most degraded form of pluralist politics imaginable.’ As they pursue the politics of difference, the ‘class war rages unabated’ and they seem ‘either unwilling or unable to focus on the unprecedented economic carnage occurring around the globe.’ Harvey's searing criticism suggests that post-Marxists have been busy fiddling while Rome burns and his comments echo those made by Marx (1978, p. 149) in his critique of the Young Hegelians who were, ‘in spite of their allegedly “world-shattering” statements, the staunchest conservatives.’ Marx lamented that the Young Hegelians were simply fighting ‘phrases’ and that they failed to acknowledge that in offering only counter-phrases, they were in no way ‘combating the real existing world’ but merely combating the phrases of the world. Taking a cue from Marx and substituting ‘phrases’ with ‘discourses’ or ‘resignifications’ we would contend that the practitioners of difference politics who operate within exaggerated culturalist frameworks that privilege the realm of representation as the primary arena of political struggle question some discourses of power while legitimating others. Moreover, because they lack a class perspective, their gestures of radicalism are belied by their own class positions.10 As Ahmad (1997a, p. 104) notes: One may speak of any number of disorientations and even oppressions, but one cultivates all kinds of politeness and indirection about the structure of capitalist class relations in which those oppressions are embedded. To speak of any of that directly and simply is to be ‘vulgar.’ In this climate of Aesopian languages it is absolutely essential to reiterate that most things are a matter of class. That kind of statement is … surprising only in a culture like that of the North American university … But it is precisely in that kind of culture that people need to hear such obvious truths. Ahmad's provocative observations imply that substantive analyses of the carnage wrought by ‘globalized’ class exploitation have, for the most part, been marginalized by the kind of radicalism that has been instituted among the academic Left in North America. He further suggests that while various post-Marxists have invited us to join their euphoric celebrations honoring the decentering of capitalism, the abandonment of class politics, and the decline of metanarratives (particularly those of Marxism and socialism), they have failed to see that the most ‘meta of all metanarratives of the past three centuries, the- creeping annexation of the globe for the dominance of capital over laboring humanity has met, during those same decades, with stunning success’ (Ahmad, 1997b, p. 364). As such, Ahmad invites us to ask anew, the proverbial question: What, then, must be done? To this question we offer no simple theoretical, pedagogical or political prescriptions. Yet we would argue that if social change is the aim, progressive educators and theorists must cease displacing class analysis with the politics of difference.

Tournament: Greenhill Round Robin | Round: 7 | Opponent: Montegomery WP | Judge: Panel
Focus on rhizomes overlooks that we are all prefigured by global capitalism, which wants us to think we can become anything so that the poor keep slaving away to the rich.  Mann 95

Mann 95 (Paul Mann Department of English Pomona College, Stupid Undergrounds, Postmodern Culture v.5 n.3 (May, 1995) DA: 7/27/12, CP)

Intellectual economics guarantees that even the most powerful and challenging work cannot protect itself from the order of fashion. Becoming-fashion, becoming-commodity, becoming-ruin. Such instant, indeed retroactive ruins, are the virtual landscape of the stupid underground. The exits and lines of flight pursued by Deleuze and Guattari are being shut down and rerouted by the very people who would take them most seriously. By now, any given work from the stupid underground's critical apparatus is liable to be tricked out with smooth spaces, war-machines, n - is, planes of consistency, plateaus and deterritorializations, strewn about like tattoos on the stupid body without organs. The nomad is already succumbing to the rousseauism and orientalism that were always invested in his figure; whatever Deleuze and Guattari intended for him, he is reduced to being a romantic outlaw, to a position opposite the State, in the sort of dialectical operation Deleuze most despised. And the rhizome is becoming just another stupid subterranean figure. It is perhaps true that Deleuze and Guattari did not adequately protect their thought from this dialectical reconfiguration (one is reminded of Breton's indictment against Rimbaud for not having prevented, in advance, Claudel's recuperation of him as a proper Catholic), but no vigilance would have sufficed in any case. The work of Deleuze and Guattari is evidence that, in real time, virtual models and maps close off the very exits they indicate. The problem is in part that rhizomes, lines of flight, smooth spaces, BwOs, etc., are at one and the same time theoretical-political devices of the highest critical order and merely fantasmatic, delirious, narcissistic models for writing, and thus perhaps an instance of the all-too-proper blurring of the distinction between criticism and fantasy. In Deleuze-speak, the stupid underground would be mapped not as a margin surrounding a fixed point, not as a fixed site determined strictly by its relation or opposition to some more or less hegemonic formation, but as an intensive, n-dimensional intersection of rhizomatic plateaus. Nomadology and rhizomatics conceive such a "space" (if one only had the proverbial nickel for every time that word is used as a critical metaphor, without the slightest reflection on what might be involved in rendering the conceptual in spatial terms) as a liquid, colloidal suspension, often retrievable by one or another techno-metaphorical zoning (e.g., "cyberspace"). What is at stake, however, is not only the topological verisimilitude of the model but the *fantastic* possibility of nonlinear passage, of multiple simultaneous accesses and exits, of infinite fractal lines occupying finite social space. In the strictest sense, stupid philosophy. Nomad thought is prosthetic, the experience of virtual exhilaration in modalities already mapped and dominated by nomad, rhizomatic capital (the political philosophy of the stupid underground: capital is more radical than any of its critiques, but one can always pretend otherwise). It is this very fantasy, this very narcissistic wish to see oneself projected past the frontier into new spaces, that abandons one to this economy, that seals these spaces within an order of critical fantasy that has long since been overdeveloped, entirely reterritorialized in advance. To pursue nomadology or rhizomatics as such is already to have lost the game. Nothing is more crucial to philosophy than escaping the dialectic and no project is more hopeless; the stupid-critical underground is the curved space in which this opposition turns back on itself. It is not yet time to abandon work that so deeply challenges our intellectual habits as does that of Deleuze and Guattari, and yet, before it has even been comprehended, in the very process of its comprehension, its fate seems secure. One pursues it and knows that the pursuit will prove futile; that every application of these new topologies will only serve to render them more pointless. The stupid optimism

Postmodern subjectivity is a shell game – it can exist only by strengthening the hold of capitalism. Snyder 2K
Laura Bartlett Snyder, Doctoral Fellow in the English Department at Louisville, “Boundary Dissolution in film, photography and advertising,” 2000, http://athena.louisville.edu/a-s/english/babo/snyder/bountexts.html

The argument I am making about the postmodern theories of subjectivity and global capitalism are similar to arguments made about multiculturalism and global capitalism by David Rieff and Slavoj Zizek.  Rieff suggests that multiculturalism is a “byproduct or corollary of a specific material integument” (62).  Rieff’s position is that although multiculturalists often regard their work as politically leftist: resulting in the breakdown of patriarchal, European hegemony and the ascendancy of the previously marginalized, they actually function as the “silent partner” of global capitalism. Additionally, Rieff points out how closely the buzz words of multiculturalism--“‘cultural diversity,’ ‘difference,’ the need to do away with boundaries’—resemble the stock phrases of the modern corporation: ‘product diversification,’ ‘the global marketplace,’ and ‘the boundary-less company’” (Rieff).  Similarly, Zizek contends that postmodern identity politics—while ostensibly seeking to subvert capitalism—are made possible only in the field of global capitalism.  He writes that “’cultural studies’, is performing the ultimate service for the unrestrained development of capitalism” and that “the ideal form of ideology of this global capitalism is multiculturalism” (218; 216).My argument is that postmodern theories and global capitalism dialectically influence one another.  Postmodern theory is generated by the material conditions of labor and production in late capitalism, which  needs consumers who will disregard national boundaries.  By the logic that all products of the system are necessary to the system, we assume that anything the system produces, it needs.  Ideological state apparatuses, like the university, do the work necessary  to interpellating the ideal subject of global capitalism. My thought is that global capitalism needs postmodern theories of subjectivity because they produce subjects who are seamlessly articulated with the structures of global capitalism.  While postmodern subjectivity may seem wildly radical at first—breaking down boundaries between genders, between machines and humans—the similarities between its subjectivities and the structures of global capitalism are eerily similar.  Fluidity, flexibility, and boundary dissolution equally describe both.  The celebration of the loss of the unified, coherent subject of modernity and the new fluid, flexible, fragmented subject of postmodernity is the stuff of “Millenial Dreams,” Paul Smith’s term for the rhetoric of globalization and the array of ideological forms which interpellate the desired subject of global capitalism.  Smith writes that “the annunciation of globalization itself is part of the ideological battery used to interpellate subjects in the current conjuncture . . . and attempt to regulate the moral and cultural practices of subjects” (46).   I agree with Tereas Ebert  that post-al theories are complicit with patriarchal capitalism.  Rather than seeking the liberation of the exploited workers of late capitalism—primarily third-world, minority, poverty-stricken women—postmodern theorists celebrate a liberatory freedom experienced by a small percentage of the first world at the expense of the rest of the world.
 
Floating subjectivity and rebellion against modernity reinforces patterns of domination. Cryderman 2K
Kevin Cryderman, “Jane and Louisa: The Tapestry Of Critical Paradigms: Hutcheon, Lyotard, Said, Dirlik, And Brodber,” 2000, http://65.107.211.206/post/caribbean/brodber/kcry1.html

In "Borderlands Radicalism," Dirlik is critical of the trends of postmodernism and postcolonialism in regard to borders, subjectivity, and history. Dirlik claims that postmodernism and postcolonialism tend to simply reinforce the reign of late capitalism: Post-modernism, articulating the condition of the globe in the age of flexible production, has done great theoretical service by challenging the tyrannical unilinearity of inherited conceptions of history and society. The political price paid for this achievement, however, has been to abolish the subject in history, which destroys the possibility of political action, or to attach action to one of another diffuse subject positions, which ends up in narcissistic preoccupations with self of one kind of another. (89) Dirlik claims that the 'happy pluralism' of postcolonialism -- such as its emphasis on flux, borderlands and liminal space -- does not so much oppose elite unified narratives of nations and cultures as it does reinforce them. Dirlik also links this trend of "fluid subject positions" (98) in postmodernism to postcolonialism and Global Capitalism: "in the age of flexible production, we all live in the borderlands. Capital, deterritorialized and decentered, establishes borderlands where it can move freely, away from the control of states and societies but in collusion with states against societies" (Dirlik 87). Moreover, the problem "presented by postcolonial discourse" is "a problem of liberating discourse that divorces itself from the material conditions of life, in this case Global Capitalism as the foundational principle of contemporary society globally" (99). Dirlik also links the intellectual class as a product of global capitalism which, according to Dirlik, "has jumbled up notions of space and time" (100). Indeed, both postmodernist and post-colonialist literature involve the fragmentation and rebellion against modernist ideologies that impose essentializing identity, linear time schemes, and totalizing narratives. 

Unified action is crucial - individual politics in flux are easily crushed by capitalism.  Ahmad 97

Ahmad,  Professorial Fellow at the Centre of Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi and is visiting Professor of Political Science at York University, 1997 (Aijaz, Culture, Nationalism, And the Role of Intellectuals in In defense of history).  NS from file

But then you have asked me also about future prospects for radical intellectuals in the United States, and you have said some provocative things about interest and identity groups, giving the example of blacks and gays and in a way feminism. Let me remark on the examples first. That everyone should have equal rights of course goes without saying. But there are also a number of ambiguities in relation to the political field. The gay rights movement, for example, cuts across the distinction between civil society and the state, the so-called private and the public. There are certain rectifi¬cations that only the state can undertake, and there is nothing structural about the U.S. state that prevents those rectifications. I don’t at all wish to minimize the extent of prejudice against homosexuality when I say that in the political field, properly so called, there is really nothing that prevents the U.S. state from absorbing the pressures of the gay rights movements within its authorized ideologies of pragmatism and pluralism. In that sense, the situation of women and blacks is quite different. Of course there are enormous prejudices against women and blacks, and of course these social prejudices are fully reflected in the behavior of the state. But I have something else in mind. The majority of blacks constitute a distinct underclass in the U.S. economy that has been reproduced over and over again since the time of slaveiy. The majority of women do the lowest paid work, in the United States and elsewhere; feminization of manual work in the core capitalist countries is part of the strategic offensive of capital against labor as such; and women’s unpaid housework is a fundamental component in minimizing the aggregate wage bill, hence for ensuring a certain rate of profit. Despite all the celebrated successes of feminism in certain areas of academic and cultural life in the United States, there have been no gains in the incomes of poor women, not to speak of black youth. The issue of justice to that vast majority of women and blacks goes to the very heart of the totality of U.S. life and cannot be fully resolved without revolutionaiy transformations. Some white, upper-class feminisms may cultivate the detachment you mentioned, but most women can’t afford that. That every group has the right to fight for members of that group also goes without saying. But I want to raise a much more difficult question about democracy. A great problem for socialist theory and practice today is that of the relationship between difference and universality, group rights and indivisible universal rights, the right as woman and the right as citizen, and the right as worker, whether citizen or immigrant. The postmodernist answer is simple: universality is a chimera; identities are local, contingent, freely chosen; rights of identity are absolute, and self-representation is the only authentic form of representation. This absolutization of identity, this quick abrogation of universality, strikes me as politically very dangerous. For a start: if in the constitution of your identity, I have no rights of cognition, participation, criticism, then on what basis may you ask for my solidarity with you except on the basis of some piety, some voluntaristic good will that I may withdraw at any moment? I can’t explicate this problem here, so let me reduce the scope of what I’m saying. You see, at this historical juncture, when the issue of people’s equal access to material goods has been posed by what I still call socialism, the capitalist state probably prefers to deal with a people that confronts it not in its unity but in its dispersal among communities and interest groups. Communities and interest groups typically raise the issue of social prejudice and distribution of the social surplus; the issue of the ownership of property as such can only be raised within the discourse of universal rights. Once we get distributed into distinct groups, our public rhetorics can then go on stressing how much we believe in everyone’s equal rights, but in the actual dealings with the state each community and each interest group can become a distinct supplicant competing with all others for its own share of the social surplus. One way of putting this may be that the capitalist state can perhaps live more easily with multiple and competing claimants on the social surplus that it governs, making sure that they cancel out each other, than with a radicalized politics of universal rights where each is to be the equal of all others, not just juridically but in every conceivable dimension, most cru¬cially the dimension of economic goods. What I am trying to say, I suppose, is that group egoism of discrete communities is perhaps not much of an improvement on the historical egoism of the bourgeois male individual, and that we need forms of politics that constitute human subjects both in their heterogeneity and their universality. (62-3)

The most primary ethical obligation is to reject capitalism in every instance – it causes massive global violence and inequality.  Zizek and Daly 04

(Slavoj and Glyn, Conversations with Zizek page 14-16)

For Zizek it is imperative that we cut through this Gordian knot of postmodern protocol and recognize that our ethico-political responsibility is to confront the constitutive violence of today’s global capitalism and its obscene naturalization / anonymization of the millions who are subjugated by it throughout the world. Against the standardized positions of postmodern culture – with all its pieties concerning ‘multiculturalist’ etiquette – Zizek is arguing for a politics that might be called ‘radically incorrect’ in the sense that it break with these types of positions 7 and focuses instead on the very organizing principles of today’s social reality: the principles of global liberal capitalism. This requires some care and subtlety. For far too long, Marxism has been bedeviled by an almost istic economism that has tended towards political morbidity. With the likes of Hilferding and Gramsci, and more recently Laclau and Mouffee, crucial theoretical advances have been made that enable the transcendence of all forms of economism. In this new context, however, Zizek argues that the problem that now presents itself is almost that of the opposite . That is to say, the prohibitive anxieties surrounding the taboo of economism can function as a way of not engaging with economic reality and as a way of implicitly accepting the latter as a basic horizon of existence. In an ironic Freudian-Lacanian twist, the fear of economism can end up reinforcing a de facto economic necessity in respect of contemporary capitalism (i.e. the initial prohibition conjures up the very thing it fears). This is not to endorse any kind of retrograde return to economism. Zizek’s point is rather that in rejecting economism we should not lose sight of the systemic power of capital in shaping the lives and destinies of humanity and our very sense of the possible. In particular we should not overlook Marx’s central insight that in order to create a universal global system the forces of capitalism seek to conceal the politico-discursive violence of its construction through a kind of gentrification of that system. What is persistently denied by neo-liberals such as Rorty (1989) and Fukuyama (1992) is that the gentrification of global liberal capitalism is one whose ‘universalism’ fundamentally reproduces and depends upon a disavowed violence that excludes vast sectors of the world’s populations. In this way, neo-liberal ideology attempts to naturalize capitalism by presenting its outcomes of winning and losing as if they were simply a matter of chance and sound judgment in a neutral market place. Capitalism does indeed create a space for a certain diversity, at least for the central capitalist regions, but it is neither neutral nor ideal and its price in terms of social exclusion is exorbitant. That is to say, the human cost in terms of inherent global poverty and degraded life chances cannot be calculated within the existing economic rationale and, in consequence, social exclusion remains mystified and nameless (viz. the patronizing reference to the ‘developing world’). And Zizek’s point is that this mystification is magnified through capitalism’s profound capacity to ingest its own excesses and negativity: to redirect (or misdirect) social antagonisms and to absorb them within a culture of differential affirmation. Instead of Bolshevism, the tendency today is towards a kind of political boutiquism that is readily sustained by postmodern forms of consumerism and lifestyle. Against this Zizek argues for a new universalism whose primary ethical directive is to confront the fact that our forms of social existence are founded on exclusion on a global scale. While it is perfectly true that universalism can never become Universal (it will always require a hegemonic-particular embodiment in order to have any meaning), what is novel about Zizek’s universalism is that it would not attempt to conceal this fact or reduce the status of the abject Other to that of a glitch in an otherwise sound matrix. 

The alt is to engage in a class based withdrawal from capitalism. We need to destroy capitalism by refusing to perpetuate it, forming resistance from within.  Herod 04

Herod, 04 (James, http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/GetFre/4thEd/4-index.htm, Getting Free, 4th EditionA sketch of an association of democratic, autonomous neighborhoods and how to create it, Fourth Edition, January 2004

It is time to try to describe, at first abstractly and later concretely, a strategy for destroying capitalism. This strategy, at its most basic, calls for pulling time, energy, and resources out of capitalist civilization and putting them into building a new civilization. The image then is one of emptying out capitalist structures, hollowing them out, by draining wealth, power, and meaning out of them until there is nothing left but shells.¶ This is definitely an aggressive strategy. It requires great militancy, and constitutes an attack on the existing order. The strategy clearly recognizes that capitalism is the enemy and must be destroyed, but it is not a frontal attack aimed at overthrowing the system, but an inside attack aimed at gutting it, while simultaneously replacing it with something better, something we want.¶ Thus capitalist structures (corporations, governments, banks, schools, etc.) are not seized so much as simply abandoned. Capitalist relations are not fought so much as they are simply rejected. We stop participating in activities that support (finance, condone) the capitalist world and start participating in activities that build a new world while simultaneously undermining the old. We create a new pattern of social relations alongside capitalist relations and then we continually build and strengthen our new pattern while doing every thing we can to weaken capitalist relations. In this way our new democratic, non-hierarchical, non-commodified relations can eventually overwhelm the capitalis relations t and force them out of existence.¶ This is how it has to be done. This is a plausible, realistic strategy. To think that we could create a whole new world of decent social arrangements overnight, in the midst of a crisis, during a so-called revolution, or during the collapse of capitalism, is foolhardy. Our new social world must grow within the old, and in opposition to it, until it is strong enough to dismantle and abolish capitalist relations. Such a revolution will never happen automatically, blindly, determinably, because of the inexorable, materialist laws of history. It will happen, and only happen, because we want it to, and because we know what we’re doing and know how we want to live, and know what obstacles have to be overcome before we can live that way, and know how to distinguish between our social patterns and theirs.  But we must not think that the capitalist world can simply be ignored, in a live and let live attitude, while we try to build new lives elsewhere. (There is no elsewhere.) There is at least one thing, wage-slavery, that we can’t simply stop participating in (but even here there are ways we can chip away at it). Capitalism must be explicitly refused and replaced by something else. This constitutes War, but it is not a war in the traditional sense of armies and tanks, but a war fought on a daily basis, on the level of everyday life, by millions of people. It is a war nevertheless because the accumulators of capital will use coercion, brutality, and murder, as they have always done in the past, to try to block any rejection of the system. They have always had to force compliance; they will not hesitate to continue doing so. Nevertheless, there are many concrete ways that individuals, groups, and neighborhoods can gut capitalism, which I will enumerate shortly.¶

Tournament: St Marks | Round: 3 | Opponent: Apple Valley JB | Judge: Rodrigo Paramo
A. links- 

1. Pragmatic eco philosophy crucial to avoiding paralysis and eco collapse-aff’s absolutist stance causes massive environmental damage.
   Andrew LIGHT Environmental Philosophy @ NYU ‘5 “What is Pragmatic Philosophy”
   http://faculty.washington.edu/alight/papers/Light.What20Pragmatic.pdf. P. 349-351

I have no easy answer to this question of how practical or “do-able” reform proposals made by philosophers should be. As
suggested above, it is a question that has obvious important implications for the application of philosophical principles to environmental policy. My intuition though is that the pragmatist ought to have a long-term end in view while at the same time she must have at the ready viable alternatives which assume current political or economic systems and structures whenever possible. This is not to say that the pragmatic philosopher gives up on the tasks of defending alternatives to current structures, and the pursuit of those alternatives in democratic debates on the reallocation of resources. It only means that our position may require, for consistency sake to our pragmatic intentions at least, that we not rely exclusively on such changes in articulating our preferred ends for better public policies. In this context, there are at least two senses in which one could understand the meaning of “pragmatic” philosophy as discussed so far. (1) Philosophy that has practical intent, anchored to practical problems, and (2) Philosophy which aids in the development of policy solutions that can actually achieve support and consensus. While Young’s approach certainly encompasses (1) the question is whether she also does (2). My own pragmatist approach assumes that there is a connection between (1) and (2) (indeed, that (1) implies (2)). Assuming a successful argument that (1) and (2) are related in this way (for some this may take some argument, for others it will be obvious) then a question remains concerning how to go about achieving (2). Let me make just one suggestion for how the pragmatist could go about reconciling her desire to change systems with the need to make achievable policy recommendations. As is suggested by my approach, my view is that if a pragmatic philosophy in the end is in the service of an argument to create better polices, then in our democratic society it must be prepared to argue its case before the public, and perhaps sometimes only before policy makers. As Said puts it, the public intellectual not only wants to express her beliefs but also wants to persuade others—meaning the public at large—of her views (1994, p. 12). This raises the critical issue of how such appeals to the public are to be made. It raises the issue of how important persuasion is to the creation of pragmatic arguments. All philosophy is in some sense about persuasion, though to differentiate ourselves from rhetoricians (if we are interested in making such distinctions, which I still am) we must restrict ourselves to persuasion through some form of argument given more or less agreed upon (and revisable) standards for what counts as a good argument. But the pragmatic philosopher is not simply concerned with per- suading other philosophers. She is also interested in persuading the public either directly (in hopes that they will in turn influence policy makers) or indirectly, by appealling to policy makers who in turn help to shape public opinion. The work of a public philosophy is not solely for intramural philosophical discussion; it is aimed at larger forums. But as I suggested before, such a task requires some attention to the question of what motivates either the public, policy makers, or both to act. Our bar is set higher than traditional philosophical standards of validity and abstractly conceived soundness. For if we are to direct our philosophy at policies in a context other than a hypothetical philosophical framework, we must also make arguments which will motivate our audiences to act. Since we are dealing in ethi- cal and political matters, the question for pragmatic philosophers like Young and myself is how much we must attend to the issue of moral motivation in forming our pragmatic arguments. If we agree that the issue of moral motivation is always crucial for a pragmatic philosophy then at least two issues arise. First, as I suggested before, we must be prepared to embrace a theoretical or conceptual pluralism which allows us to pick and choose from a range of conceptual frameworks in making our arguments without committing to the theoretical monism which may be assumed in some versions of these frameworks. The reason is that we need to be able to make arguments that will appeal to the conceptual frameworks of our audiences while recognizing that these frameworks can change from audience to audience. So, if we think a utilitarian argument will be useful for talking to economists in decision making positions, then we should be allowed to engage such a framework without completely committing ourselves to utilitarianism.

2. Critiques of technological thought will be appropriated by groups looking to destroy the environment
Ted BENTON Sociology @ Essex 5 in After Postmodernism eds. Jose Lopez and Garry Potter p. 137-138

Second, the post Kuhnian relativist aproaches to the sociology of science, in challenging the proclaimed finality and cultural authority of big science, saw themselves as on the side of 'the underdog', pressing for democratic account¬ability on the part of the scientific establishment   even for a thoroughgoing democratisation of knowledge itself. Sociologists of science have tended to see 'technoscience' as indissolubly tied to political and industrial power and domin¬ation. To call into question its epistemological authority has been to undermine a key source of legitimation for established power. However, the politics of the critique of science become more complex and ambivalent in the face of the new ecological issues. While many Greens see the interests associated with technoscience as largely to blame for many ecological hazards, they also rely on scientific detection, measurement and theoretical explanations in making out the Green case. The construction of incinerators for waste disposal adjacent to working class estates, the noise and fumes emitted by heavy road traffic, the loss of treasured landscapes and so on, are forms of ecological degradation which are readily perceptible, and may enter directly into the discourses of popular movements. However, many other, often more sinister and catastrophic, forms of ecological transformation may only be detected by scientific instrumentation. Nuclear and other forms of radiation, low concentrations of toxins in food and drinking water, antibiotic resistant pathogens, shifts in the chemical composi-tion of the upper atmosphere and so on fall into this category. In other cases, the scale of transformation is what is ecologically significant and, here again, scientific modelling and measurement displace the evidence provided by the senses of necessarily localised human agents. Global climate change, biodiversity loss, ozone depletion are among the transformations which fall into this category. Finally, rational discourse about policy options depends on (but is certainly not restricted to) best available scientific thinking about the causal mechanisms involved(the 'greenhouse' effect, CO2 exchanges at the surface of the oceans, pholovvnthesis, mechanisms of cloud formation and many others in the case of dinsate 'hanged. To expose the normatively and culturally 'constructed' character of those scientific research programmes which have so far indcnt ifled, measured and explained the hazardous dynamics of ecological change is to run a serious political risk. The big industrial complexes, such as the biotech, pharmaceutical, agribusiness, petrochemical, construction and road transport sectors, together with their state sponsors, have a lifeline thrown to them. That the knowledge  base which exposes the ecological 'externalities' of their activities is culturally biased and epistemologically questionable is music to their ears. Why put the brakes on wealth creation and progress on the basis of such flimsy and questionable evidence (see R. Rowell, 1996, esp. chap. 5)? These misuses of the work of constructionist sociology of environmental science are often seen as problematic from the standpoint of its practitioners (see, for example, r} a special issue of Social Studies of Science, 1996). Of course, it would be quite posble to accept these implications of he approach, in the face of unwanied political consequences: perhaps the weakening or even abandoning of environmental regulation and technteal safety standards could be accepted as an appropriate response to the sociologied dchunking of en ironmental science. lot esnnglv, however, few constructionists would be happy with such an out¬conic. the question is, can they coherently or consistently unhappy about it? Winne i9 and Burninghaio md. Coopei (1999) oiler sophisticated defences of their own variants of construe onism from this sort of 'realist' criticism. They claim, variously, that the 'taking of sides' in environmental conflicts is not necessarily the most productive role for social scientists to take, and that, not¬withstanding rite realist critique. it often possible to combine constructionism with cotmitiimmred cn' ironmen iahsns. These contributions deserve much fuller responses than I have space for here hot, as I shall argue below. dicnt are other reasons for scepticism about the more radical versions of constructionism. 

3. No aff offense- concern for the environment isn’t “management” –it’s a coping mechanism
Silvio FUNTOWICZ Inst. for Systems Engineering and Informatics @ Joint Research Centre, Comission of the European Communities AND Jerome RAVETZ Research Methods Consultancy ‘91  in Ecological Economics eds. Robert Costanza and Lisa Wainger p. 144
The inherent limitations of traditional problem-solving strategies are revealed by a structural feature of the new global environmental issues. For in these, decisions depend on evaluations of future states of the natural environment, resources, and human society, all of which are unknown and unknowable. The powers of science have not only produced irremediable uncertainties in knowledge, now we also find moral uncertainties, resulting from the invasion of the domains of the sacred and private. The most notable cases here we reproductive technology and also scientific research requires inflicting of pain on aware beings. Under these circumstances of radical uncertainty, a new type of problem-solving strategy is emerging. In post-normal science, the traditional description, "the art of the soluble" is no longer appropriate. For in this work, it is issues rather than problems that are examined, despite the amount of special scientific research and professional consulting conducted. Instead of the traditional images of conquering or managing, now it is better to think of coping and ameliorating. This is a far cry from the old excitement of scientific discovery or engineering creativity; but now we must cope with the consequences of those traditional activities that were conducted for so long in innocence of their effects. 

B. The impact outweighs the case- Physical existence of the environment is more important than ontology
Paul WAPNER Prf. And Director of the Global Environmental Policy Program @ American ‘3 “Leftist Criticism of ‘Nature’” Dissent Winter p.  74-75
The third response to eco-criticism would require critics to acknowledge the ways in which they themselves silence nature and then to respect the sheer otherness of the nonhuman world. Postmodernism prides itself on criticizing the urge toward mastery that characterizes modernity. But isn’t mastery exactly what postmodernism is exerting as it captures the nonhuman world within its own conceptual domain? Doesn’t postmodern cultural criticism deepen the modernist urge toward mastery by eliminating the ontological weight of the nonhuman world? What else could it mean to assert that there is no such thing as nature? I have already suggested the postmodernist response: yes, recognizing the social construction of “nature” does deny the self-expression of the nonhuman world, but how would we know what such self-expression means? Indeed, nature doesn’t speak; rather, some person always speaks on nature’s behalf, and whatever that person says is, as we all know, a social construction. All attempts to listen to nature are social constructions—except one. Even the most radical postmodernist must acknowledge the distinction between physical existence and nonexistence. As I have said, postmodernists accept that there is a physical substratum to the phenomenal world even if they argue about the different meanings we ascribe to it. This acknowledgment of physical existence is crucial. We can’t ascribe meaning to that which doesn’t appear. What doesn’t exist can manifest no character. Put differently, yes, the postmodernist should rightly worry about interpreting nature’s expressions. And all of us should be wary of those who claim to speak on nature’s behalf (including environmentalists who do that). But we need not doubt the simple idea that a prerequisite of expression is existence. This in turn suggests that preserving the nonhuman world—in all its diverse embodiments—must be seen by eco-critics as a fundamental good. Eco-critics must be supporters, in some fashion, of environmental preservation. Postmodernists reject the idea of a universal good. They rightly acknowledge the difficulty of identifying a common value given the multiple contexts of our value-producing activity. In fact, if there is one thing they vehemently scorn, it is the idea that there can be a value that stands above the individual contexts of human experience. Such a value would present itself as a metanarrative and, as Jean- François Lyotard has explained, postmodernism is characterized fundamentally by its “incredulity toward meta-narratives.” Nonetheless, I can’t see how postmodern critics can do otherwise than accept the value of preserving the nonhuman world. The nonhuman is the extreme “other”; it stands in contradistinction to humans as a species. In understanding the constructed quality of human experience and the dangers of reification, postmodernism inherently advances an ethic of respecting the “other.” At the very least, respect must involve ensuring that the “other” actually continues to exist. In our day and age, this requires us to take responsibility for protecting the actuality of the nonhuman. Instead, however, we are running roughshod over the earth’s diversity of plants, animals, and ecosystems. Postmodern critics should find this particularly disturbing. If they don’t, they deny their own intellectual insights and compromise their fundamental moral commitment. Now, what does this mean for politics and policy, and the future of the environmental movement? Society is constantly being asked to address questions of environmental quality for which there are no easy answers. As we wrestle with challenges of global climate change, ozone depletion, loss of biological diversity, and so forth, we need to consider the economic, political, cultural, and aesthetic values at stake. These considerations have traditionally marked the politics of environmental protection. A sensitivity to eco-criticism requires that we go further and include an ethic of otherness in our deliberations. That is, we need to be moved by our concern to make room for the “other” and hence fold a commitment to the nonhuman world into our policy discussions. I don’t mean that this argument should drive all our actions or that respect for the “other” should always carry the day. But it must be a central part of our reflections and calculations. For example, as we estimate the number of people that a certain area can sustain, consider what to do about climate change, debate restrictions on ocean fishing, or otherwise assess the effects of a particular course of action, we must think about the lives of other creatures on the earth—and also the continued existence of the nonliving physical world. We must do so not because we wish to maintain what is “natural” but because we wish to act in a morally respectable manner. I have been using postmodern cultural criticism against itself. Yes, the postmodernists are right: we can do what we want with the nonhuman world. There is nothing essential about the realm of rocks, trees, fish, and climate that calls for a certain type of action. But postmodernists are also right that the only ethical way to act in a world that is socially constructed is to respect the voices of the others— of those with whom we share the planet but with whom we may not share a common language or outlook. There is, in other words, a limit or guiding principle to our actions. As political theorist Leslie Thiele puts it, “One can’t argue for the diversity of views of ‘nature’ without taking a stand for the diversity of nature.”

Tournament: St Marks | Round: Semis | Opponent: Montgomery WP | Judge: Panel
A desire to ignore the consequences of their advocacy causes failure --- you must evaluate consequences of their proposal
Christopher A. Bracey 6, Associate Professor of Law, Associate Professor of African and African American Studies, Washington University in St. Louis, September, Southern California Law Review, 79 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1231, p. 1318
Second, reducing conversation on race matters to an ideological contest allows opponents to elide inquiry into whether the results of a particular preference policy are desirable. Policy positions masquerading as principled ideological stances create the impression that a racial policy is not simply a choice among available alternatives, but the embodiment of some higher moral principle. Thus, the "principle" becomes an end in itself, without reference to outcomes. Consider the prevailing view of colorblindness in constitutional discourse. Colorblindness has come to be understood as the embodiment of what is morally just, independent of its actual effect upon the lives of racial minorities. This explains Justice Thomas's belief in the "moral and constitutional equivalence" between Jim Crow laws and race preferences, and his tragic assertion that "Government cannot make us equal but can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law." 281 For Thomas, there is no meaningful difference between laws designed to entrench racial subordination and those designed to alleviate conditions of oppression. Critics may point out that colorblindness in practice has the effect of entrenching existing racial disparities in health, wealth, and society. But in framing the debate in purely ideological terms, opponents are able to avoid the contentious issue of outcomes and make viability determinations based exclusively on whether racially progressive measures exude fidelity to the ideological principle of colorblindness. Meaningful policy debate is replaced by ideological exchange, which further exacerbates hostilities and deepens the cycle of resentment.

Extinction risks outweigh everything else regardless of probability.  Matheny 07

MATHENY 7 (Jason, Department of Health Policy and Management, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, “Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction,” Risk Analysis, Vol 27, No 5)

Even if extinction events are improbable, the expected values of countermeasures could be large, as they include the value of all future lives. This introduces a discontinuity between the CEA of extinction and nonextinction risks. Even though the risk to any existing individual of dying in a car crash is much greater than the risk of dying in an asteroid impact, asteroids pose a much greater risk to the existence of future generations (we are not likely to crash all our cars at once) (Chapman, 2004). The “death-toll” of an extinction-level asteroid impact is the population of Earth, plus all the descendents of that population who would otherwise have existed if not for the impact. There is thus a discontinuity between risks that threaten 99 of humanity and those that threaten 100.

Discussions of existential risks is key to solidarity and outweighs – specifically in educational spaces.  Small 06

Jonathan Small 6, former Americorps VISTA for the Human Services Coalition,  “Moving Forward,” The Journal for Civic Commitment,  Spring, http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/other/engagement/Journal/Issue7/Small.jsp)

What will be the challenges of the new millennium? And how should we equip young people to face these challenges? While we cannot be sure of the exact nature of the challenges, we can say unequivocally that humankind will face them together. If the end of the twentieth century marked the triumph of the capitalists, individualism, and personal responsibility, the new century will present challenges that require collective action, unity, and enlightened self-interest. Confronting global warming, depleted natural resources, global super viruses, global crime syndicates, and multinational corporations with no conscience and no accountability will require cooperation, openness, honesty, compromise, and most of all solidarity – ideals not exactly cultivated in the twentieth century. We can no longer suffer to see life through the tiny lens of our own existence. Never in the history of the world has our collective fate been so intricately interwoven. Our very existence depends upon our ability to adapt to this new paradigm, to envision a more cohesive society.  With humankind’s next great challenge comes also great opportunity. Ironically, modern individualism backed us into a corner. We have two choices, work together in solidarity or perish together in alienation. Unlike any other crisis before, the noose is truly around the neck of the whole world at once. Global super viruses will ravage rich and poor alike, developed and developing nations, white and black, woman, man, and child. Global warming and damage to the environment will affect climate change and destroy ecosystems across the globe. Air pollution will force gas masks on our faces, our depleted atmosphere will make a predator of the sun, and chemicals will invade and corrupt our water supplies. Every single day we are presented the opportunity to change our current course, to survive modernity in a manner befitting our better nature. Through zealous cooperation and radical solidarity we can alter the course of human events. Regarding the practical matter of equipping young people to face the challenges of a global, interconnected world, we need to teach cooperation, community, solidarity, balance and tolerance in schools. We need to take a holistic approach to education. Standardized test scores alone will not begin to prepare young people for the world they will inherit. The three staples of traditional education (reading, writing, and arithmetic) need to be supplemented by three cornerstones of a modern education, exposure, exposure, and more exposure. How can we teach solidarity? How can we teach community in the age of rugged individualism? How can we counterbalance crass commercialism and materialism? How can we impart the true meaning of power? These are the educational challenges we face in the new century. It will require a radical transformation of our conception of education. We’ll need to trust a bit more, control a bit less, and put our faith in the potential of youth to make sense of their world.  In addition to a declaration of the gauntlet set before educators in the twenty-first century, this paper is a proposal and a case study of sorts toward a new paradigm of social justice and civic engagement education. Unfortunately, the current pedagogical climate of public K-12 education does not lend itself well to an exploratory study and trial of holistic education. Consequently, this proposal and case study targets a higher education model. Specifically, we will look at some possibilities for a large community college in an urban setting with a diverse student body.  Our guides through this process are specifically identified by the journal Equity and Excellence in Education. The dynamic interplay between ideas of social justice, civic engagement, and service learning in education will be the lantern in the dark cave of uncertainty. As such, a simple and straightforward explanation of the three terms is helpful to direct this inquiry. Before we look at a proposal and case study and the possible consequences contained therein, this paper will draw out a clear understanding of how we should characterize these ubiquitous terms and how their relationship to each other affects our study. Social Justice, Civic Engagement, Service Learning and Other Commie Crap Social justice is often ascribed long, complicated, and convoluted definitions. In fact, one could fill a good-sized library with treatises on this subject alone. Here we do not wish to belabor the issue or argue over fine points. For our purposes, it will suffice to have a general characterization of the term, focusing instead on the dynamics of its interaction with civic engagement and service learning. Social justice refers quite simply to a community vision and a community conscience that values inclusion, fairness, tolerance, and equality. The idea of social justice in America has been around since the Revolution and is intimately linked to the idea of a social contract. The Declaration of Independence is the best example of the prominence of social contract theory in the US. It states quite emphatically that the government has a contract with its citizens, from which we get the famous lines about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Social contract theory and specifically the Declaration of Independence are concrete expressions of the spirit of social justice.  Similar clamor has been made over the appropriate definitions of civic engagement and service learning, respectively. Once again, let’s not get bogged down on subtleties. Civic engagement is a measure or degree of the interest and/or involvement an individual and a community demonstrate around community issues. There is a longstanding dispute over how to properly quantify civic engagement. Some will say that today’s youth are less involved politically and hence demonstrate a lower degree of civic engagement. Others cite high volunteer rates among the youth and claim it demonstrates a high exhibition of civic engagement. And there are about a hundred other theories put forward on the subject of civic engagement and today’s youth. But one thing is for sure; today’s youth no longer see government and politics as an effective or valuable tool for affecting positive change in the world. Instead of criticizing this judgment, perhaps we should come to sympathize and even admire it. Author Kurt Vonnegut said, “There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: only nut cases want to be president.” Maybe the youth’s rejection of American politics isn’t a shortcoming but rather a rational and appropriate response to their experience. Consequently, the term civic engagement takes on new meaning for us today. In order to foster fundamental change on the systemic level, which we have already said is necessary for our survival in the twenty-first century, we need to fundamentally change our systems. Therefore, part of our challenge becomes convincing the youth that these systems, and by systems we mean government and commerce, have the potential for positive change. Civic engagement consequently takes on a more specific and political meaning in this context.  Service learning is a methodology and a tool for teaching social justice, encouraging civic engagement, and deepening practical understanding of a subject. Since it is a relatively new field, at least in the structured sense, service learning is only beginning to define itself. Through service learning students learn by experiencing things firsthand and by exposing themselves to new points of view. Instead of merely reading about government, for instance, a student might experience it by working in a legislative office. Rather than just studying global warming out of a textbook, a student might volunteer time at an environmental group. If service learning develops and evolves into a discipline with the honest goal of making better citizens, teaching social justice, encouraging civic engagement, and most importantly, exposing students to different and alternative experiences, it could be a major feature of a modern education. Service learning is the natural counterbalance to our current overemphasis on standardized testing. Social justice, civic engagement, and service learning are caught in a symbiotic cycle. The more we have of one of them; the more we have of all of them. However, until we get momentum behind them, we are stalled. Service learning may be our best chance to jumpstart our democracy. In the rest of this paper, we will look at the beginning stages of a project that seeks to do just that.

Tournament: CPS | Round: Semis | Opponent: Dougherty Valley CS | Judge: Panel
CP Text: the United States federal government should abolish the entirety of the armed forces. Edmons 04
Brad Edmonds. “Four Reasons We Should Abolish the Military” February 10, 2004. Free Republic.
Four Reasons We Should Abolish the Military To address the common claim by neoconservatives that we owe our freedom to the men and women of the US military, I've written recently that we don't owe the military anything of the sort. While many soldiers, airmen, etc. died in combat believing they were defending our freedom, they were misguided in this belief. The "for our freedom" claim is false because our freedoms were won by the founders and written into law by them, hence a military created afterward could have had nothing to do with that; the freedoms then created have only eroded over time, and the military did not prevent this (and could not, not being part of the legislative process); the military has never been necessary to prevent our freedoms being taken by other countries, as historians available all over the web are now making clear; and the military over the last century has only executed the adventurous whims of individual congressmen and presidents, and in so doing has been the muscle behind needlessly making the rest of the world hate us. Aside from looking at the past, there are compelling reasons we should abolish all government military forces now. 1. Any standing military force aside from the Navy is unconstitutional. The Constitution provides for funding of armies only two years at a time – even the typical four-year commitment for ROTC cadets and new enlistees is thus illegal, as presumably it could not be known four years in advance that there would still be a standing Army or Air Force. Many things the federal government does today are unconstitutional, but this is no reason not to continue to consider the Constitution an authoritative document. 2. The private sector could provide heavy-weapons regional defense better than the government. I neglected to mention in recent articles, but included in my "abolishing government" series, that insurers would most likely take up this task. Insurers have the resources and incentive already, and unlike the government's military, if an insurer caused "collateral damage," the insurer would be held responsible, with no protection from lawsuits. Additionally, an insurer would be required to succeed in protecting its customers, which our military isn't; and do at least as good a job of that for the dollar as the next insurer. By contrast, in today's government military, drill instructors are required to be "sensitive" rather than effective; gays and women share close quarters with men, even in combat, to the detriment of combat effectiveness; materiel is often purchased from the lowest bidder (unless the bidder represents a token minority contractor the Pentagon needs, in which case a toilet seat can cost hundreds of dollars); and in general our government military is a playground for the social-engineering initiatives of leftists in Congress, and is not dedicated primarily to its mission. The private sector, were it allowed to provide regional defense without government interference, would be more efficient, more effective, safer, and would never have incentive to engage in social engineering, nor in murderous foreign-policy adventurism and the consequent creation of bitter enemies around the world. 3. Even if the military were both efficient and constitutional, a standing military is a threat to our liberty, as has been proven in US history. The ultimate test of liberty is secession. Even Lincoln himself agreed before he became president that secession is a natural right. What made a slave a slave was that he could not secede from his owner's governance and go into business for himself. What makes the states and all their citizens slaves to the union today is that we are not allowed to secede and govern ourselves. The US military, in the only action it ever took that directly affected American liberty, prevented it – prevented the secession of several states by killing 300,000 of their citizens, then over several years enforcing draconian martial law over the survivors. 4. As the military is a government outfit, it can never be efficient. Indeed, as Ludwig von Mises showed, the US military, being a purely socialist government monopoly, can never know how much money it should have or spend, can never have a good idea how much its operations should cost. Right now, the US defense budget is over $1,400 for each man, woman, and child in the US. The private sector could provide a deterrent, enough to prevent any threat of foreign invasion, for probably 1/10 of that – which, remember, would still amount to $40 billion. No government agency can ever know what its costs should be; it is a forcible monopoly, and never can face bankruptcy, competition, or loss of customers. For the most part, the military as we have it is unconstitutional, as have been most of its actions since 1812 (in which war most of the work was done by privateers anyway). The private sector would do a far better job for far less money, as the individual Ross Perot proved in practical terms. The only impact the standing military has on our freedom is to take it away. And the military will eternally waste money because it cannot be governed by market forces, cannot ever know what its costs should be, cannot know what value it should return to stakeholders, and will never have an incentive to do a good job efficiently. In short, just as with any government service such as education or welfare services, it can never work well. This military must be abolished.

Tournament: CPS | Round: Semis | Opponent: Dougherty Valley CS | Judge: Panel
A: Public universities and colleges should either create policies, or reform their current policies on sexual harassment, to set strict harassment guidelines for in classroom behavior for teachers that prohibits speech that creates a hostile learning environment. They should also implement guidelines prohibiting student-to-student content that creates an hostile learning environment due to the sexual nature of the speech. These regulations will be enforced consistent with Title IX and VII of the Civil Rights Act. Dower 12 J.d
Dower, Benjamin. Assistant Attorney General at Texas Attorney General "Scylla of Sexual Harassment and the Charybdis of Free Speech: How Public Universities Can Craft Policies to Avoid Liability, The." Rev. Litig. 31 (2012): 703.
Sexual Harassment Policy for University Students¶ Students are prohibited from committing sexual harassment.¶ Sexual harassment for students is defined as:¶ (1) Words of a sexual nature directed at the person of the¶ addressee that, by their very utterance, inflict injury, provoke¶ resentment in the addressee, and tend to incite an immediate breach¶ of the peace. Breach of the peace, as contemplated by this provision,¶ is defined as public disorder that involves the outbreak of physical¶ violence.¶ (2) Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors,¶ and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature when¶ (a) submission to such conduct is made either¶ explicitly or implicitly a term or condition of an individual's¶ academic or employment status; or¶ (b) submission to or rejection of such conduct by an¶ individual is used as the basis for employment or academic¶ decision affecting such individual.¶ (3) Conduct of a sexual nature that is so severe and¶ pervasive-viewed both objectively and from the perspective of the¶ recipient of the remarks and considering the totality of the¶ circumstances-as to create a hostile learning environment.¶ Sexual Harassment Policy for University Employees¶ University employees are prohibited from committing sexual harassment.¶ Sexual harassment for university employees is defined as:¶ (1) Words of a sexual nature directed at the person of the addressee that, by their very utterance, inflict injury, provoke resentment in the addressee, and tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. Breach of the peace, as contemplated by this provision, *746 is defined as public disorder that involves the outbreak of physical violence.¶ (2) Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature when¶ (a) submission to such conduct is made either explicitly or implicitly a term or condition of an individual’s academic or employment status; or¶ (b) submission to or rejection of such conduct by an individual is used as the basis for employment or academic decision affecting such individual.¶ ¶ (3) Conduct of a sexual nature that is so severe or pervasive--viewed both objectively and from the perspective of the recipient of the remarks and considering the totality of the circumstances--as to create a hostile learning environment.¶ ¶ Possible Addition¶ ¶ A university employee accused of sexual harassment stemming from speech conducted in the classroom may raise, as a defense, that his or her classroom expression was reasonably related to a legitimate pedagogical interest. If the employee is able to show by a preponderance of the evidence that his or her classroom expression was reasonably related to a legitimate pedagogical interest, the committee shall weigh the value of that interest against the harm of the alleged harassment in determining both guilt and punishment.¶ 

The counterplan resolves a grey area within harassment law – right now professor speech gets protected under the first amendment. The counterplan shifts the precedent to take a stance against harassment. Marcus 08
Kenneth L  Marcus Lillie and Nathan Ackerman Chair in Equality and Justice in America, Baruch College¶ School of Public Affairs. "Higher Education, Harassment, and First Amendment Opportunism." Wm. and Mary Bill Rts. J. 16 (2007): 1025.
These incidents highlight a puzzling phenomenon in contemporary constitutional¶ culture. The puzzle has been the relatively recent appearance and eager¶ acceptance, especially in higher education, of First Amendment or academic¶ freedom arguments in areas which had long been beyond their reach. For at least¶ the "first fifteen years of its development," the law of harassment had been wellunderstood¶ to regulate a sphere of constitutionally unprotected, proscribable¶ conduct, even when it incidentally included the use of words.2' Yet in recent years¶ free-speech arguments have become a favorite topic-changing device for defenders¶ of all forms of harassment, 22 especially in post-secondary education where many are¶ especially sensitized to issues of free speech and academic freedom. The tendency¶ to construct harassing conduct as speech has important ramifications since the¶ appearance of the First Amendment, with its powerful array of standards and¶ presumptions, augurs ill for any area of regulation which is brought within its¶ shifting boundaries. As Frederick Schauer put it, "Once the First Amendment shows¶ up, much of the game is over., 23 And indeed, arguably, the game may now be over¶ for harassment law, which is to say, free speech issues may have obtained too much traction in this area to be dismissed out of hand. On the other hand, it remains at¶ best unclear as to whether the First Amendment is even salient as to this area of law.¶ The appearance of the First Amendment in this area was likely hastened by¶ overreaching on the part of civil rights advocates who, during the 1980s and 1990s,¶ introduced campus speech codes which could not help but raise First Amendment¶ attention.24 For many years, this conflict played itself out in a series of arguments¶ about campus speech codes, which were devised to protect various groups from¶ expressions which might be considered offensive or "hateful."' While these codes¶ drew some support from academic commentators, 26 the courts generally found them¶ to violate the First Amendment and other commentators agreed.27 Interestingly, few institutions have withdrawn speech or harassment codes unless threatened with the¶ risk of litigation or faced with adverse judicial decisions, and many apparently¶ remain on the books.28¶ At the same time, however, most universities have also promulgated antidiscrimination¶ and harassment policies pursuant to the requirements of various¶ federal civil rights statutes (especially Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 196429 and¶ Title IX3¶ " of the Education Amendments Act).3¶ ' Unlike hate speech codes,¶ harassment regulations (such as the federal regulations or public universities'¶ implementing policies) are not directly aimed at speech, although the harassing¶ conduct they regulate may include words.32 Given the prominence of speech¶ interests to the academic setting, however, free speech claims are now regularly¶ raised in response to various allegations of harassment; this is nowhere more true¶ than with respect to allegations of anti-Semitic harassment. Indeed, Justice Kennedy¶ once remarked in dissent that federal education harassment law is "circumscribed by the First Amendment,"33 and federal regulatory policy has assumed this to be so¶ for over a decade. 34 Nevertheless, there is reason to question the validity of this¶ assumption and the salience of free speech to the regulation of education harassment.¶ To the extent that harassment regulation encompasses some speech activities by¶ state actors on the basis of content, the most difficult constitutional question may be¶ whether First Amendment doctrine even applies to such questions or whether they¶ lay outside of the boundaries of First Amendment coverage. 35 This Article will¶ argue that the salience of the First Amendment to questions of academic harassment¶ is at best unsettled; that efforts to apply First Amendment doctrine to harassment¶ law may be seen as a form of what Frederick Schauer has described as "First¶ Amendment opportunism; ' 36 and that such efforts to extend the boundaries of the¶ First Amendment are ultimately unresolvable on the basis of constitutional doctrine¶ alone. Special attention is given to the recently resurgent problem of campus antiSemitism¶ because harassment allegations under this rubric have been subjected to¶ frequent, intense challenge as of late.37z

Tournament: CPS | Round: Semis | Opponent: Dougherty Valley CS | Judge: Panel
Harassment cases persist because of a lack of clarity in requirements – a commitment to accountability is key. Saha 8/22

MADHUMITA SAHA The writer is an academic-turned journalist. She taught history at Drexel University and New York University before joining WION. Mon, 22 Aug 2016 http://www.dnaindia.com/world/column-academia-s-feet-of-clay-sexual-misconduct-and-gender-discrimination-in-schools-2247826

In the present context, Tyann Sorrell ’s recourse to legal action seems an obvious choice. But the legal history of sexual harassment shows that the road to public protest had been tough and long. Professor Carrie N. Baker shows in her book, The Women’s Movement against Sexual Harassment, how characterizations of sexual behaviour in workplaces have evolved from being considered a moral problem of a working woman, to a social problem of male lust and seduction, and eventually in the 1970s, such acts came to be interpreted as acts of violence against women and a violation of women’s civil rights.¶ In response to public awakening to the issue, the judges ruled in the William v. Saxbe federal court case of 1976 that sexual harassment is a form of illegal sex discrimination under Title VII. Before this verdict, the US courts were of the opinion that sexual harassment was merely disharmony in a personal relationship, the result of personal urges of individuals, and not part of company policy.¶ We trust in numbers: quantifying sexual harassment in the campus¶ ¶ American universities with the most reports of rape, 2014¶ University campuses are particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment of various types. Different sorts of authorities - formal, informal, achieved as well as ascribed- are exercised over students, assistant professors, and administrative assistants. According to the federal campus safety data, nearly 100 US colleges and universities had at least 10 reports of rape on their main campuses in 2014, with Brown University and the University of Connecticut tied for the highest annual total of 43 each.¶ Recently, Association of American Universities (AAU) conducted a Campus Climate Survey on Sexual Assault and Sexual Misconduct among 150,000 students at 27 schools, including most of the Ivy League. Of the female undergraduate student respondents, 23.1 per cent informed the surveyors that they have experienced sexual misconduct due to physical force, threats of physical force, or incapacitation.¶ 2¶ Per cent of college students reporting sexual assault, 2015¶ One of the most disturbing revelations of the survey indicates that overall rates of reporting to campus officials and law enforcement were rather low.¶ Depending on the specific type of sexual harassment, only five per cent to 28 per cent of respondents claim to have reported their experience of sexual harassment to the appropriate authorities. According to the AAU Climate Survey, the most common reason for not reporting incidents of sexual assault and sexual misconduct was that it was not considered serious enough. Among other reasons, students cited they were “embarrassed, ashamed or that it would be too emotionally difficult,” and because they “did not think anything would be done about it.”¶ Taking it from here to a safer future¶ There is nothing peculiar about sexual harassment and misconduct in the US educational institutions. Embedded in the similar kind of power structure, I am sure, such acts of sexual transgression is common enough occurrence in any university under the sun. So, let’s not point a finger and try to make a case of western sexual promiscuity out of it; we are all living in fragile glass houses.¶ On 14 December 2015, Smriti Irani, the former human resource and development minister of India reported, that as per University Grants Commission (UGC), there have been 295 cases of sexual harassment against women during 2014-15 in various institutes of higher learning in India.¶ As various scholars and activists working on sexual misconduct have already pointed out, we have to be aware that even when a sexual assault has not taken place, a person can experience sexual harassment; a hostile, offensive and intimidating atmosphere - created in academic spaces - does count as sex harassment too.¶ Women belonging to minority groups of different race, caste, and religion are more vulnerable. As are people belonging to the third gender.¶ While acknowledging that women are more vulnerable to sexual conduct, we also need to come up with regulations that look into the harassment suffered by other genders too. Recently, the UGC has taken the right step towards this direction when it introduced the first gender neutral regulation on sexual harassment in India. Under this regulation, both male students and students of the third gender in universities can lodge complaints against sexual harassment faced by them.¶ Tyann Sorrell 's case, and similar other cases reported from academic institutions, should be used to create greater awareness. Sexual harassment is indeed ubiquitous; such heinous crime is not solely committed by blacks, poor and the uneducated, as is widely perceived. Power is deeply entrenched in such actions and, thus, the perpetrators often come from the most privileged section of our societies.

Successful lawsuits force school accountability to fight harassment. Silbaugh 15

Silbaugh, Katharine Law Alumni Scholar¶ BA magna cum laude, Amherst College¶ JD with high honors and Order of the Coif, University of Chicago¶ . "Reactive to Proactive: Title IX's Unrealized Capacity to Prevent Campus Sexual Assault." BUL Rev. 95 (2015): 1049.

In March of 2013, President Obama signed a re-authorization of the¶ Violence Against Women Act.97 Within the re-authorization were amendments¶ to the Clery Act, which requires educational institutions to disclose statistics¶ about the number of sexual assaults on campus in an annual report that must be¶ distributed to students and prospective students, engaging market pressures to¶ press universities into addressing sexual assault.98 The amendments to the¶ Clery Act (entitled the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act, or SaVE¶ Act)99 strengthen reporting requirements and go beyond DOE’s¶ “recommendation” that colleges educate staff and students to require¶ educational institutions to educate staff and students about campus sexual assault, including statements that sexual assault is prohibited, definitions of¶ sexual assault and consent, bystander tools, and awareness programs for new¶ students.100 The Clery Act is enforced by the DOE primarily through fines, but¶ it is not a part of Title IX. While the focus of the Clery Act remains the¶ accurate reporting of crimes, it will serve as a limited and defined mechanism¶ for getting colleges to introduce education and prevention strategies to¶ students. However, the Clery Act, unlike Title IX, does not mandate equality in¶ the provision of education; a school can check off requirements under the new¶ Clery Amendments without evaluating their efficacy or revising them toward¶ the particular goal of equal educational opportunity. Title IX has a far greater¶ capacity to address sexual assault prevention because colleges could be¶ compelled to take whatever reasonable steps can be shown to reduce assaults,¶ or combination of steps as research about efficacy continues to develop. The¶ DOE has the ability to develop a far more comprehensive approach to assault¶ prevention under Title IX than the specific prescriptions the Clery¶ Amendments mandate.¶ Does the Gebser framework constrain Title IX from doing prevention work?¶ Not for the DOE. To the contrary, the DOE has effectively used Title IX to¶ change campus culture more broadly already. Consider Title IX as the rest of¶ the world has: as sports law. Title IX applied pressure on institutions to offer¶ equality in programming and in the educational experience. Differences in¶ interest in participation couldn’t be offered as an excuse for noncompliance¶ with Title IX: if there was not a culture of sports for girls and women, schools¶ needed to create that culture to ensure equality.101 While it was not smooth¶ sailing throughout, schools largely achieved that cultural shift. This may have¶ been possible because relative to other institutions, schools are good creators¶ of culture. When schools first tried to say that they simply found the world as¶ is, with girls not wanting to participate in sports at the rate boys did, the DOE¶ pushed back. In response, schools became creative at expanding and¶ cultivating interest in sports among girls and women. The social change around¶ girls in sports resulted in large part from a charge to schools to cultivate that¶ change, taking concrete steps that would have the effect of changing cultural¶ dynamics. The colleges faced cultural resistance to change and allegations that¶ they were going too far in redesigning athletic programs and opportunities,102 much as colleges do today as they deliberate over the right sexual assault¶ prevention measures.103 But they demonstrated a powerful ability to transform¶ the culture and expectations of equality in sports participation.¶ Title IX operates primarily as a spending clause regulation overseen by the¶ DOE. The DOE should not have felt constrained by the doctrine developed to¶ address the individual cause of action. If poor reaction in response to an actual,¶ individual sexual assault can give rise to an individual cause of action, why¶ can’t high rates of sexual assault in a school’s population amount to sex¶ discrimination for purposes of DOE enforcement? If higher rates of assault¶ overall result when a school fails to take evidence-based steps to reduce the¶ overall rate of sexual assault, why wouldn’t the DOE nudge schools to be¶ proactive? What if schools have concrete tools at their disposal to reduce the¶ overall rate of assault? Isn’t that within the DOE’s enforcement purview?¶ Consider, by comparison, the legislative approach to school bullying. In the¶ past decade, nearly every state has passed laws addressing the obligations of a¶ school system to address incidents of bullying and to prevent bullying.104¶ While those statutes are aimed at both prevention and post-incident¶ intervention, the most recent and best-regarded statutes focus substantial¶ energy on requiring schools to deliver evidence-based bullying prevention¶ programming in an effort to reduce the amount of bullying within each¶ school.105 Prevention and culture change are at the core of these legal¶ interventions.106 Ideally, they would be at the core of the DOE’s approach to¶ Title IX’s guarantee of equal access to education on college campuses. Perhaps we are seeing the beginning of this exact reform: the DOE is¶ investigating schools, and, in turn, schools have stepped up their evaluations of¶ their own processes. If so, I would hope the next step will be a DOE guidance¶ on prevention measures, because to date, they’ve drawn colleges far into the¶ weeds on responses without adequately directing them toward prevention.

AFF causes a snowball effect that makes first amendment defenses impossible to beat. Schauer 04
Schauer, Frederick David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law. "The boundaries of the First Amendment: A preliminary exploration of constitutional salience." Harvard Law Review (2004): 1765-1809.
In addition to the properties of First Amendment claims that may¶ make them less likely to appear legally frivolous, the First Amend-¶ ment's magnetism may assist in ensuring that those claims will not¶ arise in isolation. There will often be multiple lawyers, multiple liti-¶ gants, and multiple public actors who perceive the virtues of the same¶ opportunistic strategy at roughly the same time, or who even may be¶ in active coordination with each other - as with the multiple chal-¶ lenges to the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, the proliferation of First¶ Amendment rhetoric surrounding legal arguments regarding computer¶ source code, and the panoply of parallel claims about First Amend-¶ ment limitations on copyright. When this is the case, the multiplicity¶ of individually tenuous claims may produce a cascade effect160 such¶ that the claims no longer appear tenuous. The combination of, say,¶ four scarcely plausible but simultaneous court challenges and twenty¶ scarcely plausible public claims of a First Amendment problem could make all these individually implausible claims seem more credible¶ than they actually are.161 From the standpoint of an interest group¶ seeking to achieve change and to mobilize public support or the sup-¶ port of other interest groups,162 winning is better than losing publicly,¶ but losing publicly is perhaps still preferable to being ignored.¶ Once the claim or argument achieves a critical mass of plausibility,¶ the game may be over. Even if individual courts reject the claim, the¶ multiplicity of now-plausible claims may give the issue what is re-¶ ferred to in inside-the-Beltway political jargon as "traction" and in¶ newsroom jargon as "legs." Interestingly, this phenomenon sometimes¶ survives even authoritative rejection of the claim. With respect to the¶ argument that hostile-environment sexual harassment enforcement has¶ serious First Amendment implications, for example, neither the Su-¶ preme Court's rejection of this argument in dicta in R.A. V v. City of¶ St. Paul163 nor the Court's silent dismissal of the same claim in Harris¶ v. Forklift Systems, Inc.164 has slowed the momentum of those who¶ would wage serious First Amendment battle against hostile-¶ environment sexual harassment law.'65 Similarly, decades of judicial¶ rejection of the argument that copyright law must be substantially re-¶ stricted by the commands of the First Amendment have scarcely dis-¶ couraged those who urge otherwise; and in some respects the Supreme¶ Court's recent decision in Eldred v. Ashcroftl66 can be considered not a¶ defeat, but rather one further step toward the entry of copyright into¶ the domain of the First Amendment: the Supreme Court did grant cer-¶ tiorari, in part to determine "whether ... the extension of existing and¶ future copyrights violates the First Amendment;"'67 and the seven-¶ Justice majority, as well as Justice Breyer in dissent,'68 acknowledged¶ that the First Amendment was not totally irrelevant. 

Sexual harassment in the classroom is a result of patriarchal violence that invades academia. Sexual harassment represents an oppressive use of power by professors and kills the participation and success of the harassed. Benson and Thomson 

Benson, Donna J., and Gregg E. Thomson. "Sexual harassment on a university campus: The confluence of authority relations, sexual interest and gender stratification." Social problems 29.3 (1982): 236-251.

It is precisely this widespread confluence of authority relations, sexual interest and gender¶ stratification which defines the problem of sexual harassment. There is, in other words, a nexus¶ of power and sexualprerogative often enjoyed by men with formal authority over women. Men¶ in such positions can engage in (or "get away with") overt sexual behaviors that would be rebuffed¶ or avoided were the relationship not one of superior and subordinate. They can also discharge selectively the power and rewards of their positions as a means to obligate women sexualy (Blau,¶ 1964).¶ As well as reward and punish women directly, men can manipulate and obscure their sexual in-¶ tentions toward female subordinates. Women learn that the "official" attention of a male¶ superior is often but a vehicle through which he can "press his pursuits" (Goffman, 1977). In¶ turn, what is often mistakenly perceived by men as an unfounded distrust or suspicion of motives¶ has its basis in previous experience with male "helpfulness." Therefore, as Thorne5 suggests, there¶ is an intrinsic ambiguity between the formal definition of the male superior/female subordinate¶ relationship and a sexual one, in which the gender of the woman can be made salient at the in-¶ itiative of the man.¶ Male Authority and Sexual Interest on the University Campus¶ At major universities, student access to individual instructors can be a scarce resource. Faculty¶ members serve as gatekeepers to the professions, yet an institutional priority on research severely¶ constrains the time and energy that they devote to instruction and interaction with under-¶ graduates (Blau, 1973). Moreover, though students are supposedly evaluated according to merit,¶ the teacher's role permits a wide latitude in the degree of interaction and helpfulness granted to¶ individual students. An instructor enjoys considerable discretionary power to provide or¶ withhold academic rewards (grades, recommendations) and related resources (help, psychological¶ support).6¶ As in the workplace, it is usually men who exercise this discretionary power over female univer-¶ sity students. While women now comprise more than half of all college students,¶ faculty-especially within higher ranks and at major universities-are overwhelmingly male.¶ About 95 percent of university full professors are men (Patterson and Engelberg, 1978). Nor-¶ mative requirements for career advancement at competitive universities are based on traditional,¶ male life-cycle patterns and work schedules that are not convenient to many women (Hochschild,¶ 1975).¶ In the past, it has been difficult for women to successfully enter any prestigious and male-¶ dominated - hence, "non-traditional" - field (Epstein, 1970). Social psychological analyses (Med-¶ nick et. al., 1975) have identified some of the barriers still faced by college women seeking such¶ careers. Yet a recent compendium of student responses to a University of California ad-¶ ministrative query about sex discrimination on campus is replete with testimony from male¶ students that female students' sexuality now gives them an unfair advantage in this competition¶ (University of California, Berkeley, 1977). While women allude to numerous sexist remarks and¶ behaviors by faculty which derogate the abilities of women as a group, the male respondents¶ claim that individual women profit from their sexual attributes because male instructors go out of¶ their way to be "extra friendly" and helpful to them. According to the male perception, then, the¶ latitude permitted in the faculty-student relationship works - at the initiative of either instructor¶ or student - to the advantage of attractive women.¶ Some sociologists of higher education view faculty-student sexual exchanges only as women at-¶ tempting to use their sexuality to compensate for a lack of academic accomplishment:¶ Innumerable girls have found that a pretty face and a tight sweater were an adequate substitute for diligence and cleverness when dealing with a male teacher. Some, having been frustrated in efforts to get¶ by on this basis, have pushed matters further and ended up in bed-though not necessarily with an A¶ (Jencks and Riesman, 1968:427n).¶ Similarly, Singer's (1964:148) empirical study of the relationship between personal attrac-¶ tiveness and university grades relies on unsupported conjecture about female manipulativeness to¶ conclude that ". . . the poor college professor is . . . enticed by the female students ... as he goes¶ about his academic and personal responsibilities." In both studies we find the unquestioned¶ assumption that women (unfairly) capitalize on their sexuality in an otherwise meritocratic and¶ asexual relationship.7¶ Our analysis of sexual harassment as the nexus of power and sexual prerogative implies that,¶ from the woman's perspective, the situation is more complex and decidedly less sanguine. Rather¶ than having a unilateral "sex advantage," female students face the possibility that male instruc-¶ tors may manipulate sexual interest and authority in ways which ultimately undermine the posi-¶ tion of women in academia. Because women can no longer be openly denied access to educational¶ and professional training legally, sexual harassment may remain an especially critical factor of¶ more covert discrimination.

We need to challenge the way masculinity invades the everyday spaces we occupy – challenging harassment is key. Cockburn 10

Cockburn 10 – visiting professor at Department of Sociology at City University London, honorary professor in the Centre for the study of gender and women at University of Warwick, Women in Black against War, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (Cynthia, “Getting to Peace: what kind of movement” womeninblack.org, http://www.womeninblack.org/old/files/OpenDemGettingtoPeace.pdf)

Diana Francis, in the third of her series of articles, asks ‘what underlies war’s continuing widespread acceptance?’ This is a useful approach to the roots of war, in my view, because it opens up to questions about society, people, you and me, who are implicitly the ones to accept (or question, or refuse) war. It invites us to interrogate a film like Avatar, which is so characteristic of the culture we live in, the culture that enables, limits and shapes us. It leads to an exploration of the continuum of violence, the connections between the explosive violence of actual war, the perennial violence inherent in our militarized condition, and violence in everyday life and everyday culture. If Mary Kaldor is right (see her contribution to this debate, ‘Reconceptualizing War‘) in saying that wars are very often fought, not to be won but rather as a kind of mutual enterprise in which the warring parties share some benefits, this too must point us towards an examination of cultures. Some of the benefits that war-making people and classes gain from the perpetuation of armed conflict will certainly be economic. But some may be advantages in self-identity as men, or regard and status with regard to other people and groups. What messages are we taking in, telling each other, that make fighting, deliberate injury and killing, seem reasonable, desirable – even glorious? Avatar is just one of a zillion instances of cultural production that normalize and glorify fighting, militarization and war. And this violent culture in which we’re immersed is profoundly gendered, as Diana Francis, and Shelley Anderson in her recent article ‘Vital Peace Constituencies’, point out. Gendered mindsets, expectations, behaviours and attitudes feed and are fed by films like this, by video games, advertising, the fashion industry and TV reality shows, that bombard our consciousness day in and day out. Masculinity and femininity are endlessly constituted in idealized, contrasted and complementary forms that are parodies of real human ‘being’. We are made over as avatars fitted out for a virtual world in which each sex is a truncated, incomplete human being, a world in which he will survive violence and deal it out, while she will allure, invite and comply. The feminist women and pro-feminist men who resist such deformation are so marginal to the narrative they scarcely make the list of credits. And, unfortunately, this is no cinema fantasy but the very world we live in. Gender struggle in the peace movement One thing I have discovered during research in and among peace movements is that a gender struggle goes on in them too. The majority of organizations are mixed. They have many women in the membership, though frequently the leading personalities and spokes-persons are male. In most countries however there are a handful of feminist antiwar, antimilitarist and peace organizations. These are often differentiated from the mainstream peace movements of which they are a part, and to which they contribute, by one particular quality. While they don’t fail to pay attention to the large-scale issues and events that concern all peace movements – weapons of mass destruction, huge global military expenditures, the worldwide system of United States military bases, and so on – they simultaneously call attention to more mundane violence and the individual lives it affects, to pain, care and responsibility. For instance, Okinawan Women Act Against Military Violence (OWAMMV), like the rest of the Japanese peace movement, are concerned with the huge burden of the US bases that spread their razor wire all over the archipelago. But they also campaign against the abuse, rape and murder of individual women that is too often associated with the areas of bars and brothels surrounding these bases. OWAAMV’s first act on learning of a new assault, however, is always to check on the wellbeing of the victim before launching (yet another) mass protest against the system that has harmed her. Likewise, In South Korea, Women Making Peace are notable for having introduced into the movement a stress on ‘peace culture’, changing lives and practices, starting with one’s own. Which does not mean they don’t go out to join demonstrations against sending troops to Afghanistan or Iraq, or join in the campaign for the reunification of Korea. They do that too. After spending time with the women of many such organizations, and as a member, myself, of both Women in Black and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, it seems to me that together we are introducing a fresh new thought into the field of international relations and war studies. We are saying: if the gendered cultures of violence in everyday life bring about ‘widespread acceptance of war’, then gender relations, as we know and live them, must be recognized as, in fact, causal in war. I have argued as much in an article appearing next month in the International Feminist Journal of Politics. A predisposing cause Most visible in the news analysis of any given war, of course, are economic factors (access to resources and markets). And yes, fair enough, capitalist expansionism and corporate interests certainly do motivate war-making governments and other social actors. Also visible, perhaps more hyped, in the conventional analysis are political factors. And, indeed, wars often are about the control or exclusion of particular kinds of people (the ones the wrong side of a border, the ones with the wrong god, or skin colour, or national name). Sometimes these two sets of motivations are summed up as ‘greed and grievance’, or ‘capitalism and nationalism’ or ‘class and race’. But the male power system (still widely called patriarchy, for lack of a better name) is intertwined with the capitalist mode of production and the nationstate system among the causes of war. As a source of cultures that produce sexual divisions – sexual divisions of labour, of war, of love – gender power relations ready us all the time for violence. They are a predisposing cause. Raewyn Connell, a well-known theoretician of masculinity and gender power, endorses this view. She writes that ‘masculinities are the forms in which many dynamics of violence take shape’. While the causes of war are many, therefore, and include ‘dispossession, poverty, greed, nationalism, racism, and other forms of inequality, bigotry and desire... Yet given the concentration of weapons and the practices of violence among men, gender patterns appear to be strategic’ 2. If gender relations are indeed one of the root causes of war, it follows that transformative change in gender relations must be part of the effort for peace. Gender work is peace work. This opens the door to men in the peace movement. To quote R.W.Connell once again, ‘Evidently, then, strategy for demilitarization and peace must include a strategy of change in masculinities. This is the new dimension in peace work which studies of men suggest: contesting the hegemony of masculinities which emphasise violence, confrontation and domination, and replacing them with patterns of masculinity more open to negotiation, cooperation and equality’. Men in the peace movement Men in the peace movement could step through that open door now and work on a critique of the manipulation of masculinity for militarism, making it a conscious part of their antiwar activism. They could say, as we wrote on our banner at the Women’s Gate of the Aldermaston Blockade a month ago, ‘No fists, no knives, no guns, no bombs. No to all violence’. Such a simple slogan links, in one giddy move, bedroom and battlefield, the violence of so-called peace and that of so-called war, in a single continuum. That is, I think, a concept with a perspective capable of inspiring a movement on a matching scale. War culture is hegemonic in our society. It’s the prevailing common-sense. The antiwar movement is, by comparison, patchy, disparate, and on some issues even divided. Parts of it focus on nuclear weapons, parts on the arms trade, parts on contemporary war-fighting. Its discourses include various kinds of socialism, pacifism, feminism – and those of various religions. These sectors and segments pull together on some issues, part company on others. To prevail over the taken-for granted militarism of the dominant culture I believe the movement has to follow the lead of organizations such as OWAAMV and Women Making Peace, and others like them in different countries, and allow a critique of gender to become a prompt to reinterpret and transform the peace movement, its aims, its structures and its own cultures. What is today a movement against war could become something wider and deeper, effectively a counter-hegemonic movement, a nonviolent movement for a nonviolent world.

And, diversity outweighs and turns the case – Chang 02

Chang, Mitchell J. "Perservation or Transformation: Where's the Real Educational Discourse on Diversity?." The Review of Higher Education 25.2 (2002): 125-140.

Historically, postsecondary institutions did not willingly embrace, let¶ alone collectively defend, diversity-related efforts. It took heavy-handed¶ intervention by the federal government to open wider the doors of higher¶ education to students of color. This change and subsequent institutional¶ alterations now considered under the rubric of diversity varied in the ease¶ with which different campuses implemented them; but it is fair to say that¶ much ongoing administrative resistance (Altbach, 1991; Olivas, 1993; Trent,¶ 1991a) and prolonged acrimonious debate (Levine, 1996) characterized the¶ typical campus dealing with diversity issues. Institutional conflicts typically¶ occurred because, as Hurtado (1996) observed, “These diversity issues¶ often required fundamental changes in premises and practices at many levels”¶ (p. 27), which, according to Chan (1989), threatened the very structure¶ of power both within and outside the university.¶ Because the diversity agenda and its related efforts seek to effect change¶ at almost all levels of higher education, it has been described as a “transformative¶ enterprise” (Nakanishi and Leong, 1978; Wei, 1993). In this view, diversity¶ initiatives are not simply innocuous extensions of preexisting¶ institutional interests but are instead efforts that challenge and seek to¶ transform traditional institutional practices and arrangements toward making¶ education more equitable, diverse, and inclusive, as well as more open¶ to alternative perspectives (Hirabayashi, 1997). Perhaps because the transformative¶ aims associated with diversity tend to challenge existing arrangements,¶ colleges and universities have not done all that they must do to¶ maximize the educational benefits associated with diversity (Allen, 1992;¶ Chang, 1999b). Hurtado (1996) held that “both resistance and change are¶ inevitable parts of the major transformation that is under way in the mission¶ of postsecondary institutions—a mission that includes diversity as a¶ key component” (p. 29). Therefore, she maintained, some tension and conflict¶ are likely at the level of deep institutional change in the history of individual¶ campus diversity efforts. In an educational setting, however, tension¶ and conflict are not necessarily problematic for learning (Gurin, 1999), unless¶ they prevent campuses from successfully implementing a multifaceted¶ approach to diversity.¶ Given that the transformative aims often clash with deep-seated institutional¶ assumptions and values, the educational benefits associated with diversity¶ emerge, more often than not, out of institutional transformation¶ and not out of preexisting ways of operating and behaving. In other words,¶ educational benefits for students emanate from changes that challenge prevailing¶ educational sensibilities and that enhance educational participation. Accordingly, retired Harvard professor Charles Willie pointed out in an interview¶ that the educational significance of diversity is best observed when¶ viewed as “the foundation for institutional change and self-correction” (qtd.¶ in Buchbinder, 1998) and not as an uncritical manifestation of preexisting¶ institutional values and ideals. As such, diversity calls into question not only¶ how learning is viewed and what is valued, but also how learning should be¶ assessed. In the next section, I will discuss further how the diversity agenda¶ seeks to transform higher education’s understanding of and impact on learning.

Tournament: CPS | Round: 2 | Opponent: Palo Alto FZ | Judge: Felix Tan
Neoliberalism structures academic freedom in the status quo. It sets limits on what is acceptable behavior to quell dissent and any facult truly radical enough to challenge corporate hegemony are tossed out before they can pose a real threat. Chatterjee and Maira 14
Chatterjee, Piya, and Sunaina Maira. "The Imperial University: race, war, and the nation-state." The imperial university: Academic repression and scholarly dissent (2014): 1-50.
Our geopolitical positions—of our immediate workplaces as well as trans- national work circuits—underscore the complex contradictions of our locations within the U.S. academy. These paradoxes of positionality and employment have seeded this project in important ways. We have both taught at the University of California for many years—in addition to other U.S. universities—and have been members of the privileged upper caste of U.S. higher education: the tenured professoriate. We have each used these privileges of class, education, and cultural capital to live and work transna- tionally and have organized around and written about issues of warfare, colo- nialism, occupation, immigration, racism, gender rights, youth culture, and labor politics, within and outside the United States. In fact, we first began working together when we collaborated in 2008 on a collective statement of feminist solidarity with women suffering from the violence of U.S. wars and occupation, during the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the Israeli siege of Gaza.7 Yet our privileges of entry, of inclusion, and of outside-ness are also always marked by the “dangerous complicities” of imperial privi- lege and neoliberal capital, as the chapters by Julia Oparah; Sylvanna Falcón, Sharmila Lodhia, Molly Talcott, and Dana Collins; Vijay Prashad; and Laura Pulido powerfully remind us. Even as we have recognized the institutional privileges and complicities through which we can do this work, we have experienced at various moments and in different ways—as the chapters by Alexis Gumbs, Clarissa Rojas, Thomas Abowd, and Nicholas De Genova suggest—a keen sense of being “outsiders” within—in the university, in aca- demic disciplines, in different nations.8¶ As scholars and teachers located within “critical ethnic studies” and “women and gender studies,” we are also well aware of a certain politics of value, legitimacy, and marginality at play, especially as the dismantling of the public higher education system and attacks on ethnic studies around the nation accelerate. The struggles to build ethnic studies and women/gen- der/sexuality studies as legitimate scholarly endeavors within the academy, emerging from several strands of the civil rights and antiwar movements, are well chronicled and keenly debated. The precarious positions as well as increasing professionalization and policing of these interdisciplinary fields within the current restructuring of the university is a matter of deep con- cern; for example, in the wake of the assault on ethnic studies in Arizona, the dismantling of women’s studies programs, and in a climate of policing and criminalizing immigrant “others” across the nation.¶ The pressure on academics to fund one’s own research—following the dominant grant-writing models of science and technology—is now even more explicit in a time of fiscal crisis and deepening fissures between faculty in the humanities, social sciences, physical sciences, education, and business who occupy very different positions in an increasingly privatized university.9 Prashad reminds us in his chapter of the consequences of the fiscal crisis for college students who bear a massive and growing burden of debt. We recognize these pressures on faculty and students as stemming from neolib- eral capitalism and the university’s capitulation to a global “structural adjust- ment” policy that is now coming “home” to roost in the United States, as astutely argued by Farah Godrej in her analysis linking the neoliberal uni- versity to militarism and violence. The academy has also tried to market the notion of “public scholarship,” transforming activist scholarship into a commodifiable form of knowledge production and dissemination that can affirm the university’s civic engagement—confined by the parameters of per- missible politics, as incisively critiqued by Salaita, Rojas, and Abowd. If we cannot—or choose not to—market our scholarship and pedagogies through these programs of funding and institutionalization, we find our work further devalued within the dominant terms of privatization in the academy. Given that neoliberal market ideologies now underwrite the “value” of our research and intellectual work, what happens to scholars whose writing directly tack- les the questions of U.S. state violence, logics of settler colonialism, and global political and economic dominance?¶ We know from stories about campaigns related to tenure or defamation of scholars, often shared in hallways during conferences and sometimes through e-mail listservs and the media, that there are serious costs to writing and speaking about these matters. For far too many colleagues who confront the most taboo of topics, such as indigenous critiques of genocide and settler colonialism or especially the question of Palestine, the price paid has been extraordinarily high. It has included the denial of promotion to tenure, being de-tenured, not having employment contracts renewed, or never being hired and being blacklisted, as this book poignantly illustrates. Coupled with the loss of livelihood or exile from the U.S. academy, many scholars have been stigmatized, harassed, and penalized in overt and covert ways. There are numerous such cases, sadly way too many to recount here—most famously those of Ward Churchill, Norman Finkelstein, David Graeber, Joel Kovel, Terri Ginsberg, Marc Ellis, Margo Nanlal-Rankoe, Wadie Said, and Sami Al- Arian—but it is generally only the handful that generate public campaigns that receive attention while many others remain unknown, not to mention innumerable cases of students who have been surveilled or harassed, such as Syed Fahad Hashmi from Brooklyn College, while again there are countless other untold stories.10 These are the scandals and open secrets, we argue, that need to be revealed and placed in broader frames of analysis of labor and survival within the U.S. university system.11

Free speech is an illusion propagated by corporatists – their model of rights assumes an equal playing field analogous to free market economists view of capital. The promotion of free speech perpetuates the idea that speech is a commodity, which strengthens neoliberalism’s hold on the academy. Brown 15
Brown, Wendy. Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism's stealth revolution. MIT Press, 2015.
At times, kennedy raises the pitch in Citizens United to depict limits on corporate funding of PAC ads as “an outright ban on speech”;19 at other times, he casts them merely as inappropriate government inter- vention and bureaucratic weightiness.20 But beneath all the hyperbole about government’s chilling of corporate speech is a crucial rhetorical move: the figuring of speech as analogous to capital in “the political marketplace.” on the one hand, government intervention is featured throughout the opinion as harmful to the marketplace of ideas that speech generates.21 Government restrictions damage freedom of speech just as they damage all freedoms. on the other hand, the unfettered accumulation and circulation of speech is cast as an unqual- ified good, essential to “the right of citizens to inquire...hear... speak...and use information to reach consensus itself a precondi- tion to enlightened self-government and a necessary means to protect it.”22 not merely corporate rights, then, but democracy as a whole is at stake in the move to deregulate speech. Importantly, however, democ- racy is here conceived as a marketplace whose goods—ideas, opinions, and ultimately, votes—are generated by speech, just as the economic market features goods generated by capital. In other words, at the very moment that Justice kennedy deems disproportionate wealth irrele- vant to the equal rights exercised in this marketplace and the utili- tarian maximization these rights generate, speech itself acquires the status of capital, and a premium is placed on its unrestricted sources and unimpeded flow.¶ What is significant about rendering speech as capital? economiza- tion of the political occurs not through the mere application of market principles to nonmarket fields, but through the conversion of political processes, subjects, categories, and principles to economic ones. This is the conversion that occurs on every page of the kennedy opinion. If everything in the world is a market, and neoliberal markets con- sist only of competing capitals large and small, and speech is the capital of the electoral market, then speech will necessarily share cap- ital’s attributes: it appreciates through calculated investment, and it advances the position of its bearer or owner. Put the other way around, once speech is rendered as the capital of the electoral marketplace, it is appropriately unrestricted and unregulated, fungible across actors and venues, and existing solely for the advancement or enhancement of its bearer’s interests. The classic associations of political speech with freedom, conscience, deliberation, and persuasion are nowhere in sight.¶ How, precisely, is speech capital in the kennedy opinion? How does it come to be figured in economic terms where its regulation or restriction appears as bad for its particular marketplace and where its monopolization by corporations appears as that which is good for all? The transmogrification of speech into capital occurs on a number of levels in kennedy’s account. First, speech is like capital in its tendency to proliferate and circu- late, to push past barriers, to circumvent laws and other restrictions, indeed, to spite efforts at intervention or suppression.23 speech is thus rendered as a force both natural and good, one that can be wrongly impeded and encumbered, but never quashed.¶ second, persons are not merely producers, but consumers of speech, and government interference is a menace—wrong in prin- ciple and harmful in effect—at both ends. The marketplace of ideas, kennedy repeats tirelessly, is what decides the value of speech claims. every citizen must judge the content of speech for himself or herself; it cannot be a matter for government determination, just as govern- ment should not usurp other consumer choices.24 In this discussion, kennedy makes no mention of shared deliberation or judgment in politics or of voices that are unfunded and relatively powerless. He is focused on the wrong of government “commanding where a per- son may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, using censorship to control thought.”25 If speech generates goods consumed according to individual choice, govern- ment distorts this market by “banning the political speech of millions of associations of citizens” (that is, corporations) and by paternal- istically limiting what consumers may know or consider. Again, if speech is the capital of the political marketplace, then we are polit- ically free when it circulates freely. And it circulates freely only when corporations are not restricted in what speech they may fund or promulgate.¶ Third, kennedy casts speech not as a medium for expression or dialogue, but rather as innovative and productive, just as capital is. There is “a creative dynamic inherent in the concept of free expres- sion” that intersects in a lively way with “rapid changes in technol- ogy” to generate the public good.26 This aspect of speech, kennedy argues, specifically “counsels against upholding a law that restricts political speech in certain media or by certain speakers.”27 Again, the dynamism, innovativeness, and generativity of speech, like that of all capital, is dampened by government intervention.¶ Fourth, and perhaps most important in establishing speech as the capital of the electoral marketplace, kennedy sets the power of speech and the power of government in direct and zero-sum-game opposition to one another. Repeatedly across the lengthy opinion for the majority, he identifies speech with freedom and government with control, cen- sorship, paternalism, and repression.28 When free speech and govern- ment meet, it is to contest one another: the right of speech enshrined in the First Amendment, he argues, is “premised on mistrust of gov- ernmental power” and is “an essential mechanism of democracy because it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people.”29 Here are other variations on this theme in the opinion:¶ The First Amendment was certainly not understood by the framers to condone the suppression of political speech in society’s most salient media. It was understood as a response to the repression of speech.30¶ When Government seeks to use its full power, including criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought.... The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.31 This reading of the First Amendment and of the purpose of political speech positions government and speech as warring forces parallel to those of government and capital in a neoliberal economy.

This turns the case – the commodification of speech reflects the capitalist illusion of freedom. It makes speech meaningless and kills value to life. Smith ‘14
R.C. Smith April 24, 2014 “POWER, CAPITAL and THE RISE OF THE MASS SURVEILLANCE STATE: ON THE ABSENCE OF DEMOCRACY, ETHICS, DISENCHANTMENT and CRITICAL THEORY” Heathwood Institute and Press http://www.heathwoodpress.com/power-capital-the-rise-of-the-mass-surveillance-state-on-the-absence-of-democracy-ethics-disenchantment-critical-theory/ JJN from file
One pressing issue, moreover, is that majority of the popular movements that have emerged in response to the Snowden leaks appear to be reformist in character. As a result, the discourse isn’t so much about fundamental system change; rather it becomes crafted into making mass surveillance less repulsive and more socially acceptable, even marketable. (Consider, for instance, the latest reforms proposed by President Barack Obama). For Adorno, this reformist inclination can be explained in part through an analysis of the logic of the system of capital. We read in Adorno how under modernity – i.e., capitalism – human beings are treated as commodities4 and the political-economy, which is principled on concentrations of power (i.e., ‘contradictory recognition’5), goes over the head of the individual, particularly as ‘coercive society’ aims to ‘shape people’ on behalf of the economic, social and political status quo.6 The system of capital, along with the instrumental use of Enlightenment ideals to promote a rational, efficient system7 have laid a foundation for society wherein the political-economy influences individuals and manufactures consent.8 Accordingly, people are seen as “substitutable entities valued merely for their instrumental uses or ability to command market resources,” and even where “commodification is resisted, the overriding pull of society is toward the status quo and those forms that are valued by society”. 9 As Kate Schick writes: The mind thus shapes itself into socially acceptable, marketable forms and freedom becomes an illusion, made all the more dangerous and difficult to resist because of the appearance of freedom. This is not the fault of Enlightenment ideals as such, but the instrumental use of these ideals in the promotion of a rational, efficient system: ‘The network of the whole is drawn ever tighter, modelled after the act of exchange’ (Adorno 1981: 21).10 Present in the logic of the system of capital itself is not an ‘emancipatory reason’ that aims toward universal guiding principles of an actually egalitarian democracy – i.e., Equality, Egalitarianism, Justice, Rights, etc. Rather, in modern capitalism, with its instrumental reason and positivist logic, such concepts lose their meaning.11 The social narrative no longer accommodates these fundamental principles or judges them to be delusions, because all concepts must be strictly functional in order to be considered “reasonable”.12 In turn, the ideals of a ‘good’ society, for example ideals toward an actual egalitarian democracy, become dependent on the “interests” of the dominant and governing system, which produces and reproduces the epistemic context of its own validity.13

Our critique independently outweighs the case -  neoliberalism causes extinction and massive social inequalities – the affs single issue legalistic solution is the exact kind of politics neolib wants us to engage in so the root cause to go unquestioned. Farbod 15
 ( Faramarz Farbod , PhD Candidate @ Rutgers, Prof @ Moravian College, Monthly Review, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2015/farbod020615.html, 6-2)
Global capitalism is the 800-pound gorilla. The twin ecological and economic crises, militarism, the rise of the surveillance state, and a dysfunctional political system can all be traced to its normal operations. We need a transformative politics from below that can challenge the fundamentals of capitalism instead of today's politics that is content to treat its symptoms. The problems we face are linked to each other and to the way a capitalist society operates. We must make an effort to understand its real character. The fundamental question of our time is whether we can go beyond a system that is ravaging the Earth and secure a future with dignity for life and respect for the planet. What has capitalism done to us lately? The best science tells us that this is a do-or-die moment. We are now in the midst of the 6th mass extinction in the planetary history with 150 to 200 species going extinct every day, a pace 1,000 times greater than the 'natural' extinction rate.1 The Earth has been warming rapidly since the 1970s with the 10 warmest years on record all occurring since 1998.2 The planet has already warmed by 0.85 degree Celsius since the industrial revolution 150 years ago. An increase of 2° Celsius is the limit of what the planet can take before major catastrophic consequences. Limiting global warming to 2°C requires reducing global emissions by 6 per year. However, global carbon emissions from fossil fuels increased by about 1.5 times between 1990 and 2008.3 Capitalism has also led to explosive social inequalities. The global economic landscape is littered with rising concentration of wealth, debt, distress, and immiseration caused by the austerity-pushing elites. Take the US. The richest 20 persons have as much wealth as the bottom 150 million.4 Since 1973, the hourly wages of workers have lagged behind worker productivity rates by more than 800.5 It now takes the average family 47 years to make what a hedge fund manager makes in one hour.6 Just about a quarter of children under the age of 5 live in poverty.7 A majority of public school students are low-income.8 85 of workers feel stress on the job.9 Soon the only thing left of the American Dream will be a culture of hustling to survive. Take the global society. The world's billionaires control $7 trillion, a sum 77 times the debt owed by Greece to the European banks.10 The richest 80 possess more than the combined wealth of the bottom 50 of the global population (3.5 billion people).11 By 2016 the richest 1 will own a greater share of the global wealth than the rest of us combined.12 The top 200 global corporations wield twice the economic power of the bottom 80 of the global population.13 Instead of a global society capitalism is creating a global apartheid. What's the nature of the beast? Firstly, the "egotistical calculation" of commerce wins the day every time. Capital seeks maximum profitability as a matter of first priority. Evermore "accumulation of capital" is the system's bill of health; it is slowdowns or reversals that usher in crises and set off panic. Cancer-like hunger for endless growth is in the system's DNA and is what has set it on a tragic collision course with Nature, a finite category. Secondly, capitalism treats human labor as a cost. It therefore opposes labor capturing a fair share of the total economic value that it creates. Since labor stands for the majority and capital for a tiny minority, it follows that classism and class warfare are built into its DNA, which explains why the "middle class" is shrinking and its gains are never secure. Thirdly, private interests determine massive investments and make key decisions at the point of production guided by maximization of profits. That's why in the US the truck freight replaced the railroad freight, chemicals were used extensively in agriculture, public transport was gutted in favor of private cars, and big cars replaced small ones. What should political action aim for today? The political class has no good ideas about how to address the crises. One may even wonder whether it has a serious understanding of the system, or at least of ways to ameliorate its consequences. The range of solutions offered tends to be of a technical, legislative, or regulatory nature, promising at best temporary management of the deepening crises. The trajectory of the system, at any rate, precludes a return to its post-WWII regulatory phase. It's left to us as a society to think about what the real character of the system is, where we are going, and how we are going to deal with the trajectory of the system -- and act accordingly. The critical task ahead is to build a transformative politics capable of steering the system away from its destructive path. Given the system's DNA, such a politics from below must include efforts to challenge the system's fundamentals, namely, its private mode of decision-making about investments and about what and how to produce. Furthermore, it behooves us to heed the late environmentalist Barry Commoner's insistence on the efficacy of a strategy of prevention over a failed one of control or capture of pollutants. At a lecture in 1991, Commoner remarked: "Environmental pollution is an incurable disease; it can only be prevented"; and he proceeded to refer to "a law," namely: "if you don't put a pollutant in the environment it won't be there." What is nearly certain now is that without democratic control of wealth and social governance of the means of production, we will all be condemned to the labor of Sisyphus. Only we won't have to suffer for all eternity, as the degradation of life-enhancing natural and social systems will soon reach a point of no return. 

The alternative is a relentless class-based politics that works against the university’s economic underpinnings – only engaging in a critique that focuses on the economic forces at play in public universities can we resolve capitalism. Sculos and Walsh 16
Sculos, Bryant William a¶ Department of Politics and International Relations, Florida International University , and Sean Noah Walsh Department of Political Science and Economics, Capital University. "The Counterrevolutionary Campus: Herbert Marcuse and the Suppression of Student Protest Movements." New Political Science (2016): 1-17.
¶ The recognition of repressive tolerance as a tool of counterrevolution calls for a careful¶ examination of leftist strategy. For example, so-called ‘microaggressions’, or ‘trigger warnings’,¶ should be taken seriously.65 However, we should and need to ask ourselves: in a world of¶ pervasive macroaggressions and trigger-pulling in a world of wretched poverty, torture and¶ disappeared dissidents—if these concerns should take center stage. We ought to reflect and¶ ask if identity concerns are more important than class or economic concerns. Marcuse would¶ surely argue that class remains a crucial component alongside other dimensions of identity¶ and oppression (for example, race, gender, sexuality, sexual orientation, religion et cetera).¶ He would demand that we act locally but organize globally, and that we refuse the lure of¶ divisive identity politics, without eschewing the central importance of criticizing racialized,¶ gendered dimensions to capitalist oppressions. We must principally and aggressively resist¶ the demand that we tolerate the expressions or enactments of these oppressions under the¶ guise of liberal toleration. In response to this revolting, nauseating, murderous demand, we¶ must revolt in all the ways we can, and that is precisely what #BlackLivesMatter, the Black¶ Liberation Collective (a nascent, more radical national student organization, distinct but¶ related to BLM and includes many of the campus protesters from around the United States),¶ and the broader student movements are aiming and struggling for (even if right now what¶ they are struggling for is precisely that focused vision).¶ The claim that free speech is under assault is often deployed as a tool of repressive toleration¶ by the Right. Perhaps we need some more hashtags: #BlackVoicesMatter or¶ #BlackProtestsMatter (though the label ‘black’ here, as it is with BLM, is meant to be inclusive,¶ not exclusive. There are numbers of white and non-black allies of the organization, as can¶ be seen in any cursory examination of these various protests. This is explicitly laid out in the¶ official platform of the BLM organization. This is the case for BDS as well; it is not about identity so much as it is about defending the humanity of all).66 We need more than just¶ hashtags though. Much more. We have seen the foundations of more. BLM’s platform does¶ not, however, include any mention of capitalism or economic exploitation, despite the fact¶ that the leadership of the organization has spoken out against racialized capitalism.67 The¶ Black Liberation Collective already includes a critique of capitalism alongside other forms¶ of oppression in their platform.68 These are the early and precarious stages of a potentially¶ emergent cohesive Left for the twenty-first century. Through Marcuse’s critical gaze, we can¶ observe what these students and activists have already realized, what is truly intolerable:¶ the demand that we all tolerate the intolerable. Today, the path to liberating tolerance¶ requires the refusal to accept such silencing.¶ Importantly, we must not limit ourselves to merely critiquing existing oppressions, or just¶ suggest principled radical reforms that could move us towards an emancipated, just (global)¶ society. As many on the Left have attempted, though sadly without much wider recognition,¶ we need to start building these alternative futures in the counterrevolutionary present wherever¶ and whenever possible. This means first building racially, sexually and gender inclusive¶ communicative and organizational bridges between both nascent and longer established¶ social movements and class-based organizations, including the too often forgotten Left¶ political parties.69 Liberating tolerance could tear open avenues for the development of the¶ ‘new sensibility’ Marcuse heralds in his late work. We see this as crucial for the possibility of¶ a new society, a free, just, and rational society antipodal and antithetical to the unfree, unjust,¶ and irrational confines of neoliberal capitalism. College campuses have, since Marcuse’s time¶ been a potentially key environment for the cultivation of this ‘new sensibility’—a sensibility,¶ a mentality, oriented towards care, compassion, love, justice, cooperation and indeed active¶ disgust at their inverses.70 BLM and BDS and other less well-known organized movements¶ offer us a new hope and opportunity to revitalize a youthful emancipatory disposition with¶ sustainability.¶ Liberating tolerance against repressive tolerance has the potential to open up the material¶ and ideological space for precisely these developments, against every wish of the counterrevolutionary¶ forces that militate against progress through the silencing of the exuberant¶ dissent we are witnessing across college campuses in the United States and around the¶ world. We write in support of these students and their rejection of white supremacy, racial¶ injustice (on campus and beyond), police brutality as standard practice, especially against¶ minorities, and their calls for an egalitarian educational experience, including the extension¶ of that experience for all people in the United States and around the world. Beyond Herbert¶ Marcuse’s words, we have his emancipatory democratic impetus—we hope to have embodied¶ that impetus here and shown it to be more relevant than ever.

The role of the judge is to be a critical analyst testing whether the underlying assumptions of the AFF are valid. This is a question of the whether the AFF scholarship is good – not the passage of the plan. 

First, neoliberalism operates through a narrow vision of politics that sustains itself through the illusion of pragmatism. We should refuse their demand for a plan. Blalock, JD, 2015
(Corinne, “NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CRISIS OF LEGAL THEORY”, Duke University, LAW AND CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS Vol. 77:71) MG from file
RECOVERING LEGAL THEORY’S RELEVANCE? The lens of neoliberalism not only allows one to see how these narratives fit together to reveal a larger rationality but also to understand why the solutions they propose fail to challenge or even escape that rationality. I address the three most prominent prescriptions being offered by critical legal scholars today: (1) a pragmatic turn to politics, (2) a return to more explicit normative and moral claims, and (3) acceptance in recognition that the decline is merely an ebb in the regular cycles of theory. A. Prescription: More Politics The most common prescription for recovering legal theory’s vibrancy is a greater participation in politics—scholars should eschew descriptive projects, especially those that might be used to bolster the conservative argument on an issue or in a case, as well as those critiques that appear purely academic, in favor of projects intended to influence the courts in progressive ways.134 One can certainly understand why this is a tempting prescription in light of the success of explicitly conservative legal theory and methods135 and concern that left-leaning legal academics have not taken up this charge.136 However, this demand for political engagement has unintended consequences: It legitimizes the current frameworks. As the Roberts Court further embraces neoliberal principles, persuading the Court means functioning within neoliberal logic and is therefore counterproductive for the revitalization of critical legal theory. Moreover, this political prescription tends to produce a reified notion of what counts as politics, limiting the political as well as intellectual potential of theoretical projects. For example, in the wake of the of the Court’s incremental move toward recognition of same-sex marriage in United States v. Windsor, 137 many progressive legal scholars have written on the subject hoping to nudge the Court toward full recognition. But in light of Nancy Fraser’s work, one should ask just what kind of recognition that would be—whether it would displace materialist claims or reify forms of identity.138 Full recognition of same-sex marriage is a destination toward which the Court is already heading and an area where the public discourse has largely already arrived. Emphasizing this area also participates in the ideology of erasure, leading many to believe that the current Court is making progressive interventions because it is progressive on identity and cultural issues, even though Windsor was handed down in a term in which the Court retrenched on significant materialist issues and embodied a number of blatantly neoliberal positions.139 Even if not writing for the Court, a legal scholar’s attempt to be useful to those in the profession who share her political goals risks constraining the legal profession and its own professional and disciplinary norms.140 In this way, the focus on concrete political effects helps foster legal thought’s “considerable capacity for resisting self-reflection and analysis,”141 which has only become more pronounced in the face of the neoliberalization of the academy as instrumental knowledge is increasingly privileged. When attempting to counter hegemony, what one needs to do is disrupt the legible—to expand the contours of what is considered political—not to accept the narrowly circumscribed zone of politics neoliberalism demarcates. Therefore, it is crucial not to judge critical legal scholarship according to whether its political impact is immediate or even known, and thus a turn to politics is not the remedy for legal theory’s marginalization. B. Prescription: More Normativity Some scholars recognize the danger of embracing a reified notion of politics that unwittingly reaffirms the status quo, and instead champion assertions of substantive morality to counteract the cold logics of pragmatism and efficiency.142 This proposed solution advocates a return to more substantive ideals of justice and equality. Although it may be true that change will ultimately require wresting these liberal and democratic ideals from neoliberalism and refilling their hollowed-out forms, this approach entails a number of pitfalls. The first is simply the inevitable question regarding moral claims: Whose morality is to be asserted? This question has created crisis on the left before, even producing some of the schisms among the crits recounted above. Neoliberalism does not have to contend with this issue—it foregrounds its formal nature and holds itself out as not needing to create a universal morality or set of values. More importantly, it claims to provide a structure in which one can keep one’s own substantive morals. Therefore, neoliberalism’s logic cannot be countered by moral claims without first disrupting its illusion of amorality. The ineffectiveness of the progressive critique of law and economics, based in claims of distributive justice and moral imperative, provides a clear example of how the neoliberal discourse can capture normative claims. The work of Martha McCluskey, one of the few legal scholars writing about neoliberalism in the domestic context over the last ten years, highlights the extent to which the “distributive justice” critique, which argues against the privileging of efficiency over equality and redistribution, fails to challenge the underlying logic.143 McCluskey illustrates how critics of law and economics who critique the approach’s inattention to redistribution have already ceded the central point, by arguing within the conventional views that “efficiency is about expanding the societal pie and redistribution is about dividing it.”144 “Neoliberalism’s disadvantage is not, as most critics worry, its inattention to redistribution, but to the contrary, its very obsession with redistribution as a distinctly seductive yet treacherous policy separate from efficiency.”145 In order to challenge this rationality, she explains, one cannot “misconstrue neoliberalism as a project to promote individual freedom and value-neutral economics at the expense of social responsibility and community morality.”146 One must instead recognize that neoliberalism has redefined social responsibility and community morality. Therefore, one must refuse the false dichotomy between the economic and cultural spheres (a division that allows the neoliberal discourse to displace cultural concerns to a moment after the economic concerns have been dealt with). Merely asserting the falsity of this separation is not sufficient. Neoliberalism has real effects in the world that strengthen its ideological claims.147 Therefore, it is not a struggle that can take place solely on the terrain of discourse or ideology. Like neoliberalism generally, law and economics does not hold itself out as infallible or as an embodiment of social ideals, but instead as the best society can do. It functions precisely on the logic that there is no alternative. Like Hayek’s theory, “law and economics is full of stories about how liberal rights and regulation designed to advance equality victimize the all-powerful market, undermining its promised rewards.”148 In light of this, it is a mistake to see neoliberalism as disavowing moral principles in favor of economic ones; it instead folds them into one another: “The Law and Economics movement is rooted in the moral ideal of the market as the social realization of individual liberty and popular democracy.”149 Neoliberalism’s approach presents itself not only as efficient, but also as just. Legal scholars need to recognize neoliberalism’s focus on the market is not only a form of morality, but also a powerful one. They cannot assume that in a battle of moralities the substantive communitarian ideal will win.150 Furthermore, the neoliberal framework, through its reconfiguration of the subject as an entrepreneur, justifies material inequalities—in contrast to liberalism’s mere blindness to them. Consequently, merely asserting the existence of material inequalities does not immediately undermine neoliberalism’s claims. Far from the engaged citizen who actively produces the polis in liberal theory, the neoliberal subject is a rational, calculating, and independent entity “whose moral autonomy is measured by her capacity for ‘self-care’—the ability to provide for her own needs and service her own ambitions.”151 The subject’s morality is not in relation to principles or ideals, but is “a matter of rational deliberation about costs, benefits, and consequences.”152 If efficiency is the morality of our time, the poor are cast not only as “undeserving” but also as morally bankrupt. Therefore, efficiency replaces not only political morality, but also all other forms of value. Therefore, critics are right that other forms of value have been crowded out; but the logic is deeper than they seem to realize. It goes beyond the scope of what is being done in the legal academy. It is a logic that organizes our time and therefore must be countered differently. More normativity is not the answer to legal theory’s marginalization because neoliberalism’s logic can accommodate even radically contradictory moralities under its claims of moral pluralism. Ethical claims of justice and community may need to be made, but one must first recognize that countering hegemony is harder than merely articulating an alternative; hegemony must be disrupted first. Disrupting neoliberalism’s logic thus entails not only recognizing that neoliberalism has a morality, but also taking that morality seriously. C. Prescription: Acceptance The final response of legal theorists to their field’s marginalization is to dismiss it as merely the regular ebb and flow of theory’s prominence.153 Putting it in terms of Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts, the contemporary moment is just the “normal science” of the paradigm brought about by the crits’ revolutionary moment in the 1970s and 1980s.154 The vitality, this narrative contends, will return when a competing paradigm emerges. There are several problems with this perspective on the decline. First, it entails an error in logic insofar as it takes an external perspective. Legal theory does not inevitably rise and fall but only according to the work being produced; or, to put it another way, this descriptive account of theory’s ebb can be a selffulfilling prophecy insofar as it decreases scholars’ motivation to pursue and receptivity toward theoretical projects. Second, legal scholars cannot be content with normal science when it has the kinds of consequences for democracy and economic inequality that neoliberal hegemony does. The Court is currently entrenching these principles at an unprecedented rate in areas of free speech, equal protection, and antitrust to name a few.155 At first, such acceptance appears to be what Janet Halley is advocating in “taking a break from feminism,”156 but upon closer inspection it is not. Halley is cautioning against the left’s nostalgia—concluding that operating under the banner of feminism and a preoccupation with “reviving” feminism looks backward instead of forward.157 Critical legal scholarship instead needs to be “self-critical” and to recognize that “how we make and apply legal theory arises out of the circumstances in which we recognize problems and articulate solutions.”158 Theory must arise from engagement with the current circumstances. Acceptance cannot be the solution; legal theory must produce the momentum to move forward. VII CONCLUSION: WHERE WE GO FROM HERE The way forward cannot entail a return to reified notions of theory any more than by a return to reified notions of politics. Critical legal scholars should not attempt to revitalize previous critical movements but, instead, reinvigorate the practice of critique within the legal academy. A. Why Critique Naming neoliberalism is necessary in order to counteract it. Without explicit identification, there can be no truly oppositional position. It also makes legible connections that would otherwise go unseen, as was the case with scholars writing about the decline. But there must also be a step beyond naming: critique. Critique means taking neoliberal rationality seriously. The approach must not be dismissive, merely pointing out neoliberalism’s inconsistencies, but instead must recognize that neoliberal rationality is inherently appealing. One cannot merely indict efficiency as contrary to more substantive values, but one also must recognize that efficiency is inextricably tied to beliefs about liberty, dignity, and individual choice, as well as corresponding beliefs about the capacities and limits of the state to effectuate change. No one is arguing that neoliberalism is the best of all possible worlds; in fact, its power comes precisely from abandoning such a claim. In recognizing its hegemonic status, legal scholars can understand the critical task as being more than just demystification. Neoliberal does not paper over inequalities after all; it justifies them. Ultimately, critique should function as a means of opening the conversation in ways that go beyond the picture of law painted by the Roberts Court—to refuse to allow the legal academy to be merely mimetic of a Court that is clearly embracing a neoliberal vision. Critique provides a means of thinking about law as not limited by what the markets can tolerate; it is the means through which one can discover a form of resistance that goes beyond nostalgia for the liberal welfare state. And finally, critique is simply a means of asserting that things can be different than they are in a world that constantly insists that there is no alternative.

Tournament: CPS | Round: Quarters | Opponent: Lynbrook NS | Judge: Panel
Neoliberalism structures academic freedom in the status quo. It sets limits on what is acceptable behavior to quell dissent and any facult truly radical enough to challenge corporate hegemony are tossed out before they can pose a real threat. Chatterjee and Maira 14
Chatterjee, Piya, and Sunaina Maira. "The Imperial University: race, war, and the nation-state." The imperial university: Academic repression and scholarly dissent (2014): 1-50.
Our geopolitical positions—of our immediate workplaces as well as trans- national work circuits—underscore the complex contradictions of our locations within the U.S. academy. These paradoxes of positionality and employment have seeded this project in important ways. We have both taught at the University of California for many years—in addition to other U.S. universities—and have been members of the privileged upper caste of U.S. higher education: the tenured professoriate. We have each used these privileges of class, education, and cultural capital to live and work transna- tionally and have organized around and written about issues of warfare, colo- nialism, occupation, immigration, racism, gender rights, youth culture, and labor politics, within and outside the United States. In fact, we first began working together when we collaborated in 2008 on a collective statement of feminist solidarity with women suffering from the violence of U.S. wars and occupation, during the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the Israeli siege of Gaza.7 Yet our privileges of entry, of inclusion, and of outside-ness are also always marked by the “dangerous complicities” of imperial privi- lege and neoliberal capital, as the chapters by Julia Oparah; Sylvanna Falcón, Sharmila Lodhia, Molly Talcott, and Dana Collins; Vijay Prashad; and Laura Pulido powerfully remind us. Even as we have recognized the institutional privileges and complicities through which we can do this work, we have experienced at various moments and in different ways—as the chapters by Alexis Gumbs, Clarissa Rojas, Thomas Abowd, and Nicholas De Genova suggest—a keen sense of being “outsiders” within—in the university, in aca- demic disciplines, in different nations.8¶ As scholars and teachers located within “critical ethnic studies” and “women and gender studies,” we are also well aware of a certain politics of value, legitimacy, and marginality at play, especially as the dismantling of the public higher education system and attacks on ethnic studies around the nation accelerate. The struggles to build ethnic studies and women/gen- der/sexuality studies as legitimate scholarly endeavors within the academy, emerging from several strands of the civil rights and antiwar movements, are well chronicled and keenly debated. The precarious positions as well as increasing professionalization and policing of these interdisciplinary fields within the current restructuring of the university is a matter of deep con- cern; for example, in the wake of the assault on ethnic studies in Arizona, the dismantling of women’s studies programs, and in a climate of policing and criminalizing immigrant “others” across the nation.¶ The pressure on academics to fund one’s own research—following the dominant grant-writing models of science and technology—is now even more explicit in a time of fiscal crisis and deepening fissures between faculty in the humanities, social sciences, physical sciences, education, and business who occupy very different positions in an increasingly privatized university.9 Prashad reminds us in his chapter of the consequences of the fiscal crisis for college students who bear a massive and growing burden of debt. We recognize these pressures on faculty and students as stemming from neolib- eral capitalism and the university’s capitulation to a global “structural adjust- ment” policy that is now coming “home” to roost in the United States, as astutely argued by Farah Godrej in her analysis linking the neoliberal uni- versity to militarism and violence. The academy has also tried to market the notion of “public scholarship,” transforming activist scholarship into a commodifiable form of knowledge production and dissemination that can affirm the university’s civic engagement—confined by the parameters of per- missible politics, as incisively critiqued by Salaita, Rojas, and Abowd. If we cannot—or choose not to—market our scholarship and pedagogies through these programs of funding and institutionalization, we find our work further devalued within the dominant terms of privatization in the academy. Given that neoliberal market ideologies now underwrite the “value” of our research and intellectual work, what happens to scholars whose writing directly tack- les the questions of U.S. state violence, logics of settler colonialism, and global political and economic dominance?¶ We know from stories about campaigns related to tenure or defamation of scholars, often shared in hallways during conferences and sometimes through e-mail listservs and the media, that there are serious costs to writing and speaking about these matters. For far too many colleagues who confront the most taboo of topics, such as indigenous critiques of genocide and settler colonialism or especially the question of Palestine, the price paid has been extraordinarily high. It has included the denial of promotion to tenure, being de-tenured, not having employment contracts renewed, or never being hired and being blacklisted, as this book poignantly illustrates. Coupled with the loss of livelihood or exile from the U.S. academy, many scholars have been stigmatized, harassed, and penalized in overt and covert ways. There are numerous such cases, sadly way too many to recount here—most famously those of Ward Churchill, Norman Finkelstein, David Graeber, Joel Kovel, Terri Ginsberg, Marc Ellis, Margo Nanlal-Rankoe, Wadie Said, and Sami Al- Arian—but it is generally only the handful that generate public campaigns that receive attention while many others remain unknown, not to mention innumerable cases of students who have been surveilled or harassed, such as Syed Fahad Hashmi from Brooklyn College, while again there are countless other untold stories.10 These are the scandals and open secrets, we argue, that need to be revealed and placed in broader frames of analysis of labor and survival within the U.S. university system.11

Humans are grounded in material conditions that create all thought – trying to abstract from material reality is another link to the K. Eagleton
Eagleton, Terry. Why Marx was right. Yale University Press, 2011. CC

In this sense, Marx was more of an antiphilosopher than a philosopher. In fact, Etienne Balibar has called him ‘‘per- haps . . . the greatest antiphilosopher of the modern age.’’Antiphilosophers are those who are wary of philosophy—not just in the sense that Brad Pitt might be, but nervous of it for philosophically interesting reasons. They tend to come up with ideas that are suspicious of ideas; and though they are for the most part entirely rational, they tend not to believe that reason is what it all comes down to. Feuerbach, from whom Marx learned some of his materialism, wrote that any authen- tic philosophy has to begin with its opposite, nonphilosophy. The philosopher, he remarked, must accept ‘‘what in man does not philosophise, what is rather opposed to philosophy and abstract thought.’’≤ He also commented that ‘‘it is man who thinks, not the Ego or Reason.’’≥ As Alfred Schmidt observes, ‘‘The understanding of man as a needy, sensuous, physiological being is therefore the precondition of any the- ory of subjectivity.’’∂ Human consciousness, in other words, is corporeal—which is not to say that it is nothing more than the body. It is rather a sign of the way in which the body is always in a sense unfinished, open-ended, always capable of more creative activity than what it may be manifesting right now. We think as we do, then, because of the kind of animals we are. If our thought is strung out in time, it is because that is the way our bodies and sense-perceptions are too. Philoso- phers sometimes wonder whether a machine could think. Maybe it could, but it would be in a way very different from ourselves. This is because a machine’s material makeup is so different from ours. It has no bodily needs, for example, and none of the emotional life which in the case of us humans is bound up with such needs. Our own kind of thinking is inseparable from this sensory, practical and emotional con- text. This is why, if a machine could think, we might not be able to understand what it was thinking. The philosophy Marx broke with was for the most part a contemplative affair. Its typical scenario was that of a pas- sive, isolated, disembodied human subject disinterestedly sur- veying an isolated object. Marx, as we have seen, rejected this kind of subject; but he also insisted that the object of our knowledge is not something eternally fixed and given. It is more likely to be the product of our own historical activity. Just as we have to rethink the subject as a form of practice, so we have to rethink the objective world as the result of human practice. And this means among other things that it can in principle be changed. Starting with human beings as active and practical, and then situating their thought within that context, help us to cast new light on some of the problems which have plagued philosophers. People who work on the world are less likely to doubt that there is anything out there than those who contemplate it from a leisurely distance. In fact, sceptics can exist in the first place only because there is something out there. If there were not a material world to feed them they would die, and their doubts would perish along with them. If you believe that human beings are passive in the face of reality, this may also persuade you to query the existence of such a world. This is because we confirm the existence of things by experiencing their resistance to our demands. And we do this primarily through our practical activity. Philosophers have sometimes raised the question of ‘‘other minds.’’ How do we know that the human bodies we encounter have minds like ours? A materialist would reply that if they did not, we would probably not be around to raise the question. There could be no material production to keep us alive without social cooperation, and the capacity to com- municate with others is a large part of what we mean by hav- ing a mind. One might also point out that the word ‘‘mind’’ is a way of describing the behavior of a particular kind of body: a creative, meaningful, communicative one. We do not need to peer inside people’s heads or wire them up to machines to see whether they possess this mysterious entity. We look at what they do. Consciousness is not some spectral phenome- non; it is something we can see, hear and handle. Human bodies are lumps of material, but peculiarly creative, expres- sive ones; and it is this creativity that we call ‘‘mind.’’ To call human beings rational is to say that their behavior reveals a pattern of meaning or significance. Enlightenment mate- rialists have sometimes been rightly accused of reducing the world to so much dead, meaningless matter. Just the reverse is true of Marx’s materialism. The materialist’s response to the sceptic is not a knock- down argument. You might always claim that our experience of social cooperation, or of the world’s resistance to our proj- ects, is itself not to be trusted. Perhaps we are only imagining these things. But looking at such problems in a materialist spirit can illuminate them in a new way. It is possible to see, for example, how intellectuals who begin from the disembodied mind, and quite often end up there as well, are likely to be puzzled by how the mind relates to the body, as well as to the bodies of others. It may be that they see a gap between mind and world. This is ironic, since it is quite often the way the world shapes their own minds that gives rise to this idea. Intellectuals themselves are a caste of people somewhat re-mote from the material world. Only on the back of a material surplus in society is it possible to produce a professional elite of priests, sages, artists, counsellors, Oxford dons and the like. Plato thought that philosophy required a leisured aris- tocratic elite. You cannot have literary salons and learned societies if everyone has to work just to keep social life ticking over. Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cul- tures. (They are just as rare in advanced societies, where universities have become organs of corporate capitalism.) Because intellectuals do not need to labour in the sense that bricklayers do, they can come to regard themselves and their ideas as independent of the rest of social existence. And this is one of the many things that Marxists mean by ideology. Such people tend not to see that their very distance from society is itself socially conditioned. The prejudice that thought is inde- pendent of reality is itself shaped by social reality. For Marx, our thought takes shape in the process of working on the world, and this is a material necessity determined by our bodily needs. One might claim, then, that think- ing itself is a material necessity. Thinking and our bodily drives are closely related, as they are for Nietzsche and Freud. Consciousness is the result of an interaction between ourselves and our material surroundings. It is itself a historical prod- uct. Humanity, Marx writes, is ‘‘established’’ by the material world, since only by engaging with it can we exercise our powers and have their reality confirmed. It is the ‘‘otherness’’ of reality, its resistance to our designs on it, which first brings us to self-awareness. And this means above all the existence of others. It is through others that we become what we are. Personal identity is a social product. There could not just be one person, any more than there could just be one number. At the same time, however, this reality should be recog- nized as the work of our own hands. Not to see it as this—to regard it as something natural or inexplicable, independent of our own activity—is what Marx calls alienation. He means the condition in which we forget that history is our own production, and come to be mastered by it as by an alien force. For arx, writes the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, the objectivity of the world ‘‘is grounded . . . in the bodily organi- sation of human beings, which is oriented towards action.’’∑ In a sense, then, consciousness is always in some sense ‘‘belated,’’ as reason is belated in a child. Before we even come to reflect, we are always already situated in a material context; and our thought, however apparently abstract and theoreti- cal, is shaped to the core by this fact. It is philosophical ideal- ism which forgets that our ideas have a foundation in prac- tice. By detaching them from this context, it can fall victim to the illusion that it is thought which creates reality.
Property rights are part of the neoliberal strategy to expand the control of markets and corporations over society.  Hatcher 10

Hatcher 10 (Wayne McIntosh, Professor, Department of Government and Politics University of Maryland; and Laura Hatcher, Ph.D., Political Science at University of Massachussetts) Property Rights and Neoliberalism: Introduction 

Property rights have always held high status on the US political agenda and in many systems featuring a corporate capitalist economy. These rights are included in constitutional designs, debates, and development. Efforts to curb state appropriation of private properties for public purposes also have a long and storied history. The modern libertarian movement in the US (which has a familial relationship with neoliberalism abroad) has coupled animosity toward direct government seizures with resistance against regulatory regimes by attempting to demonstrate specific regulatory effects that allegedly diminish property values.  According to this design, whether it is direct or indirect, government policy that penetrates the boundaries of private property violates a basic tenet of fundamental liberty. Ultimately, the effort appears to place cultural demands for property in a new light, both in the US and throughout the world. This collection provides a range of perspectives on these phenomena. Property Rights in Neoliberal Contexts In the case of property rights, neoliberalism’s role matters in part because it has, over the course of the last half of the twentieth century, responded to and been a part of restructuring our notions of property and the institutions that regulate it. “Neoliberalism,” however, is notoriously difficult to define and readers should not be surprised to find some tensions in the nuances discussed by the various authors in this volume. Tackling the problem of definition early on in this project, we asked our authors to use a broad understanding from Harrington and Turem’s 2006 article, “Accountability in Neoliberal Regulatory Regimes.” In it, they define neoliberalism as implying “the (re)emergence of the market and economic rationale as the dominant organizing logic in society” (Harrington and Turem 2006: 204). Part of this process includes “the dismantling of the welfare state, erosion of social provisions, turn to monetarism in fiscal and financial management, tax cuts for business, and increasing disciplining of the state via markets and market mechanisms” (Ibid: 204-205). Similarly, David Harvey points out that the role of the state in this process is to “create and preserve” institutional frameworks that are appropriate for these practices (Harvey 2005: 2). Since property rights are fundamental to the market, understanding how property rights are structured as well as wielded to make claims seems an important element of understanding how these institutional frameworks come into being. Moreover, when property rights are restructured or new forms of property are created, power shifts in a society. Distribution of property, its uses, and whether owners of new forms of property will be granted the same rights as owners of traditional property, all become elements of restructured power. This strongly suggests that when property rights are mobilized by activists, we are seeing not only an attempt to shift societal structures, but also a symptom that structures have already shifted. Sometimes this happens as official actors attempt to regulate new property forms. At other times, this happens as different forms of knowledge (i.e., science, social science, and so on) challenge the way property is traditionally understood either through new forms of property or by highlighting how recognized rights of old forms of property do not work with a new invention or discovery. For example, do we own our own genetic material? Do the scientists who discovered the processes for studying genes (or any other patentable process for studying biology, genetics and so forth) own the material they can isolate, examine, and convert into marketable commodities? Does their right to the process itself extend to the object of that process? Or, is this part of a base of knowledge to which all humans should have access? Most importantly, how does the political struggle that takes place over such issues restructure power and create political claims?

Free speech is an illusion propagated by corporatists – their model of rights assumes an equal playing field analogous to free market economists view of capital. The promotion of free speech perpetuates the idea that speech is a commodity, which strengthens neoliberalism’s hold on the academy. Brown 15
Brown, Wendy. Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism's stealth revolution. MIT Press, 2015.
At times, kennedy raises the pitch in Citizens United to depict limits on corporate funding of PAC ads as “an outright ban on speech”;19 at other times, he casts them merely as inappropriate government inter- vention and bureaucratic weightiness.20 But beneath all the hyperbole about government’s chilling of corporate speech is a crucial rhetorical move: the figuring of speech as analogous to capital in “the political marketplace.” on the one hand, government intervention is featured throughout the opinion as harmful to the marketplace of ideas that speech generates.21 Government restrictions damage freedom of speech just as they damage all freedoms. on the other hand, the unfettered accumulation and circulation of speech is cast as an unqual- ified good, essential to “the right of citizens to inquire...hear... speak...and use information to reach consensus itself a precondi- tion to enlightened self-government and a necessary means to protect it.”22 not merely corporate rights, then, but democracy as a whole is at stake in the move to deregulate speech. Importantly, however, democ- racy is here conceived as a marketplace whose goods—ideas, opinions, and ultimately, votes—are generated by speech, just as the economic market features goods generated by capital. In other words, at the very moment that Justice kennedy deems disproportionate wealth irrele- vant to the equal rights exercised in this marketplace and the utili- tarian maximization these rights generate, speech itself acquires the status of capital, and a premium is placed on its unrestricted sources and unimpeded flow.¶ What is significant about rendering speech as capital? economiza- tion of the political occurs not through the mere application of market principles to nonmarket fields, but through the conversion of political processes, subjects, categories, and principles to economic ones. This is the conversion that occurs on every page of the kennedy opinion. If everything in the world is a market, and neoliberal markets con- sist only of competing capitals large and small, and speech is the capital of the electoral market, then speech will necessarily share cap- ital’s attributes: it appreciates through calculated investment, and it advances the position of its bearer or owner. Put the other way around, once speech is rendered as the capital of the electoral marketplace, it is appropriately unrestricted and unregulated, fungible across actors and venues, and existing solely for the advancement or enhancement of its bearer’s interests. The classic associations of political speech with freedom, conscience, deliberation, and persuasion are nowhere in sight.¶ How, precisely, is speech capital in the kennedy opinion? How does it come to be figured in economic terms where its regulation or restriction appears as bad for its particular marketplace and where its monopolization by corporations appears as that which is good for all? The transmogrification of speech into capital occurs on a number of levels in kennedy’s account. First, speech is like capital in its tendency to proliferate and circu- late, to push past barriers, to circumvent laws and other restrictions, indeed, to spite efforts at intervention or suppression.23 speech is thus rendered as a force both natural and good, one that can be wrongly impeded and encumbered, but never quashed.¶ second, persons are not merely producers, but consumers of speech, and government interference is a menace—wrong in prin- ciple and harmful in effect—at both ends. The marketplace of ideas, kennedy repeats tirelessly, is what decides the value of speech claims. every citizen must judge the content of speech for himself or herself; it cannot be a matter for government determination, just as govern- ment should not usurp other consumer choices.24 In this discussion, kennedy makes no mention of shared deliberation or judgment in politics or of voices that are unfunded and relatively powerless. He is focused on the wrong of government “commanding where a per- son may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, using censorship to control thought.”25 If speech generates goods consumed according to individual choice, govern- ment distorts this market by “banning the political speech of millions of associations of citizens” (that is, corporations) and by paternal- istically limiting what consumers may know or consider. Again, if speech is the capital of the political marketplace, then we are polit- ically free when it circulates freely. And it circulates freely only when corporations are not restricted in what speech they may fund or promulgate.¶ Third, kennedy casts speech not as a medium for expression or dialogue, but rather as innovative and productive, just as capital is. There is “a creative dynamic inherent in the concept of free expres- sion” that intersects in a lively way with “rapid changes in technol- ogy” to generate the public good.26 This aspect of speech, kennedy argues, specifically “counsels against upholding a law that restricts political speech in certain media or by certain speakers.”27 Again, the dynamism, innovativeness, and generativity of speech, like that of all capital, is dampened by government intervention.¶ Fourth, and perhaps most important in establishing speech as the capital of the electoral marketplace, kennedy sets the power of speech and the power of government in direct and zero-sum-game opposition to one another. Repeatedly across the lengthy opinion for the majority, he identifies speech with freedom and government with control, cen- sorship, paternalism, and repression.28 When free speech and govern- ment meet, it is to contest one another: the right of speech enshrined in the First Amendment, he argues, is “premised on mistrust of gov- ernmental power” and is “an essential mechanism of democracy because it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people.”29 Here are other variations on this theme in the opinion:¶ The First Amendment was certainly not understood by the framers to condone the suppression of political speech in society’s most salient media. It was understood as a response to the repression of speech.30¶ When Government seeks to use its full power, including criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought.... The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.31 This reading of the First Amendment and of the purpose of political speech positions government and speech as warring forces parallel to those of government and capital in a neoliberal economy.

This turns the case – the commodification of speech reflects the capitalist illusion of freedom. It makes speech meaningless and kills value to life. Smith ‘14
R.C. Smith April 24, 2014 “POWER, CAPITAL and THE RISE OF THE MASS SURVEILLANCE STATE: ON THE ABSENCE OF DEMOCRACY, ETHICS, DISENCHANTMENT and CRITICAL THEORY” Heathwood Institute and Press http://www.heathwoodpress.com/power-capital-the-rise-of-the-mass-surveillance-state-on-the-absence-of-democracy-ethics-disenchantment-critical-theory/ JJN from file
One pressing issue, moreover, is that majority of the popular movements that have emerged in response to the Snowden leaks appear to be reformist in character. As a result, the discourse isn’t so much about fundamental system change; rather it becomes crafted into making mass surveillance less repulsive and more socially acceptable, even marketable. (Consider, for instance, the latest reforms proposed by President Barack Obama). For Adorno, this reformist inclination can be explained in part through an analysis of the logic of the system of capital. We read in Adorno how under modernity – i.e., capitalism – human beings are treated as commodities4 and the political-economy, which is principled on concentrations of power (i.e., ‘contradictory recognition’5), goes over the head of the individual, particularly as ‘coercive society’ aims to ‘shape people’ on behalf of the economic, social and political status quo.6 The system of capital, along with the instrumental use of Enlightenment ideals to promote a rational, efficient system7 have laid a foundation for society wherein the political-economy influences individuals and manufactures consent.8 Accordingly, people are seen as “substitutable entities valued merely for their instrumental uses or ability to command market resources,” and even where “commodification is resisted, the overriding pull of society is toward the status quo and those forms that are valued by society”. 9 As Kate Schick writes: The mind thus shapes itself into socially acceptable, marketable forms and freedom becomes an illusion, made all the more dangerous and difficult to resist because of the appearance of freedom. This is not the fault of Enlightenment ideals as such, but the instrumental use of these ideals in the promotion of a rational, efficient system: ‘The network of the whole is drawn ever tighter, modelled after the act of exchange’ (Adorno 1981: 21).10 Present in the logic of the system of capital itself is not an ‘emancipatory reason’ that aims toward universal guiding principles of an actually egalitarian democracy – i.e., Equality, Egalitarianism, Justice, Rights, etc. Rather, in modern capitalism, with its instrumental reason and positivist logic, such concepts lose their meaning.11 The social narrative no longer accommodates these fundamental principles or judges them to be delusions, because all concepts must be strictly functional in order to be considered “reasonable”.12 In turn, the ideals of a ‘good’ society, for example ideals toward an actual egalitarian democracy, become dependent on the “interests” of the dominant and governing system, which produces and reproduces the epistemic context of its own validity.13

Our critique independently outweighs the case -  neoliberalism causes extinction and massive social inequalities – the affs single issue legalistic solution is the exact kind of politics neolib wants us to engage in so the root cause to go unquestioned. Farbod 15
 ( Faramarz Farbod , PhD Candidate @ Rutgers, Prof @ Moravian College, Monthly Review, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2015/farbod020615.html, 6-2)
Global capitalism is the 800-pound gorilla. The twin ecological and economic crises, militarism, the rise of the surveillance state, and a dysfunctional political system can all be traced to its normal operations. We need a transformative politics from below that can challenge the fundamentals of capitalism instead of today's politics that is content to treat its symptoms. The problems we face are linked to each other and to the way a capitalist society operates. We must make an effort to understand its real character. The fundamental question of our time is whether we can go beyond a system that is ravaging the Earth and secure a future with dignity for life and respect for the planet. What has capitalism done to us lately? The best science tells us that this is a do-or-die moment. We are now in the midst of the 6th mass extinction in the planetary history with 150 to 200 species going extinct every day, a pace 1,000 times greater than the 'natural' extinction rate.1 The Earth has been warming rapidly since the 1970s with the 10 warmest years on record all occurring since 1998.2 The planet has already warmed by 0.85 degree Celsius since the industrial revolution 150 years ago. An increase of 2° Celsius is the limit of what the planet can take before major catastrophic consequences. Limiting global warming to 2°C requires reducing global emissions by 6 per year. However, global carbon emissions from fossil fuels increased by about 1.5 times between 1990 and 2008.3 Capitalism has also led to explosive social inequalities. The global economic landscape is littered with rising concentration of wealth, debt, distress, and immiseration caused by the austerity-pushing elites. Take the US. The richest 20 persons have as much wealth as the bottom 150 million.4 Since 1973, the hourly wages of workers have lagged behind worker productivity rates by more than 800.5 It now takes the average family 47 years to make what a hedge fund manager makes in one hour.6 Just about a quarter of children under the age of 5 live in poverty.7 A majority of public school students are low-income.8 85 of workers feel stress on the job.9 Soon the only thing left of the American Dream will be a culture of hustling to survive. Take the global society. The world's billionaires control $7 trillion, a sum 77 times the debt owed by Greece to the European banks.10 The richest 80 possess more than the combined wealth of the bottom 50 of the global population (3.5 billion people).11 By 2016 the richest 1 will own a greater share of the global wealth than the rest of us combined.12 The top 200 global corporations wield twice the economic power of the bottom 80 of the global population.13 Instead of a global society capitalism is creating a global apartheid. What's the nature of the beast? Firstly, the "egotistical calculation" of commerce wins the day every time. Capital seeks maximum profitability as a matter of first priority. Evermore "accumulation of capital" is the system's bill of health; it is slowdowns or reversals that usher in crises and set off panic. Cancer-like hunger for endless growth is in the system's DNA and is what has set it on a tragic collision course with Nature, a finite category. Secondly, capitalism treats human labor as a cost. It therefore opposes labor capturing a fair share of the total economic value that it creates. Since labor stands for the majority and capital for a tiny minority, it follows that classism and class warfare are built into its DNA, which explains why the "middle class" is shrinking and its gains are never secure. Thirdly, private interests determine massive investments and make key decisions at the point of production guided by maximization of profits. That's why in the US the truck freight replaced the railroad freight, chemicals were used extensively in agriculture, public transport was gutted in favor of private cars, and big cars replaced small ones. What should political action aim for today? The political class has no good ideas about how to address the crises. One may even wonder whether it has a serious understanding of the system, or at least of ways to ameliorate its consequences. The range of solutions offered tends to be of a technical, legislative, or regulatory nature, promising at best temporary management of the deepening crises. The trajectory of the system, at any rate, precludes a return to its post-WWII regulatory phase. It's left to us as a society to think about what the real character of the system is, where we are going, and how we are going to deal with the trajectory of the system -- and act accordingly. The critical task ahead is to build a transformative politics capable of steering the system away from its destructive path. Given the system's DNA, such a politics from below must include efforts to challenge the system's fundamentals, namely, its private mode of decision-making about investments and about what and how to produce. Furthermore, it behooves us to heed the late environmentalist Barry Commoner's insistence on the efficacy of a strategy of prevention over a failed one of control or capture of pollutants. At a lecture in 1991, Commoner remarked: "Environmental pollution is an incurable disease; it can only be prevented"; and he proceeded to refer to "a law," namely: "if you don't put a pollutant in the environment it won't be there." What is nearly certain now is that without democratic control of wealth and social governance of the means of production, we will all be condemned to the labor of Sisyphus. Only we won't have to suffer for all eternity, as the degradation of life-enhancing natural and social systems will soon reach a point of no return. 

The alternative is a relentless class-based politics that works against the university’s economic underpinnings – only engaging in a critique that focuses on the economic forces at play in public universities can we resolve capitalism. Sculos and Walsh 16
Sculos, Bryant William a¶ Department of Politics and International Relations, Florida International University , and Sean Noah Walsh Department of Political Science and Economics, Capital University. "The Counterrevolutionary Campus: Herbert Marcuse and the Suppression of Student Protest Movements." New Political Science (2016): 1-17.
¶ The recognition of repressive tolerance as a tool of counterrevolution calls for a careful¶ examination of leftist strategy. For example, so-called ‘microaggressions’, or ‘trigger warnings’,¶ should be taken seriously.65 However, we should and need to ask ourselves: in a world of¶ pervasive macroaggressions and trigger-pulling in a world of wretched poverty, torture and¶ disappeared dissidents—if these concerns should take center stage. We ought to reflect and¶ ask if identity concerns are more important than class or economic concerns. Marcuse would¶ surely argue that class remains a crucial component alongside other dimensions of identity¶ and oppression (for example, race, gender, sexuality, sexual orientation, religion et cetera).¶ He would demand that we act locally but organize globally, and that we refuse the lure of¶ divisive identity politics, without eschewing the central importance of criticizing racialized,¶ gendered dimensions to capitalist oppressions. We must principally and aggressively resist¶ the demand that we tolerate the expressions or enactments of these oppressions under the¶ guise of liberal toleration. In response to this revolting, nauseating, murderous demand, we¶ must revolt in all the ways we can, and that is precisely what #BlackLivesMatter, the Black¶ Liberation Collective (a nascent, more radical national student organization, distinct but¶ related to BLM and includes many of the campus protesters from around the United States),¶ and the broader student movements are aiming and struggling for (even if right now what¶ they are struggling for is precisely that focused vision).¶ The claim that free speech is under assault is often deployed as a tool of repressive toleration¶ by the Right. Perhaps we need some more hashtags: #BlackVoicesMatter or¶ #BlackProtestsMatter (though the label ‘black’ here, as it is with BLM, is meant to be inclusive,¶ not exclusive. There are numbers of white and non-black allies of the organization, as can¶ be seen in any cursory examination of these various protests. This is explicitly laid out in the¶ official platform of the BLM organization. This is the case for BDS as well; it is not about identity so much as it is about defending the humanity of all).66 We need more than just¶ hashtags though. Much more. We have seen the foundations of more. BLM’s platform does¶ not, however, include any mention of capitalism or economic exploitation, despite the fact¶ that the leadership of the organization has spoken out against racialized capitalism.67 The¶ Black Liberation Collective already includes a critique of capitalism alongside other forms¶ of oppression in their platform.68 These are the early and precarious stages of a potentially¶ emergent cohesive Left for the twenty-first century. Through Marcuse’s critical gaze, we can¶ observe what these students and activists have already realized, what is truly intolerable:¶ the demand that we all tolerate the intolerable. Today, the path to liberating tolerance¶ requires the refusal to accept such silencing.¶ Importantly, we must not limit ourselves to merely critiquing existing oppressions, or just¶ suggest principled radical reforms that could move us towards an emancipated, just (global)¶ society. As many on the Left have attempted, though sadly without much wider recognition,¶ we need to start building these alternative futures in the counterrevolutionary present wherever¶ and whenever possible. This means first building racially, sexually and gender inclusive¶ communicative and organizational bridges between both nascent and longer established¶ social movements and class-based organizations, including the too often forgotten Left¶ political parties.69 Liberating tolerance could tear open avenues for the development of the¶ ‘new sensibility’ Marcuse heralds in his late work. We see this as crucial for the possibility of¶ a new society, a free, just, and rational society antipodal and antithetical to the unfree, unjust,¶ and irrational confines of neoliberal capitalism. College campuses have, since Marcuse’s time¶ been a potentially key environment for the cultivation of this ‘new sensibility’—a sensibility,¶ a mentality, oriented towards care, compassion, love, justice, cooperation and indeed active¶ disgust at their inverses.70 BLM and BDS and other less well-known organized movements¶ offer us a new hope and opportunity to revitalize a youthful emancipatory disposition with¶ sustainability.¶ Liberating tolerance against repressive tolerance has the potential to open up the material¶ and ideological space for precisely these developments, against every wish of the counterrevolutionary¶ forces that militate against progress through the silencing of the exuberant¶ dissent we are witnessing across college campuses in the United States and around the¶ world. We write in support of these students and their rejection of white supremacy, racial¶ injustice (on campus and beyond), police brutality as standard practice, especially against¶ minorities, and their calls for an egalitarian educational experience, including the extension¶ of that experience for all people in the United States and around the world. Beyond Herbert¶ Marcuse’s words, we have his emancipatory democratic impetus—we hope to have embodied¶ that impetus here and shown it to be more relevant than ever.

The role of the judge is to be a critical analyst testing whether the underlying assumptions of the AFF are valid. This is a question of the whether the AFF scholarship is good – not the passage of the plan. 

First, neoliberalism operates through a narrow vision of politics that sustains itself through the illusion of pragmatism. We should refuse their demand for a plan. Blalock, JD, 2015
(Corinne, “NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CRISIS OF LEGAL THEORY”, Duke University, LAW AND CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS Vol. 77:71) MG from file
RECOVERING LEGAL THEORY’S RELEVANCE? The lens of neoliberalism not only allows one to see how these narratives fit together to reveal a larger rationality but also to understand why the solutions they propose fail to challenge or even escape that rationality. I address the three most prominent prescriptions being offered by critical legal scholars today: (1) a pragmatic turn to politics, (2) a return to more explicit normative and moral claims, and (3) acceptance in recognition that the decline is merely an ebb in the regular cycles of theory. A. Prescription: More Politics The most common prescription for recovering legal theory’s vibrancy is a greater participation in politics—scholars should eschew descriptive projects, especially those that might be used to bolster the conservative argument on an issue or in a case, as well as those critiques that appear purely academic, in favor of projects intended to influence the courts in progressive ways.134 One can certainly understand why this is a tempting prescription in light of the success of explicitly conservative legal theory and methods135 and concern that left-leaning legal academics have not taken up this charge.136 However, this demand for political engagement has unintended consequences: It legitimizes the current frameworks. As the Roberts Court further embraces neoliberal principles, persuading the Court means functioning within neoliberal logic and is therefore counterproductive for the revitalization of critical legal theory. Moreover, this political prescription tends to produce a reified notion of what counts as politics, limiting the political as well as intellectual potential of theoretical projects. For example, in the wake of the of the Court’s incremental move toward recognition of same-sex marriage in United States v. Windsor, 137 many progressive legal scholars have written on the subject hoping to nudge the Court toward full recognition. But in light of Nancy Fraser’s work, one should ask just what kind of recognition that would be—whether it would displace materialist claims or reify forms of identity.138 Full recognition of same-sex marriage is a destination toward which the Court is already heading and an area where the public discourse has largely already arrived. Emphasizing this area also participates in the ideology of erasure, leading many to believe that the current Court is making progressive interventions because it is progressive on identity and cultural issues, even though Windsor was handed down in a term in which the Court retrenched on significant materialist issues and embodied a number of blatantly neoliberal positions.139 Even if not writing for the Court, a legal scholar’s attempt to be useful to those in the profession who share her political goals risks constraining the legal profession and its own professional and disciplinary norms.140 In this way, the focus on concrete political effects helps foster legal thought’s “considerable capacity for resisting self-reflection and analysis,”141 which has only become more pronounced in the face of the neoliberalization of the academy as instrumental knowledge is increasingly privileged. When attempting to counter hegemony, what one needs to do is disrupt the legible—to expand the contours of what is considered political—not to accept the narrowly circumscribed zone of politics neoliberalism demarcates. Therefore, it is crucial not to judge critical legal scholarship according to whether its political impact is immediate or even known, and thus a turn to politics is not the remedy for legal theory’s marginalization. B. Prescription: More Normativity Some scholars recognize the danger of embracing a reified notion of politics that unwittingly reaffirms the status quo, and instead champion assertions of substantive morality to counteract the cold logics of pragmatism and efficiency.142 This proposed solution advocates a return to more substantive ideals of justice and equality. Although it may be true that change will ultimately require wresting these liberal and democratic ideals from neoliberalism and refilling their hollowed-out forms, this approach entails a number of pitfalls. The first is simply the inevitable question regarding moral claims: Whose morality is to be asserted? This question has created crisis on the left before, even producing some of the schisms among the crits recounted above. Neoliberalism does not have to contend with this issue—it foregrounds its formal nature and holds itself out as not needing to create a universal morality or set of values. More importantly, it claims to provide a structure in which one can keep one’s own substantive morals. Therefore, neoliberalism’s logic cannot be countered by moral claims without first disrupting its illusion of amorality. The ineffectiveness of the progressive critique of law and economics, based in claims of distributive justice and moral imperative, provides a clear example of how the neoliberal discourse can capture normative claims. The work of Martha McCluskey, one of the few legal scholars writing about neoliberalism in the domestic context over the last ten years, highlights the extent to which the “distributive justice” critique, which argues against the privileging of efficiency over equality and redistribution, fails to challenge the underlying logic.143 McCluskey illustrates how critics of law and economics who critique the approach’s inattention to redistribution have already ceded the central point, by arguing within the conventional views that “efficiency is about expanding the societal pie and redistribution is about dividing it.”144 “Neoliberalism’s disadvantage is not, as most critics worry, its inattention to redistribution, but to the contrary, its very obsession with redistribution as a distinctly seductive yet treacherous policy separate from efficiency.”145 In order to challenge this rationality, she explains, one cannot “misconstrue neoliberalism as a project to promote individual freedom and value-neutral economics at the expense of social responsibility and community morality.”146 One must instead recognize that neoliberalism has redefined social responsibility and community morality. Therefore, one must refuse the false dichotomy between the economic and cultural spheres (a division that allows the neoliberal discourse to displace cultural concerns to a moment after the economic concerns have been dealt with). Merely asserting the falsity of this separation is not sufficient. Neoliberalism has real effects in the world that strengthen its ideological claims.147 Therefore, it is not a struggle that can take place solely on the terrain of discourse or ideology. Like neoliberalism generally, law and economics does not hold itself out as infallible or as an embodiment of social ideals, but instead as the best society can do. It functions precisely on the logic that there is no alternative. Like Hayek’s theory, “law and economics is full of stories about how liberal rights and regulation designed to advance equality victimize the all-powerful market, undermining its promised rewards.”148 In light of this, it is a mistake to see neoliberalism as disavowing moral principles in favor of economic ones; it instead folds them into one another: “The Law and Economics movement is rooted in the moral ideal of the market as the social realization of individual liberty and popular democracy.”149 Neoliberalism’s approach presents itself not only as efficient, but also as just. Legal scholars need to recognize neoliberalism’s focus on the market is not only a form of morality, but also a powerful one. They cannot assume that in a battle of moralities the substantive communitarian ideal will win.150 Furthermore, the neoliberal framework, through its reconfiguration of the subject as an entrepreneur, justifies material inequalities—in contrast to liberalism’s mere blindness to them. Consequently, merely asserting the existence of material inequalities does not immediately undermine neoliberalism’s claims. Far from the engaged citizen who actively produces the polis in liberal theory, the neoliberal subject is a rational, calculating, and independent entity “whose moral autonomy is measured by her capacity for ‘self-care’—the ability to provide for her own needs and service her own ambitions.”151 The subject’s morality is not in relation to principles or ideals, but is “a matter of rational deliberation about costs, benefits, and consequences.”152 If efficiency is the morality of our time, the poor are cast not only as “undeserving” but also as morally bankrupt. Therefore, efficiency replaces not only political morality, but also all other forms of value. Therefore, critics are right that other forms of value have been crowded out; but the logic is deeper than they seem to realize. It goes beyond the scope of what is being done in the legal academy. It is a logic that organizes our time and therefore must be countered differently. More normativity is not the answer to legal theory’s marginalization because neoliberalism’s logic can accommodate even radically contradictory moralities under its claims of moral pluralism. Ethical claims of justice and community may need to be made, but one must first recognize that countering hegemony is harder than merely articulating an alternative; hegemony must be disrupted first. Disrupting neoliberalism’s logic thus entails not only recognizing that neoliberalism has a morality, but also taking that morality seriously. C. Prescription: Acceptance The final response of legal theorists to their field’s marginalization is to dismiss it as merely the regular ebb and flow of theory’s prominence.153 Putting it in terms of Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts, the contemporary moment is just the “normal science” of the paradigm brought about by the crits’ revolutionary moment in the 1970s and 1980s.154 The vitality, this narrative contends, will return when a competing paradigm emerges. There are several problems with this perspective on the decline. First, it entails an error in logic insofar as it takes an external perspective. Legal theory does not inevitably rise and fall but only according to the work being produced; or, to put it another way, this descriptive account of theory’s ebb can be a selffulfilling prophecy insofar as it decreases scholars’ motivation to pursue and receptivity toward theoretical projects. Second, legal scholars cannot be content with normal science when it has the kinds of consequences for democracy and economic inequality that neoliberal hegemony does. The Court is currently entrenching these principles at an unprecedented rate in areas of free speech, equal protection, and antitrust to name a few.155 At first, such acceptance appears to be what Janet Halley is advocating in “taking a break from feminism,”156 but upon closer inspection it is not. Halley is cautioning against the left’s nostalgia—concluding that operating under the banner of feminism and a preoccupation with “reviving” feminism looks backward instead of forward.157 Critical legal scholarship instead needs to be “self-critical” and to recognize that “how we make and apply legal theory arises out of the circumstances in which we recognize problems and articulate solutions.”158 Theory must arise from engagement with the current circumstances. Acceptance cannot be the solution; legal theory must produce the momentum to move forward. VII CONCLUSION: WHERE WE GO FROM HERE The way forward cannot entail a return to reified notions of theory any more than by a return to reified notions of politics. Critical legal scholars should not attempt to revitalize previous critical movements but, instead, reinvigorate the practice of critique within the legal academy. A. Why Critique Naming neoliberalism is necessary in order to counteract it. Without explicit identification, there can be no truly oppositional position. It also makes legible connections that would otherwise go unseen, as was the case with scholars writing about the decline. But there must also be a step beyond naming: critique. Critique means taking neoliberal rationality seriously. The approach must not be dismissive, merely pointing out neoliberalism’s inconsistencies, but instead must recognize that neoliberal rationality is inherently appealing. One cannot merely indict efficiency as contrary to more substantive values, but one also must recognize that efficiency is inextricably tied to beliefs about liberty, dignity, and individual choice, as well as corresponding beliefs about the capacities and limits of the state to effectuate change. No one is arguing that neoliberalism is the best of all possible worlds; in fact, its power comes precisely from abandoning such a claim. In recognizing its hegemonic status, legal scholars can understand the critical task as being more than just demystification. Neoliberal does not paper over inequalities after all; it justifies them. Ultimately, critique should function as a means of opening the conversation in ways that go beyond the picture of law painted by the Roberts Court—to refuse to allow the legal academy to be merely mimetic of a Court that is clearly embracing a neoliberal vision. Critique provides a means of thinking about law as not limited by what the markets can tolerate; it is the means through which one can discover a form of resistance that goes beyond nostalgia for the liberal welfare state. And finally, critique is simply a means of asserting that things can be different than they are in a world that constantly insists that there is no alternative.

Tournament: Alta | Round: 4 | Opponent: San Marino ED | Judge: Paul Montreuil
Police should be removed from schools by local governments. And Governments responsible for school resource officers should implement the Coalition Against Police Abuse proposal for civilian review which includes- -establish “Loyal Opposition Policy Review Boards” for civilian oversight of police conduct, policy, and hiring/firing decisions
-The boards should be: elected, paid, and independent of police agencies
-The boards should have special investigators with unrestricted access to crime scenes and the power to subpoena police department personnel and records
-The board should have authority over all claims of police misconduct including: assault, discrimination, infiltration of community groups, sexual harassment, false arrest, and misuse of force. The board should be able to mandate training or discipline for officers up to and including firing, protections for police whistleblowers, and mandate of municipal damages
-Special city prosecutors should be appointed independent of the city attorney’s office and the city council who handle all criminal cases against police officers and have full subpoena powers
-staff should be hired on the basis of affirmative action policies 

CRBs are a legitimate alternative to immunity reform- their decisions affect the ‘clearly established’ doctrine which solves the case without judicial change
Meltzer, JD, 14
(Ryan E., Texas LR 92: 1277 Qualified Immunity and Constitutional-Norm Generation in the Post-Saucier Era: “Clearly Establishing” the Law Through Civilian Oversight of Police)
In the course of investigating discrete incidents of alleged police misconduct, civilian external investigatory bodies engage in fact-finding and identification and application of governing legal standards in much the same way as a court assesses a motion to suppress evidence or a § 1983 claim alleging a deprivation of constitutional rights.31 More importantly, these bodies constantly encounter novel factual scenarios, particularly ones implicating the Fourth Amendment,32 such that their findings epitomize the sort of fact-specific guidance endorsed by the Court.33 Further, to the extent that they are empowered to make policy recommendations to the police departments they oversee, civilian external investigatory bodies also resemble compliance agencies like the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), whose advisory reports have helped to provide the sort of “notice” required to overcome an official’s qualified immunity.34 Consequently, the Court’s qualified immunity jurisprudence appears to permit the findings of such bodies to contribute to the clearly-established-law analysis. At present, however, the work of civilian external investigatory bodies—work that produces a wealth of valuable information and often confronts constitutional questions that might otherwise escape formal adjudication— is largely divorced from that of the courts.35 This state of affairs represents a costly missed opportunity, especially in the wake of Pearson. (1281-2)
CRB’s regulate school police
City of Baltimore 16
(http://civilrights.baltimorecity.gov/civilian-review-board)
The Civilian Review Board of Baltimore City is an independent agency in the city through which members of the public can issue a complaint against officers of various law enforcement units. The Civilian Review Board takes complaints that allege the use of excessive force, abusive language, harassment, false arrest, and false imprisonment. The law enforcement units that the Civilian Review Board handles complaints for are: the Baltimore City Police Department, the Baltimore City School Police, the Baltimore City Sheriff's Office, the Baltimore Environmental Police, the Police Force of the Baltimore City Community College, and the Police Force of Morgan State. The Civilian Review Board also reviews Police Department Procedures and makes recommendations to the Commissioner.

The CP Solves the Case 

1. Giroux concludes only the counterplan solves – presence is the key internal link to violence. Giroux 15
   Henry A.; 11-11-2015; McMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest and The Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. He also is a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University; "Terrorizing Students: The Criminalization of Children in the US Police State"; http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/33604-terrorizing-students-the-criminalization-of-children-in-the-us-police-state~~ EE
   Educators, young people, parents and others concerned about violence in schools need to organize and demand that the police be removed from school. Not only is their presence a waste of taxpayers' money and an interference with children's education, they also pose a threat to student safety. 45 Instead of putting police in schools, money should be spent on more guidance teachers, social workers, teachers, community intervention workers and other professionals who are trained to provide a secure and supportive environment for young people. It is particularly crucial to support those social services, classroom practices and policies that work to keep students in schools. Everything possible should be done to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline and the underlying forces that produce it. At the same time, more profound change must take place on a national level, since the violence waged by the police is symptomatic of a society now ruled by a financial elite who trade in cruelty, punishment and despair. US society is broken, and the violence to which it appears addicted will continue until the current configurations of power, politics, inequality and injustice are eliminated.

2. Only EXTERNAL, CIVILIAN oversight can alter police behavior- the AFF’s internal legal reform drives police misconduct underground- it’s a trap
Akbar, 15 – Assistant Professor of Law at Michael E. Moritz College of Law, the Ohio State University (Amna, “National Security’s Broken Windows”, UCLA Law Review, Vol. 62, pg. 834, May 2015, Lexis)
This Article has attempted to identify the problems with community engagement and counterradicalization in the national security context, drawing from the critiques of community policing and broken windows in the ordinary criminal context. The canvas for this critical engagement was limited insofar as  *906  Muslim communities' experiences in these programs have been largely sheltered from public view. Harvesting those experiences is no doubt essential to understanding the possibilities and limitations of these programs. This Article provided a sketch of the problems lurking near the surface - that is left to future work.
Is community engagement salvageable? Moving community engagement toward its most democratic aspirations - toward a more genuine exercise in community consultation, contestation, and collaboration - would involve ridding the program of its pernicious baggage. For example, law enforcement could end community engagement's integration with community-wide intelligence gathering, or could decouple community engagement from CVE and counterradicalization.
Certainly there are strong normative reasons, including those that motivate this Article, to expect and demand that law enforcement account for the realities of marginalized communities. But we cannot expect that dialogue will necessarily lead to accountability, meaningful contestation, or realignment of police approaches in marginalized communities. After all, law enforcement is itself a significant vehicle for marginalization and racialization in the United States. It is reasonable to question whether community policing - or policing at all - can be expected to be the vehicle for the change we are seeking. The problem and the solution may be entirely mismatched.
The allure of community policing rests in part on a broader construct of dialogue as inherently valuable. While dialogue can certainly be valuable, its value will depend on the context and the point of view from which it is being evaluated. Dialogue often serves a different function for the more powerful in the conversation than the less powerful. The idea that dialogue is the cure-all for poor relationships between police and marginalized communities emerges from a failure to recognize the structures and histories of police impunity in these communities, as well as the material realities that keep inequality in place. When the dialogue in question is with the police, initiated by the police, and on the police's own terms, not only is the function of the dialogue necessarily limited, the entire initiative should raise red flags. How will the dialogue change the material reality of policing in the community? Does the dialogue further exacerbate inequality or simply validate preexisting policing practices through the performance of democratic legitimacy? Or is it really allowing for messy democratic contestation, and the possibility for change in the material conditions of the relationship between the police and the marginalized?
For community policing to be an effective tool in changing the relationship between the marginalized and law enforcement, marginalized communities cannot simply be offered a seat at the table to participate in preconceived policing  *907  programs. They must have the political power to hold police accountable. For community policing mechanisms to offer potential for real change to marginalized communities, communities must build capacity and political power to demand accountability. So while we might advocate for law enforcement to engage marginalized communities, we cannot rely on law enforcement initiatives to recalibrate relationships long rife with deep inequality. The pressure for meaningful change must come from outside, from the communities themselves organizing for change. n325
Net Benefit:
Civil rights focus fails- it takes a black and white approach to police conduct that ensures resistance. Schlanger 15
Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law, University of Michigan (Margo, “Intelligence Legalism and the National Security Agency's Civil Liberties Gap”, Harvard National Security Journal, Vol. 6, pg. 112, 2015, Lexis)
I have suggested that rights discourse tends to sweep under the rug the messiness of civil liberties protections--the policy issues that lie at the core of civil liberties interests. That messiness will be apparent in what follows; there are no magic bullets here. But a measure can be useful even if messy or compromised. It is possible that that none of the offices described below will accomplish very much. It seems to me, however, that soft administrative measures are useful tools in the civil liberties toolkit, well worth trying by a principal--whether that principal is the President or the Congress--who wants to give more priority to civil liberties but lacks the institutional capacity to do so directly and repeatedly over time. Each of these three offices might represent civil liberties interests more systematically than current arrangements, and might advocate for more liberty protective government protocols and programs. It is worth emphasizing, too, that measures such as these might have not just cumulative but also mutually reinforcing effects, creating a civil liberties cadre with security clearances, who might assist each other in a variety of ways. n360 In addition to promoting civil liberties/privacy interstitially, offices like these assist other more authoritative rulemakers to understand the civil liberties implications of their choices. For example, they can help Congress in its otherwise very difficult oversight task, flagging issues that need more congressional attention. n361 And in several different ways, they may increase public access to otherwise secret matters, which in turn increases pressure on those authoritative rulemakers: They generate reports--both public and private--which can be used by Congress and the public. n362 And they build relationships with non-governmental organizations that promote increased official disclosure. My argument is not that offices like these are a cure-all  *193  for achieving optimal policy, but that they may be a useful part of a complicated ecology.

Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 2 | Opponent: St Thomas Academy SK | Judge: Akhil Gandra
A. Uniqueness- 

The new generation LGBTQ movement is working with community-based solutions, moving away from the flare of courts. Lazare ‘10/13
Sarah Lazare is a staff writer for AlterNet, A former staff writer for Common Dreams. “Meet 5 Movement Leaders Across the U.S. Fighting for LGTBQ Issues on the Ground.” Alternet. October 13, 2016. http://www.alternet.org/lgbtq/meet-5-movement-leaders-across-us-fighting-lgtbq-issues-ground JJN
"We've gotten dragged into a national conversation where same-sex marriage is held up as the pinnacle of the LGBTQ struggle, but there are so many other things our communities struggle around, issues that have to do with life and death,” Paulina Helm-Hernandez, the co-director of the queer liberation group Southerners on New Ground (SONG), told AlterNet. “We’re dealing with issues like criminalization, health care access and core safety. We’re thinking about ways our people know a lot about violence and how to survive." Helm-Hernandez is one of countless movement leaders in rural communities and urban centers across the country bringing a queer lens to racial, social and economic justice activism. LGBTQ organizers are at the helm of the Movement for Black Lives, calling for an end to extrajudicial police killings, and on the frontlines of native resistance at Standing Rock, where indigenous earth defenders have erected a "two-spirit camp," for gay and lesbian indigenous people. They are demanding an stop to deportations and mass incarceration and devising concrete, community-safety alternatives to calling the police. While fending off the racist incitement of the 2016 election cycle, LGBTQ organizers are also going on the offensive, preparing to mobilize for demilitarization at home and abroad no matter who wins in November. AlterNet spoke with five U.S.-based organizers whose political and cultural work shows that LGBTQ movements go far beyond marriage equality, and are shaping the social movements that define our times. 1. Kym Anthoni, New Orleans “Second lining is very big in New Orleans culture,” said Anthoni, an organizer with the youth-led LGBTQ organization BreakOUT. “After someone passes away, people will do a dance celebrating resilience. Every year around the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, we do a second line for the people who died to celebrate resilience, strength and moving forward.” “When a transgender woman has been killed, or you’ve gone through a bunch of bullshit, we embody the culture of second line, recognizing that we have a lot of pain and embracing resilience, saying let’s let go of the harsh shit that you’ve been through and celebrate the fact that you made it,” Anthoni continued. “Last year for the Trans March of resilience, we had a whole second line. We were uplifting the voices that are normally not uplifted in our culture.” New Orleans has been hit hard in recent years by a wave of killings targeting transgender women of color. Among them was BreakOUT community member Penny Proud, a 21-year-old black transgender woman murdered in 2015. This summer, the organization released a statement reading, “It is with heavy hearts that we share the news that another young, black trans/gender non-conforming person, Devin Diamond, has been murdered in New Orleans, just a few weeks after 24-year-old Erica ‘E’ Davis was shot in the Treme neighborhood on her way to work.” Key to BreakOUT’s organizing is the principle that “we deserve to walk down the street and not be attacked, we deserve to not be criminalized,” said Anthoni. This demand is aimed at curbing vigilante violence as well as law enforcement brutality. The organization’s first campaign was called We Deserve Better and took on rampant abuse by the New Orleans Police Department. According to a report released in 2014 by BreakOUT, police abuse is widespread. The survey found that “75 percent of people of color respondents feel they have been targeted by police for their sexual orientation or gender identity or gender expression compared with 24 percent of white respondents.” In addition, the report states that “43 percent of people of color respondents have been asked for a sexual favor by police compared with 11 percent of white respondents.” Anthoni emphasized that it is important for the broader public to understand that police brutality is also an LGBTQ issue. “Police always target trans women of color just for being trans,” Anthoni said. “They over-eroticize transgender bodies. The queer and transgender youth of color are most targeted by law enforcement. It’s a huge issue because it takes your power away, it makes you feel vulnerable. Our vulnerability can sometimes cost us our lives.” In addition to organizing, political education and youth work in local high schools, Anthoni said, “The main core of what we do is heart healing justice work. We focus on finding ways to heal as a community.”

B. Links- 

1. Court civil rights victories act as fly paper drawing other social movements into the court to focus on litigation strategies
   Rosenberg 8 (Gerald N., University of Chicago political science and law professor, Ph.D. from Yale University, member of the Washington, D.C. bar, The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring about Social Change?, p. 427)
   If this is the case, then there is another important way in which courts affect social change. It is, to put it simply, that courts act as “fly-paper” for social reformers who succumb to the “lure of litigation.” If the constraints of the Constrained Court view are correct, then courts can seldom produce significant social reform. Yet if groups advocating such reform continue to look to the courts for aid, and spend precious resources in litigation, then the courts also limit change by deflecting claims from substantive political battles, where success is possible, to harmless legal ones where it is not. Even when major cases are won, the achievement is often more symbolic that real. Thus, courts may serve an ideological function of luring movements for social reform to an institution that is structurally constrained from serving their needs, providing only an illusion of change.

2. This is specifically true for LGBTQ movements
Jane S. Schacter* James E. and Ruth B. Doyle-Bascom Professor of Law, University of Wisconsin Law School; Edwin A. Heafey, Jr. Visiting Professor of Law, Stanford Law School, 2005-2006; A.B., University of Pennsylvania, 1980; J.D., Harvard University, 1984. Drake Law Review Summer 06
There is an emerging view of the role of courts in the sexual orientation domain that echoes Professor Gerald Rosenberg's landmark book, The Hollow hope. n9 This view is distinctly skeptical about the prospects of courts accomplishing much reform in the area of gay rights. n10 *863 It should not be confused with normative critiques of "activist courts" made by those who object to same-sex marriage or other gay rights. n11 The skepticism inspired by The Hollow hope is empirical in nature and often made by those evincing no particular hostility to gay rights. n12 The thinking goes roughly like this: courts cannot produce significant change, only legislatures can. Legislators, who are politically accountable, will act in ways that are consistent with public opinion. By contrast, courts may get out too far in front of public opinion and, when they do, backlash is sure to follow. Against this background, count my Essay as a plea for caution and context. The question whether courts can, or do, produce social change on sexual orientation issues is a question that is, on closer analysis, too crude to be all that useful. I will suggest that rather than staking out broad claims or pursuing unbroken causal arrows, scholars ought to bring into focus the variability, contingency, and complexity that presents itself as we try to map the relationship between courts and social change in the area of gay rights. True, any romanticized picture of judges as countermajoritarian revolutionaries, single-handedly making public policy more progressive, is empirically unsustainable. But we should not replace one piece of mythology with another. The notion that the institutional properties of courts disable them from ever driving social change in a significant way has its own caricatured qualities.

C. Internal Link- Courts Wreck movements

1. Judicial review produces divide and conquer
   Becker 93 (Mary, Prof of Law @ University of Chicago Law School; 64 U. Colo. L. Rev. 975 ln)
   Binding judicial review can impede political movements even when the Supreme Court does not actually block success. The relegation of high matters, such as sexual equality, to the courts saps political movements of their strength, particularly after ineffective victories. 76 At the same time, judicial review can mobilize the opposition, and the Court itself will be influenced by the resulting political climate, a climate it has helped create. When ineffective judicial victories weaken a movement, there may be less grass-roots pressure for change. Yet, real change in the relationship between the sexes is unlikely without change at the grass-roots level. Decisions from on high are unlikely to transform intimate relationships. Judicial victories protecting one or some outsider groups, but not all such groups, also interfere with the development of effective coalitions. This may be most harmful to the most vulnerable groups, such as lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men. Real or perceived judicial protection of less marginal groups, such as straight women or racial minorities, may mean that these groups are less likely to form effective coalitions with the more marginal groups. Judicial review is, therefore, a "divide and conquer" strategy.
   2. Perceived victories cause mass movement deflation
   Rosenberg 8 (Gerald N., University of Chicago political science and law professor, Ph.D. from Yale University, member of the Washington, D.C. bar, The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change?, p. 422-423)
   In contrast to this conclusion, it might be suggested that throughout this book I have asked too much of courts.  After all, in all the cases examined, court decisions produced some change, however small.  Given that political action appeared impossible in many instances, such as with civil rights in the 1950s, same-sex marriage in the 1990s, and reform of the criminal justice system more generally, isn’t some positive change better than none?  In a world of unlimited resources, this would be the case.  In the world in which those seeking significant social reform live, however, strategic choices have costs, and a strategy that produces little or not change and induces backlash drains resources that could be more effectively employed in other strategies.  In addition, vindication of constitutional principles accompanied by small change may be mistaken for widespread significant social reform, inducing reformers to relax their efforts.
   D. Impacts
   LGBTQ Rights are crucial to avoid extinction Tatchell ’89
   Peter Tatchell - is a British human rights campaignerbest known for his work with LGBT social movements, was selected as Labour Party Parliamentary candidate for Bermondsey. “Gay Liberation is Central to Human Emancipation.” Peter Tatchell.net. However, note at the bottom: “An edited version of this article was published in "Labour Briefing", 1989. See also "Beyond lesbian and gay rights", Interlink. May /June 1989.” http://www.petertatchell.net/masculinity/gay_liberation.htm JJN *bracketed for offensive language
   Lesbian and gay LGTBQ liberation is of critical importance to the broader project of human emancipation. It is not merely a minority issue, nor purely a question of civil rights and sexual freedom. The ultimate aim is a cultural revolution to end heterosexual supremacism and the concomitant cult of heterosexual masculinity which underpins all relations of oppression and exploitation. This was the revolutionary agenda of the lesbian and gay liberation movement which emerged 20 years ago following the Stonewall Riots in New York in June 1969. In contrast to earlier liberal-oriented movements for homosexual equality, the lesbian and gay liberation movement did not seek to ape heterosexual values or secure the acceptance of homosexuals within the existing sexual conventions. Indeed, it repudiated the prevailing sexual morality and institutions - rejecting not only heterosexism but also heterosexual masculinity with its oppressive predisposition to rivalry, toughness and aggression (most potently symbolised by the rapist and the queer-basher). In contrast the "radical drag" and''gender-bender" politics of the Gay Liberation Front glorified male gentleness. It was a conscious, if sometimes exaggerated, attempt to renounce the oppressiveness of masculinity and subvert the way masculinity functions to buttress the subordination of women and gay men. Lesbian and gay liberation is therefore truly revolutionary because it specifically rejects the male heterosexual cult of masculine competitiveness, domination and violence. Instead, it affirms the worthwhileness of male sensitivity and affection between men and, in the case of lesbians, the intrinsic value of an eroticism and love independent of heterosexual men. By challenging heterosexual masculinity, the politics of lesbian and gay liberation has profound radical implications for oppressed peoples everywhere: it actively subverts the male heterosexual machismo' values which lie at the heart of all systems of domination, exploitation and oppression. Lesbian and gay liberation is therefore not an issue which is peripheral. It is, indeed absolutely central to revolutionary change and human liberation in general. Without the successful construction of a cult of heterosexual masculinity and a mass of aggressive male egos, neither sexual, class, racial, species, nor imperialist oppression are possible. All these different forms of oppression depend on two factors for their continued maintenance. First, on specific economic and political structures. And second, on a significant proportion of the population, mainly heterosexual men, being socialised into the acceptance of harsh masculine values which involve the legitimisation of aggression and the suppression of gentleness and emotion. The embracing of these culturally-conditioned macho values, whether consciously or unconsciously, is what makes so many millions of people able to participate in repressive regimes. (This interaction between social structures, ideology and individual psychology was a thesis which the communist psychologist, Wilhelm Reich, was attempting to articulate nearly 60 years ago in his book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism). In the case of German fascism, what Nazism did was merely awake and excite the latent brutality which is intrinsic to heterosexual masculinity in class societies. It then systematically manipulated and organised this unleashed masculine violence into a fascist regime of terror and torture which culminated in the holocaust. Since it is the internalisation of the masculine cult of toughness and domination which makes people psychologically suited and willing to be part of oppressive relations of exploitation and subjection, repressive states invariably glorify masculine "warrior" ideals and legally and ideologically suppress those men - mainly homosexuals - who fail to conform to them. Given that this internalisation of masculine aggression within the male population is a prerequisite for injustice and tyranny, love and tenderness between men ceases to be a purely private matter or simply a question of personal lifestyle. Instead, it objectively becomes an act of subversion which undermines the very foundations of oppression. Hence the Nazis' vilification of gay men as "sexual subversives" and "sexual saboteurs" who, in the words of Heinrich Himmler, had to be "exterminated- root and branch." In conclusion: the goal of eradicating injustice and exploitation requires us to change both the social structure and the individual personality to create people who, liberated from masculinity, no longer psychologically crave the power to dominate and exploit others and who are therefore unwilling to be the agents of oppressive regimes (whether as soldiers, police, gaolers and censors or as routine civil servants and state administrators who act as the passive agents of repression by keeping the day-to-day machinery of unjust government ticking over). By challenging the cult of heterosexual masculinity, lesbian and gay liberation politics is about much more than the limited agenda of human rights. It offers a unique and revolutionary contribution to the emancipation of the whole of humanity from all forms of oppression and subjugation.

Tournament: Alta | Round: 2 | Opponent: Centennial HH | Judge: Seth Wetsel
The US is currently holding terrorists at bay through security tactics that go under the public radar and require extreme efficiency. Atkins 11/17 

Doug Atkins writer and contributor to boston globe Nov 17, 2016 Terror at Home: We Are Smarter Than We Think https://ivn.us/2016/11/17/winning-war-terror/

Fear mongering media outlets have convinced many that we are losing the war on terror at home. The truth is, however, that we are doing quite well.¶ According to the October Terror Threat Snapshot, released by the Majority Staff of the Homeland Security Committee, US authorities have arrested 109 suspects in ISIS related incidences since 2014.¶ The report states, “These individuals had, among other acts: plotted attacks; attempted to join ISIS in Iraq and Syria (or facilitated others’ travel); provided money, equipment, and weapons to ISIS; and falsified statements to federal authorities. Eight ISIS-linked terrorists have been killed while carrying out five separate attacks in California, Florida, Massachusetts, Texas, and Minnesota.” Currently, there are over 1,000 active FBI investigations into homegrown terrorism according to Director James Comey. He stated that over 80 percent of those are ISIS related. Since September 11, 2001, there have been at least 171 homegrown jihadist plots in the United States, including attempts to join terrorist groups overseas and execute attacks at home. More than 86 percent of these cases have occurred or been uncovered since 2009.¶ There is a lot of “behind the scenes” action, resulting in statistics like those above, that the general public rarely hears about in mainstream media.¶ Tactics such as leveraging the criminal justice system, seizing financial assets, gathering intelligence, covert operations, restricting movement of suspected terrorists, monitoring social media, and enhanced border restrictions and rules are all tools which aid in capturing US and foreign jihadists. As a result of these methods, fighters traveling into Syria and Iraq (at a one-time high of 2,000 monthly) have now fallen to as few as 50 per month.¶ U.S. efforts to counteract ISIS messaging online have proven an effective way to deter recruitment. ISIS has social media experts, and even hosts real-time Q and A sessions online where recruiters answer questions such as, “How do I travel, undetected, from the US to Syria?” Radical extremists post videos online, encouraging young people who have felt rejected by American society to take up Jihad.¶ According to the Terror Snapshot, here are some of the actions and arrests during this past September which have stopped some of these radicalized individuals from acting:¶ September 8: Marie Castelli, a 56-year-old U.S. citizen and Muslim convert from Maysville, Kentucky, was arrested after issuing violent threats and lying to federal authorities. Castelli promoted ISIS propaganda through social media.¶ September 10: An ISIS-linked cyber hacking group released a “kill list” with information about real estate professionals in the United States and encouraged individuals to locate and attack them.¶ September 18: Ahmad Khan Rahami, a 28-year-old U.S. citizen who was born in Afghanistan and is a resident of Elizabeth, New Jersey, was arrested after launching a bombing campaign targeting multiple locations in New York and New Jersey. Rahami was carrying a journal citing ISIS’s call for its followers in the West to launch attacks at home.¶ September 18: Dahir Adan, a 20-year-old U.S. citizen living in St. Cloud, Minnesota, attacked nearly a dozen people with a knife at a mall. Adan was born to a Somali family in Kenya before immigrating to the United States. Adan reportedly asked victims during his stabbing spree at a mall in Minnesota if they were Muslim. ISIS’s primary media arm claimed Adan was an ISIS supporter shortly after the attack.¶ September 30: Nelash Mohamed Das, a 24-year-old Bangladeshi citizen who has been living in Maryland as a legal permanent resident, was arrested after he plotted to kill a member of the U.S. military on behalf of ISIS.¶ Authorities know that roughly 90 percent of ISIS fanatics charged in the US are male and an average of 26.3 years of age. We are learning how to find these high risk individuals and arrest them. Almost 30 percent of those arrested were planning ISIS related attacks.¶ In a few instances, individuals known to be associated with terrorist groups have unsuccessfully attempted to gain admittance to the US through the refugee program. Over the past fiscal year, the Obama Administration has let almost 13,000 refugees through our borders and planned to allow in even more. By comparison, 1.3 million refugees arrived in Europe during that same time period. Trump has indicated that he intends to reduce these numbers drastically.¶ Although the US has a highly rigorous screening process for incoming refugees (Consuming 18 – 24 months for each person) the Terror Snapshot states that, “American law enforcement and intelligence officials have repeatedly indicated that the U.S. lacks reliable and credible intelligence to properly vet and screen potential Syrian refugees.”¶ President-Elect Trump has repeatedly indicated that he plans to improve this process with what he calls “extreme vetting.”¶ ISIS has proven to be a challenger unlike anything the US has previously faced. Their ability to use the internet and social media to reach high risk individuals and radicalize them to the ISIS cause has created a threat that is difficult to combat. Our intelligence agencies continue to learn and grow, having great, if often unrecognized, successes in protecting the American people.

Qualified immunity for security officials is necessary to secrecy, efficiency, and flexible decision-making.  Samp 6/8
*Brackets in original
Richard A. Samp JD Washington Legal Foundation June 8, 2016 Ascroft v Turkmen Amicus Briefs. BRIEF OF FORMER U.S. ATTORNEYS GENERAL¶ WILLIAM P. BARR, ALBERTO R. GONZALES,¶ EDWIN MEESE III, MICHAEL B. MUKASEY, AND¶ DICK THORNBURGH; FORMER FBI DIRECTORS¶ WILLIAM S. SESSIONS AND WILLIAM H. WEBSTER;¶ AND WASHINGTON LEGAL FOUNDATION¶ AS AMICI CURIAE IN SUPPORT OF PETITIONERS http://www.scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Ashcroft-v-Turkmen-WLF-amicus.pdf

The petitions raise issues of exceptional¶ importance. Amici urge the Court to grant review of¶ all three Questions Presented. We write separately to¶ focus particular emphasis on the qualified immunity¶ question. Qualified immunity not only provides¶ government officials with a defense to liability; it also¶ is “an entitlement not to stand trial or face the other¶ burdens of litigation.” Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472 U.S.¶ 511, 526 (1985) (emphasis added). The Court has made¶ clear that the “driving force” behind creation of the¶ qualified immunity doctrine was a desire to ensure¶ that “‘insubstantial claims’ will be resolved prior to¶ discovery.” Anderson v. Creighton, 483 U.S. 635, 640¶ n.2 (1987). Yet, the decision below calls into question¶ the ability of high-level Executive Branch officials to¶ win dismissal, on qualified immunity grounds, of even¶ frivolous Bivens litigation filed by anyone claiming to¶ be aggrieved by their official conduct.¶ In the absence of dismissal, those officials face¶ the prospect of discovery proceedings that are highly¶ likely to distract them from their other responsibilities.¶ As former senior Executive Branch officials, the¶ individual amici curiae are concerned by the disruptive¶ effects of such discovery, and they are very concerned¶ that such disruptions are likely to impair the ability of¶ high-level officials to carry out their missions effectively. Review is warranted to determine whether¶ such disruptions are required under the terms of the¶ qualified immunity doctrine and the pleading¶ standards established by the Federal Rules of Civil¶ Procedure, particularly when (as here) the challenged¶ actions involve sensitive national security issues.¶ Respondents raise constitutional claims that are¶ largely the same as those at issue in Iqbal and that¶ arise from precisely the same underlying facts: the¶ detention of Arab/Muslim unauthorized aliens at the¶ MDC under harsh conditions in 2001-02. Iqbal¶ determined that the complaint at issue there did not¶ adequately state a constitutional claim against¶ Ashcroft and Mueller for their alleged role in the¶ detentions. The Second Circuit decision, by reaching¶ the opposite conclusion in connection with a complaint¶ that added little in the way of new factual allegations,¶ is in considerable tension with Iqbal. The same¶ considerations that led the Court to review (and¶ ultimately overturn) the Second Circuit’s assessment¶ of the adequacy of the pleadings in Iqbal should¶ persuade the Court to grant review here as well. In¶ particular, Respondents’ complaint includes no factual¶ allegations from which one can reasonably infer that¶ Ashcroft, Mueller, and Ziglar played any role in¶ determining the conditions of Respondents’¶ confinement.¶ Review is also warranted to determine whether¶ the courts should recognize a judicially inferred¶ damages remedy against senior Executive Branch¶ officials for alleged infringement of Respondents’¶ constitutional rights in the course of carrying out their¶ national security responsibilities. As Petitioners note, the appeals courts are sharply divided on the issue,¶ with the Fourth, Seventh, Ninth, and D.C. Circuits¶ issuing decisions that conflict with the decision below.¶ Review is warranted to resolve that conflict.¶ Amici also write separately to note that the¶ Second Circuit’s unprecedented recognition of Bivens¶ actions to challenge Executive Branch national security¶ policy conflicts with decisions of this Court. The Court¶ has cautioned against recognition of new Bivens¶ remedies when, as here, “special factors” counsel¶ hesitation. Those special factors include the national¶ security and immigration-law aspects of this case¶ (areas in which courts traditionally defer to the¶ judgments of the elected branches), the availability of¶ alternative remedies (e.g., habeas corpus proceedings),¶ and the failure of Congress to provide an express¶ damages remedy despite its considerable focus on¶ detention-related issues arising in the course of the¶ 9/11 investigation.¶ REASONS FOR GRANTING THE PETITION¶ I. REVIEW IS WARRANTED BECAUSE THE¶ DECISION BELOW THREATENS THE¶ ABILITY OF FEDERAL OFFICIALS TO¶ AVOID THE BURDENS OF LITIGATION¶ IMPOSED BY INSUBSTANTIAL CLAIMS¶ The Court has long recognized that significant¶ burdens are imposed on government officials when¶ they are required to defend damages claims filed¶ against them in their individual capacities for actions¶ taken in connection with their employment. As the¶ Court explained in Harlow: Each such suit against high-level¶ government officials almost invariably¶ results in these officials and their¶ colleagues being subjected to extensive¶ discovery into traditionally protected¶ areas, such as their deliberations¶ preparatory to the formulation of¶ government policy and their intimate¶ thought processes and communications at¶ the presidential and cabinet levels. Such¶ discovery is wide-ranging, timeconsuming,¶ and not without considerable¶ cost to the officials involved.¶ Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800, 817 n.29 (quoting¶ Halperin v. Kissinger, 606 F.2d 1192, 1214 (D.C. Cir.¶ 1979) (Gesell, J., concurring)).¶ The burdens can be particularly pronounced¶ among officials working on national security matters,¶ where the high level of public passion can result in¶ increased levels of litigation. As Justice Stevens¶ explained:¶ The passions aroused by matters of¶ national security and foreign policy and¶ the high profile of Cabinet officers with¶ functions in that area make them “easily¶ identifiable targets for suits for civil¶ damages.” Nixon v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S.¶ 731, 753 (1982). Persons of wisdom¶ and honor will hesitate to answer the¶ President’s call to serve in these vital¶ positions if they fear that vexatious and¶ politically motivated litigation associated with their public decisions will squander¶ their time and reputation, and sap their¶ personal financial resources when they¶ leave office. The multitude of lawsuits¶ filed against high officials in recent years¶ only confirms the rationality of this¶ anxiety.¶ Mitchell, 472 U.S. at 541-42 (Stevens, J., concurring in¶ the judgment).¶ Events proved Justice Stevens’s prescience.¶ Lawsuits seeking damages from senior Executive¶ Branch officials for actions they took regarding¶ national security matters proliferated throughout the¶ administrations of Presidents Barack Obama, George¶ W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. See, e.g., Lebron v.¶ Rumsfeld, 670 F.3d 540 (4th Cir. 2012) (suit against¶ Defense Secretaries Leon Panetta and Donald¶ Rumsfeld alleging mistreatment of military detainee);¶ Ashcroft v. Al-Kidd, 563 U.S. 731 (2011) (suit against¶ Attorney General alleging improper authorization of¶ material-witness warrants to detain terrorism¶ suspects); Gonzalez v. Reno, 325 F.2d 1228 (11th Cir.¶ 2003) (suit against Attorney General arising from¶ execution of an arrest warrant for six-year-old Elian¶ Gonzalez). A. The Qualified Immunity Doctrine¶ Was Crafted to Reduce the Burden¶ on Government Officials of¶ Defending Against Damages Claims¶ In an effort to reduce the burdens imposed by¶ such suits, the Court has crafted a qualified immunity doctrine designed to provide government officials with¶ not only a defense to liability but also an “immunity¶ from suit.” Mitchell, 472 U.S. at 526. The “driving¶ force” behind creation of the doctrine was a desire to¶ ensure that “insubstantial claims will be resolved¶ prior to discovery.” Anderson, 483 U.S. at 640 n.2. See¶ also Saucier v. Katz, 533 U.S. 194, 200 (2001) (“Where¶ the defendant seeks qualified immunity, a ruling on¶ that issue should be made early in the proceedings so¶ that the costs and expenses of trial are avoided where¶ the defense is dispositive.”).¶ Qualified immunity shields a government official¶ from liability in an individual capacity so long as the¶ official has not violated “clearly established statutory¶ or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person¶ would have known.” Harlow, 457 U.S. at 818. To¶ overcome the defense of qualified immunity the¶ plaintiff must show: (1) the facts, viewed in the light¶ most favorable to the plaintiff, demonstrate the¶ deprivation of a statutory or constitutional right; and¶ (2) the right was clearly established at the time of the¶ deprivation. Saucier, 533 U.S. at 199. Courts are¶ “permitted to exercise their sound discretion in¶ deciding which of the two prongs of the qualified¶ immunity analysis should be addressed first in light of¶ the circumstances in the particular case at hand.”¶ Pearson v. Callahan, 555 U.S. 223, 236 (2009). Amici¶ submit that review of the second prong—whether the¶ asserted right was “clearly established”—is¶ particularly warranted in this case.

The AFF ruling on qualififed immunity limits it for all officials – courts take previous rulings to apply up the executive ladder. Cornyn et al 01
 (John, Andy Taylor First Assistant Attorney General Gregory S. Coleman Solicitor General Counsel of Record Lisa R. Eskow Assistant Solicitor General P.O. Box 12548 Austin, Texas 78711-2548 (512) 936-1700 Counsel for Amici Bill Pryor Attorney General of Alabama 11 South Union Street Montgomery, AL 36130 Bruce M. Botelho Attorney General of Alaska P.O. Box 110300 Juneau, AK 99811-0300 Mark Pryor Attorney General of Arkansas 323 Center St., Ste. 200 Little Rock, AR 72201 Bill Lockyer Attorney General of California 1300 1 Street, Ste. 125 P.O. Box 944255 Sacramento, CA 94244-2550 Ken Salazar Attorney General of Colorado 1525 Sherman St., 7th Fl. Denver, CO 80203 Richard Blumenthal Attorney General of Connecticut 55 Elm Street Hartford, CT 06141-0120 M. Jane Brady Attorney General of Delaware 820 N. French St. Wilmington, DE 19801 James E. Ryan Attorney General of Illinois 100 W. Randolph St., 12th Fl. Chicago, IL 60601 Richard P. Ieyoub Attorney General of Louisiana P.O. Box 94095 Baton Rouge, LA 70804-9095 J. Joseph Curran, Jr. Attorney General of Maryland 200 St. Paul Place Baltimore, MD 21202 Thomas F. Reilly Attorney General of Massachusetts One Ashburton Place Boston, MA 02108-1698 Mike Moore Attorney General of Mississippi P.O. Box 220 Jackson, MS 39205 Joseph P. Mazurek Attorney General of Montana 215 N. Sanders P.O. Box 201401 Helena, MT 59620-1401 Don Stenberg Attorney General of Nebraska 2115 State Capitol Lincoln, NE 68509 Eliot Spitzer Attorney General of New York The Capitol Albany, NY 12224 Heidi Heitkamp Attorney General of North Dakota 600 E. Boulevard Ave. Bismarck, ND 58505-0040 Betty D. Montgomery Attorney General of Ohio 30 E. Broad St., 17th Fl. Columbus, OH 43215 W.A. Drew Edmondson Attorney General of Oklahoma 2300 N. Lincoln Blvd., Ste. 112 Oklahoma City, OK 73105-4894 Hardy Myers Attorney General of Oregon 1162 Court St. N.E. Salem, OR 97310 D. Michael Fisher Attorney General of Pennsylvania 16th Fl., Strawberry Square Harrisburg, PA 17120 Charles M. Condon Attorney General of South Carolina P.O. Box 11549 Columbia, SC 29211 Mark Barnett Attorney General of South Dakota 500 East Capitol Avenue Pierre, SD 57501-5070 Paul G. Summers Attorney General of Tennessee 425 Fifth Ave., North Nashville, TN 37243 Jan Graham Attorney General of Utah 236 State Capitol Salt Lake City, UT 84114 William H. Sorrell Attorney General of Vermont 109 State Street Montpelier, VT 05609-1001 Christine O. Gregoire Attorney General of Washington 1125 Washington Street P.O. Box 40100 Olympia, WA 98504-0100 Brief of The States of Texas, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut,¶ Delaware, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, and Washington as Amici Curiae in Support of Petitioner)
The “reasonable mistake” is one of the core tenets of qualified immunity jurisprudence. In fact, were this Court to prohibit or limit the applicability of qualified immunity and the “reasonable mistake” with respect to excessive force claims, that philosophical departure would have ripple effects beyond the excessive force context. If officers who make *21 reasonable, albeit mistaken, judgments about the necessity of force can be categorically excluded from the ambit of qualified immunity, other public employees exercising discretionary functions might fear that their immunity protections could be forfeited next. This could dissuade individuals from taking government jobs. Public servants should not have to worry that courts might make policy-based distinctions about which types of duties should be afforded immunity protections, and which should not. To transform qualified immunity into a guessing game would defeat the purpose of the doctrine. Harlow's objective legal reasonableness test was designed to strike a balance between the need to vindicate civil rights abuses and the need to promote public service and shield government officials from insubstantial civil rights claims. It is inevitable that public servants will err; and when they do, they should be secure in knowing that their errors will not subject them to liability, or suit, provided they err in a manner that is objectively reasonable. Harlow's compromise may be imperfect, but it should be preserved, as it strikes the best “balance between the evils inevitable in an available alternative.” See Harlow, 457 U.S., at 813.

Flexibility is key to fighting terror Kirchner ‘14
Richard (Rik) Kirchner, Jr. is Chief Executive Officer of KIRIK International, Inc., and Executive Director of the Institute for Surveillance and Threat Detection, a first of its kind educational center dedicated solely to the discipline of Surveillance Detection and Behavioral Detection, delivering Antiterrorism and Threat assessment, development, and implementation to High Value Target and Critical Infrastructure/Key Resource program managers for comprehensive Threat Detection programs with subject matter expertise in Hostile Surveillance, Threat Detection, and Threat Management. “Surveillance and Threat Detection: Prevention versus Mitigation.” Elsevier. 2014. https://books.google.com/books?id=NYS-AQAAQBAJandpg=PA37andlpg=PA37anddq=22search+and+seizure22+and+22prevent+terrorism22andsource=blandots=jMP5xoUYQkandsig=u-N0ufTTRfALYHgFDQ_ZNtlWgYMandhl=enandsa=Xandved=0ahUKEwiO94Lu0rHQAhVnrVQKHW63AW8Q6AEISjAJ#v=onepageandq=22search20and20seizure2220and2022prevent20terrorism22andf=false JJN
While counterterrorism and terrorism prevention are concepts traditionally associated with our nation’s intelligence agencies, there are many basic avenues law enforcement can take in fighting terrorism. Simply keeping an eye out for indicators of preincident planning is integral to counterterrorism efforts nationwide. Patriot Act provisions assist law enforcement efforts greatly by facilitating more efficient terrorist monitoring and probable cause development. Finally, familiarization with state and federal law pertaining to the prevention of terrorist attacks is an absolute must. Terrorism presents a challenge to law enforcement as it requires police to act proactively against crimes (terrorist acts) that, in many cases, have not yet been committed. If the police wait, as they do traditionally, to react to terrorist crimes after they are committed, then the roles of the police are that of a first responder and an investigator. The public, however, expects police to deal with terrorism differently. This is mainly because crimes such as rape, theft, robbery, and even murder target the individual while terrorism targets the public. As such, the public demands that the police act to prevent terrorism before it becomes a criminal reality. Police officers are given the rights to search and seizure based on probable cause (Terry vs Ohio) and to stop a person for inquiry based on reasonable suspicion. These rights were afforded to officers in order to help them prevent a crime that they believe is about to occur. To prove a crime, officers need to find evidence. However, when it comes to terrorism, evidence and weapons are not always there to find even at the execution of the attack. Let’s consider 9/11 and assume for a minute that the terrorists would have been caught prior to boarding the planes. Would we have had the foresight to articulate probable cause based on the terrorists’ behavior and, if so, would we have regarded their box cutters as weapons (evidence) for a possible hijacking? Probably not. In order to reach reasonable suspicion, officers must rely on their training and experience to come up “with an articulable and particularized belief that criminal activity is afoot” Orleans vs United States, 517 U.S. 690 696 (1996) Illinois vs Gates, 462 U.S at 235. To be able to articulate terrorism-related reasonable suspicion, officers must be trained and gain experience in terrorism methods of operations. In other words, officers must be able to look at a situation or activity (suspicion) and have the capability to explain what they are seeing through their terrorist eyes. Officers are not trained (or not having the experience) in doing offensive surveillance, building a bomb or developing a terrorist plan among other things, will never be able to explain what they see as a terrorism-related reasonable cause. As in the case of reasonable suspicion, to develop probable cause, officers need to fall back on their training and experience in order to describe “known facts and circumstances that are sufficient to warrant a man of reasonable prudence in the belief that contraband or evidence of a crime will be found” Orleans vs United States, 517 U.S. 690 696 (1996) Illinois vs Gates, 462 U.S. at 213,238 (1983). Finding bombs and terrorist weapons is a difficult task, as almost anything can be used as a weapon and bombs appear in countless shapes and forms. In order to develop a terrorist-related probable cause, officers need to rely more on information provided by the suspect than on tangible evidence. To obtain this information, officers must utilize different questioning techniques then those used when interviewing suspected criminals. Approaching the suspect from a “law enforcement” angle will probably not work because the suspect has yet to have broken the law in the case of identifiable reasonable suspicion and probable cause . Moreover, cooperation and information are needed to establish probable cause or refuse the reasonable suspicions found. Asking for an ID and checking the suspect’s criminal record are unlikely to help the officer because most terrorist avoid criminal activities and their records are therefore clean. The key to success lies in open-ended, public service-oriented and inquisitive questioning geared toward refuting reasonable suspicions. In essence, the questioning that the officer conducts should resemble that of a receptionist asking politely about the intentions of a visitor entering a building and not that of an officer who has just pulled over a person for speeding recklessly on the highway.  

A single coordinated attack escalates and kills billions Myhrvold 2014
Myhrvold 2014 (Nathan P chief executive and founder of Intellectual Ventures and a former chief technology officer at Microsoft; Strategic Terrorism: A Call to Action; cco.dodlive.mil/files/2014/04/Strategic_Terrorism_corrected_II.pdf; kdf)
Technology contains no inherent moral directive—it empowers people, whatever their intent, good or evil. This has always been true: when bronze implements supplanted those made of stone, the ancient world got scythes and awls, but also swords and battle-axes. The novelty of our present situation is that modern technology can provide small groups of people with much greater lethality than ever before. We now have to worry that private parties might gain access to weapons that are as destructive as—or possibly even more destructive than— those held by any nation-state. A handful of people, perhaps even a single individual, could have the ability to kill millions or even billions. Indeed, it is possible, from a technological standpoint, to kill every man, woman, and child on earth. The gravity of the situation is so extreme that getting the concept across without seeming silly or alarmist is challenging. Just thinking about the subject with any degree of seriousness numbs the mind. The goal of this essay is to present the case for making the needed changes before such a catastrophe occurs. The issues described here are too important to ignore. Failing nation-states—like North Korea—which possess nuclear weapons potentially pose a nuclear threat. Each new entrant to the nuclear club increases the possibility this will happen, but this problem is an old one, and one that existing diplomatic and military structures aim to manage. The newer and less understood danger arises from the increasing likelihood that stateless groups, bent on terrorism, will gain access to nuclear weapons, most likely by theft from a nation-state. Should this happen, the danger we now perceive to be coming from rogue states will pale in comparison. The ultimate response to a nuclear attack is a nuclear counterattack. Nation states have an address, and they know that we will retaliate in kind. Stateless groups are much more difficult to find which makes a nuclear counterattack virtually impossible. As a result, they can strike without fear of overwhelming retaliation, and thus they wield much more effective destructive power. Indeed, in many cases the fundamental equation of retaliation has become reversed. Terrorists often hope to provoke reprisal attacks on their own people, swaying popular opinion in their favor. The aftermath of 9/11 is a case in point. While it seems likely that Osama bin Laden and his henchmen hoped for a massive overreaction from the United States, it is unlikely his Taliban hosts anticipated the U.S. would go so far as to invade Afghanistan. Yes, al-Qaeda lost its host state and some personnel. The damage slowed the organization down but did not destroy it. Instead, the stateless al-Qaeda survived and adapted. The United States can claim some success against al-Qaeda in the years since 9/11, but it has hardly delivered a deathblow. Eventually, the world will recognize that stateless groups are more powerful than nation-states because terrorists can wield weapons and mount assaults that no nationstate would dare to attempt. So far, they have limited themselves to dramatic tactical terrorism: events such as 9/11, the butchering of Russian schoolchildren, decapitations broadcast over the internet, and bombings in major cities. Strategic objectives cannot be far behind. 

Trump responds with Nukes in the Middle East against ISIS. Borgwardt 3/31

Elizabeth Borgwardt is a history professor at Washington University and the author of The Nuremberg Idea, forthcoming from Knopf. “9/11: What Would Trump Do?” http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/03/donald-trump-2016-terrorist-attack-foreign-policy-213784 March 31, 2016

Donald Trump’s March 21 interview with the Washington Post editorial board should make every potential voter’s blood run cold. After noting that ISIS should be knocked out flat, yet indicating that large numbers of U.S. troops should not be involved, Mr. Trump suggested that it was better to be “unpredictable” in the face of U.S. enemies, before twice dodging a question about whether he would advocate the use of tactical nuclear weapons against ISIS. (To be fair, the interview transcript indicates that much more time was spent discussing Mr. Trump’s hand size than anything to do with nuclear weapons.)¶ All this was before the attacks in Belgium; my sense is that a 9/11-style attack on U.S. soil would mean that any remaining restraints to the use of weapons of mass destruction—including nuclear weapons—would likely be swiftly swept aside.¶ General Douglas MacArthur had notoriously floated the idea of using nuclear weapons against China in the Korean conflict (1950-53) when he was concerned about Chinese moves to support North Korean aggression. In posthumously published interviews, MacArthur said that he could have won the war in ten days: “I would have dropped 30 or so atomic bombs … strung across the neck of Manchuria. For at least 60 years there could have been no land invasion of Korea from the North.”¶ Part of MacArthur’s logic was that the United States would have needed to fight communist China eventually, so it would be best to nuke them while they were still weak, recovering from World War II and the Chinese Revolution (1949), as opposed to fighting them later after they had become much stronger. “That makes sense to me!” opined a Trump backer with whom I recently spoke on this topic. And yet, I offered, most Americans today are probably pretty happy that we didn’t use nuclear weapons against China in the Korean war, or would be if they knew anything about that historical interlude. “I guess,” he said. “But why not press your advantage when you have one?”¶ I offer this example because my sense is that in a putative Trump administration, “the gloves would be off” and all barriers—including public opinion—to the first use of various kinds of weapons of mass destruction would likely be at an all-time low. Bruce Cumings, the leading U.S. historian of Korea, has commented on the MacArthur incident in an analysis from back in 2004. Cumings noted that “MacArthur sounds like a warmongering lunatic” for advocating the use of nuclear weapons, but also explained that, astonishing as it might seem, the general actually had some support for his outlandish proposal. Cumings also noted that MacArthur’s conduct, quite appropriately, contributed to the celebrated war hero’s dismissal by President Truman. But that was then.

Tournament: Alta | Round: 2 | Opponent: Centennial HH | Judge: Seth Wetsel
There’s a growing trend to kill Trump – google searches prove. Faulkner 11/11
Faulkner, Trisha. "'Donald Trump Dead' Has Started Trending On Google -- Is Trump’s Life In Danger?" The Inquisitr News. November 11, 2016. Accessed November 23, 2016. http://www.inquisitr.com/3707209/donald-trump-dead-has-started-trending/. JD
“Donald Trump dead” is one of the top-searched Google queries following Election Day. The question remains: Why are so many people asking Google whether or not Donald Trump is dead? The Mirror reports that a new study of Google search data conducted by a digital marketing agency called Search Laboratory revealed that the question of whether or not Donald Trump is dead is one of the top-searched Google queries for the month of November. The Mirror points out that what some people may find more shocking is that this popular search query is not limited to the United States. Data reveals that whether Donald Trump is dead is also a popular search query in Europe this month. For anyone who has been following the 2016 election, it is not too surprising to see a query such as “is Donald Trump dead” trending on Google. The Mirror believes the trending query goes back to a hoax that was making the rounds last month. The hoax claimed that Donald Trump had suffered a cardiac arrest during one of his campaign rallies. In addition to “is Donald Trump dead,” other trending search queries for the month of November include “is Hillary Clinton Jewish,” “are Bill and Hillary Clinton still married,” and “how many times has Donald Trump gone bankrupt?” The search data acquired during the study determined that from the very beginning of the 2016 election, search volume for information and answers about Donald Trump has been consistently higher than that of Clinton across five European countries, including Germany, Italy, France, the U.K., and Spain. Considering a recent discovery by fans of The Walking Dead, it is possible the fact that “Donald Trump dead” is trending has little to do with the actual life of the president-elect of the United States. According to the Huffington Post, fans of The Walking Dead recently started reporting that they had spotted a Donald Trump zombie. Check out the Twitter posts below to see whether or not you agree with The Walking Dead fans about the Donald Trump zombie. Comic Book even made an attempt to reach out to AMC and ask if the zombie fans had spotted was actually a Donald Trump zombie. Unfortunately, AMC denied that fans had spotted a dead Donald Trump in The Walking Dead. AMC claimed it was “just a walker” and that Walking Dead fans were drawing their own conclusions. It is, however, just as possible that “Donald Trump dead” is trending on Google because his life is in danger. According to Western Journalism, the Secret Service has advised Donald Trump to wear a bulletproof vest any time he is in public because of the number of death threats he has already received. Both Donald Trump and his vice president-elect, Mike Pence, have received multiple death threats every day.

QI lets the secret service take precautions to protect the President. Hudson 14
Hudson, David L., Jr. "Qualified Immunity Protects Secret Service Agents." First Amendment Center. June 3, 2014. Accessed November 23, 2016. http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/qualified-immunity-protects-secret-service-agents. JD
A recent unanimous decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in favor of two Secret Service agents shows the power of the qualified-immunity doctrine. The high court ruled in Wood v. Moss that the agents were entitled to qualified immunity when they moved protesters an additional block further away than supporters of former President George W. Bush were allowed to gather in Jacksonville, Ore., in October 2004. The protesters contended that the actions of the agents violated the most fundamental free-speech principle – that the government may not discriminate against different private speakers on the basis of their viewpoints. In other words, government officials generally may not engage in viewpoint discrimination. The protesters said the Secret Service agents evinced such discrimination when they moved them further away from the president than his supporters when he stopped at a local inn to dine. While the concept of viewpoint discrimination is important in First Amendment law, the qualified-immunity doctrine trumped it in this context of protecting the president. The qualified-immunity doctrine provides that government officials are not liable unless they violate clearly established constitutional or statutory law of which reasonable officials should be aware. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg reasoned that it was not clearly established to the Secret Service agents when they had to make an on-the-spot security determination that they had to keep supporters and protesters equidistant from the president. Two other principles support the Court’s ruling that granted qualified immunity. The first is the importance of protecting the president and the second is the idea that speakers often don’t get to speak wherever they want. Concerning the president, Justice Ginsburg said his protection was of “overwhelming importance in our constitutional system. Regarding the location of speech, she declared that “the fundamental right to speak secured by the First Amendment does not leave people at liberty to publicize their views whenever and however and wherever they please.” In a constitutional democracy, government officials must respect the right of dissent. But Secret Service agents are entrusted with a most difficult task – protecting the leader of the Free World. They are entitled to a healthy dose of leeway when they make security-based decisions.
If Trump dies, Pence is president not sure it’s needed, but idk takes 2 secs CNN 13
CNN Library. "Succession: Presidential and Vice Presidential Fast Facts." CNN. August 27, 2013. Accessed November 26, 2016. http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/27/us/succession-presidential-and-vice-presidential-fast-facts/. JD
Article 2, Section 1, Clause 6, Constitution of the United States: In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the Same shall devolve on the Vice President, and the Congress may by Law provide for the Case of Removal, Death, Resignation or Inability, both of the President and Vice President declaring what Officer shall then act as President, and such Officer shall act accordingly, until the Disability be removed, or a President shall be elected. In the case that the president can no longer serve, the vice president would serve as president.
Pence is Trump plus – super anti-abortion and LGBT rights. Mastick 10/7
Mastick, William. "Mike Pence: As Bad or Worse than Trump." Watching America. October 07, 2016. Accessed November 26, 2016. http://watchingamerica.com/WA/2016/10/07/mike-pence-as-bad-or-worse-than-trump/. JD
Throughout U.S. history, nine vice presidents have reached the White House because the president died or resigned. If, by an unfortunate turn of events, Donald Trump wins the November election, we better say a prayer that nothing happens to him over the next four years. If Trump was unable to serve, automatically by law, Mike Pence would take over the presidency and things could be even worse. He is a regressive, ultra-conservative politician, a radical figure without any charisma, idolized by right-wingers, who hates immigrants, refugees and homosexuals. Pence fully supports building the infamous border wall and deporting all those who are undocumented. On the surface, it would seem that he adds nothing to the Republican nominee, gives the impression of being an empty suit, and only exists to defend the man at the top of the ticket. However, it is because of Pence that Trump now has many evangelical conservatives on his side who at first opposed him for having been married three times, his pro-choice stance, and referring to the communion wafer as "my little cracker." Chosen by Trump to potentially be second-in-command of the most powerful nation in the world, Pence is 57 years old, currently serves as governor of Indiana and previously spent 12 inglorious, yet embarrassing years in Washington as his state’s congressman, proposing 90 amendments and new regulations to Congress without a single one of them being passed into law. Every single one was ignored or rejected. Among them was his 2007 proposal to make English the official and sole language of the United States. In matters of immigration, Trump undoubtedly found his soulmate. For years, Pence insisted, also unsuccessfully, on implementing a law that would prohibit federal funds from going to hospitals and emergency medical centers that provide service to undocumented immigrants and tried to allow both public and private health facilities to deny care, turn them in and if possible, send them back to their country to be seen by a doctor there. He is against a path to citizenship in all cases for young people brought to the U.S. as children who know no other country as well as for those parents who gave birth to and raised children in the United States. Just this Monday, a federal court stopped him from denying public funds to help Syrian refugees in his state. Pence maintains that marriage is and should only be between a man and woman. As governor, he unsuccessfully attempted to block same-sex marriage in Indiana or from recognizing such marriage performed in other states. In 2015, he garnered national attention by imposing a law allowing shops to refuse service to gay couples. The reaction was so swift and negative that sports leagues, tech companies, artists and businesses cancelled their contracts in Indiana forcing him to retract the law. But perhaps his most controversial position is on abortion, which he totally opposes, signing earlier this year the second strictest law in the country that prohibits and punishes abortion even if the fetus suffers a physical or mental malformation. Additionally, it requires a funeral be performed after each abortion. Pence is married with three children. For a time, he worked as a talk radio host where he became known as an ultra-conservative. He is opposed to gays and lesbians enlisting in the Armed Forces because he says that homosexuality weakens the ranks and military life. He does not like parties, claims to be an enemy of frivolity and is a complete teetotaler. He hates alcohol and to avoid temptation, will only attend events where alcoholic beverages are served if his wife goes with him.
Assassination leads to government instability and civil war – democratic or autocratic Iqbal and Zorn 08
Iqbal, Zaryab, and Christopher Zorn. "The political consequences of assassination." Journal of Conflict Resolution 52, no. 3 (2008): 385-400. WHB
Assassination is generally defined as the killing of a public figure for political rea- sons; although it is an attack against an individual, the motives for an assassination are necessarily of a political nature (Khatchadourian 1974). In particular, the murder of a head of state1 often occurs as a means to bring about large-scale political change. In ancient political theory, assassination was often viewed as a viable method of end- ing the rule of an illegitimate ruler (Ford 1985) or to terminate the reign of a tyrant (Padover 1943; Walzer 1974); Julius Caesar’s assassination, for example, was justi- fied by many as tyrannicide. In contrast, modern societies have mostly regarded assassinations as acts of political violence that cannot be condoned on the basis of a need for political reform (see, e.g., Nielson 1974). Consistent with this modern view of assassination, we regard the act a phenomenon of political violence and therefore a negative influence on that state’s political system rather than as a legitimate mechanism for causing political change. As with other acts of political violence— such as coups—the effect of assassinations is to destabilize a society, with the mur- der of a head of state being particularly detrimental to the sociopolitical system. At the same time, as political events, assassinations capture the public imagination; years after the actual events, books about the assassinations of presidents Kennedy and Lincoln continue to appear in the popular press. Yet beyond some historical accounts of specific assassinations (e.g., De Witte 2001; Posner 1993; Raj 2001) or studies of psychological profiles of individual assassins (e.g., Freedman 1965; Slomich and Kantor 1969; Ben-Yehuda 1993), social scientists have paid relatively little attention to explaining assassination as a form of political violence, and even less to assessing its social and political consequences. To the extent that social-scientific work on assas- sinations has been done, it has tended to examine the social impact of assassinations, most commonly through a focus on assassinations’ effects on crime (Berkowitz and Macauley 1971), public opinion (Greenberg 1964; Patterson 1971; Hartnett and Libby 1972; Angermeyer and Matschinger 1995; Esaiasson and Granberg 1996; Yuchtman- Yaar and Hermann 1998; Raviv et al. 1998; Peri 2000; Klingman 2001) and political socialization (Orren and Peterson 1967; Siegel 1977).2 But despite this dearth of empirical research, assassinations of national leaders are widely believed (and asserted) to have substantial social and political effects. Patterson (1971) states flatly that ‘‘the death of the central authority figure in national political systems, whether it be Louis XVI, Josef Stalin, George V, or the American president, produces a crisis of authority’’ (p. 269). Snitch (1982) outlines the effectiveness of assassinations in achieving a range of terrorists’ goals, includ- ing broadening their base of support, ‘‘undermining the morale and prestige of the government’’ and prompting the government into desperate countermeasures (p. 56). More recently, Appleton (2000) claims that ‘‘the impact of assassinations on America and the world is incalculable’’ (p. 495) and noted that by a wide mar- gin, Americans cite the assassination of President John F. Kennedy as the crime that had the greatest impact on American society in the last hundred years. The predominance of such claims is, in many respects, unsurprising: in the wake of such a major assault on—in many cases—the most important political institution of a state, it would be shocking not to find at least some negative consequences. Assassination directly and severely perturbs a state’s political system and thus might be expected to lead to a range of manifestations of political unrest and instability, including riots, strikes, and demonstrations. Beyond these relatively minor reflections of domestic malaise, the sudden and violent death of a leader may also embolden dissatisfied groups to push for greater political change, in extreme cases leading to coups, revolution, and even civil war. At the same time, however, the forces that influence the occurrence of an assas- sination may also play a key role in mitigating its social and political impact. Recent empirical work has noted that assassinations are less likely to occur in sys- tems that provide a regular, institutionalized means of leadership turnover (Iqbal and Zorn 2006). Those findings suggest that political systems where executive turn- over is both regular and (mostly) nonviolent may also react differently to an assas- sination. In particular, such systems may reduce or eliminate the need for a period of political instability following such an event. Whether through constitutional suc- cession, hereditary accession, or other means, the presence of an accepted system for selecting a subsequent executive both assuages citizens’ concerns over the con- tinuity of the regime and reduces or eliminates the opportunity for dissident groups to attempt to seize power by force. Conversely, systems in which leadership succession occurs largely through internal struggle or guile are substantially more likely to observe a period of unrest following such a forcible removal of the head of state. In such a system, the assassi- nation of the head of state creates a power vacuum that is not immediately filled through institutionalized channels. This vacuum provides incentives for various factions to vie for power, often through violent means. In addition, the demise of a strong head of state may also open up opportunities for a general increase in dissent in the society. It is not unusual for highly repressive societies to experience high levels of stability due to widespread fear of extreme punishment for dissent (Hibbs 1973; Ferrara 2003). The death of that leader may give rise to (possibly violent) poli- tical demands by previously disenfranchised or repressed groups (e.g., Carey 2007). Ironically, domestic political upheavals may be facilitated by efforts at democratiza- tion following the assassination of an autocratic leader, as various groups seek repre- sentation or power. Such turmoil is unlikely in a state with a regularized system of succession.3 Taken together, these considerations lead us to expect that in general, the assassi- nation of a head of state will lead to an increase in the extent of political unrest, ran- ging from expressions of dissent (such as riots and antigovernment demonstrations) to the incidence of civil war. In addition, however, we believe that the impact of assassination will be mitigated by the presence of mechanisms for the peaceful acces- sion of the executive. That is, while assassination will in every event be destabilizing, the extent of that destabilization will be far greater in states that lack a formalized means of leadership succession. Thus, we test two main hypotheses: first, that the assassination of a head of state results in increased levels of domestic political tur- moil and armed conflict, and second, that the negative effects of assassination on domestic political stability are lower in states with regular and institutionalized mechanisms for leadership succession than in states that lack such succession pro- cesses. In the analyses that follow, we examine these expectations empirically.

Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 7 | Opponent: Scarsdale GZ | Judge: Carlos Taylor
The endpoint of the 1AC is the antiblack status quo – blackness is defined in terms of an ontological structural antagonism with white civil society that is reproduced by any attempt to use existing legal structures or philosophies.  Warren 13

Calvin Warren, Onticide: Toward an Afro-pessimistic Queer Theory" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association Annual Meeting, 2013.  NS

We could suggest that the term “black queer” dramatizes the fundamental tension in humanism itself, especially contemporary iterations of it: how to eradicate the violence that limits human potential, and expand the category of the human, when the violence rejected is absolutely necessary for the human to exist as such. In other words, humanism is caught in an ethical dilemma, or double-bind.  The “emancipatory meditations” against the violence that produces contingent experiences of unfreedom for humans also provides the grounding for the category of the human around which these meditations mobilize.  The “human” is a repository of violent practices and technologies that has crystalized over time. The ethical impulse is to resolve the tension within humanism, to wrest the “human” from the historical violence upon which it is founded. This ethical enterprise inevitably fails, for in the end, the human is nothing more than this very violence, rendering violence and the human mutually constitutive and coterminous. The experience of unfreedom (suffering) is the outcome of this violence. Making this suffering legible is the ethical drive of humanist thinking and the objective of a politics invested in “freedom.” Violence, humanity, unfreedom, and freedom constitute an unending cycle of desire, deferral, and despair.  This cycle of violence captures the tension in humanism that much of contemporary theory either attempts to resolve (Ethics) or wishes to abandon (divesture). The violence that constitutes the human and produces suffering is sustained through an ontological antagonism. The boundaries of the human are shored-up by this antagonism and without it, the human, and the world within which it lives, would cease to exist. The non-ontology of blackness secures the boundaries of the human; it delimits the coordinates of the human. Blackness is an exclusion that enables ontology.  In its exclusion from the realm of ontology, blackness is un-thinkable, innominate, and paradoxical. In essence, blackness exists to not exist—it embodies the most perplexing paradox that sustains ontology (or in psychoanalytic terms it is the Real of ontology). The field of Ethics, then, conceals a dirty secret: the ontological ground upon which it is situated is unethical. Ethics subverts itself, but it can only exist through this very subversion. All ethical discourses organized around the elimination of suffering or the experiences of freedom are imbricated in this unethicality. Blackness is both the life and death of humanism and its ethics, and for this reason, it lacks a legible grammar to articulate this dread. It is an incomprehensible suffering, or an unending injury not understood as legitimate injury. To take matters further, there would be no human suffering without the prior exclusion of blackness, but there would also be no world or human without this exclusion either. It is an unresolvable antagonism. 2  The term “black queer” is a philosophical conundrum, or problem space, precisely because it carries this antagonism, the ethical dilem- ma of humanism, within its discursive structure. 3 It brings two crises into juxtaposition creating somewhat of a theoretical fatality, a devas- tating crime scene. At the site of this fatality lies a mutilated, supine black body we cannot quite place within the symbolics of identity, politics, history, sociology, or law. In cases like these, we put “theory” and “philosophy” into service to figure out who did “it,” what was the murder weapon, and what was the injury—if we can even call it an injury. This situation frustrates the researcher (researcher as detective, philosopher, and medical examiner all at once) in that he lacks a coherent grammar to make this suffering legible, the assaulting party is more like a structural phenomenon, and the fatality is a precondition of the world itself. In this sense, the fatality is rendered banal, diurnal, and quotidian, as it sustains the very field of existence.

In its ontological absence the black is a fungible object open to gratuitous violence and void of relational capacity.  R.L. 13

R.L., WANDERINGS OF THE SLAVE: BLACK LIFE AND SOCIAL DEATH, 2013,
Mute Magazine  NS

For the Afro-pessimists, the black subject is exiled from the human relation, which is predicated on social recognition, volition, subjecthood, and the valuation of life itself. Thus black existence is marked as an ontological absence, posited as sentient object and devoid of any positive relationality, in contradistinction to the human subject’s presence. How does this negative relationality originate and maintain itself? Through a structural violence, which is the formative relation that positions the slave, making it the central ontological foundation of black existence: Structural vulnerability to appropriation, perpetual and involuntary openness, including all the wanton uses of the body … should be understood as the paradigmatic conditions of black existence in the Americas, the defining characteristics of New World anti-blackness. In short, the black, whether slave or ‘free,’ lives under the commandment of whites.10 Contrary to contingent applications of violence in accordance with legitimate cause (transgression of law, as repressive strategy, as reaction, etc.), violence against blacks is gratuitous, without any prior reason or justification. It is the direct relation of force as the basis of the slave relation, which essentially structures the disposession of black existence, an ontological disposession of being. This gratuitous violence, on the one hand, subjugates black existence to an irrational accumulation of bodies, and subsequently produces a condensed delimitation of blackness in space. Whether it was the owning and trading of slaves or the contemporary phenomena of the ghetto and mass incarceration, black existence is excluded and stockpiled as so many objects within a spatial boundary. In this condition, life is reduced to a statistical quantity, black existence is made exchangeable with any other. Therefore, on the other hand, black existence is also a fungible object, infinitely malleable in its content due to the abstraction of its quality and open for use for anyone who can claim subjecthood.11 These structural features come to their fullest expression in the contemporary scenario of police shootings. The endless stream of young black men shot by police borders on excess, demonstrating the pure interchangeability of such names as equivalents, meaning that such seemingly particular empirical cases are in actuality a general condition. Blackness is as devalued as it is susceptible to all aspects of material and social containment, control and debility. Yet, in these instances, even morally indignant liberals are complicit with anti-blackness by focusing on police shootings as a contingent rather than structural feature of black existence.
Democracy’s freedom is rendered coherent by the incoherence of the black matrix’s captivity – physical and psychological sexual terror are hidden beneath the dominant narrative of “improvement”. James 13
Joy James. "Afrarealism and the Black Matrix: Maroon Philosophy at Democracy's Border." The Black Scholar 43.4 (2013): 124-31. Web EE

Afrarealism recognizes two coterminous phenomena: democracy as a boundary defining freedom through captivity, and maroon philosophy at the borders reimagining freedom through flight. Afrarealism does not equate democracy with freedom as some black philosophy does. Rather, Afrarealism's journey moves adjacent to a democracy originating and reproducing amid racial captivity and racial rape. Afrarealism also sojourns with black philosophy's challenges to racial supremacy. Afrarealism sees through the lens of a black matrix. As both spectacle and spectrum, the black matrix allows a broader grasp of anti-black state and citizenship terror, and wounded agency pursuing freedom. 6 A form of maroon philosophy (all black philosophy is not radicalized as maroon philosophy), Afrarealist political theory treks beyond conventional militarized borders to survey democracy's violence toward the black matrix and black reproductivity. The violent exploitation of black productivity in agricultural, industrial, penal, and cultural markets is a historical and structural feature of democracy. These aggressions and violations I have earlier described as "state violence."7 Democracy's aggressions against the black matrix, its terror against black reproductive labor, its sanction of racial rape I describe here as state "intimate violence." State violence and intimate state violence are two related but distinct phenomena. Violations of black productivity coexist with terror against black reproductivity. Afrarealism witnesses both and calls for greater scrutiny to assaults against black reproductivity, an under-theorized feature of black captivity. Reproductivity Equally violently exploited in labor, black captive males and females enriched racial capital. Yet the inequities of the terror in their reproductive labors were diminished in both enslavement and abolition narratives, initially shaped and controlled by propertied white males. (In fantasies of democracy, the enslaver rescues the savage from barbarity, and the abolitionist saves the savage from the enslaver. Afrarealism sees both forms of "salvation" as captivity.) Colonial, imperial, and corporate state violence fomented and structured anti-black practices and policies. Productivity in work and labor, based on economic exploitation, and civil and human rights violations became the primary analytical framework for critiquing democracy's rapaciousness toward black captivity-a capacity first legalized in the US Constitution's "3/5 clause" and later in its thirteenth amendment codifying enslavement through imprisonment. Reproductivity, marginalized as a theoretical space for analyzing (and undoing) democracy's terrors, points to the black matrix as the site for the symbolic and material subjugations that birthed the maroon philosopher. When and wherever the concept of racial capital overshadows the phenomenon of racial rape, the outline of democracy's boundary and the contour of its terrors are obscured. Terror against the black matrix shapes those borders. Afrarealism redirects maroon philosophy to criminal violence and political terror directed toward the exteriority of black productivity and the interiority of black reproductivity. Anti-black violence and terror also exist within maroonage complicating the enterprise of freedom; particularly if the terror registers most through forms of sexual predation. Racial Rape Historically, captive females were violently forced to labor alongside captive males. This seeming erasure of gendered differences masculinized black suffering. Under patriarchy, violence against the female form is often denied or deflected through language that renders female trauma invisible, inconsequential, or self-inflicted. The "uncut bond" of black exploitation and trauma under white supremacy meant a folding of black female trauma into the black male frame, from which it receded from common view, typically emerging as spectacle only and not as spectrum. Thus common perceptions of black suffering became embodied in and represented by male trauma-emanating from the lash, shackle, the brand, convict lease, lynch mob, death row, mass imprisonment, and "stop-nfrisk." With the norm and apex of black suffering centered on violence in the public realm and the public spaces of the private realm (cloistered plantations and prisons), racial rape became subsumed under racial capital. The official chronology of and narratives about violence and terror that constitute US democracy's borders-chattel slavery, the convict prison lease system,9 jim Crow segregation, mass incarceration, "stop-n-frisk"- crowd out the black matrix, displacing it from philosophical inquiries into subjugation. The interiority of this trauma zone has paltry public record and memory. Racial rape, the dominant threat, appears in black women's writings, memoirs, fiction, and art, but in these forms may be categorized as emotive performance, mere illustrations for rather than inherently forms of critical philosophy. Racial rape is complicated and mercurial although all blood trails are traceable to the black matrix. Part of the trauma of captive males entails their sexual violations. Boys and men could be forced into being proxy rapists, coerced to rape for the entertainment, edification, or enrichment of their captors or "masters." And black boys and men themselves are rape victims. (legal discourse has changed to acknowledge male victimization as rape; recently the US justice Department under Eric Holder redefined "rape" to include males.) Outside the narratives of compulsory heterosexuality, black males were raped by their white captors or were forced to rape others, or both. Outside of the narratives of compulsory black solidarity, captive males raped for pornographic, sadistic pleasure or material gain (more food and benefits, fewer beatings, etc. from violent authoritarians). Any philosophical aversion, emotional dissonance, political "shame" toward critiques of racial rape leaves black masculinity theory adrift or disengaged. Either it dangles as strange fruit or following the broken branch collapses heavily upon the black matrix. If black philosophy undervalues male entanglement and investment in racial rape and violence against reproductivity, it loses sight of the violence manifested through sexual trauma and denigration, forced breeding or sterilization, or abuse of or contempt for children. Thus the currency of black philosophical engagements with freedom is undermined. Male captives "feminized" through blackness, and terrorized by mutating manifestations of white supremacy, have structural male supremacy over black females. Male captives did and do not, could and cannot suffer rape as routine entertainment or the terrors of forced reproductivity. Hopefully, we agree that this discussion is not about which (trans)gendered being suffers most under racial subjugation; rather the focus rests on the "nature" of the subjugator's extensive reach into interior spaces, its colonization and scarification of black wombs and matrices that have no public record. American democracy's generative violence uniquely and strategically targets the black matrix because it offers the foundational frame for building the border between democracy and captivity, and deniability of state inmate violence. The black matrix is where patriarchal, racial-sexual violence, economics, and privatized terrors meet. The maroonage is where they are dissipated into the dust of Afrarealist departures. Historically, captives and fugitives painted political ethics and theory so that maroon philosophy could map freedom along the contours and fault lines of colonial and imperial democracies.10 When early rebellions and multiracial maroonage receded to leave only blackness at democracy's outermost borders, that blackness solidified into the silhouette of the black matrix, as the basic boundary between domination and power, 11 between the violence of productive labor for the marketplace and the terror that reproduces "plantation babies.''12 Encompassing democracy's anti-black animus and maroonage's anti-black feminist sentiments, the black matrix both points to and constitutes uncharted territory on the other side of democracy. Its objective is to destabilize democracy's mythology and maroonage's demystifications as a form of pleasure, as well as justice.

The demand for legal relief is the perfection of slavery, making the slave bow down to the master.  Farley 05

Anthony. Prof. Farley specializes in Constitutional Law, Criminal Procedure and Legal Theory. Taught at Boston College Before Teaching at Albany “Perfecting Slavery” Page 221-222.  NS

Slavery is with us still. We are haunted by slavery. We are animated by slavery. White-over-black is slavery and segregation and neosegregation and every situation in which the distribution of material or spiritual goods follows the colorline. The movement from slavery to segregation to neosegregation to whatever form of white-over-black it is that may come with post-modernity or after is not toward freedom. The movement from slavery to segregation to neosegregation is the movement of slavery perfecting itself. White-over-black is neosegregation. White-over-black is segregation. White-over-black is slavery. All of it is white-over-black, only white-over-black, and that continually. The story of progress up from slavery is a lie, the longest lie. The story of progress up from slavery is told juridically in the form of the rule of law. Slavery is the rule of law. And slavery is death. The slave perfects itself as a slave when it bows down before its master of its own free will. That is the moment in which the slave accomplishes the impossible reconciliation of its freedom with its unfreedom by willing itself unfree.  When exactly does this perfection of slavery take place? The slave bows down before its master when it prays for legal relief, when it prays for equal rights, and while it cultivates the field of law hoping for an answer.
Thus the alternative is to embrace the demand of the slave - the end of the world.  Wilderson 02
Frank Wilderson, The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal, resented at Imprisoned Intellectuals  Conference Brown University, April 13th 2002.  NS

If we are to take Fanon at his word when he writes,  Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder (37) then we must accept the fact that no other body functions in the Imaginary, the Symbolic, or the Real so completely as a repository of complete disorder as the Black body. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Real, for in its magnetizing of bullets the Black body functions as the map of gratuitous violence through which civil society is possible: namely, those other bodies for which violence is, or can be, contingent. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Symbolic, for Blackness in America generates no categories for the chromosome of History, no data for the categories of Immigration or Sovereignty; it is an experience without analog a past, without a heritage. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Imaginary for  whoever says  rape  says Black,  (Fanon) , whoever says  prison  says Black, and whoever says  AIDS  says Black (Sexton)  the  Negro is a phobogenic object  (Fanon). Indeed and a phobogenic object and a past without a heritage and the map of gratuitous violence and a program of complete disorder. But whereas this realization is, and should be cause for alarm, it should not be cause for lament, or worse, disavowal not at least, for a true revolutionary, or for a truly revolutionary movement such as prison abolition. If a social movement is to be neither social democratic, nor Marxist, in terms of the structure of its political desire then it should grasp the invitation to assume the positionality of subjects of social death that present themselves; and, if we are to be honest with ourselves we must admit that the  Negro  has been inviting Whites, and as well as civil society’s junior partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They have been, and remain today even in the most anti-racist movements, like the prison abolition movement invested elsewhere. This is not to say that all oppositional political desire today is pro-White, but it is to say that it is almost always anti-Black which is to say it will not dance with death. Black liberation, as a prospect, makes radicalism more dangerous to the U.S. Not because it raises the specter of some alternative polity (like socialism, or community control of existing resources) but because its condition of possibility as well as its gesture of resistance functions as a negative dialectic: a politics of refusal and a refusal to affirm, aprogram of complete disorder.  One must embrace its disorder, its incoherence and allow oneself to be elaborated by it, if indeed one’s politics are to be underwritten by a desire to take this country down.  If this is not the desire which underwrites one’s politics then through what strategy of legitimation is the word  prison  being linked to the word  abolition? What are this movement’s lines of political accountability? There’s nothing foreign, frightening, or even unpracticed about the embrace of disorder and incoherence. The desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by disorder and incoherence is not anathema in and of itself: no one, for example, has ever been known to say gee-whiz, if only my orgasms would end a little sooner, or maybe not come at all.  But few so-called radicals desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by the disorder and incoherence of Blackness and the state of political movements in America today is marked by this very Negrophobogenisis:  gee-whiz, if only Black rage could be more coherent, or maybe not come at all.  Perhaps there’s something more terrifying about the joy of Black, then there is about the joy of sex (unless one is talking sex with a Negro). Perhaps coalitions today prefer to remain in-orgasmic in the face of civil society with hegemony as a handy prophylactic, just in case. But if, through this stasis, or paralysis, they try to do the work of prison abolition that work will fail; because it is always work from a position of coherence (i.e. the worker) on behalf of a position of incoherence, the Black subject, or prison slave. In this way, social formations on the Left remain blind to the contradictions of coalitions between workers and slaves. They remain coalitions operating within the logic of civil society; and function less as revolutionary promises and more as crowding out scenarios of Black antagonisms they simply feed our frustration.  Whereas the positionality of the worker  be s/he a factory worker demanding a monetary wage or an immigrant or White woman demanding a social wage  gestures toward the reconfiguration of civil society, the positionality of the Black subject be s/he a prison-slave or a prison-slave-in-waiting  gestures toward the disconfiguration of civil society: from the coherence of civil society, the Black subject beckons with the incoherence of civil war. A civil war which reclaims Blackness not as a positive value, but as a politically enabling site, to quote Fanon, of  absolute dereliction: a  scandal  which rends civil society asunder.  Civil war, then, becomes that unthought, but never forgotten understudy of hegemony. A Black specter waiting in the wings, an endless antagonism that cannot be satisfied (via reform or reparation) but must nonetheless be pursued to the death.

Recognizing that blackness is pathologized is key to embracing social life in social death.  Sexton 11
Jared Sexton, ANTE-ANTI-BLACKNESS: AFTERTHOUGHTS, Cultural Studies Association Issue 1, 2011.  NS

Against the raceless credo, then, racism cannot be rejected without a dialectic in which humanity experiences a blackened world" (Gordon 1997: 67). What is this willingness to 'be' black, of choosing to be black affirmatively rather than reluctantly, that Gordon finds as the key ethical moment in Fanon? Elsewhere, in a discussion of W. E. B. Du Bois on the study of black folk, Gordon restates an existential phenomenological conception of the anti-black world developed across his first several books: "Blacks here suffer the phobogenic reality posed by the spirit of racial seriousness. In effect, they more than symbolize or signify various social pathologies – they become them. In our anti-black world, blacks are pathology" (Gordon 2000: 87). This conception would seem to support to Moten's contention that even much radical black studies scholarship sustains the association of blackness with a certain sense of decay and thereby fortifies and extends the interlocutory life of widely accepted political common sense. In fact, it would seem that Gordon deepens the already problematic association to the level of identity. And yet, this is precisely what Gordon argues is the value and insight of Fanon: he fully accepts the definition of himself as pathological as it is imposed by a world that knows itself through that imposition, rather than remaining in a reactive stance that insists on the heterogeneity between a self and an imago originating in culture.  Though it may appear counter-intuitive, or rather because it is counter-intuitive, this acceptance or affirmation is active; it is a willing or willingness, in other words, to pay whatever social costs accrue to being black, to inhabiting blackness, to living a black social life under the shadow of social death. This is not an accommodation to the dictates of the anti-black world.  The affirmation of blackness, which is to say an affirmation of pathological being, is a refusal to distance oneself from blackness in a valorization of minor differences that bring one closer to health, life, or sociality. Fanon writes in the first chapter of Black Skin, White Masks: "A Senegalese who learns Creole to pass for Antillean is a case of alienation. The Antilleans who make a mockery out of him are lacking in judgment" (Fanon 2008: 21). In a world structured by the twin axioms of white superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and black non-existence, a world structured by a negative categorical imperative – "above all, don’t be black" (Gordon 1997: 63) – in this world, the zero degree of transformation is the turn toward blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that "resides in the idea that 'I am thought of as less than human'" (Nyong'o 2002: 389). 22 In this we might create a transvaluation of pathology itself, something like an embrace of pathology without pathos. To speak of black social life and black social death, black social life against black social death, black social life as black social death, black social life in black social death – all of this is to find oneself in the midst of an argument that is also a profound agreement, an agreement that takes shape in (between) meconnaissance and (dis)belief. Black optimism is not the negation of the negation that is afro-pessimism, just as black social life does not negate black social death by vitalizing it. A living death is a much a death as it is a living. Nothing in afro-pessimism suggests that there is no black (social) life, only that black life is not social life in the universe formed by the codes of state and civil society, of citizen and subject, of nation and culture, of people and place, of history and heritage, of all the things that colonial society has in common with the colonized, of all that capital has in common with labor – the modern world system. 23 Black life is not lived in the world that the world lives in, but it is lived underground, in outer space. This is agreed. That is to say, what Moten asserts against afro-pessimism is a point already affirmed by afro-pessimism, is, in fact, one of the most polemical dimensions of afro-pessimism as a project: namely, that black life is not social, or rather that black life is lived in social death. Double emphasis, on lived and on death. That's the whole point of the enterprise at some level. It is all about the implications of this agreed upon point where arguments (should) begin, but they cannot (yet) proceed.  Wilderson's is an analysis of the law in its operation as "police power and racial prerogative both under and after slavery" (Wagner 2009: 243). So too is Moten's analysis, at least that just-less-than-half of the intellectual labor committed to the object of black studies as critique of (the anti-blackness of) Western civilization. But Moten is just that much more interested in how black social life steals away or escapes from the law, how it frustrates the police power and, in so doing, calls that very policing into being in the first place. The policing of black freedom, then, is aimed less at its dreaded prospect, apocalyptic rhetoric notwithstanding, than at its irreducible precedence. The logical and ontological priority of the unorthodox self-predicating activity of blackness, the "improvisatory exteriority" or "improvisational immanence" that blackness is, renders the law dependent upon what it polices. This is not the noble agency of resistance. It is a reticence or reluctance that we might not know if it were not pushing back, so long as we know that this pushing back is really a pushing forward. So, in this perverse sense, black social death is black social life. The object of black studies is the aim of black studies. The most radical negation of the anti-black world is the most radical affirmation of a blackened world. Afro-pessimism is "not but nothing other than" black optimism. 24

Framing issue. Their refusal to engage in discussions of the way that anti-blackness shapes the world will lose them this debate. Sexton 16
Jared Sexton, Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, associate professor of African American Studies and Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine, “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word,” Rhizomes issue 19,sections 1-8
- A shift away from politics of inclusion is the only real ethical move
- Pessimism is a political position that we need to use to understand the world 

1 Afro-Pessimism is a contemporary phenomenon, some may even scoff that it is trendy, but its political and intellectual evolution is considerably longer and its ethical bearings much broader than one might expect, and there is work yet to be done regarding a genealogy of its orientation and sensibility. No individual or collective effort, of course, springs forth whole cloth and yet the controversy that has accompanied the emergence of this discourse over the better part of the past decade has suffered greatly from a refusal—on the part of most critics and too many proponents as well—to follow the old Jamesonian edict to historicize the theoretical aim and object (Herman 2003). I only note the problem here, as the development of proper context would require far more space than available at present. The vacuum-packed controversy has been surprisingly pointed as a result, and it is easy to miss the true significance thereof between the epiphanic tone of recent acquaintance and the acrimony of recurrent denunciation. 2 Some part of the pace and extent of debate about Afro-Pessimism to date is no doubt due to the proliferation of social media platforms in the same moment when the professoriate groans under the intensified administrative command to turn research into output with eventual market value (including the market value of "civic engagement"); the subsequent migration of much previously refereed scholarly commentary to these less (or differently) regulated forums in search of greater and faster measurable impact and, for better or worse, readership beyond the ken of advanced higher education; and the increased if uneven porosity of deliberations among activists, artists, educators, journalists, non-profit workers, researchers, etc. afforded by the digitization of print culture and the growing access to recordings of conference panels, public lectures, radio interviews, and the like. It is no exaggeration to say that, as a result of this convergence of global economic restructuring and technological development, there are thousands of online conversations underway across Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe, especially among students and young scholars, adjudicating the relative merits of Afro-Pessimism. 3 But this much could be said about any number of topical discussions featured anywhere from chat rooms and microblogs to virtual meetings and TED talks. What accounts for the particular critical purchase and affective resonance of what I called elsewhere "a highly technical dispute in a small corner of the American academy" has more likely to do with a growing understanding of the common (which is not to say shared, much less identical) political conditions of diverse black life-worlds with respect to claims and practices of freedom. That common sense of things is bound to a terrible and terrifying acknowledgement of not only the tragic material and symbolic continuities everywhere revealed by the history of post-emancipation societies throughout the Diaspora, but also, more fundamentally, the uncontainable categorical sprawl of the epochal transformation that names the emergence of racial slavery as such. In this, the postulate of a free black - whether non-slave or former-slave - would appear as oxymoron. None of which should stop anyone from believing its true, that being the crux. If Afro-Pessimism has captured the imagination of certain black radical formations and suggested a critical idiom, provoking a basic rethinking among more than a few of their non-black counterparts by the way, it has also, and maybe for the same reasons, struck a nerve among others, all along the color line, who fear that open-minded engagement involves forsaking some of the most hard-earned lessons of the last generation. 4 The reticence expressed about the force and signification of Afro-Pessimism, which in some quarters has bloomed into open if largely uninformed resistance, has taken on the logic of preemptive strike. Though we have little engagement in print thus far, due in part to the recentness of the published literature, certain discussions are nonetheless afoot on the left "devoted to blaming pessimism for whatever crisis is thought to occupy us at the moment." Afro-Pessimism, in this case and on this count, is thought to be, in no particular order: a negative appraisal of the capabilities of black peoples, associating blackness with lack rather than tracing the machinations through which the association is drawn and enforced, even in the black psyche, across the longue durée; a myopic denial of overlapping and ongoing histories of struggle and a fatal misunderstanding of the operational dynamics of power, its general economy or micro-physics, reifying what should be historicized en route to analysis; a retrograde and isolationist nationalism, a masculinist and heteronormative enterprise, a destructive and sectarian ultra-leftism, and a chauvinist American exceptionalism; a reductive and morbid fixation on the depredations of slavery that superimposes the figure of the slave as an anachronism onto ostensibly post-slavery societies, and so on. 5 The last assertion, which actually links together all of the others, evades the nagging burden of proof of abolition and, moreover, fails to acknowledge that one can account for historically varying instances of anti-blackness while maintaining the claim that slavery is here and now. Most telling though is the leitmotif of offense, and the felt need among critics to defend themselves, their work, their principles and their politics against the perceived threat. In place of thoughtful commentary, we have distancing and disavowal. The grand pronouncement is offered, generally, without the impediment of sustained reading or attempted dialogue, let alone careful study of the relevant literature. The entire undertaking, the movement of thought it pursues, is apprehended instead as its lowest common denominator, indicted by proxy, and tried in absentia as caricature.1 6 Astonishingly, all of this refuses to countenance the rhetorical dimensions of the discourse of Afro-Pessimism (despite the minor detail that its principal author is a noted creative writer and its first major statement is found in an award-winning literary work of memoir) and the productive theoretical effects of the fiction it creates, namely, a meditation on a poetics and politics of abjection wherein racial blackness operates as an asymptotic approximation of that which disturbs every claim or formation of identity and difference as such.2 Afro-Pessimism is thus not against the politics of coalition simply because coalitions tend systematically to render supposed common interests as the concealed particular interests of the most powerful and privileged elements of the alliance. Foremost, Afro-Pessimism it seeks, in Wilderson's parlance, "to shit on the inspiration of the personal pronoun we" (143) because coalitions require a logic of identity and difference, of collective selves modeled on the construct of the modern individual, an entity whose coherence is purchased at the expense of whatever is cast off by definition. The subject of politics is essentially dividual and there is in effect always another intervention to be made on behalf of some aspect of the group excluded in the name of the proper.3 The ever-expansive inclusionary gesture must thus be displaced by another more radical approach: an ethics of the real, a politics of the imperative, engaged in its interminably downward movement. This daunting task entails making necessity out of virtue, as it were, willing the need for the black radical imagination and not just its revisable demand. If certain scholars whose work has been instructive or inspirational for Afro-Pessimism miss this point too, it may have something to do with the search for a method of gaining agency that, while rightly suspending the assumption of an a priori agent, nonetheless rushes past the hidden structure of violence that underwrites so many violent acts, whether spectacular or mundane. 7 Such may provide reassurance for those informed by the basic assumptions and animated by the esprit de corps of the theoretical orientations and conceptual frames in question, but it cannot be mistaken for an adequate defense of a disposition. We would do well, on this score, to heed Joshua Dienstag's rather germane suggestion in Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit that "some thought should be given to why this word functions so well as a gesture of dismissal" and, likewise, to "the routine use of 'pessimist' and its cognates as a casual intellectual put-down" (Dienstag 2006: x). For present purposes, Afro-Pessimism as epithet would be the obverse of the unasked question: Why has this discourse found its articulation now? Rather than simply motivating speculation about the psychological states and political commitments of theorists, commentators, students, advocates or adherents; the intervention and implications of Afro-Pessimism, however they are adjudged, "need to be addressed at the theoretical level at which they arose" (Dienstag 2001: 924). Dienstag writes further: Critics have often mistaken a depiction of the world for a choice about our future, as if scholars had rejoiced at the decline or decay they described. ... Yet, despite the abuse they attract pessimists keep appearing—and this should not be surprising since the world keeps delivering bad news. Instead of blaming pessimism, perhaps, we can learn from it. Rather than hiding from the ugliness of the world, perhaps we can discover how best to withstand it (Dienstag 2006: x).4 8 As if they rejoiced about the wrong things and, by contrast, failed to rejoice about the right ones. Why not turn this (moralistic) accusation into (political-intellectual) opportunity? Indeed, the moniker "Afro-Pessimism" emerges at a certain inaugural moment as the embrace of a critical outlook deemed, upon review, to be disappointing or discouraging to an ostensibly progressive, even modernist anti-racism (Hartman 2003). Détournement. Resignification. A simple enough term for withstanding the ugliness of the world—and learning from it—might be suffering and Afro-Pessimism is, among other things, an attempt to formulate an account of such suffering, to establish the rules of its grammar, "to think again about the position of the ex-slave," as Bryan Wagner puts it in his Disturbing the Peace, "without recourse to the consolation of transcendence" (Wagner 2009: 2). The difficulty has to do with the special force that the consolation of transcendence—be it cultural, economic, geographical, historical, political, psychological, sexual, social or symbolic—brings to bear on the activity of thinking, no less of speaking and writing, about those whose transcendence is foreclosed in and for the modern world.

Tournament: Alta | Round: Quarters | Opponent: Hendrick Hudson MG | Judge: Panel
The endpoint of the 1AC is the antiblack status quo – blackness is defined in terms of an ontological structural antagonism with white civil society that is reproduced by any attempt to use existing legal structures or philosophies.  Warren 13

Calvin Warren, Onticide: Toward an Afro-pessimistic Queer Theory" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association Annual Meeting, 2013.  NS

We could suggest that the term “black queer” dramatizes the fundamental tension in humanism itself, especially contemporary iterations of it: how to eradicate the violence that limits human potential, and expand the category of the human, when the violence rejected is absolutely necessary for the human to exist as such. In other words, humanism is caught in an ethical dilemma, or double-bind.  The “emancipatory meditations” against the violence that produces contingent experiences of unfreedom for humans also provides the grounding for the category of the human around which these meditations mobilize.  The “human” is a repository of violent practices and technologies that has crystalized over time. The ethical impulse is to resolve the tension within humanism, to wrest the “human” from the historical violence upon which it is founded. This ethical enterprise inevitably fails, for in the end, the human is nothing more than this very violence, rendering violence and the human mutually constitutive and coterminous. The experience of unfreedom (suffering) is the outcome of this violence. Making this suffering legible is the ethical drive of humanist thinking and the objective of a politics invested in “freedom.” Violence, humanity, unfreedom, and freedom constitute an unending cycle of desire, deferral, and despair.  This cycle of violence captures the tension in humanism that much of contemporary theory either attempts to resolve (Ethics) or wishes to abandon (divesture). The violence that constitutes the human and produces suffering is sustained through an ontological antagonism. The boundaries of the human are shored-up by this antagonism and without it, the human, and the world within which it lives, would cease to exist. The non-ontology of blackness secures the boundaries of the human; it delimits the coordinates of the human. Blackness is an exclusion that enables ontology.  In its exclusion from the realm of ontology, blackness is un-thinkable, innominate, and paradoxical. In essence, blackness exists to not exist—it embodies the most perplexing paradox that sustains ontology (or in psychoanalytic terms it is the Real of ontology). The field of Ethics, then, conceals a dirty secret: the ontological ground upon which it is situated is unethical. Ethics subverts itself, but it can only exist through this very subversion. All ethical discourses organized around the elimination of suffering or the experiences of freedom are imbricated in this unethicality. Blackness is both the life and death of humanism and its ethics, and for this reason, it lacks a legible grammar to articulate this dread. It is an incomprehensible suffering, or an unending injury not understood as legitimate injury. To take matters further, there would be no human suffering without the prior exclusion of blackness, but there would also be no world or human without this exclusion either. It is an unresolvable antagonism. 2  The term “black queer” is a philosophical conundrum, or problem space, precisely because it carries this antagonism, the ethical dilem- ma of humanism, within its discursive structure. 3 It brings two crises into juxtaposition creating somewhat of a theoretical fatality, a devas- tating crime scene. At the site of this fatality lies a mutilated, supine black body we cannot quite place within the symbolics of identity, politics, history, sociology, or law. In cases like these, we put “theory” and “philosophy” into service to figure out who did “it,” what was the murder weapon, and what was the injury—if we can even call it an injury. This situation frustrates the researcher (researcher as detective, philosopher, and medical examiner all at once) in that he lacks a coherent grammar to make this suffering legible, the assaulting party is more like a structural phenomenon, and the fatality is a precondition of the world itself. In this sense, the fatality is rendered banal, diurnal, and quotidian, as it sustains the very field of existence.

In its ontological absence the black is a fungible object open to gratuitous violence and void of relational capacity.  R.L. 13

R.L., WANDERINGS OF THE SLAVE: BLACK LIFE AND SOCIAL DEATH, 2013,
Mute Magazine  NS

For the Afro-pessimists, the black subject is exiled from the human relation, which is predicated on social recognition, volition, subjecthood, and the valuation of life itself. Thus black existence is marked as an ontological absence, posited as sentient object and devoid of any positive relationality, in contradistinction to the human subject’s presence. How does this negative relationality originate and maintain itself? Through a structural violence, which is the formative relation that positions the slave, making it the central ontological foundation of black existence: Structural vulnerability to appropriation, perpetual and involuntary openness, including all the wanton uses of the body … should be understood as the paradigmatic conditions of black existence in the Americas, the defining characteristics of New World anti-blackness. In short, the black, whether slave or ‘free,’ lives under the commandment of whites.10 Contrary to contingent applications of violence in accordance with legitimate cause (transgression of law, as repressive strategy, as reaction, etc.), violence against blacks is gratuitous, without any prior reason or justification. It is the direct relation of force as the basis of the slave relation, which essentially structures the disposession of black existence, an ontological disposession of being. This gratuitous violence, on the one hand, subjugates black existence to an irrational accumulation of bodies, and subsequently produces a condensed delimitation of blackness in space. Whether it was the owning and trading of slaves or the contemporary phenomena of the ghetto and mass incarceration, black existence is excluded and stockpiled as so many objects within a spatial boundary. In this condition, life is reduced to a statistical quantity, black existence is made exchangeable with any other. Therefore, on the other hand, black existence is also a fungible object, infinitely malleable in its content due to the abstraction of its quality and open for use for anyone who can claim subjecthood.11 These structural features come to their fullest expression in the contemporary scenario of police shootings. The endless stream of young black men shot by police borders on excess, demonstrating the pure interchangeability of such names as equivalents, meaning that such seemingly particular empirical cases are in actuality a general condition. Blackness is as devalued as it is susceptible to all aspects of material and social containment, control and debility. Yet, in these instances, even morally indignant liberals are complicit with anti-blackness by focusing on police shootings as a contingent rather than structural feature of black existence.

The demand for legal relief is the perfection of slavery, making the slave bow down to the master.  Farley 05

Anthony. Prof. Farley specializes in Constitutional Law, Criminal Procedure and Legal Theory. Taught at Boston College Before Teaching at Albany “Perfecting Slavery” Page 221-222.  NS

Slavery is with us still. We are haunted by slavery. We are animated by slavery. White-over-black is slavery and segregation and neosegregation and every situation in which the distribution of material or spiritual goods follows the colorline. The movement from slavery to segregation to neosegregation to whatever form of white-over-black it is that may come with post-modernity or after is not toward freedom. The movement from slavery to segregation to neosegregation is the movement of slavery perfecting itself. White-over-black is neosegregation. White-over-black is segregation. White-over-black is slavery. All of it is white-over-black, only white-over-black, and that continually. The story of progress up from slavery is a lie, the longest lie. The story of progress up from slavery is told juridically in the form of the rule of law. Slavery is the rule of law. And slavery is death. The slave perfects itself as a slave when it bows down before its master of its own free will. That is the moment in which the slave accomplishes the impossible reconciliation of its freedom with its unfreedom by willing itself unfree.  When exactly does this perfection of slavery take place? The slave bows down before its master when it prays for legal relief, when it prays for equal rights, and while it cultivates the field of law hoping for an answer.
Anti-anthropocentric discourse fosters a problematic race neutral mentality—liberal white activists refuse to interrogate the cultural characteristics of our relationship to the environment because doing so would force them to confront their privilege
JMB, ’12 02/29/12, JMB is his pen name, he is a PhD student in Environmental Studies in Oregon, He’s citing numerous peer reviewed studies in his article. “Colorblind Racism and Environmentalism”, http://ecesisfactor.blogspot.com/2012/02/colorblind-racism-and-environmentalism.html

In their analysis of food justice, Teresa M. Mares and Devon C. Peña (2011) point to a pervasive lack of deep cultural-ecological understanding, particularly among white food activists. They begin with an anecdote involving a vegan Slow Food activist who, despite professed commitment to local foods, knows nothing of the indigenous culture where she lives. She is unable to name whose land she lives on, or even any of the foods they rely upon. When asked about these matters, the woman responds, “in Skagit, you know, there are a lot of multigenerational farmers who are not Native American. They have been here a long time and have as much stake in this watershed as anyone else”. This assertion displaces focus from the question of Native foodways and attempts simultaneously to legitimate the land tenure of white farmers, an issue which she was not asked to defend. The woman goes on to describe conflict between Indians and farmers, an issue which she concedes she knows little about, though her earlier comment regarding the Skagit farmers suggests where she might stand on the issue (2011). It seems unlikely that this activist would think of herself as racist, even though her responses suggest unexamined privilege and white racial allegiances. Additionally, this implied allegiance with farming families over the concerns of indigenous fishing rights complicates not only this person’s claims of “colorblindness” but also her professed relationship to food systems that support environmental and human health (Norgaard 2011). Julie Guthman (2011) examines more overt colorblind discourse. In her analysis of farmer’s markets, CSAs, and community gardens, she notes “the many discourses of alternative food hail a white subject and thereby code the practices and spaces of alternative food as white”. Focusing on two sets of data, Guthman looks at pervasive rhetorical tendencies that contribute to the white racializing of alternative foods. One particularly important tendency is the universalizing white values. In doing this, white values become coded as the norm, and when those values do not “resonate, it is assumed that those for whom they do not resonate must be educated…or be forever marked as different” (2011). This universalizing problematically reenscribes racial/cultural difference, while also prohibiting discourses of race by proposing that such discourses are not needed. For example, in her interviews of CSA managers, several respondents were openly hostile to questions that directly asked about race. Managers responded with comments that reaffirmed their belief in the universal value of their project, writing “we always hope for more people and do not focus on ethnic—what we present attracts all!” (Guthman 2011). This manager seems oblivious to the whiteness of the space he and his colleagues have developed and is affronted by the suggestion that it would be right to seek out more customers of color. Other respondents suggested that the research itself was racist for asking questions about inclusion. One wrote “Difference is wrong; it is better to try to become color blind in how we do things… your question has a slant of political correctness”. This manager explicitly deploys the rhetoric of colorblindness while simultaneously dismissing efforts at inclusion as “political correctness”. Another CSA manager also balked at the “pressure to be perfectly politically correct” (2011). While Guthman’s surveys indicate white internalization and deployment of colorblind racism, work by vegan scholar Breeze Harper (2011) considers ways in which animal rights activism and vegan praxis are coded as white, and how vegans of color respond to such coding. Harper’s work, like Guthman’s asserts, “practices, institutions, and spaces are coded as “white”—or at least “not black”—not only through the bodies that tend to inhabit and participate in them but also the discourses that circulate through them” (Guthman 2011). Harper indicates that veganism and animal rights activism are generally associated with “radically leftist and progressive” whites, “incapable of participating in the overt racism one can normally find within radical right…organizations” (Harper 2011). Although their political positioning may incline white vegans to avoid traditional forms of racism, Harper notes that “collectively, “good whites” tend to shy away from antiracism and reflections on white and class privilege” (2011). Through a quick exploration of popular vegan books and websites, Harper illustrates this tendency to omit discussions of race, class, and sexuality. Then, drawing on comments taken from the popular blog Vegans of Color, Harper illuminates the “effects of colorblind discourses on activists of color” and how some whites respond to the experiences of fellow vegans (2011). Centrally, Harper’s analysis focuses on how words like “exotic” presume "a white audience, marginalizing the subjectivities of vegans of color” (2011). The white blogger responses to VOC posts regarding this issue highlight colorblind racism. Harper analyzes the response of a blogger, Kram, who conflates geographic food sources with the concept of “foreign” or “exotic”. Kram goes on to write, “if I were ever to be called out on terms of “white guilt” or “colonialist” or other terms for trying to go to events that are more inclusive of POC people of color, or run/by or sponsored by POC, then I will not be inclined to participate in those events”. Her tone denies responsibility for any possible wrongdoing, and furthermore “places responsibility for her inclusion on people of color”. This type of response seems strongly indicative of colorblind racism. Kram asserts her white privilege, declaring her opinions on a blog for vegans of color, while simultaneously undermining her fellow vegan’s experiences. Another series of experiences recorded in the Vegans of Color blog highlight how colorblind racism has a “chilling effect” (Guthman 2011) on people of color and shapes the responses of white vegans. Bloggers Nassim and Supernovadiva, relate the discomforts experienced by vegans of color in white spaces. Nassim writes of a conference that leaves her feeling “so frustrated with the population, the cause and …like I could not call myself a vegan. As if “vegan” was a white word” (Harper 2011). Supernovadiva describes the tendency of white animal rights activists to single her out because of her race. She writes, “the colorblind thing comes up and how that person don’t see color BUT you bee lined straight to me to tell me you’re colorblind, seriously” (Harper 2011). These expressions of how colorblind racism effects vegans of color is met on the blog with further examples of the very same discourse. Although overt racism tends to be scarce in environmental and animal rights movements, colorblind racism and other liberal forms of racist praxis are pervasive. Discourses that ignore or dispute any critical analysis of race are likely to reaffirm racism despite “good intentions”. Furthermore, contemporary uses of words such as “exotic” or “foreign” effectively reinforce white as the norm, and in some cases affirm colonial legacies that equate dark skinned people and “racialized others” with “dirt, filth,” and “uncleanliness” placing them “outside of civilized society” (Park and Pello 2011). These concepts, even when unvoiced, shape policy decisions and the codification of environmental activism, and environmental benefits as white.
Thus the alternative is to embrace the demand of the slave - the end of the world.  Wilderson 02

Frank Wilderson, The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal, resented at Imprisoned Intellectuals  Conference Brown University, April 13th 2002.  NS

If we are to take Fanon at his word when he writes,  Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder (37) then we must accept the fact that no other body functions in the Imaginary, the Symbolic, or the Real so completely as a repository of complete disorder as the Black body. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Real, for in its magnetizing of bullets the Black body functions as the map of gratuitous violence through which civil society is possible: namely, those other bodies for which violence is, or can be, contingent. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Symbolic, for Blackness in America generates no categories for the chromosome of History, no data for the categories of Immigration or Sovereignty; it is an experience without analog a past, without a heritage. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Imaginary for  whoever says  rape  says Black,  (Fanon) , whoever says  prison  says Black, and whoever says  AIDS  says Black (Sexton)  the  Negro is a phobogenic object  (Fanon). Indeed and a phobogenic object and a past without a heritage and the map of gratuitous violence and a program of complete disorder. But whereas this realization is, and should be cause for alarm, it should not be cause for lament, or worse, disavowal not at least, for a true revolutionary, or for a truly revolutionary movement such as prison abolition. If a social movement is to be neither social democratic, nor Marxist, in terms of the structure of its political desire then it should grasp the invitation to assume the positionality of subjects of social death that present themselves; and, if we are to be honest with ourselves we must admit that the  Negro  has been inviting Whites, and as well as civil society’s junior partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They have been, and remain today even in the most anti-racist movements, like the prison abolition movement invested elsewhere. This is not to say that all oppositional political desire today is pro-White, but it is to say that it is almost always anti-Black which is to say it will not dance with death. Black liberation, as a prospect, makes radicalism more dangerous to the U.S. Not because it raises the specter of some alternative polity (like socialism, or community control of existing resources) but because its condition of possibility as well as its gesture of resistance functions as a negative dialectic: a politics of refusal and a refusal to affirm, aprogram of complete disorder.  One must embrace its disorder, its incoherence and allow oneself to be elaborated by it, if indeed one’s politics are to be underwritten by a desire to take this country down.  If this is not the desire which underwrites one’s politics then through what strategy of legitimation is the word  prison  being linked to the word  abolition? What are this movement’s lines of political accountability? There’s nothing foreign, frightening, or even unpracticed about the embrace of disorder and incoherence. The desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by disorder and incoherence is not anathema in and of itself: no one, for example, has ever been known to say gee-whiz, if only my orgasms would end a little sooner, or maybe not come at all.  But few so-called radicals desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by the disorder and incoherence of Blackness and the state of political movements in America today is marked by this very Negrophobogenisis:  gee-whiz, if only Black rage could be more coherent, or maybe not come at all.  Perhaps there’s something more terrifying about the joy of Black, then there is about the joy of sex (unless one is talking sex with a Negro). Perhaps coalitions today prefer to remain in-orgasmic in the face of civil society with hegemony as a handy prophylactic, just in case. But if, through this stasis, or paralysis, they try to do the work of prison abolition that work will fail; because it is always work from a position of coherence (i.e. the worker) on behalf of a position of incoherence, the Black subject, or prison slave. In this way, social formations on the Left remain blind to the contradictions of coalitions between workers and slaves. They remain coalitions operating within the logic of civil society; and function less as revolutionary promises and more as crowding out scenarios of Black antagonisms they simply feed our frustration.  Whereas the positionality of the worker  be s/he a factory worker demanding a monetary wage or an immigrant or White woman demanding a social wage  gestures toward the reconfiguration of civil society, the positionality of the Black subject be s/he a prison-slave or a prison-slave-in-waiting  gestures toward the disconfiguration of civil society: from the coherence of civil society, the Black subject beckons with the incoherence of civil war. A civil war which reclaims Blackness not as a positive value, but as a politically enabling site, to quote Fanon, of  absolute dereliction: a  scandal  which rends civil society asunder.  Civil war, then, becomes that unthought, but never forgotten understudy of hegemony. A Black specter waiting in the wings, an endless antagonism that cannot be satisfied (via reform or reparation) but must nonetheless be pursued to the death.

Recognizing that blackness is pathologized is key to embracing social life in social death.  Sexton 11

Jared Sexton, ANTE-ANTI-BLACKNESS: AFTERTHOUGHTS, Cultural Studies Association Issue 1, 2011.  NS

Against the raceless credo, then, racism cannot be rejected without a dialectic in which humanity experiences a blackened world" (Gordon 1997: 67). What is this willingness to 'be' black, of choosing to be black affirmatively rather than reluctantly, that Gordon finds as the key ethical moment in Fanon? Elsewhere, in a discussion of W. E. B. Du Bois on the study of black folk, Gordon restates an existential phenomenological conception of the anti-black world developed across his first several books: "Blacks here suffer the phobogenic reality posed by the spirit of racial seriousness. In effect, they more than symbolize or signify various social pathologies – they become them. In our anti-black world, blacks are pathology" (Gordon 2000: 87). This conception would seem to support to Moten's contention that even much radical black studies scholarship sustains the association of blackness with a certain sense of decay and thereby fortifies and extends the interlocutory life of widely accepted political common sense. In fact, it would seem that Gordon deepens the already problematic association to the level of identity. And yet, this is precisely what Gordon argues is the value and insight of Fanon: he fully accepts the definition of himself as pathological as it is imposed by a world that knows itself through that imposition, rather than remaining in a reactive stance that insists on the heterogeneity between a self and an imago originating in culture.  Though it may appear counter-intuitive, or rather because it is counter-intuitive, this acceptance or affirmation is active; it is a willing or willingness, in other words, to pay whatever social costs accrue to being black, to inhabiting blackness, to living a black social life under the shadow of social death. This is not an accommodation to the dictates of the anti-black world.  The affirmation of blackness, which is to say an affirmation of pathological being, is a refusal to distance oneself from blackness in a valorization of minor differences that bring one closer to health, life, or sociality. Fanon writes in the first chapter of Black Skin, White Masks: "A Senegalese who learns Creole to pass for Antillean is a case of alienation. The Antilleans who make a mockery out of him are lacking in judgment" (Fanon 2008: 21). In a world structured by the twin axioms of white superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and black non-existence, a world structured by a negative categorical imperative – "above all, don’t be black" (Gordon 1997: 63) – in this world, the zero degree of transformation is the turn toward blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that "resides in the idea that 'I am thought of as less than human'" (Nyong'o 2002: 389). 22 In this we might create a transvaluation of pathology itself, something like an embrace of pathology without pathos. To speak of black social life and black social death, black social life against black social death, black social life as black social death, black social life in black social death – all of this is to find oneself in the midst of an argument that is also a profound agreement, an agreement that takes shape in (between) meconnaissance and (dis)belief. Black optimism is not the negation of the negation that is afro-pessimism, just as black social life does not negate black social death by vitalizing it. A living death is a much a death as it is a living. Nothing in afro-pessimism suggests that there is no black (social) life, only that black life is not social life in the universe formed by the codes of state and civil society, of citizen and subject, of nation and culture, of people and place, of history and heritage, of all the things that colonial society has in common with the colonized, of all that capital has in common with labor – the modern world system. 23 Black life is not lived in the world that the world lives in, but it is lived underground, in outer space. This is agreed. That is to say, what Moten asserts against afro-pessimism is a point already affirmed by afro-pessimism, is, in fact, one of the most polemical dimensions of afro-pessimism as a project: namely, that black life is not social, or rather that black life is lived in social death. Double emphasis, on lived and on death. That's the whole point of the enterprise at some level. It is all about the implications of this agreed upon point where arguments (should) begin, but they cannot (yet) proceed.  Wilderson's is an analysis of the law in its operation as "police power and racial prerogative both under and after slavery" (Wagner 2009: 243). So too is Moten's analysis, at least that just-less-than-half of the intellectual labor committed to the object of black studies as critique of (the anti-blackness of) Western civilization. But Moten is just that much more interested in how black social life steals away or escapes from the law, how it frustrates the police power and, in so doing, calls that very policing into being in the first place. The policing of black freedom, then, is aimed less at its dreaded prospect, apocalyptic rhetoric notwithstanding, than at its irreducible precedence. The logical and ontological priority of the unorthodox self-predicating activity of blackness, the "improvisatory exteriority" or "improvisational immanence" that blackness is, renders the law dependent upon what it polices. This is not the noble agency of resistance. It is a reticence or reluctance that we might not know if it were not pushing back, so long as we know that this pushing back is really a pushing forward. So, in this perverse sense, black social death is black social life. The object of black studies is the aim of black studies. The most radical negation of the anti-black world is the most radical affirmation of a blackened world. Afro-pessimism is "not but nothing other than" black optimism. 24
Framing issue. Their refusal to engage in discussions of the way that anti-blackness shapes the world will lose them this debate. Sexton 16
Jared Sexton, Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, associate professor of African American Studies and Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine, “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word,” Rhizomes issue 19,sections 1-8
- A shift away from politics of inclusion is the only real ethical move
- Pessimism is a political position that we need to use to understand the world 

1 Afro-Pessimism is a contemporary phenomenon, some may even scoff that it is trendy, but its political and intellectual evolution is considerably longer and its ethical bearings much broader than one might expect, and there is work yet to be done regarding a genealogy of its orientation and sensibility. No individual or collective effort, of course, springs forth whole cloth and yet the controversy that has accompanied the emergence of this discourse over the better part of the past decade has suffered greatly from a refusal—on the part of most critics and too many proponents as well—to follow the old Jamesonian edict to historicize the theoretical aim and object (Herman 2003). I only note the problem here, as the development of proper context would require far more space than available at present. The vacuum-packed controversy has been surprisingly pointed as a result, and it is easy to miss the true significance thereof between the epiphanic tone of recent acquaintance and the acrimony of recurrent denunciation. 2 Some part of the pace and extent of debate about Afro-Pessimism to date is no doubt due to the proliferation of social media platforms in the same moment when the professoriate groans under the intensified administrative command to turn research into output with eventual market value (including the market value of "civic engagement"); the subsequent migration of much previously refereed scholarly commentary to these less (or differently) regulated forums in search of greater and faster measurable impact and, for better or worse, readership beyond the ken of advanced higher education; and the increased if uneven porosity of deliberations among activists, artists, educators, journalists, non-profit workers, researchers, etc. afforded by the digitization of print culture and the growing access to recordings of conference panels, public lectures, radio interviews, and the like. It is no exaggeration to say that, as a result of this convergence of global economic restructuring and technological development, there are thousands of online conversations underway across Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe, especially among students and young scholars, adjudicating the relative merits of Afro-Pessimism. 3 But this much could be said about any number of topical discussions featured anywhere from chat rooms and microblogs to virtual meetings and TED talks. What accounts for the particular critical purchase and affective resonance of what I called elsewhere "a highly technical dispute in a small corner of the American academy" has more likely to do with a growing understanding of the common (which is not to say shared, much less identical) political conditions of diverse black life-worlds with respect to claims and practices of freedom. That common sense of things is bound to a terrible and terrifying acknowledgement of not only the tragic material and symbolic continuities everywhere revealed by the history of post-emancipation societies throughout the Diaspora, but also, more fundamentally, the uncontainable categorical sprawl of the epochal transformation that names the emergence of racial slavery as such. In this, the postulate of a free black - whether non-slave or former-slave - would appear as oxymoron. None of which should stop anyone from believing its true, that being the crux. If Afro-Pessimism has captured the imagination of certain black radical formations and suggested a critical idiom, provoking a basic rethinking among more than a few of their non-black counterparts by the way, it has also, and maybe for the same reasons, struck a nerve among others, all along the color line, who fear that open-minded engagement involves forsaking some of the most hard-earned lessons of the last generation. 4 The reticence expressed about the force and signification of Afro-Pessimism, which in some quarters has bloomed into open if largely uninformed resistance, has taken on the logic of preemptive strike. Though we have little engagement in print thus far, due in part to the recentness of the published literature, certain discussions are nonetheless afoot on the left "devoted to blaming pessimism for whatever crisis is thought to occupy us at the moment." Afro-Pessimism, in this case and on this count, is thought to be, in no particular order: a negative appraisal of the capabilities of black peoples, associating blackness with lack rather than tracing the machinations through which the association is drawn and enforced, even in the black psyche, across the longue durée; a myopic denial of overlapping and ongoing histories of struggle and a fatal misunderstanding of the operational dynamics of power, its general economy or micro-physics, reifying what should be historicized en route to analysis; a retrograde and isolationist nationalism, a masculinist and heteronormative enterprise, a destructive and sectarian ultra-leftism, and a chauvinist American exceptionalism; a reductive and morbid fixation on the depredations of slavery that superimposes the figure of the slave as an anachronism onto ostensibly post-slavery societies, and so on. 5 The last assertion, which actually links together all of the others, evades the nagging burden of proof of abolition and, moreover, fails to acknowledge that one can account for historically varying instances of anti-blackness while maintaining the claim that slavery is here and now. Most telling though is the leitmotif of offense, and the felt need among critics to defend themselves, their work, their principles and their politics against the perceived threat. In place of thoughtful commentary, we have distancing and disavowal. The grand pronouncement is offered, generally, without the impediment of sustained reading or attempted dialogue, let alone careful study of the relevant literature. The entire undertaking, the movement of thought it pursues, is apprehended instead as its lowest common denominator, indicted by proxy, and tried in absentia as caricature.1 6 Astonishingly, all of this refuses to countenance the rhetorical dimensions of the discourse of Afro-Pessimism (despite the minor detail that its principal author is a noted creative writer and its first major statement is found in an award-winning literary work of memoir) and the productive theoretical effects of the fiction it creates, namely, a meditation on a poetics and politics of abjection wherein racial blackness operates as an asymptotic approximation of that which disturbs every claim or formation of identity and difference as such.2 Afro-Pessimism is thus not against the politics of coalition simply because coalitions tend systematically to render supposed common interests as the concealed particular interests of the most powerful and privileged elements of the alliance. Foremost, Afro-Pessimism it seeks, in Wilderson's parlance, "to shit on the inspiration of the personal pronoun we" (143) because coalitions require a logic of identity and difference, of collective selves modeled on the construct of the modern individual, an entity whose coherence is purchased at the expense of whatever is cast off by definition. The subject of politics is essentially dividual and there is in effect always another intervention to be made on behalf of some aspect of the group excluded in the name of the proper.3 The ever-expansive inclusionary gesture must thus be displaced by another more radical approach: an ethics of the real, a politics of the imperative, engaged in its interminably downward movement. This daunting task entails making necessity out of virtue, as it were, willing the need for the black radical imagination and not just its revisable demand. If certain scholars whose work has been instructive or inspirational for Afro-Pessimism miss this point too, it may have something to do with the search for a method of gaining agency that, while rightly suspending the assumption of an a priori agent, nonetheless rushes past the hidden structure of violence that underwrites so many violent acts, whether spectacular or mundane. 7 Such may provide reassurance for those informed by the basic assumptions and animated by the esprit de corps of the theoretical orientations and conceptual frames in question, but it cannot be mistaken for an adequate defense of a disposition. We would do well, on this score, to heed Joshua Dienstag's rather germane suggestion in Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit that "some thought should be given to why this word functions so well as a gesture of dismissal" and, likewise, to "the routine use of 'pessimist' and its cognates as a casual intellectual put-down" (Dienstag 2006: x). For present purposes, Afro-Pessimism as epithet would be the obverse of the unasked question: Why has this discourse found its articulation now? Rather than simply motivating speculation about the psychological states and political commitments of theorists, commentators, students, advocates or adherents; the intervention and implications of Afro-Pessimism, however they are adjudged, "need to be addressed at the theoretical level at which they arose" (Dienstag 2001: 924). Dienstag writes further: Critics have often mistaken a depiction of the world for a choice about our future, as if scholars had rejoiced at the decline or decay they described. ... Yet, despite the abuse they attract pessimists keep appearing—and this should not be surprising since the world keeps delivering bad news. Instead of blaming pessimism, perhaps, we can learn from it. Rather than hiding from the ugliness of the world, perhaps we can discover how best to withstand it (Dienstag 2006: x).4 8 As if they rejoiced about the wrong things and, by contrast, failed to rejoice about the right ones. Why not turn this (moralistic) accusation into (political-intellectual) opportunity? Indeed, the moniker "Afro-Pessimism" emerges at a certain inaugural moment as the embrace of a critical outlook deemed, upon review, to be disappointing or discouraging to an ostensibly progressive, even modernist anti-racism (Hartman 2003). Détournement. Resignification. A simple enough term for withstanding the ugliness of the world—and learning from it—might be suffering and Afro-Pessimism is, among other things, an attempt to formulate an account of such suffering, to establish the rules of its grammar, "to think again about the position of the ex-slave," as Bryan Wagner puts it in his Disturbing the Peace, "without recourse to the consolation of transcendence" (Wagner 2009: 2). The difficulty has to do with the special force that the consolation of transcendence—be it cultural, economic, geographical, historical, political, psychological, sexual, social or symbolic—brings to bear on the activity of thinking, no less of speaking and writing, about those whose transcendence is foreclosed in and for the modern world.

Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 4 | Opponent: Westwood RM | Judge: Lauren Burdt
Our system of policing is no accident – it is a direct result of economic policies keep to put poor and disenfranchised people on the margins with no political power. . Potter 15 

Gary Potter 1/15/15 “Police Violence, Capital and Neoliberalism” http://uprootingcriminology.org/essays/police-violence-capital-neoliberalism/

Starting with the Reagan administration the federal government began to cease investment in urban renewal programs and urban development. Funds which had been made available to local city governments dried up and disappeared. The withdrawal of federal support had two main impacts. First, a wide range of positive social and development programs were terminated. Second, cities faced a problem of rapidly increasing debt. With the federal government’s retreat from governance to sovereignty urban governments increasingly looked to banks and financiers to cover their costs and obligations. The banks were only too happy to fill the void. They predicated their underwriting of municipal governance with three demands. First, social welfare programs had to be ravaged. Second, municipal services and space had to be privatized. Third, order maintenance through aggressive policing had to serve the interests of land developers, realtors, banks, corporations and private business. In other words, municipal government had to divest itself from its own populace and as a result the police no longer served the community they served finance capital alone.¶ So, municipal governments no longer governed. They became profit-producing, entrepreneurial, sovereign fiefdoms no longer serving their residents but totally focused on policies that made urban areas financially, socially and politically attractive to corporations, developers and banks. A combination of private and corporate financial investment and urban government policies created the conditions for a perfect storm of gentrification that deliberately displaced impoverished neighborhoods, massively widened wealth differentials, exacerbated class conflicts and required a militarized, violent army of occupation. Gentrification turned police departments into privately-owned, violent, security forces who no longer answered to the people they allegedly served.¶ New Crime and Actuarial Policing¶ The simple fact is that almost everyone’s contact with the criminal justice system starts with the police. In fact, the overwhelming majority of Americans will have interactions with the police as their only criminal justice system contact. These interactions rarely result in arrest, let alone prosecution conviction or incarceration. In fact, of all those people who have been subjected to “stop and frisk” police tactics, 90 are never found to be engaged in criminal activity. That fact alone demonstrates that the police are not fighting crime but are engaged in a pattern of discipline and regulation directed at those targeted by neoliberal policies. The police are not protecting communities and keeping them secure, the police are playing a key role in destabilizing and reshaping those communities for the benefit of financial entrepreneurs.¶ Beginning in the 1990s many police departments abandoned “crime-fighting” in favor of an “order maintenance” policing strategy. Rather than targeting serious crimes like assault, robbery, rape, burglary, theft and homicide police departments turned their attention to minor, low-level instance of “disorder.” So incivility and behavior which is somehow defined as annoying like homelessness, panhandling, public alcohol consumption and minor vandalism became the new “index crimes” targeted by police departments. The result was obvious. The police engaged in punitive, oppressive and often violent tactics directed primarily at poor, inner-city communities. The net impact was that policing was no longer directed at serious crime, it was the new social engineering policy of the state to attack poverty.¶ The neoliberal demand for order maintenance makes a mockery of arguments that policing strategies are designed to protect us from harm from violent and property crimes. In 2013 police made 11,302,102 arrests. Of those 480,360 (4) were for violent crimes and 1,559,284 (13.8) were for property crimes. In view of the simple fact that arrest is the starting point for most police violence against civilians the question becomes what exactly is the police doing that require so many other arrests? The answer is that they were engaged in policing disorder, rudeness and bothersome behavior not crime.¶ The most telling category of arrests is the amorphous category of “all other offenses, defining by the FBI as “all violations of state or local laws not specifically identified as Part I or Part II offenses, except traffic violations.” In other words all criminal acts not defined by the FBI as being “serious” crimes. In 2013 police made 3,282,651 (29) arrests for “all other” infractions, a number dwarfing arrests for both violent and property offenses. But, it’s worse than that. In addition to the “all other offenses” category police made 1,441,209 arrests (12.8 of all arrests) for vandalism, curfew violation and loitering, vagrancy, disorderly conduct, drunkenness and liquor law violations (excluding drunk driving), extremely minor offenses as well. So 42 of police arrests were for public order indiscretions. If we add to those numbers the victimless crimes of prostitution and drug abuse (1,549,663 arrests and 13.7 of all arrests) we end up with a total 56 of all arrests that posed no discernible threat to the public.¶ Punitive policing has nothing to do with crime. It is, in fact, a symbolic representation of state power, a form of public humiliation and public punishment. Order maintenance strategies were direct almost exclusively against the poor and people of color in the United States. Policing became the primary tool of neoliberalism to control, humiliate and regulate the poor.¶ New crimes and new policing strategies like those associated with Wilson and Kelling’s infamous “Broken Windows Theory” had very little to do with serious crime. Instead, a plethora of new laws and policing priorities were focused on one thing and one thing only, the protection of capital flows to protect and enhance private investment and development in urban settings. For example, one of the first campaigns launched by NYPD under its “broken windows” paradigm was to crack down on and arrest street vendors. It was, of course, just this type of policing strategy that led to the tragic police-killing of Eric Garner for selling cigarettes on the streets. The demand for new laws and aggressive policing of street life came directly from commercial interests who argued that street vending, street artists, and the like created congestion on sidewalks and competed with the products being peddled in their stores. Aggressive policing toward sidewalk vendors, singers, dancers and artists had nothing to do with serious crime. It had everything to with private profit.¶ Similarly, it was corporate real estate developers who pushed for aggressive policing and changes in police deployment strategies as a means to clear out neighborhoods for gentrification. Once again new laws and aggressive policing strategies were aimed at the homeless, the poor and the mentally ill. Corporate elites wielded their considerable political clout to reallocate police resources from “crime” to removing obstacles to their takeover of land and buildings and their subsequent profits from skyrocketing rents and sales of refurbished urban housing. Simply put, the police were used to displace entire populations and sanitize the streets not for the benefit of residents, but for the profits of corporations.¶ NYPD’s Compstat program is the prime example of how police resources are reallocated for private profit. New York’s police commissioner Bill Bratton was a primary architect of this new form of police accountability to corporate interests. Bratton reorganized the NYPD around “private-sector business practices and principles for management.” Compstat, in addition to heightening police accountability to financial capital also decreased police accountability to poor communities. No longer were the concerns of residents the primary motivation for police activity. Now the police were accountable only to actuarial statistical patterns and numbers which served to define “disorder” in a manner conducive to private business and development. Compstat in no way provided any meaningful community input to policing. It was and is a total rejection of community input and the full embrace of private business and financial section input.¶ The result of all of this was the criminalization of “disorder.” Suddenly police became more concerned about panhandling, public singing and dancing, loitering, public drinking, bicycle riders, boom boxes, prostitutes, graffiti and street vending than they were about serious criminal harms. Criminalizing previously noncriminal acts resulted in a strategy of order-maintenance policing that was both punitive and judgmental in vilifying those who might be marginally annoying but in no way dangerous. This was both a gift to corporate interests and a war on the poor. In concert with the severe cuts to social service programs and the new definition of “crime” as disorder, policing became a major policy initiative in dealing with structural poverty. Neoliberal policies including massive corporate tax cuts and even corporate tax forgiveness along with the gutting of the progressive income tax created levels of inequality in the United States unheard of since slavery and the rise of the robber barons. The redistribution of income alone was astonishing. In 1980 the top 10 of income earners controlled 35 of all income. Today they control more than 50. The Gini Ratio which measures income inequality soared to .46 making the United States the most unequal industrialized country in the world.¶ At the same the U.S. prison population soared from around 500,000 in 1980 to over 2.5 million today with another 5 million under the control of one or another correctional programs. Today the United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world and one out of every 30 adults are under control of the correctional system. And all this occurred in the midst of a dramatic drop in criminal victimization. The violent crime rate in 1981 was 52.3 per 1,000 people. In 2013 it was 26.1 per 1,000 people. The rise in incarceration had nothing to with crime. It had everything to do with an orderly corporatized society.¶ Neoliberalism has adopted a policy of incarceration as a response to control of poor communities and a growing surplus population of the unemployed and underemployed. As neoliberal policies have abandoned the state’s function of governance and eviscerated welfare policies it has looked to the criminal justice system as its primary response to poverty. That response has included both punitive and aggressive policing and the vindictive use of incarceration. The disorderly among us are subjected to arrest, police violence, incarceration and displacement from their communities. Order maintenance policing (Broken Windows) targets the homeless, the mentally ill and the poor for arrest and prosecution. Police resources are disproportionately reassigned to poor communities. A massive 33 nationwide cut in spending on health care for the mentally ill, including funds for medication, has resulted in police intervention as a primary modality to deal with psychiatric problems. Once the concept of crime was replaced by quality-of-life violations of local ordinances it was easy for police to find “cause” to stop-and-frisk almost anyone. Despite the fact that stop-and-frisk policies rarely resulted in arrests or the discovery of actual “crime” nonwhites were subjected to the tactic six times more frequently than Caucasians even with crime rates held constant. In New York City 90 of the precincts with high frequencies of police stops were majority-minority precincts. Analyzes of stops found that the strongest predictive variable was the poverty rates of the neighborhoods in which the stops occurred.

The affirmative’s legalistic approach to police violence brings us further away from recognizing the economic forces at work that makes police violence inevitable. Lane 7/21. 

ALYCEE LANE JULY 21, 2016 “Violence, Death and Our Neoliberal Police”  http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/21/violence-death-and-our-neoliberal-police/

If what we are witnessing in these violent encounters with police is neoliberalism in action, then we have to come up with an entirely different set of solutions to change policing. This is not to dismiss body cameras and training, which will no doubt save some lives. But they are technical fixes that do not address at all the neoliberal character of our police departments, the transformation of peace officers into neoliberal police, the policies that align policing with corporate power, and the violence that neoliberalism produces.¶ In fact, these fixes amount to our use of the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. After all, through neoliberal policies governments regularly take “outside of the realm of the political” the myriad problems that communities face and then render these problems “technical and actionable,” as Lester Spence has observed. So when we offer solutions like body cameras, we make fixing the police a technical matter rather than a political matter, and in so doing we legitimize and further entrench neoliberal policies and practices that enact invisible, spectacular, and ultimately normalized violence on those who don’t fit the mold. The consequence is that we’ll continue to receive tweets and Facebook feeds of police killings.¶ But we’ll also see more retaliatory killings of police officers – like the killings that occurred recently in Dallas and Baton Rouge – as more people realize that neoliberal policing, and the violence it enacts, is exactly the kind of policing our governments intend. Such counter-violence, however, is extraordinarily ironic, for individuals who engage in retaliatory killings – individuals who are, and will likely continue to be, primarily men – ultimately express just how deeply they have internalized the ideals that constitute the Virtuous Neoliberal Citizen: self-reliance or rugged individualism, personal responsibility, distrust of government, efficiency, cruelty. With an Izhmash-Saiga 5.45 mm rifle or some other AK-style weapon in tow, they alone will fix the problem of police violence, and in so doing, they will precisely, and finally, fit the neoliberal mode.¶ Repairing the police and our system of policing, then, clearly demands that we end not only neoliberal policing, but also the transformation of men and women into neoliberal police. To do this, we must relentlessly break down these moments of violence between officers and the community in order to unearth the neoliberal politics they express and enact, and that our government officials (local, state, national) continue to impose upon us at our expense (and for the benefit of the wealthy), but most especially at the expense of our abandoned, disposed children, women and men.¶ It is through this kind of work, in fact, that we can begin to upend an order that neoliberal proponents present as the only alternative and that appears all-powerful and all-encompassing. By doing this work, we’ll discover just how much neoliberalism and the violence it produces is, as Oksala makes clear, a “specific, rationally reflected and coordinated way of governing” – including the hiring, oversight, and training of police – that we absolutely have the power to change.

Blaming violence on ‘bad individual’s through civil suits replicates neoliberalism – it deflects blame on to individuals whose actions are predetermined by neoliberalism. Smith 15

Robert C. Smith The author of several books and over 100 academic articles, Robert is a Teaching-Scholar at the Cooperative Institute of Transnational Studies. He is also the founder of Heathwood Institute and PressHeathwood Institute and Press¶ AN INSTITUTION OF OPPRESSION OR FOR PUBLIC WELL-BEING AND CIVIL RIGHTS? REFLECTIONS ON THE INSTITUTION OF POLICE AND A RADICAL ALTERNATIVE May 4, 2015¶  http://www.heathwoodpress.com/an-institution-of-oppression-or-for-public-well-being-and-civil-rights-reflections-on-the-institution-of-police-and-a-radical-alternative-r-c-smith/
My aim here, however, has less to do with critique than with a consideration of alternatives, particularly when it comes to police. Movements in response to recent events in the US have rightly put demands for police reform at the top of the agenda. But there is something of a myth around such belief in reform. To paraphrase Ta-Nehisi Coates, when tackling the problem of the institution of police and the issue of “police authority” (not to mention “power”), the real problem is one of restoring democratic authority.12 To put it another way: “a reform that begins with the officer on the beat is not reform at all. It’s avoidance. It’s a continuance of the American preference for considering the actions of bad individuals, as opposed to the function and intention of systems.”13¶ One cannot meaningfully dismantle the racist and unjust institution of the police without, firstly, tackling the belief that all our social problems can be solved with force.14 Secondly, the question of modern political-economy and its principle mode of relations must also be brought into direct focus, especially considering the manner in which current social-economic conditions tend to foster deep alienation which, in turn, establishes a social world open to the reproduction of practical and institutional power, domination, and coercion.¶ To this point, the American preference – as with much of the west in general – for considering the actions of ‘bad individuals’, as opposed to the function of ‘(bad) social systems’, represents a position of convenience. It deflects from the necessary course of difficult questions that need to be asked – a course that fundamentally challenges the status quo (Adorno). Regarding police brutality, is there an element of individual agency that we must recognize? Of course. If the modern institution of police represents a form of structural violence, as in the case of the almost daily murders of young black men and women, we must also bring into question the individual officer. Somewhere, at some point, the officer has a choice to stand-down, to drop the baton and shield, rip off the badge and refuse to partake in the violent repression of a citizen’s movement. On the side of structure, however, this choice is also defined within the context of economic coercion; ideological pressures to preserve status and economic benefits for one’s family; and twisted narratives of tribalism and of the positive values of a less-than-emancipatory system of law and order (what Sartre might have called “facticity”).¶ In further considering this point, allow me to ask the following question. Can it be said that every police officer is racist or believes in the oppression of others? Is it possible that some believe in the role of policing as a community service, rather than as an oppressive institution? The question that each officer should ask themselves, as they stand together in their militarized lines, facing fellow citizens with their modern weaponry, is ‘what actually am I standing for?’ Does one stand for oppression? Does one stand for indifferent corporations? Or does one stand for community and the rights of each citizen? In case of the latter, the very institution, the validity or legitimacy of the very concept of modern policing, collapses under the weight of its own illegitimacy.¶ If, as Luis Fernandez once said, asking the question ‘what are the alternatives to policing?’ is really to ask ‘what are the alternatives to capitalism?’, then the argument for or against the police boils down to either civil liberty or its opposite. And this is precisely the point or line of thought I would like to strike when reflecting on an alternative to police. In another way: it is along this line of thought that I think we might best formulate a structural critique of modern policing and an alternative, one that is for community, for the promotion of the “mediating subject”15 and mutual recognition16, and the protection of minority groups, civil rights and actual democracy.¶ If modern policing is based on the regulation and control of a community, the alternative, which could no longer be called “policing”, would be largely non-hierarchical, in line, perhaps, with a progressive notion of restorative justice inclined toward defending civil rights and principles of actual democracy as opposed to undermining them.¶ While this alternative would represent unarmed mediation, dialogue, and reconciliation in practice,17 it would also coincide with and mutually reinforce significant transformations across all norms of society: from the economic and political to health, education, food and so on. To be clear, what I am indicating is an alternative to police in the context of broader, holistic structural and systemic change across all social spheres or domains.¶ Rather than superficial reforms that maintain the status quo (Adorno), which the 1 would surely lobby for, the transformation of law, of justice, of policing in line with a progressive notion of restorative justice would need to coincide with a greater transformative vision and social philosophy. This transformative vision and social philosophy would not only support decriminalization. Or disarmament. Or the community development of a supportive social apparatus (as opposed to police) comprised of support-workers, case-workers, teachers, mental-health professionals and therapists, drug counselors, guidance counselors – all working on the basis of a person-centred and humanistic approach. It would also represent the reorganisation of political-economy and the establishing of social-economic conditions that would foster and support direct and participatory democratic models, which are particularly vital to any notion of restorative justice, and therefore also a complete transformation of society – of a post-police, post-capitalist society.

This turns the aff – police violence is a direct result of neoliberalism. A failure to recognize that makes violence inevitable. Lane 7/21

ALYCEE LANE JULY 21, 2016 “Violence, Death and Our Neoliberal Police”  http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/21/violence-death-and-our-neoliberal-police/

If we examine through the prism of neoliberalism the killing of Philando Castile – that is, if we think of the killing as a “moment when violence and neoliberalism coalesced” – then we are immediately confronted with the fact that, to a great extent, the current problem of policing is a problem of neoliberal policing. It is a problem of the production of police as officers whose enforcement of the law is guided by neoliberal policies and procedures, the violence of which no amount of body cameras or use of force training or diversity training can adequately address. Indeed, the fact of neoliberal policing requires from all of us a radically different response to policing and police killings, a response by which we directly confront policing, and our governments’ constitution of law enforcement, as neoliberal practice.¶ So let’s talk about this moment when neoliberalism and violence converged:¶ Over the course of fourteen years, Minnesota police initiated at least 52 encounters (a staggering number) with Philando Castile, citing him for minor offenses like driving without wearing a seat belt, speeding, and driving without a muffler. These encounters resulted in Philando being assessed a total of $6,588 in fines and fees.¶ Given these circumstances, let’s assume (indeed, it is probably safe to assume) that St. Anthony Police Department – the police department that employs Jeronimo Yanez, the officer who killed Philando – operates under a scheme similar to the one that was in place in Ferguson, Missouri when Officer Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown.¶ Under that scheme (as the U.S. Department of Justice found), City of Ferguson officials “routinely” urged its Chief of Police “to generate more revenue” for the City “through enforcement” and to meet specific revenue goals. In response, the Chief pressured his officers and created a culture in which officers competed with one another in generating revenue; created opportunities to issue citations in order to meet revenue goals; engaged primarily African American citizens as objects from which they could profit as well as subjected them to the department’s and City’s market discipline; and, measured their own value and success as police officers in market terms (the department looked favorably upon and rewarded officers who met their revenue demands).¶ Through this scheme, the City in essence transformed the police into neoliberal police officers, into men and women who would enforce the law in ways that folded penal discipline into the “market-driven disciplinary logic” of neoliberalism, and whose policing became the expression of what Simon Springer calls neoliberalism’s “fundamental virtues”: “individualism, competitiveness and economic self-sufficiency.”¶ As they sought out opportunities to generate revenue, officers also engaged in the kind of ‘Othering’ upon which neoliberalism depends. As Springer writes, neoliberalism not only “treats as enemies” those “who don’t fit the mold of a proper neoliberal subject” (e.g., possessive individualism, economic self-sufficiency); it also “actively facilitates the abandonment of ‘Others’ who fall outside of ‘neoliberal normativity’, a conceptual category that cuts across multiple categories of discrimination including class, race, ethnicity, gender, sex, sexuality, age and ability.”¶ Ferguson’s neoliberal police officers (and city officials) regarded African Americans and poor people as those who don’t fit the mold. The latter were not the victims of neoliberal policies that had been embraced on a local, national and global scale. Instead, they were failures, people who were unwilling to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and remake themselves in the ways that the market demanded. Consequently, it was right to treat both as objects by which to profit and “as enemies” who needed to be disciplined and controlled.¶ That the City’s scheme and the neoliberal logic behind it would create the circumstances that led to Michael Brown’s death is clear. Indeed, through that scheme Ferguson officials and the police department produced a “‘state of exception,’ wherein…exceptional violence” – i.e.., violence that shocks, that “elicits a deep emotional response” – was “transformed into exemplary violence,” into violence that “forms the rule,” and particularly for those excluded and abandoned. Without social media, Brown’s death would have merely been a part of the everyday violence that police directed at Ferguson’s African American community and poor people generally, violence made increasingly likely by the market driven imperative of the Ferguson police force. And of course Brown’s death took place against the backdrop of the invisible violence of the City’s neoliberal policies (creation of unequal and increasingly privatized schools, attraction of business that paid little taxes and employed workers at low wages, privatization of public services, etc.).¶ If Officer Yanez worked under a governmental scheme similar to the one in Ferguson, then in that moment when he pulled the trigger (four or five times) he embodied, expressed and enacted the neoliberal principles and logic by which his department and his city operate.¶ But let’s suppose that the St. Anthony Police Department is not a business enterprise disguised as a police department, made so at the behest of city officials. Does that change the conclusion?¶ Hardly.¶ We live in the context of a global neoliberal order. And to a frightening degree, “we have become entrepreneurs of our lives,” as Johanna Oksala writes, “competing in the free market called society.” Indeed, we “compete in an ever-expanding range of fields, and invest in ourselves by enhancing our abilities and appearance, by improving our strategies of life coaching and time management. Our life has become an enterprise that we must lead to success.”¶ In other words, we are all neoliberals now, and as Springer argues, all of us are “implicated in the perpetuation of neoliberalised violence.”¶ A few months ago, I complained to my partner that the preschool our three-year old attends had not yet taught her the alphabet and numbers – at least not in any way that in my mind reflected academic rigor. “How is she going to succeed?” I asked. “When she gets to kindergarten, all the other kids will be way ahead.” I was ready to pull her out and send her to a school with a more disciplined, focused program, one that would lead to her academic success and, eventually, her career success. Lurking in the back of my mind was the fate of black girls, who have very little the market recognizes as valuable.¶ Let me repeat: my daughter is three. She attends a school in which learning happens outdoors – in a forest – where the kids discover things like rabbits and tadpoles and swarms of ladybugs and dead birds and, from those things, learn about habitats and camouflage and metamorphosis and death.¶ Against a neoliberal, market-driven idea of education – one that permeates the public sphere and that has redefined the purpose of school and education – I measured this wide-open, wonderful way of learning and found it wanting. Without even thinking about it, I was ready to subject my three-year old to the disciplinary logic of a neoliberal education and thus to perform an act, the violence of which (to creativity, to learning) I could not see.¶ Even if Officer Yanez had not performed his duty in accordance with the kind of policies that guided Ferguson’s police department, he nevertheless killed Philando within the context of a broader neoliberal framework that marked men like Philando as always already outside of neoliberal normativity (black male + broke ass car = enemy) and denied them any claim to the neoliberal virtues of economic self-sufficiency and possessive individualism. As to the latter, black people throughout United States history have been cast as anything but a collection of individuals. Instead, we are a monolith that can be used and disposed of at will (hence, Dallas police killer Micah Xavier Johnson is not Micah Xavier Johnson as such; instead, he is Black Lives Matter).¶ Moreover, that broader neoliberal framework, which defines (in the words of Lester Spence) “freedom in market terms rather than political terms,” is a racial capitalist framework that defines African Americans as unfree Others in order to naturalize class hierarchies. Thus, when Officer Yanez encountered Philando, he encountered an unfree Other who – in spite of that mark – had the audacity to claim the status of a free person by openly carrying a gun. Officer Yanez encountered the enemy.¶ My point in all of this is that Officer Yanez – like all of us, like me – was (is) immersed in neoliberalism and inevitably internalized as well as reproduced it in his employment life (and probably in his personal life as well). He was armed with it, so to speak, when he encountered and then killed Philando Castile, and I suspect this was true as well for Officer Darren Wilson of Ferguson, Missouri.

Our critique independently outweighs the case -  neoliberalism causes extinction and massive social inequalities – the affs single issue legalistic solution is the exact kind of politics neolib wants us to engage in so the root cause to go unquestioned. Farbod 15
 ( Faramarz Farbod , PhD Candidate @ Rutgers, Prof @ Moravian College, Monthly Review, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2015/farbod020615.html, 6-2)

Global capitalism is the 800-pound gorilla. The twin ecological and economic crises, militarism, the rise of the surveillance state, and a dysfunctional political system can all be traced to its normal operations. We need a transformative politics from below that can challenge the fundamentals of capitalism instead of today's politics that is content to treat its symptoms. The problems we face are linked to each other and to the way a capitalist society operates. We must make an effort to understand its real character. The fundamental question of our time is whether we can go beyond a system that is ravaging the Earth and secure a future with dignity for life and respect for the planet. What has capitalism done to us lately? The best science tells us that this is a do-or-die moment. We are now in the midst of the 6th mass extinction in the planetary history with 150 to 200 species going extinct every day, a pace 1,000 times greater than the 'natural' extinction rate.1 The Earth has been warming rapidly since the 1970s with the 10 warmest years on record all occurring since 1998.2 The planet has already warmed by 0.85 degree Celsius since the industrial revolution 150 years ago. An increase of 2° Celsius is the limit of what the planet can take before major catastrophic consequences. Limiting global warming to 2°C requires reducing global emissions by 6 per year. However, global carbon emissions from fossil fuels increased by about 1.5 times between 1990 and 2008.3 Capitalism has also led to explosive social inequalities. The global economic landscape is littered with rising concentration of wealth, debt, distress, and immiseration caused by the austerity-pushing elites. Take the US. The richest 20 persons have as much wealth as the bottom 150 million.4 Since 1973, the hourly wages of workers have lagged behind worker productivity rates by more than 800.5 It now takes the average family 47 years to make what a hedge fund manager makes in one hour.6 Just about a quarter of children under the age of 5 live in poverty.7 A majority of public school students are low-income.8 85 of workers feel stress on the job.9 Soon the only thing left of the American Dream will be a culture of hustling to survive. Take the global society. The world's billionaires control $7 trillion, a sum 77 times the debt owed by Greece to the European banks.10 The richest 80 possess more than the combined wealth of the bottom 50 of the global population (3.5 billion people).11 By 2016 the richest 1 will own a greater share of the global wealth than the rest of us combined.12 The top 200 global corporations wield twice the economic power of the bottom 80 of the global population.13 Instead of a global society capitalism is creating a global apartheid. What's the nature of the beast? Firstly, the "egotistical calculation" of commerce wins the day every time. Capital seeks maximum profitability as a matter of first priority. Evermore "accumulation of capital" is the system's bill of health; it is slowdowns or reversals that usher in crises and set off panic. Cancer-like hunger for endless growth is in the system's DNA and is what has set it on a tragic collision course with Nature, a finite category. Secondly, capitalism treats human labor as a cost. It therefore opposes labor capturing a fair share of the total economic value that it creates. Since labor stands for the majority and capital for a tiny minority, it follows that classism and class warfare are built into its DNA, which explains why the "middle class" is shrinking and its gains are never secure. Thirdly, private interests determine massive investments and make key decisions at the point of production guided by maximization of profits. That's why in the US the truck freight replaced the railroad freight, chemicals were used extensively in agriculture, public transport was gutted in favor of private cars, and big cars replaced small ones. What should political action aim for today? The political class has no good ideas about how to address the crises. One may even wonder whether it has a serious understanding of the system, or at least of ways to ameliorate its consequences. The range of solutions offered tends to be of a technical, legislative, or regulatory nature, promising at best temporary management of the deepening crises. The trajectory of the system, at any rate, precludes a return to its post-WWII regulatory phase. It's left to us as a society to think about what the real character of the system is, where we are going, and how we are going to deal with the trajectory of the system -- and act accordingly. The critical task ahead is to build a transformative politics capable of steering the system away from its destructive path. Given the system's DNA, such a politics from below must include efforts to challenge the system's fundamentals, namely, its private mode of decision-making about investments and about what and how to produce. Furthermore, it behooves us to heed the late environmentalist Barry Commoner's insistence on the efficacy of a strategy of prevention over a failed one of control or capture of pollutants. At a lecture in 1991, Commoner remarked: "Environmental pollution is an incurable disease; it can only be prevented"; and he proceeded to refer to "a law," namely: "if you don't put a pollutant in the environment it won't be there." What is nearly certain now is that without democratic control of wealth and social governance of the means of production, we will all be condemned to the labor of Sisyphus. Only we won't have to suffer for all eternity, as the degradation of life-enhancing natural and social systems will soon reach a point of no return. 

The alternative is an embrace of class-consciousness as a method of critiquing neoliberalism’s grip on policing. LaVenia 15

Peter A. LaVenia PhD in Political Science from the University at Albany, SUNY. He is the Secretary of the NY State Green Party and manages Matt Funiciello’s campaign for Congress. JANUARY 16, 2015 “Police Behavior and Neoliberalism” http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/16/police-behavior-and-neoliberalism/

The cause of impotence on the part of elected officials even in the face of public intransigence by their own police forces lies rather within the socio-political landscape of declining US hegemony in the world-system and its byproduct, neoliberalism. The latter is too often a catch all explanation for Marxists and leftists trying to explain the current era, but here it makes sense. Policing in post-1980 America, roughly the beginnings of neoliberalism, are predicated on the “broken windows” theory first put into practice by NYC Police Commissioner Bill Bratton: crack down on working class behaviors now designated as unwanted or illegal, use the fines and fees from enforcing the criminalization of working class life to prop up municipal budgets gutted by tax cuts, offshoring, and underconsumption caused by wage stagnation. Interestingly the NYC police have essentially admitted as such during their slowdown and refusal to issue quality-of-life tickets over the past few weeks.¶ In conjunction with this politicians like de Blasio, assuming he actually would want to reform police behavior, find a distinct lack of allies in their own class (and parties) on this issue. Broken windows policing is popular with the financial elites and the ruling class because the money collected and produced by it means more progressive taxation that would otherwise fill the budget gaps of municipalities and states is avoided. It also has the consequence of splitting working people who might otherwise band together to demand – in a class conscious way – better living conditions, wages, and political power. Whites learn to be fearful of minority communities alternatively seen as both enemy and victim of circumstances, all the while needing the police and state to protect them. Of course maintaining this is crucial to legitimizing capitalism and preventing concerted resistance – that’s what the buildup of irrational attitudes of submission to authority do (to quote Chomsky) on the one hand, and on the other the racism inherent in the splitting of the US working class into white and minority groups.¶ There is, then, an implicit understanding by these mayors that their only allies in restraining the police would be working class Americans, and that to begin to do so would mean to put forward a broadly pro-worker agenda of higher wages, progressive taxation, restoring once-gutted social programs, and expanding the political power of the average worker. Quality-of-life problems will only be eliminated when their cause – ultimately capitalism – is, but by beginning to lift millions out of poverty and rebuilding communities the rationale for broken windows policing would begin to disappear. In another era, one with a faction of big business and finance capital willing to compromise on issues of wages and taxation, Mayor de Blasio and his peers would have found allies in the establishment. Now, the stark choice for the mayors and local pols on police behavior is to either acquiesce in one way or another or to throw in your lot with what would rapidly take on the characteristics of a working class political movement.¶ Nothing is likely to happen without protests and organization by labor and working Americans who demand not just an end to broken windows policing but the conditions that supposedly necessitated it in the first place. Crumbling infrastructure, decaying housing, bad schools, crappy jobs and low wages, lack of real health care, gutted social programs: these so-called broken windows that have been used to justify police militarization are the symptom of a rotten system. It is very hopeful indeed that protests against police brutality have sprung up across the United States, and could evolve into a movement to reject the neoliberal consensus. Until then we are likely to see nothing but equivocation by local officials and big city mayors.

Neoliberalism sustains itself by operating by propagating a narrow lens of what it means to be ‘political.’ We situate the judge as a critical educator who steps back to evaluate the frames through which we view policy first. Blalock, JD, 2015
(Corinne, “NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CRISIS OF LEGAL THEORY”, Duke University, LAW AND CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS Vol. 77:71) MG from file
RECOVERING LEGAL THEORY’S RELEVANCE? The lens of neoliberalism not only allows one to see how these narratives fit together to reveal a larger rationality but also to understand why the solutions they propose fail to challenge or even escape that rationality. I address the three most prominent prescriptions being offered by critical legal scholars today: (1) a pragmatic turn to politics, (2) a return to more explicit normative and moral claims, and (3) acceptance in recognition that the decline is merely an ebb in the regular cycles of theory. A. Prescription: More Politics The most common prescription for recovering legal theory’s vibrancy is a greater participation in politics—scholars should eschew descriptive projects, especially those that might be used to bolster the conservative argument on an issue or in a case, as well as those critiques that appear purely academic, in favor of projects intended to influence the courts in progressive ways.134 One can certainly understand why this is a tempting prescription in light of the success of explicitly conservative legal theory and methods135 and concern that left-leaning legal academics have not taken up this charge.136 However, this demand for political engagement has unintended consequences: It legitimizes the current frameworks. As the Roberts Court further embraces neoliberal principles, persuading the Court means functioning within neoliberal logic and is therefore counterproductive for the revitalization of critical legal theory. Moreover, this political prescription tends to produce a reified notion of what counts as politics, limiting the political as well as intellectual potential of theoretical projects. For example, in the wake of the of the Court’s incremental move toward recognition of same-sex marriage in United States v. Windsor, 137 many progressive legal scholars have written on the subject hoping to nudge the Court toward full recognition. But in light of Nancy Fraser’s work, one should ask just what kind of recognition that would be—whether it would displace materialist claims or reify forms of identity.138 Full recognition of same-sex marriage is a destination toward which the Court is already heading and an area where the public discourse has largely already arrived. Emphasizing this area also participates in the ideology of erasure, leading many to believe that the current Court is making progressive interventions because it is progressive on identity and cultural issues, even though Windsor was handed down in a term in which the Court retrenched on significant materialist issues and embodied a number of blatantly neoliberal positions.139 Even if not writing for the Court, a legal scholar’s attempt to be useful to those in the profession who share her political goals risks constraining the legal profession and its own professional and disciplinary norms.140 In this way, the focus on concrete political effects helps foster legal thought’s “considerable capacity for resisting self-reflection and analysis,”141 which has only become more pronounced in the face of the neoliberalization of the academy as instrumental knowledge is increasingly privileged. When attempting to counter hegemony, what one needs to do is disrupt the legible—to expand the contours of what is considered political—not to accept the narrowly circumscribed zone of politics neoliberalism demarcates. Therefore, it is crucial not to judge critical legal scholarship according to whether its political impact is immediate or even known, and thus a turn to politics is not the remedy for legal theory’s marginalization. B. Prescription: More Normativity Some scholars recognize the danger of embracing a reified notion of politics that unwittingly reaffirms the status quo, and instead champion assertions of substantive morality to counteract the cold logics of pragmatism and efficiency.142 This proposed solution advocates a return to more substantive ideals of justice and equality. Although it may be true that change will ultimately require wresting these liberal and democratic ideals from neoliberalism and refilling their hollowed-out forms, this approach entails a number of pitfalls. The first is simply the inevitable question regarding moral claims: Whose morality is to be asserted? This question has created crisis on the left before, even producing some of the schisms among the crits recounted above. Neoliberalism does not have to contend with this issue—it foregrounds its formal nature and holds itself out as not needing to create a universal morality or set of values. More importantly, it claims to provide a structure in which one can keep one’s own substantive morals. Therefore, neoliberalism’s logic cannot be countered by moral claims without first disrupting its illusion of amorality. The ineffectiveness of the progressive critique of law and economics, based in claims of distributive justice and moral imperative, provides a clear example of how the neoliberal discourse can capture normative claims. The work of Martha McCluskey, one of the few legal scholars writing about neoliberalism in the domestic context over the last ten years, highlights the extent to which the “distributive justice” critique, which argues against the privileging of efficiency over equality and redistribution, fails to challenge the underlying logic.143 McCluskey illustrates how critics of law and economics who critique the approach’s inattention to redistribution have already ceded the central point, by arguing within the conventional views that “efficiency is about expanding the societal pie and redistribution is about dividing it.”144 “Neoliberalism’s disadvantage is not, as most critics worry, its inattention to redistribution, but to the contrary, its very obsession with redistribution as a distinctly seductive yet treacherous policy separate from efficiency.”145 In order to challenge this rationality, she explains, one cannot “misconstrue neoliberalism as a project to promote individual freedom and value-neutral economics at the expense of social responsibility and community morality.”146 One must instead recognize that neoliberalism has redefined social responsibility and community morality. Therefore, one must refuse the false dichotomy between the economic and cultural spheres (a division that allows the neoliberal discourse to displace cultural concerns to a moment after the economic concerns have been dealt with). Merely asserting the falsity of this separation is not sufficient. Neoliberalism has real effects in the world that strengthen its ideological claims.147 Therefore, it is not a struggle that can take place solely on the terrain of discourse or ideology. Like neoliberalism generally, law and economics does not hold itself out as infallible or as an embodiment of social ideals, but instead as the best society can do. It functions precisely on the logic that there is no alternative. Like Hayek’s theory, “law and economics is full of stories about how liberal rights and regulation designed to advance equality victimize the all-powerful market, undermining its promised rewards.”148 In light of this, it is a mistake to see neoliberalism as disavowing moral principles in favor of economic ones; it instead folds them into one another: “The Law and Economics movement is rooted in the moral ideal of the market as the social realization of individual liberty and popular democracy.”149 Neoliberalism’s approach presents itself not only as efficient, but also as just. Legal scholars need to recognize neoliberalism’s focus on the market is not only a form of morality, but also a powerful one. They cannot assume that in a battle of moralities the substantive communitarian ideal will win.150 Furthermore, the neoliberal framework, through its reconfiguration of the subject as an entrepreneur, justifies material inequalities—in contrast to liberalism’s mere blindness to them. Consequently, merely asserting the existence of material inequalities does not immediately undermine neoliberalism’s claims. Far from the engaged citizen who actively produces the polis in liberal theory, the neoliberal subject is a rational, calculating, and independent entity “whose moral autonomy is measured by her capacity for ‘self-care’—the ability to provide for her own needs and service her own ambitions.”151 The subject’s morality is not in relation to principles or ideals, but is “a matter of rational deliberation about costs, benefits, and consequences.”152 If efficiency is the morality of our time, the poor are cast not only as “undeserving” but also as morally bankrupt. Therefore, efficiency replaces not only political morality, but also all other forms of value. Therefore, critics are right that other forms of value have been crowded out; but the logic is deeper than they seem to realize. It goes beyond the scope of what is being done in the legal academy. It is a logic that organizes our time and therefore must be countered differently. More normativity is not the answer to legal theory’s marginalization because neoliberalism’s logic can accommodate even radically contradictory moralities under its claims of moral pluralism. Ethical claims of justice and community may need to be made, but one must first recognize that countering hegemony is harder than merely articulating an alternative; hegemony must be disrupted first. Disrupting neoliberalism’s logic thus entails not only recognizing that neoliberalism has a morality, but also taking that morality seriously. C. Prescription: Acceptance The final response of legal theorists to their field’s marginalization is to dismiss it as merely the regular ebb and flow of theory’s prominence.153 Putting it in terms of Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts, the contemporary moment is just the “normal science” of the paradigm brought about by the crits’ revolutionary moment in the 1970s and 1980s.154 The vitality, this narrative contends, will return when a competing paradigm emerges. There are several problems with this perspective on the decline. First, it entails an error in logic insofar as it takes an external perspective. Legal theory does not inevitably rise and fall but only according to the work being produced; or, to put it another way, this descriptive account of theory’s ebb can be a selffulfilling prophecy insofar as it decreases scholars’ motivation to pursue and receptivity toward theoretical projects. Second, legal scholars cannot be content with normal science when it has the kinds of consequences for democracy and economic inequality that neoliberal hegemony does. The Court is currently entrenching these principles at an unprecedented rate in areas of free speech, equal protection, and antitrust to name a few.155 At first, such acceptance appears to be what Janet Halley is advocating in “taking a break from feminism,”156 but upon closer inspection it is not. Halley is cautioning against the left’s nostalgia—concluding that operating under the banner of feminism and a preoccupation with “reviving” feminism looks backward instead of forward.157 Critical legal scholarship instead needs to be “self-critical” and to recognize that “how we make and apply legal theory arises out of the circumstances in which we recognize problems and articulate solutions.”158 Theory must arise from engagement with the current circumstances. Acceptance cannot be the solution; legal theory must produce the momentum to move forward. VII CONCLUSION: WHERE WE GO FROM HERE The way forward cannot entail a return to reified notions of theory any more than by a return to reified notions of politics. Critical legal scholars should not attempt to revitalize previous critical movements but, instead, reinvigorate the practice of critique within the legal academy. A. Why Critique Naming neoliberalism is necessary in order to counteract it. Without explicit identification, there can be no truly oppositional position. It also makes legible connections that would otherwise go unseen, as was the case with scholars writing about the decline. But there must also be a step beyond naming: critique. Critique means taking neoliberal rationality seriously. The approach must not be dismissive, merely pointing out neoliberalism’s inconsistencies, but instead must recognize that neoliberal rationality is inherently appealing. One cannot merely indict efficiency as contrary to more substantive values, but one also must recognize that efficiency is inextricably tied to beliefs about liberty, dignity, and individual choice, as well as corresponding beliefs about the capacities and limits of the state to effectuate change. No one is arguing that neoliberalism is the best of all possible worlds; in fact, its power comes precisely from abandoning such a claim. In recognizing its hegemonic status, legal scholars can understand the critical task as being more than just demystification. Neoliberal does not paper over inequalities after all; it justifies them. Ultimately, critique should function as a means of opening the conversation in ways that go beyond the picture of law painted by the Roberts Court—to refuse to allow the legal academy to be merely mimetic of a Court that is clearly embracing a neoliberal vision. Critique provides a means of thinking about law as not limited by what the markets can tolerate; it is the means through which one can discover a form of resistance that goes beyond nostalgia for the liberal welfare state. And finally, critique is simply a means of asserting that things can be different than they are in a world that constantly insists that there is no alternative.

Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: Semis | Opponent: Stuyvesant KF | Judge: Panel
Fixation on black incarceration obscures the broader issue of prisons
Gottschalk , PhD Yale, 15
(Marie, Prof. @ Penn- Professor Gottschalk specializes in American politics, with a focus on criminal justice, health policy, race, the development of the welfare state, and business-labor relations,  She has a B.A. in history from Cornell University, an M.P.A. from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Yale University. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/mass-incarceration-war-on-drugs/)
The African-American incarceration rate of about 2,300 per 100,000 people is clearly off the charts and a shocking figure. The black-white incarceration rate in the United States is about 6 to 1. Focusing so intently on these racial disparities often obscures the fact that the incarceration rates for other groups in the United States, including whites and Latinos, is also comparatively very high, just not astronomically high as in the case of blacks. The white incarceration rate in the United States is about 400 per 100,000. This is about 2 to 2.5 times the total incarceration rates of the most punitive countries in Western Europe and about 5 to 6 times the rate of the least punitive ones. Even if you released every African American from US prisons and jails today, we’d still have a mass incarceration crisis in this country. I do not mean to minimize the enormity of the problem of the carceral state for African Americans but rather to make a larger point about how we need to think about racial disparities and criminal justice in a more nuanced way and in a wider context. 

Our system of policing is no accident – it is a direct result of economic policies keep to put poor and disenfranchised people on the margins with no political power. Potter 15 

Gary Potter 1/15/15 “Police Violence, Capital and Neoliberalism” http://uprootingcriminology.org/essays/police-violence-capital-neoliberalism/

Starting with the Reagan administration the federal government began to cease investment in urban renewal programs and urban development. Funds which had been made available to local city governments dried up and disappeared. The withdrawal of federal support had two main impacts. First, a wide range of positive social and development programs were terminated. Second, cities faced a problem of rapidly increasing debt. With the federal government’s retreat from governance to sovereignty urban governments increasingly looked to banks and financiers to cover their costs and obligations. The banks were only too happy to fill the void. They predicated their underwriting of municipal governance with three demands. First, social welfare programs had to be ravaged. Second, municipal services and space had to be privatized. Third, order maintenance through aggressive policing had to serve the interests of land developers, realtors, banks, corporations and private business. In other words, municipal government had to divest itself from its own populace and as a result the police no longer served the community they served finance capital alone.¶ So, municipal governments no longer governed. They became profit-producing, entrepreneurial, sovereign fiefdoms no longer serving their residents but totally focused on policies that made urban areas financially, socially and politically attractive to corporations, developers and banks. A combination of private and corporate financial investment and urban government policies created the conditions for a perfect storm of gentrification that deliberately displaced impoverished neighborhoods, massively widened wealth differentials, exacerbated class conflicts and required a militarized, violent army of occupation. Gentrification turned police departments into privately-owned, violent, security forces who no longer answered to the people they allegedly served.¶ New Crime and Actuarial Policing¶ The simple fact is that almost everyone’s contact with the criminal justice system starts with the police. In fact, the overwhelming majority of Americans will have interactions with the police as their only criminal justice system contact. These interactions rarely result in arrest, let alone prosecution conviction or incarceration. In fact, of all those people who have been subjected to “stop and frisk” police tactics, 90 are never found to be engaged in criminal activity. That fact alone demonstrates that the police are not fighting crime but are engaged in a pattern of discipline and regulation directed at those targeted by neoliberal policies. The police are not protecting communities and keeping them secure, the police are playing a key role in destabilizing and reshaping those communities for the benefit of financial entrepreneurs.¶ Beginning in the 1990s many police departments abandoned “crime-fighting” in favor of an “order maintenance” policing strategy. Rather than targeting serious crimes like assault, robbery, rape, burglary, theft and homicide police departments turned their attention to minor, low-level instance of “disorder.” So incivility and behavior which is somehow defined as annoying like homelessness, panhandling, public alcohol consumption and minor vandalism became the new “index crimes” targeted by police departments. The result was obvious. The police engaged in punitive, oppressive and often violent tactics directed primarily at poor, inner-city communities. The net impact was that policing was no longer directed at serious crime, it was the new social engineering policy of the state to attack poverty.¶ The neoliberal demand for order maintenance makes a mockery of arguments that policing strategies are designed to protect us from harm from violent and property crimes. In 2013 police made 11,302,102 arrests. Of those 480,360 (4) were for violent crimes and 1,559,284 (13.8) were for property crimes. In view of the simple fact that arrest is the starting point for most police violence against civilians the question becomes what exactly is the police doing that require so many other arrests? The answer is that they were engaged in policing disorder, rudeness and bothersome behavior not crime.¶ The most telling category of arrests is the amorphous category of “all other offenses, defining by the FBI as “all violations of state or local laws not specifically identified as Part I or Part II offenses, except traffic violations.” In other words all criminal acts not defined by the FBI as being “serious” crimes. In 2013 police made 3,282,651 (29) arrests for “all other” infractions, a number dwarfing arrests for both violent and property offenses. But, it’s worse than that. In addition to the “all other offenses” category police made 1,441,209 arrests (12.8 of all arrests) for vandalism, curfew violation and loitering, vagrancy, disorderly conduct, drunkenness and liquor law violations (excluding drunk driving), extremely minor offenses as well. So 42 of police arrests were for public order indiscretions. If we add to those numbers the victimless crimes of prostitution and drug abuse (1,549,663 arrests and 13.7 of all arrests) we end up with a total 56 of all arrests that posed no discernible threat to the public.¶ Punitive policing has nothing to do with crime. It is, in fact, a symbolic representation of state power, a form of public humiliation and public punishment. Order maintenance strategies were direct almost exclusively against the poor and people of color in the United States. Policing became the primary tool of neoliberalism to control, humiliate and regulate the poor.¶ New crimes and new policing strategies like those associated with Wilson and Kelling’s infamous “Broken Windows Theory” had very little to do with serious crime. Instead, a plethora of new laws and policing priorities were focused on one thing and one thing only, the protection of capital flows to protect and enhance private investment and development in urban settings. For example, one of the first campaigns launched by NYPD under its “broken windows” paradigm was to crack down on and arrest street vendors. It was, of course, just this type of policing strategy that led to the tragic police-killing of Eric Garner for selling cigarettes on the streets. The demand for new laws and aggressive policing of street life came directly from commercial interests who argued that street vending, street artists, and the like created congestion on sidewalks and competed with the products being peddled in their stores. Aggressive policing toward sidewalk vendors, singers, dancers and artists had nothing to do with serious crime. It had everything to with private profit.¶ Similarly, it was corporate real estate developers who pushed for aggressive policing and changes in police deployment strategies as a means to clear out neighborhoods for gentrification. Once again new laws and aggressive policing strategies were aimed at the homeless, the poor and the mentally ill. Corporate elites wielded their considerable political clout to reallocate police resources from “crime” to removing obstacles to their takeover of land and buildings and their subsequent profits from skyrocketing rents and sales of refurbished urban housing. Simply put, the police were used to displace entire populations and sanitize the streets not for the benefit of residents, but for the profits of corporations.¶ NYPD’s Compstat program is the prime example of how police resources are reallocated for private profit. New York’s police commissioner Bill Bratton was a primary architect of this new form of police accountability to corporate interests. Bratton reorganized the NYPD around “private-sector business practices and principles for management.” Compstat, in addition to heightening police accountability to financial capital also decreased police accountability to poor communities. No longer were the concerns of residents the primary motivation for police activity. Now the police were accountable only to actuarial statistical patterns and numbers which served to define “disorder” in a manner conducive to private business and development. Compstat in no way provided any meaningful community input to policing. It was and is a total rejection of community input and the full embrace of private business and financial section input.¶ The result of all of this was the criminalization of “disorder.” Suddenly police became more concerned about panhandling, public singing and dancing, loitering, public drinking, bicycle riders, boom boxes, prostitutes, graffiti and street vending than they were about serious criminal harms. Criminalizing previously noncriminal acts resulted in a strategy of order-maintenance policing that was both punitive and judgmental in vilifying those who might be marginally annoying but in no way dangerous. This was both a gift to corporate interests and a war on the poor. In concert with the severe cuts to social service programs and the new definition of “crime” as disorder, policing became a major policy initiative in dealing with structural poverty. Neoliberal policies including massive corporate tax cuts and even corporate tax forgiveness along with the gutting of the progressive income tax created levels of inequality in the United States unheard of since slavery and the rise of the robber barons. The redistribution of income alone was astonishing. In 1980 the top 10 of income earners controlled 35 of all income. Today they control more than 50. The Gini Ratio which measures income inequality soared to .46 making the United States the most unequal industrialized country in the world.¶ At the same the U.S. prison population soared from around 500,000 in 1980 to over 2.5 million today with another 5 million under the control of one or another correctional programs. Today the United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world and one out of every 30 adults are under control of the correctional system. And all this occurred in the midst of a dramatic drop in criminal victimization. The violent crime rate in 1981 was 52.3 per 1,000 people. In 2013 it was 26.1 per 1,000 people. The rise in incarceration had nothing to with crime. It had everything to do with an orderly corporatized society.¶ Neoliberalism has adopted a policy of incarceration as a response to control of poor communities and a growing surplus population of the unemployed and underemployed. As neoliberal policies have abandoned the state’s function of governance and eviscerated welfare policies it has looked to the criminal justice system as its primary response to poverty. That response has included both punitive and aggressive policing and the vindictive use of incarceration. The disorderly among us are subjected to arrest, police violence, incarceration and displacement from their communities. Order maintenance policing (Broken Windows) targets the homeless, the mentally ill and the poor for arrest and prosecution. Police resources are disproportionately reassigned to poor communities. A massive 33 nationwide cut in spending on health care for the mentally ill, including funds for medication, has resulted in police intervention as a primary modality to deal with psychiatric problems. Once the concept of crime was replaced by quality-of-life violations of local ordinances it was easy for police to find “cause” to stop-and-frisk almost anyone. Despite the fact that stop-and-frisk policies rarely resulted in arrests or the discovery of actual “crime” nonwhites were subjected to the tactic six times more frequently than Caucasians even with crime rates held constant. In New York City 90 of the precincts with high frequencies of police stops were majority-minority precincts. Analyzes of stops found that the strongest predictive variable was the poverty rates of the neighborhoods in which the stops occurred.

The affirmative’s legalistic approach to police violence brings us further away from recognizing the economic forces at work that makes police violence inevitable. Lane 7/21. 

ALYCEE LANE JULY 21, 2016 “Violence, Death and Our Neoliberal Police”  http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/21/violence-death-and-our-neoliberal-police/

If what we are witnessing in these violent encounters with police is neoliberalism in action, then we have to come up with an entirely different set of solutions to change policing. This is not to dismiss body cameras and training, which will no doubt save some lives. But they are technical fixes that do not address at all the neoliberal character of our police departments, the transformation of peace officers into neoliberal police, the policies that align policing with corporate power, and the violence that neoliberalism produces.¶ In fact, these fixes amount to our use of the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. After all, through neoliberal policies governments regularly take “outside of the realm of the political” the myriad problems that communities face and then render these problems “technical and actionable,” as Lester Spence has observed. So when we offer solutions like body cameras, we make fixing the police a technical matter rather than a political matter, and in so doing we legitimize and further entrench neoliberal policies and practices that enact invisible, spectacular, and ultimately normalized violence on those who don’t fit the mold. The consequence is that we’ll continue to receive tweets and Facebook feeds of police killings.¶ But we’ll also see more retaliatory killings of police officers – like the killings that occurred recently in Dallas and Baton Rouge – as more people realize that neoliberal policing, and the violence it enacts, is exactly the kind of policing our governments intend. Such counter-violence, however, is extraordinarily ironic, for individuals who engage in retaliatory killings – individuals who are, and will likely continue to be, primarily men – ultimately express just how deeply they have internalized the ideals that constitute the Virtuous Neoliberal Citizen: self-reliance or rugged individualism, personal responsibility, distrust of government, efficiency, cruelty. With an Izhmash-Saiga 5.45 mm rifle or some other AK-style weapon in tow, they alone will fix the problem of police violence, and in so doing, they will precisely, and finally, fit the neoliberal mode.¶ Repairing the police and our system of policing, then, clearly demands that we end not only neoliberal policing, but also the transformation of men and women into neoliberal police. To do this, we must relentlessly break down these moments of violence between officers and the community in order to unearth the neoliberal politics they express and enact, and that our government officials (local, state, national) continue to impose upon us at our expense (and for the benefit of the wealthy), but most especially at the expense of our abandoned, disposed children, women and men.¶ It is through this kind of work, in fact, that we can begin to upend an order that neoliberal proponents present as the only alternative and that appears all-powerful and all-encompassing. By doing this work, we’ll discover just how much neoliberalism and the violence it produces is, as Oksala makes clear, a “specific, rationally reflected and coordinated way of governing” – including the hiring, oversight, and training of police – that we absolutely have the power to change.

Blaming violence on ‘bad individual’s through civil suits replicates neoliberalism – it deflects blame on to individuals whose actions are predetermined by neoliberalism. Smith 15

Robert C. Smith The author of several books and over 100 academic articles, Robert is a Teaching-Scholar at the Cooperative Institute of Transnational Studies. He is also the founder of Heathwood Institute and PressHeathwood Institute and Press¶ AN INSTITUTION OF OPPRESSION OR FOR PUBLIC WELL-BEING AND CIVIL RIGHTS? REFLECTIONS ON THE INSTITUTION OF POLICE AND A RADICAL ALTERNATIVE May 4, 2015¶  http://www.heathwoodpress.com/an-institution-of-oppression-or-for-public-well-being-and-civil-rights-reflections-on-the-institution-of-police-and-a-radical-alternative-r-c-smith/
My aim here, however, has less to do with critique than with a consideration of alternatives, particularly when it comes to police. Movements in response to recent events in the US have rightly put demands for police reform at the top of the agenda. But there is something of a myth around such belief in reform. To paraphrase Ta-Nehisi Coates, when tackling the problem of the institution of police and the issue of “police authority” (not to mention “power”), the real problem is one of restoring democratic authority.12 To put it another way: “a reform that begins with the officer on the beat is not reform at all. It’s avoidance. It’s a continuance of the American preference for considering the actions of bad individuals, as opposed to the function and intention of systems.”13¶ One cannot meaningfully dismantle the racist and unjust institution of the police without, firstly, tackling the belief that all our social problems can be solved with force.14 Secondly, the question of modern political-economy and its principle mode of relations must also be brought into direct focus, especially considering the manner in which current social-economic conditions tend to foster deep alienation which, in turn, establishes a social world open to the reproduction of practical and institutional power, domination, and coercion.¶ To this point, the American preference – as with much of the west in general – for considering the actions of ‘bad individuals’, as opposed to the function of ‘(bad) social systems’, represents a position of convenience. It deflects from the necessary course of difficult questions that need to be asked – a course that fundamentally challenges the status quo (Adorno). Regarding police brutality, is there an element of individual agency that we must recognize? Of course. If the modern institution of police represents a form of structural violence, as in the case of the almost daily murders of young black men and women, we must also bring into question the individual officer. Somewhere, at some point, the officer has a choice to stand-down, to drop the baton and shield, rip off the badge and refuse to partake in the violent repression of a citizen’s movement. On the side of structure, however, this choice is also defined within the context of economic coercion; ideological pressures to preserve status and economic benefits for one’s family; and twisted narratives of tribalism and of the positive values of a less-than-emancipatory system of law and order (what Sartre might have called “facticity”).¶ In further considering this point, allow me to ask the following question. Can it be said that every police officer is racist or believes in the oppression of others? Is it possible that some believe in the role of policing as a community service, rather than as an oppressive institution? The question that each officer should ask themselves, as they stand together in their militarized lines, facing fellow citizens with their modern weaponry, is ‘what actually am I standing for?’ Does one stand for oppression? Does one stand for indifferent corporations? Or does one stand for community and the rights of each citizen? In case of the latter, the very institution, the validity or legitimacy of the very concept of modern policing, collapses under the weight of its own illegitimacy.¶ If, as Luis Fernandez once said, asking the question ‘what are the alternatives to policing?’ is really to ask ‘what are the alternatives to capitalism?’, then the argument for or against the police boils down to either civil liberty or its opposite. And this is precisely the point or line of thought I would like to strike when reflecting on an alternative to police. In another way: it is along this line of thought that I think we might best formulate a structural critique of modern policing and an alternative, one that is for community, for the promotion of the “mediating subject”15 and mutual recognition16, and the protection of minority groups, civil rights and actual democracy.¶ If modern policing is based on the regulation and control of a community, the alternative, which could no longer be called “policing”, would be largely non-hierarchical, in line, perhaps, with a progressive notion of restorative justice inclined toward defending civil rights and principles of actual democracy as opposed to undermining them.¶ While this alternative would represent unarmed mediation, dialogue, and reconciliation in practice,17 it would also coincide with and mutually reinforce significant transformations across all norms of society: from the economic and political to health, education, food and so on. To be clear, what I am indicating is an alternative to police in the context of broader, holistic structural and systemic change across all social spheres or domains.¶ Rather than superficial reforms that maintain the status quo (Adorno), which the 1 would surely lobby for, the transformation of law, of justice, of policing in line with a progressive notion of restorative justice would need to coincide with a greater transformative vision and social philosophy. This transformative vision and social philosophy would not only support decriminalization. Or disarmament. Or the community development of a supportive social apparatus (as opposed to police) comprised of support-workers, case-workers, teachers, mental-health professionals and therapists, drug counselors, guidance counselors – all working on the basis of a person-centred and humanistic approach. It would also represent the reorganisation of political-economy and the establishing of social-economic conditions that would foster and support direct and participatory democratic models, which are particularly vital to any notion of restorative justice, and therefore also a complete transformation of society – of a post-police, post-capitalist society.

This turns the aff – police violence is a direct result of neoliberalism. A failure to recognize that makes violence inevitable. Lane 7/21

ALYCEE LANE JULY 21, 2016 “Violence, Death and Our Neoliberal Police”  http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/21/violence-death-and-our-neoliberal-police/

If we examine through the prism of neoliberalism the killing of Philando Castile – that is, if we think of the killing as a “moment when violence and neoliberalism coalesced” – then we are immediately confronted with the fact that, to a great extent, the current problem of policing is a problem of neoliberal policing. It is a problem of the production of police as officers whose enforcement of the law is guided by neoliberal policies and procedures, the violence of which no amount of body cameras or use of force training or diversity training can adequately address. Indeed, the fact of neoliberal policing requires from all of us a radically different response to policing and police killings, a response by which we directly confront policing, and our governments’ constitution of law enforcement, as neoliberal practice.¶ So let’s talk about this moment when neoliberalism and violence converged:¶ Over the course of fourteen years, Minnesota police initiated at least 52 encounters (a staggering number) with Philando Castile, citing him for minor offenses like driving without wearing a seat belt, speeding, and driving without a muffler. These encounters resulted in Philando being assessed a total of $6,588 in fines and fees.¶ Given these circumstances, let’s assume (indeed, it is probably safe to assume) that St. Anthony Police Department – the police department that employs Jeronimo Yanez, the officer who killed Philando – operates under a scheme similar to the one that was in place in Ferguson, Missouri when Officer Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown.¶ Under that scheme (as the U.S. Department of Justice found), City of Ferguson officials “routinely” urged its Chief of Police “to generate more revenue” for the City “through enforcement” and to meet specific revenue goals. In response, the Chief pressured his officers and created a culture in which officers competed with one another in generating revenue; created opportunities to issue citations in order to meet revenue goals; engaged primarily African American citizens as objects from which they could profit as well as subjected them to the department’s and City’s market discipline; and, measured their own value and success as police officers in market terms (the department looked favorably upon and rewarded officers who met their revenue demands).¶ Through this scheme, the City in essence transformed the police into neoliberal police officers, into men and women who would enforce the law in ways that folded penal discipline into the “market-driven disciplinary logic” of neoliberalism, and whose policing became the expression of what Simon Springer calls neoliberalism’s “fundamental virtues”: “individualism, competitiveness and economic self-sufficiency.”¶ As they sought out opportunities to generate revenue, officers also engaged in the kind of ‘Othering’ upon which neoliberalism depends. As Springer writes, neoliberalism not only “treats as enemies” those “who don’t fit the mold of a proper neoliberal subject” (e.g., possessive individualism, economic self-sufficiency); it also “actively facilitates the abandonment of ‘Others’ who fall outside of ‘neoliberal normativity’, a conceptual category that cuts across multiple categories of discrimination including class, race, ethnicity, gender, sex, sexuality, age and ability.”¶ Ferguson’s neoliberal police officers (and city officials) regarded African Americans and poor people as those who don’t fit the mold. The latter were not the victims of neoliberal policies that had been embraced on a local, national and global scale. Instead, they were failures, people who were unwilling to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and remake themselves in the ways that the market demanded. Consequently, it was right to treat both as objects by which to profit and “as enemies” who needed to be disciplined and controlled.¶ That the City’s scheme and the neoliberal logic behind it would create the circumstances that led to Michael Brown’s death is clear. Indeed, through that scheme Ferguson officials and the police department produced a “‘state of exception,’ wherein…exceptional violence” – i.e.., violence that shocks, that “elicits a deep emotional response” – was “transformed into exemplary violence,” into violence that “forms the rule,” and particularly for those excluded and abandoned. Without social media, Brown’s death would have merely been a part of the everyday violence that police directed at Ferguson’s African American community and poor people generally, violence made increasingly likely by the market driven imperative of the Ferguson police force. And of course Brown’s death took place against the backdrop of the invisible violence of the City’s neoliberal policies (creation of unequal and increasingly privatized schools, attraction of business that paid little taxes and employed workers at low wages, privatization of public services, etc.).¶ If Officer Yanez worked under a governmental scheme similar to the one in Ferguson, then in that moment when he pulled the trigger (four or five times) he embodied, expressed and enacted the neoliberal principles and logic by which his department and his city operate.¶ But let’s suppose that the St. Anthony Police Department is not a business enterprise disguised as a police department, made so at the behest of city officials. Does that change the conclusion?¶ Hardly.¶ We live in the context of a global neoliberal order. And to a frightening degree, “we have become entrepreneurs of our lives,” as Johanna Oksala writes, “competing in the free market called society.” Indeed, we “compete in an ever-expanding range of fields, and invest in ourselves by enhancing our abilities and appearance, by improving our strategies of life coaching and time management. Our life has become an enterprise that we must lead to success.”¶ In other words, we are all neoliberals now, and as Springer argues, all of us are “implicated in the perpetuation of neoliberalised violence.”¶ A few months ago, I complained to my partner that the preschool our three-year old attends had not yet taught her the alphabet and numbers – at least not in any way that in my mind reflected academic rigor. “How is she going to succeed?” I asked. “When she gets to kindergarten, all the other kids will be way ahead.” I was ready to pull her out and send her to a school with a more disciplined, focused program, one that would lead to her academic success and, eventually, her career success. Lurking in the back of my mind was the fate of black girls, who have very little the market recognizes as valuable.¶ Let me repeat: my daughter is three. She attends a school in which learning happens outdoors – in a forest – where the kids discover things like rabbits and tadpoles and swarms of ladybugs and dead birds and, from those things, learn about habitats and camouflage and metamorphosis and death.¶ Against a neoliberal, market-driven idea of education – one that permeates the public sphere and that has redefined the purpose of school and education – I measured this wide-open, wonderful way of learning and found it wanting. Without even thinking about it, I was ready to subject my three-year old to the disciplinary logic of a neoliberal education and thus to perform an act, the violence of which (to creativity, to learning) I could not see.¶ Even if Officer Yanez had not performed his duty in accordance with the kind of policies that guided Ferguson’s police department, he nevertheless killed Philando within the context of a broader neoliberal framework that marked men like Philando as always already outside of neoliberal normativity (black male + broke ass car = enemy) and denied them any claim to the neoliberal virtues of economic self-sufficiency and possessive individualism. As to the latter, black people throughout United States history have been cast as anything but a collection of individuals. Instead, we are a monolith that can be used and disposed of at will (hence, Dallas police killer Micah Xavier Johnson is not Micah Xavier Johnson as such; instead, he is Black Lives Matter).¶ Moreover, that broader neoliberal framework, which defines (in the words of Lester Spence) “freedom in market terms rather than political terms,” is a racial capitalist framework that defines African Americans as unfree Others in order to naturalize class hierarchies. Thus, when Officer Yanez encountered Philando, he encountered an unfree Other who – in spite of that mark – had the audacity to claim the status of a free person by openly carrying a gun. Officer Yanez encountered the enemy.¶ My point in all of this is that Officer Yanez – like all of us, like me – was (is) immersed in neoliberalism and inevitably internalized as well as reproduced it in his employment life (and probably in his personal life as well). He was armed with it, so to speak, when he encountered and then killed Philando Castile, and I suspect this was true as well for Officer Darren Wilson of Ferguson, Missouri.

Our critique independently outweighs the case -  neoliberalism causes extinction and massive social inequalities – the affs single issue legalistic solution is the exact kind of politics neolib wants us to engage in so the root cause to go unquestioned. Farbod 15
 ( Faramarz Farbod , PhD Candidate @ Rutgers, Prof @ Moravian College, Monthly Review, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2015/farbod020615.html, 6-2)

Global capitalism is the 800-pound gorilla. The twin ecological and economic crises, militarism, the rise of the surveillance state, and a dysfunctional political system can all be traced to its normal operations. We need a transformative politics from below that can challenge the fundamentals of capitalism instead of today's politics that is content to treat its symptoms. The problems we face are linked to each other and to the way a capitalist society operates. We must make an effort to understand its real character. The fundamental question of our time is whether we can go beyond a system that is ravaging the Earth and secure a future with dignity for life and respect for the planet. What has capitalism done to us lately? The best science tells us that this is a do-or-die moment. We are now in the midst of the 6th mass extinction in the planetary history with 150 to 200 species going extinct every day, a pace 1,000 times greater than the 'natural' extinction rate.1 The Earth has been warming rapidly since the 1970s with the 10 warmest years on record all occurring since 1998.2 The planet has already warmed by 0.85 degree Celsius since the industrial revolution 150 years ago. An increase of 2° Celsius is the limit of what the planet can take before major catastrophic consequences. Limiting global warming to 2°C requires reducing global emissions by 6 per year. However, global carbon emissions from fossil fuels increased by about 1.5 times between 1990 and 2008.3 Capitalism has also led to explosive social inequalities. The global economic landscape is littered with rising concentration of wealth, debt, distress, and immiseration caused by the austerity-pushing elites. Take the US. The richest 20 persons have as much wealth as the bottom 150 million.4 Since 1973, the hourly wages of workers have lagged behind worker productivity rates by more than 800.5 It now takes the average family 47 years to make what a hedge fund manager makes in one hour.6 Just about a quarter of children under the age of 5 live in poverty.7 A majority of public school students are low-income.8 85 of workers feel stress on the job.9 Soon the only thing left of the American Dream will be a culture of hustling to survive. Take the global society. The world's billionaires control $7 trillion, a sum 77 times the debt owed by Greece to the European banks.10 The richest 80 possess more than the combined wealth of the bottom 50 of the global population (3.5 billion people).11 By 2016 the richest 1 will own a greater share of the global wealth than the rest of us combined.12 The top 200 global corporations wield twice the economic power of the bottom 80 of the global population.13 Instead of a global society capitalism is creating a global apartheid. What's the nature of the beast? Firstly, the "egotistical calculation" of commerce wins the day every time. Capital seeks maximum profitability as a matter of first priority. Evermore "accumulation of capital" is the system's bill of health; it is slowdowns or reversals that usher in crises and set off panic. Cancer-like hunger for endless growth is in the system's DNA and is what has set it on a tragic collision course with Nature, a finite category. Secondly, capitalism treats human labor as a cost. It therefore opposes labor capturing a fair share of the total economic value that it creates. Since labor stands for the majority and capital for a tiny minority, it follows that classism and class warfare are built into its DNA, which explains why the "middle class" is shrinking and its gains are never secure. Thirdly, private interests determine massive investments and make key decisions at the point of production guided by maximization of profits. That's why in the US the truck freight replaced the railroad freight, chemicals were used extensively in agriculture, public transport was gutted in favor of private cars, and big cars replaced small ones. What should political action aim for today? The political class has no good ideas about how to address the crises. One may even wonder whether it has a serious understanding of the system, or at least of ways to ameliorate its consequences. The range of solutions offered tends to be of a technical, legislative, or regulatory nature, promising at best temporary management of the deepening crises. The trajectory of the system, at any rate, precludes a return to its post-WWII regulatory phase. It's left to us as a society to think about what the real character of the system is, where we are going, and how we are going to deal with the trajectory of the system -- and act accordingly. The critical task ahead is to build a transformative politics capable of steering the system away from its destructive path. Given the system's DNA, such a politics from below must include efforts to challenge the system's fundamentals, namely, its private mode of decision-making about investments and about what and how to produce. Furthermore, it behooves us to heed the late environmentalist Barry Commoner's insistence on the efficacy of a strategy of prevention over a failed one of control or capture of pollutants. At a lecture in 1991, Commoner remarked: "Environmental pollution is an incurable disease; it can only be prevented"; and he proceeded to refer to "a law," namely: "if you don't put a pollutant in the environment it won't be there." What is nearly certain now is that without democratic control of wealth and social governance of the means of production, we will all be condemned to the labor of Sisyphus. Only we won't have to suffer for all eternity, as the degradation of life-enhancing natural and social systems will soon reach a point of no return. 

The alternative is an embrace of class-consciousness as a method of critiquing neoliberalism’s grip on policing. LaVenia 15

Peter A. LaVenia PhD in Political Science from the University at Albany, SUNY. He is the Secretary of the NY State Green Party and manages Matt Funiciello’s campaign for Congress. JANUARY 16, 2015 “Police Behavior and Neoliberalism” http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/16/police-behavior-and-neoliberalism/

The cause of impotence on the part of elected officials even in the face of public intransigence by their own police forces lies rather within the socio-political landscape of declining US hegemony in the world-system and its byproduct, neoliberalism. The latter is too often a catch all explanation for Marxists and leftists trying to explain the current era, but here it makes sense. Policing in post-1980 America, roughly the beginnings of neoliberalism, are predicated on the “broken windows” theory first put into practice by NYC Police Commissioner Bill Bratton: crack down on working class behaviors now designated as unwanted or illegal, use the fines and fees from enforcing the criminalization of working class life to prop up municipal budgets gutted by tax cuts, offshoring, and underconsumption caused by wage stagnation. Interestingly the NYC police have essentially admitted as such during their slowdown and refusal to issue quality-of-life tickets over the past few weeks.¶ In conjunction with this politicians like de Blasio, assuming he actually would want to reform police behavior, find a distinct lack of allies in their own class (and parties) on this issue. Broken windows policing is popular with the financial elites and the ruling class because the money collected and produced by it means more progressive taxation that would otherwise fill the budget gaps of municipalities and states is avoided. It also has the consequence of splitting working people who might otherwise band together to demand – in a class conscious way – better living conditions, wages, and political power. Whites learn to be fearful of minority communities alternatively seen as both enemy and victim of circumstances, all the while needing the police and state to protect them. Of course maintaining this is crucial to legitimizing capitalism and preventing concerted resistance – that’s what the buildup of irrational attitudes of submission to authority do (to quote Chomsky) on the one hand, and on the other the racism inherent in the splitting of the US working class into white and minority groups.¶ There is, then, an implicit understanding by these mayors that their only allies in restraining the police would be working class Americans, and that to begin to do so would mean to put forward a broadly pro-worker agenda of higher wages, progressive taxation, restoring once-gutted social programs, and expanding the political power of the average worker. Quality-of-life problems will only be eliminated when their cause – ultimately capitalism – is, but by beginning to lift millions out of poverty and rebuilding communities the rationale for broken windows policing would begin to disappear. In another era, one with a faction of big business and finance capital willing to compromise on issues of wages and taxation, Mayor de Blasio and his peers would have found allies in the establishment. Now, the stark choice for the mayors and local pols on police behavior is to either acquiesce in one way or another or to throw in your lot with what would rapidly take on the characteristics of a working class political movement.¶ Nothing is likely to happen without protests and organization by labor and working Americans who demand not just an end to broken windows policing but the conditions that supposedly necessitated it in the first place. Crumbling infrastructure, decaying housing, bad schools, crappy jobs and low wages, lack of real health care, gutted social programs: these so-called broken windows that have been used to justify police militarization are the symptom of a rotten system. It is very hopeful indeed that protests against police brutality have sprung up across the United States, and could evolve into a movement to reject the neoliberal consensus. Until then we are likely to see nothing but equivocation by local officials and big city mayors.

The role of the judge is to be a critical analyst testing whether the underlying assumptions of the AFF are valid. This is a question of the whether the AFF scholarship is good – not the passage of the plan. 

First, neoliberalism sustains itself by operating by propagating a narrow lens of what it means to be ‘political.’ We situate the judge as a critical educator who steps back to evaluate the frames through which we view policy first. Blalock, JD, 2015
(Corinne, “NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CRISIS OF LEGAL THEORY”, Duke University, LAW AND CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS Vol. 77:71) MG from file
RECOVERING LEGAL THEORY’S RELEVANCE? The lens of neoliberalism not only allows one to see how these narratives fit together to reveal a larger rationality but also to understand why the solutions they propose fail to challenge or even escape that rationality. I address the three most prominent prescriptions being offered by critical legal scholars today: (1) a pragmatic turn to politics, (2) a return to more explicit normative and moral claims, and (3) acceptance in recognition that the decline is merely an ebb in the regular cycles of theory. A. Prescription: More Politics The most common prescription for recovering legal theory’s vibrancy is a greater participation in politics—scholars should eschew descriptive projects, especially those that might be used to bolster the conservative argument on an issue or in a case, as well as those critiques that appear purely academic, in favor of projects intended to influence the courts in progressive ways.134 One can certainly understand why this is a tempting prescription in light of the success of explicitly conservative legal theory and methods135 and concern that left-leaning legal academics have not taken up this charge.136 However, this demand for political engagement has unintended consequences: It legitimizes the current frameworks. As the Roberts Court further embraces neoliberal principles, persuading the Court means functioning within neoliberal logic and is therefore counterproductive for the revitalization of critical legal theory. Moreover, this political prescription tends to produce a reified notion of what counts as politics, limiting the political as well as intellectual potential of theoretical projects. For example, in the wake of the of the Court’s incremental move toward recognition of same-sex marriage in United States v. Windsor, 137 many progressive legal scholars have written on the subject hoping to nudge the Court toward full recognition. But in light of Nancy Fraser’s work, one should ask just what kind of recognition that would be—whether it would displace materialist claims or reify forms of identity.138 Full recognition of same-sex marriage is a destination toward which the Court is already heading and an area where the public discourse has largely already arrived. Emphasizing this area also participates in the ideology of erasure, leading many to believe that the current Court is making progressive interventions because it is progressive on identity and cultural issues, even though Windsor was handed down in a term in which the Court retrenched on significant materialist issues and embodied a number of blatantly neoliberal positions.139 Even if not writing for the Court, a legal scholar’s attempt to be useful to those in the profession who share her political goals risks constraining the legal profession and its own professional and disciplinary norms.140 In this way, the focus on concrete political effects helps foster legal thought’s “considerable capacity for resisting self-reflection and analysis,”141 which has only become more pronounced in the face of the neoliberalization of the academy as instrumental knowledge is increasingly privileged. When attempting to counter hegemony, what one needs to do is disrupt the legible—to expand the contours of what is considered political—not to accept the narrowly circumscribed zone of politics neoliberalism demarcates. Therefore, it is crucial not to judge critical legal scholarship according to whether its political impact is immediate or even known, and thus a turn to politics is not the remedy for legal theory’s marginalization. B. Prescription: More Normativity Some scholars recognize the danger of embracing a reified notion of politics that unwittingly reaffirms the status quo, and instead champion assertions of substantive morality to counteract the cold logics of pragmatism and efficiency.142 This proposed solution advocates a return to more substantive ideals of justice and equality. Although it may be true that change will ultimately require wresting these liberal and democratic ideals from neoliberalism and refilling their hollowed-out forms, this approach entails a number of pitfalls. The first is simply the inevitable question regarding moral claims: Whose morality is to be asserted? This question has created crisis on the left before, even producing some of the schisms among the crits recounted above. Neoliberalism does not have to contend with this issue—it foregrounds its formal nature and holds itself out as not needing to create a universal morality or set of values. More importantly, it claims to provide a structure in which one can keep one’s own substantive morals. Therefore, neoliberalism’s logic cannot be countered by moral claims without first disrupting its illusion of amorality. The ineffectiveness of the progressive critique of law and economics, based in claims of distributive justice and moral imperative, provides a clear example of how the neoliberal discourse can capture normative claims. The work of Martha McCluskey, one of the few legal scholars writing about neoliberalism in the domestic context over the last ten years, highlights the extent to which the “distributive justice” critique, which argues against the privileging of efficiency over equality and redistribution, fails to challenge the underlying logic.143 McCluskey illustrates how critics of law and economics who critique the approach’s inattention to redistribution have already ceded the central point, by arguing within the conventional views that “efficiency is about expanding the societal pie and redistribution is about dividing it.”144 “Neoliberalism’s disadvantage is not, as most critics worry, its inattention to redistribution, but to the contrary, its very obsession with redistribution as a distinctly seductive yet treacherous policy separate from efficiency.”145 In order to challenge this rationality, she explains, one cannot “misconstrue neoliberalism as a project to promote individual freedom and value-neutral economics at the expense of social responsibility and community morality.”146 One must instead recognize that neoliberalism has redefined social responsibility and community morality. Therefore, one must refuse the false dichotomy between the economic and cultural spheres (a division that allows the neoliberal discourse to displace cultural concerns to a moment after the economic concerns have been dealt with). Merely asserting the falsity of this separation is not sufficient. Neoliberalism has real effects in the world that strengthen its ideological claims.147 Therefore, it is not a struggle that can take place solely on the terrain of discourse or ideology. Like neoliberalism generally, law and economics does not hold itself out as infallible or as an embodiment of social ideals, but instead as the best society can do. It functions precisely on the logic that there is no alternative. Like Hayek’s theory, “law and economics is full of stories about how liberal rights and regulation designed to advance equality victimize the all-powerful market, undermining its promised rewards.”148 In light of this, it is a mistake to see neoliberalism as disavowing moral principles in favor of economic ones; it instead folds them into one another: “The Law and Economics movement is rooted in the moral ideal of the market as the social realization of individual liberty and popular democracy.”149 Neoliberalism’s approach presents itself not only as efficient, but also as just. Legal scholars need to recognize neoliberalism’s focus on the market is not only a form of morality, but also a powerful one. They cannot assume that in a battle of moralities the substantive communitarian ideal will win.150 Furthermore, the neoliberal framework, through its reconfiguration of the subject as an entrepreneur, justifies material inequalities—in contrast to liberalism’s mere blindness to them. Consequently, merely asserting the existence of material inequalities does not immediately undermine neoliberalism’s claims. Far from the engaged citizen who actively produces the polis in liberal theory, the neoliberal subject is a rational, calculating, and independent entity “whose moral autonomy is measured by her capacity for ‘self-care’—the ability to provide for her own needs and service her own ambitions.”151 The subject’s morality is not in relation to principles or ideals, but is “a matter of rational deliberation about costs, benefits, and consequences.”152 If efficiency is the morality of our time, the poor are cast not only as “undeserving” but also as morally bankrupt. Therefore, efficiency replaces not only political morality, but also all other forms of value. Therefore, critics are right that other forms of value have been crowded out; but the logic is deeper than they seem to realize. It goes beyond the scope of what is being done in the legal academy. It is a logic that organizes our time and therefore must be countered differently. More normativity is not the answer to legal theory’s marginalization because neoliberalism’s logic can accommodate even radically contradictory moralities under its claims of moral pluralism. Ethical claims of justice and community may need to be made, but one must first recognize that countering hegemony is harder than merely articulating an alternative; hegemony must be disrupted first. Disrupting neoliberalism’s logic thus entails not only recognizing that neoliberalism has a morality, but also taking that morality seriously. C. Prescription: Acceptance The final response of legal theorists to their field’s marginalization is to dismiss it as merely the regular ebb and flow of theory’s prominence.153 Putting it in terms of Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts, the contemporary moment is just the “normal science” of the paradigm brought about by the crits’ revolutionary moment in the 1970s and 1980s.154 The vitality, this narrative contends, will return when a competing paradigm emerges. There are several problems with this perspective on the decline. First, it entails an error in logic insofar as it takes an external perspective. Legal theory does not inevitably rise and fall but only according to the work being produced; or, to put it another way, this descriptive account of theory’s ebb can be a selffulfilling prophecy insofar as it decreases scholars’ motivation to pursue and receptivity toward theoretical projects. Second, legal scholars cannot be content with normal science when it has the kinds of consequences for democracy and economic inequality that neoliberal hegemony does. The Court is currently entrenching these principles at an unprecedented rate in areas of free speech, equal protection, and antitrust to name a few.155 At first, such acceptance appears to be what Janet Halley is advocating in “taking a break from feminism,”156 but upon closer inspection it is not. Halley is cautioning against the left’s nostalgia—concluding that operating under the banner of feminism and a preoccupation with “reviving” feminism looks backward instead of forward.157 Critical legal scholarship instead needs to be “self-critical” and to recognize that “how we make and apply legal theory arises out of the circumstances in which we recognize problems and articulate solutions.”158 Theory must arise from engagement with the current circumstances. Acceptance cannot be the solution; legal theory must produce the momentum to move forward. VII CONCLUSION: WHERE WE GO FROM HERE The way forward cannot entail a return to reified notions of theory any more than by a return to reified notions of politics. Critical legal scholars should not attempt to revitalize previous critical movements but, instead, reinvigorate the practice of critique within the legal academy. A. Why Critique Naming neoliberalism is necessary in order to counteract it. Without explicit identification, there can be no truly oppositional position. It also makes legible connections that would otherwise go unseen, as was the case with scholars writing about the decline. But there must also be a step beyond naming: critique. Critique means taking neoliberal rationality seriously. The approach must not be dismissive, merely pointing out neoliberalism’s inconsistencies, but instead must recognize that neoliberal rationality is inherently appealing. One cannot merely indict efficiency as contrary to more substantive values, but one also must recognize that efficiency is inextricably tied to beliefs about liberty, dignity, and individual choice, as well as corresponding beliefs about the capacities and limits of the state to effectuate change. No one is arguing that neoliberalism is the best of all possible worlds; in fact, its power comes precisely from abandoning such a claim. In recognizing its hegemonic status, legal scholars can understand the critical task as being more than just demystification. Neoliberal does not paper over inequalities after all; it justifies them. Ultimately, critique should function as a means of opening the conversation in ways that go beyond the picture of law painted by the Roberts Court—to refuse to allow the legal academy to be merely mimetic of a Court that is clearly embracing a neoliberal vision. Critique provides a means of thinking about law as not limited by what the markets can tolerate; it is the means through which one can discover a form of resistance that goes beyond nostalgia for the liberal welfare state. And finally, critique is simply a means of asserting that things can be different than they are in a world that constantly insists that there is no alternative.

Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: Finals | Opponent: Cambridge Rindge OS | Judge: Panel
Humans are grounded in material conditions that create all thought – trying to abstract from material reality is another link to the K. Eagleton
Eagleton, Terry. Why Marx was right. Yale University Press, 2011. CC

In this sense, Marx was more of an antiphilosopher than a philosopher. In fact, Etienne Balibar has called him ‘‘per- haps . . . the greatest antiphilosopher of the modern age.’’Antiphilosophers are those who are wary of philosophy—not just in the sense that Brad Pitt might be, but nervous of it for philosophically interesting reasons. They tend to come up with ideas that are suspicious of ideas; and though they are for the most part entirely rational, they tend not to believe that reason is what it all comes down to. Feuerbach, from whom Marx learned some of his materialism, wrote that any authen- tic philosophy has to begin with its opposite, nonphilosophy. The philosopher, he remarked, must accept ‘‘what in man does not philosophise, what is rather opposed to philosophy and abstract thought.’’≤ He also commented that ‘‘it is man who thinks, not the Ego or Reason.’’≥ As Alfred Schmidt observes, ‘‘The understanding of man as a needy, sensuous, physiological being is therefore the precondition of any the- ory of subjectivity.’’∂ Human consciousness, in other words, is corporeal—which is not to say that it is nothing more than the body. It is rather a sign of the way in which the body is always in a sense unfinished, open-ended, always capable of more creative activity than what it may be manifesting right now. We think as we do, then, because of the kind of animals we are. If our thought is strung out in time, it is because that is the way our bodies and sense-perceptions are too. Philoso- phers sometimes wonder whether a machine could think. Maybe it could, but it would be in a way very different from ourselves. This is because a machine’s material makeup is so different from ours. It has no bodily needs, for example, and none of the emotional life which in the case of us humans is bound up with such needs. Our own kind of thinking is inseparable from this sensory, practical and emotional con- text. This is why, if a machine could think, we might not be able to understand what it was thinking. The philosophy Marx broke with was for the most part a contemplative affair. Its typical scenario was that of a pas- sive, isolated, disembodied human subject disinterestedly sur- veying an isolated object. Marx, as we have seen, rejected this kind of subject; but he also insisted that the object of our knowledge is not something eternally fixed and given. It is more likely to be the product of our own historical activity. Just as we have to rethink the subject as a form of practice, so we have to rethink the objective world as the result of human practice. And this means among other things that it can in principle be changed. Starting with human beings as active and practical, and then situating their thought within that context, help us to cast new light on some of the problems which have plagued philosophers. People who work on the world are less likely to doubt that there is anything out there than those who contemplate it from a leisurely distance. In fact, sceptics can exist in the first place only because there is something out there. If there were not a material world to feed them they would die, and their doubts would perish along with them. If you believe that human beings are passive in the face of reality, this may also persuade you to query the existence of such a world. This is because we confirm the existence of things by experiencing their resistance to our demands. And we do this primarily through our practical activity. Philosophers have sometimes raised the question of ‘‘other minds.’’ How do we know that the human bodies we encounter have minds like ours? A materialist would reply that if they did not, we would probably not be around to raise the question. There could be no material production to keep us alive without social cooperation, and the capacity to com- municate with others is a large part of what we mean by hav- ing a mind. One might also point out that the word ‘‘mind’’ is a way of describing the behavior of a particular kind of body: a creative, meaningful, communicative one. We do not need to peer inside people’s heads or wire them up to machines to see whether they possess this mysterious entity. We look at what they do. Consciousness is not some spectral phenome- non; it is something we can see, hear and handle. Human bodies are lumps of material, but peculiarly creative, expres- sive ones; and it is this creativity that we call ‘‘mind.’’ To call human beings rational is to say that their behavior reveals a pattern of meaning or significance. Enlightenment mate- rialists have sometimes been rightly accused of reducing the world to so much dead, meaningless matter. Just the reverse is true of Marx’s materialism. The materialist’s response to the sceptic is not a knock- down argument. You might always claim that our experience of social cooperation, or of the world’s resistance to our proj- ects, is itself not to be trusted. Perhaps we are only imagining these things. But looking at such problems in a materialist spirit can illuminate them in a new way. It is possible to see, for example, how intellectuals who begin from the disembodied mind, and quite often end up there as well, are likely to be puzzled by how the mind relates to the body, as well as to the bodies of others. It may be that they see a gap between mind and world. This is ironic, since it is quite often the way the world shapes their own minds that gives rise to this idea. Intellectuals themselves are a caste of people somewhat re-mote from the material world. Only on the back of a material surplus in society is it possible to produce a professional elite of priests, sages, artists, counsellors, Oxford dons and the like. Plato thought that philosophy required a leisured aris- tocratic elite. You cannot have literary salons and learned societies if everyone has to work just to keep social life ticking over. Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cul- tures. (They are just as rare in advanced societies, where universities have become organs of corporate capitalism.) Because intellectuals do not need to labour in the sense that bricklayers do, they can come to regard themselves and their ideas as independent of the rest of social existence. And this is one of the many things that Marxists mean by ideology. Such people tend not to see that their very distance from society is itself socially conditioned. The prejudice that thought is inde- pendent of reality is itself shaped by social reality. For Marx, our thought takes shape in the process of working on the world, and this is a material necessity determined by our bodily needs. One might claim, then, that think- ing itself is a material necessity. Thinking and our bodily drives are closely related, as they are for Nietzsche and Freud. Consciousness is the result of an interaction between ourselves and our material surroundings. It is itself a historical prod- uct. Humanity, Marx writes, is ‘‘established’’ by the material world, since only by engaging with it can we exercise our powers and have their reality confirmed. It is the ‘‘otherness’’ of reality, its resistance to our designs on it, which first brings us to self-awareness. And this means above all the existence of others. It is through others that we become what we are. Personal identity is a social product. There could not just be one person, any more than there could just be one number. At the same time, however, this reality should be recog- nized as the work of our own hands. Not to see it as this—to regard it as something natural or inexplicable, independent of our own activity—is what Marx calls alienation. He means the condition in which we forget that history is our own production, and come to be mastered by it as by an alien force. For arx, writes the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, the objectivity of the world ‘‘is grounded . . . in the bodily organi- sation of human beings, which is oriented towards action.’’∑ In a sense, then, consciousness is always in some sense ‘‘belated,’’ as reason is belated in a child. Before we even come to reflect, we are always already situated in a material context; and our thought, however apparently abstract and theoreti- cal, is shaped to the core by this fact. It is philosophical ideal- ism which forgets that our ideas have a foundation in prac- tice. By detaching them from this context, it can fall victim to the illusion that it is thought which creates reality.

The affirmative’s legalistic approach to police violence brings us further away from recognizing the economic forces at work that makes police violence inevitable. Lane 7/21. 

ALYCEE LANE JULY 21, 2016 “Violence, Death and Our Neoliberal Police”  http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/21/violence-death-and-our-neoliberal-police/

If what we are witnessing in these violent encounters with police is neoliberalism in action, then we have to come up with an entirely different set of solutions to change policing. This is not to dismiss body cameras and training, which will no doubt save some lives. But they are technical fixes that do not address at all the neoliberal character of our police departments, the transformation of peace officers into neoliberal police, the policies that align policing with corporate power, and the violence that neoliberalism produces.¶ In fact, these fixes amount to our use of the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. After all, through neoliberal policies governments regularly take “outside of the realm of the political” the myriad problems that communities face and then render these problems “technical and actionable,” as Lester Spence has observed. So when we offer solutions like body cameras, we make fixing the police a technical matter rather than a political matter, and in so doing we legitimize and further entrench neoliberal policies and practices that enact invisible, spectacular, and ultimately normalized violence on those who don’t fit the mold. The consequence is that we’ll continue to receive tweets and Facebook feeds of police killings.¶ But we’ll also see more retaliatory killings of police officers – like the killings that occurred recently in Dallas and Baton Rouge – as more people realize that neoliberal policing, and the violence it enacts, is exactly the kind of policing our governments intend. Such counter-violence, however, is extraordinarily ironic, for individuals who engage in retaliatory killings – individuals who are, and will likely continue to be, primarily men – ultimately express just how deeply they have internalized the ideals that constitute the Virtuous Neoliberal Citizen: self-reliance or rugged individualism, personal responsibility, distrust of government, efficiency, cruelty. With an Izhmash-Saiga 5.45 mm rifle or some other AK-style weapon in tow, they alone will fix the problem of police violence, and in so doing, they will precisely, and finally, fit the neoliberal mode.¶ Repairing the police and our system of policing, then, clearly demands that we end not only neoliberal policing, but also the transformation of men and women into neoliberal police. To do this, we must relentlessly break down these moments of violence between officers and the community in order to unearth the neoliberal politics they express and enact, and that our government officials (local, state, national) continue to impose upon us at our expense (and for the benefit of the wealthy), but most especially at the expense of our abandoned, disposed children, women and men.¶ It is through this kind of work, in fact, that we can begin to upend an order that neoliberal proponents present as the only alternative and that appears all-powerful and all-encompassing. By doing this work, we’ll discover just how much neoliberalism and the violence it produces is, as Oksala makes clear, a “specific, rationally reflected and coordinated way of governing” – including the hiring, oversight, and training of police – that we absolutely have the power to change.

Civil suits put an asking price on people’s suffering. Abel 81
Richard L. Abel, Prof of Law @ UCLA, ’81 (British Jouranal of Law and Societ 8:1, “A Critique of American Tort Law,” jstor) EE
Finally, tort law responds to intangible injury by extending that fundamental concept of capitalism - the commodity form - from the sphere of production to the sphere of reproduction. Damages for pain and suffering extrapolate the Benthamite hedonic calculus to its ultimate extreme, insisting that for every pain suffered there is some equivalent pleasure that will erase it a pleasure that can be bought with money and that the jury therefore must simulate a market in sadomasochism by asking themselves what they would charge to undergo the victim's misfortune. Tort thus extracts an involuntary present sacrifice in exchange for future gain (damages), thereby reproducing bourgeois notions of delayed gratification, an instrumental view of the self, characteristics that Weber stressed in his identification of capitalism with the Protestant ethic. 1 10 They commodify our unique experience by substituting the universal equivalent, money - as when a plaintiff's attorney asks the jury to assign a money value to each second of the victim's pain and then aggregate it over a lifetime of suffering.111 This dehumanization is particularly striking in two extreme (and opposite) situations: when injuries shorten a victim's life expectancy so that money damages are rationalized as enhancing present pleasure in lieu of a future foregone1 12 a secular variation on the Faustian compact; and when the guardian of a child born illegitimate or deformed sues for wrongful life, arguing that money is necessary to compensate the child for the net detriment of a disadvantaged life over never existing. 1 13 Giving the victim money damages for pain and suffering, especially when the injury is severe and the award proportionately large, has several additional consequences: it salves the guilt the rest of us feel at having been spared such torment (the survivor syndrome);114 it justifies us in succumbing to the selfish desire to have nothing further to do with the disabled and disfigured; indeed, rather than stimulating compassion for the victim, large awards incite envy for what is seen as a windfall ; 115 and they convey the (erroneous) impression that the compensation system is working well if anything, too well. 116

Tort law commodifies suffering as loss of earning power – kills VTL. Abel 81
Richard L. Abel, Prof of Law @ UCLA, ’81 (British Jouranal of Law and Societ 8:1, “A Critique of American Tort Law,” jstor) EE
Capitalism also shapes the experience of injury. First (and this enumeration is not chronological) capitalism creates a proletariat that must sell its labour for wages in order to live. It simultaneously destroys the obligations of mutual support outside the nuclear family 15 and pays those within it who are gainfully employed a level of wages too low to support nonproductive members. Because inability to work thus becomes tantamount to destitution or dependence upon charity, the core of damages is compensation for loss of earning capacity.16 Second, capitalists, petty bourgeois, and more recently unionized workers are able to accumulate consumer goods which require protection against inadvertent destruction (just as there is greater power to destroy, so there is more to be destroyed).17 The capitalist process of commodification and the industrial process of mass production make one chattel as good as another (indeed, the newer the better) and money the equivalent of all; hence money damages come to be seen as adequate compensation. Third, the family (now shrunk to a nucleus) is no longer able to care for illness or injury, partly because its members must seek employment outside the home and partly because care itself has been commodified and monopolized by the emergent medical profession. Since this monopoly allows professionals to command high fees, injuries come to "cost" a great deal more.18 Finally, the logic of the commodity form19 is progressively extended to nonproductive experience (damages for pain and suffering, emotional distress) and intimate relationships (damages for wrongful death, loss of consortium). Thus tort law under capitalism equates labour, possessions, care, emotional and physical integrity, and ultimately love with money.

This turns the aff – police violence is a direct result of neoliberalism. A failure to recognize that makes violence inevitable. Lane 7/21

ALYCEE LANE JULY 21, 2016 “Violence, Death and Our Neoliberal Police”  http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/21/violence-death-and-our-neoliberal-police/

If we examine through the prism of neoliberalism the killing of Philando Castile – that is, if we think of the killing as a “moment when violence and neoliberalism coalesced” – then we are immediately confronted with the fact that, to a great extent, the current problem of policing is a problem of neoliberal policing. It is a problem of the production of police as officers whose enforcement of the law is guided by neoliberal policies and procedures, the violence of which no amount of body cameras or use of force training or diversity training can adequately address. Indeed, the fact of neoliberal policing requires from all of us a radically different response to policing and police killings, a response by which we directly confront policing, and our governments’ constitution of law enforcement, as neoliberal practice.¶ So let’s talk about this moment when neoliberalism and violence converged:¶ Over the course of fourteen years, Minnesota police initiated at least 52 encounters (a staggering number) with Philando Castile, citing him for minor offenses like driving without wearing a seat belt, speeding, and driving without a muffler. These encounters resulted in Philando being assessed a total of $6,588 in fines and fees.¶ Given these circumstances, let’s assume (indeed, it is probably safe to assume) that St. Anthony Police Department – the police department that employs Jeronimo Yanez, the officer who killed Philando – operates under a scheme similar to the one that was in place in Ferguson, Missouri when Officer Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown.¶ Under that scheme (as the U.S. Department of Justice found), City of Ferguson officials “routinely” urged its Chief of Police “to generate more revenue” for the City “through enforcement” and to meet specific revenue goals. In response, the Chief pressured his officers and created a culture in which officers competed with one another in generating revenue; created opportunities to issue citations in order to meet revenue goals; engaged primarily African American citizens as objects from which they could profit as well as subjected them to the department’s and City’s market discipline; and, measured their own value and success as police officers in market terms (the department looked favorably upon and rewarded officers who met their revenue demands).¶ Through this scheme, the City in essence transformed the police into neoliberal police officers, into men and women who would enforce the law in ways that folded penal discipline into the “market-driven disciplinary logic” of neoliberalism, and whose policing became the expression of what Simon Springer calls neoliberalism’s “fundamental virtues”: “individualism, competitiveness and economic self-sufficiency.”¶ As they sought out opportunities to generate revenue, officers also engaged in the kind of ‘Othering’ upon which neoliberalism depends. As Springer writes, neoliberalism not only “treats as enemies” those “who don’t fit the mold of a proper neoliberal subject” (e.g., possessive individualism, economic self-sufficiency); it also “actively facilitates the abandonment of ‘Others’ who fall outside of ‘neoliberal normativity’, a conceptual category that cuts across multiple categories of discrimination including class, race, ethnicity, gender, sex, sexuality, age and ability.”¶ Ferguson’s neoliberal police officers (and city officials) regarded African Americans and poor people as those who don’t fit the mold. The latter were not the victims of neoliberal policies that had been embraced on a local, national and global scale. Instead, they were failures, people who were unwilling to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and remake themselves in the ways that the market demanded. Consequently, it was right to treat both as objects by which to profit and “as enemies” who needed to be disciplined and controlled.¶ That the City’s scheme and the neoliberal logic behind it would create the circumstances that led to Michael Brown’s death is clear. Indeed, through that scheme Ferguson officials and the police department produced a “‘state of exception,’ wherein…exceptional violence” – i.e.., violence that shocks, that “elicits a deep emotional response” – was “transformed into exemplary violence,” into violence that “forms the rule,” and particularly for those excluded and abandoned. Without social media, Brown’s death would have merely been a part of the everyday violence that police directed at Ferguson’s African American community and poor people generally, violence made increasingly likely by the market driven imperative of the Ferguson police force. And of course Brown’s death took place against the backdrop of the invisible violence of the City’s neoliberal policies (creation of unequal and increasingly privatized schools, attraction of business that paid little taxes and employed workers at low wages, privatization of public services, etc.).¶ If Officer Yanez worked under a governmental scheme similar to the one in Ferguson, then in that moment when he pulled the trigger (four or five times) he embodied, expressed and enacted the neoliberal principles and logic by which his department and his city operate.¶ But let’s suppose that the St. Anthony Police Department is not a business enterprise disguised as a police department, made so at the behest of city officials. Does that change the conclusion?¶ Hardly.¶ We live in the context of a global neoliberal order. And to a frightening degree, “we have become entrepreneurs of our lives,” as Johanna Oksala writes, “competing in the free market called society.” Indeed, we “compete in an ever-expanding range of fields, and invest in ourselves by enhancing our abilities and appearance, by improving our strategies of life coaching and time management. Our life has become an enterprise that we must lead to success.”¶ In other words, we are all neoliberals now, and as Springer argues, all of us are “implicated in the perpetuation of neoliberalised violence.”¶ A few months ago, I complained to my partner that the preschool our three-year old attends had not yet taught her the alphabet and numbers – at least not in any way that in my mind reflected academic rigor. “How is she going to succeed?” I asked. “When she gets to kindergarten, all the other kids will be way ahead.” I was ready to pull her out and send her to a school with a more disciplined, focused program, one that would lead to her academic success and, eventually, her career success. Lurking in the back of my mind was the fate of black girls, who have very little the market recognizes as valuable.¶ Let me repeat: my daughter is three. She attends a school in which learning happens outdoors – in a forest – where the kids discover things like rabbits and tadpoles and swarms of ladybugs and dead birds and, from those things, learn about habitats and camouflage and metamorphosis and death.¶ Against a neoliberal, market-driven idea of education – one that permeates the public sphere and that has redefined the purpose of school and education – I measured this wide-open, wonderful way of learning and found it wanting. Without even thinking about it, I was ready to subject my three-year old to the disciplinary logic of a neoliberal education and thus to perform an act, the violence of which (to creativity, to learning) I could not see.¶ Even if Officer Yanez had not performed his duty in accordance with the kind of policies that guided Ferguson’s police department, he nevertheless killed Philando within the context of a broader neoliberal framework that marked men like Philando as always already outside of neoliberal normativity (black male + broke ass car = enemy) and denied them any claim to the neoliberal virtues of economic self-sufficiency and possessive individualism. As to the latter, black people throughout United States history have been cast as anything but a collection of individuals. Instead, we are a monolith that can be used and disposed of at will (hence, Dallas police killer Micah Xavier Johnson is not Micah Xavier Johnson as such; instead, he is Black Lives Matter).¶ Moreover, that broader neoliberal framework, which defines (in the words of Lester Spence) “freedom in market terms rather than political terms,” is a racial capitalist framework that defines African Americans as unfree Others in order to naturalize class hierarchies. Thus, when Officer Yanez encountered Philando, he encountered an unfree Other who – in spite of that mark – had the audacity to claim the status of a free person by openly carrying a gun. Officer Yanez encountered the enemy.¶ My point in all of this is that Officer Yanez – like all of us, like me – was (is) immersed in neoliberalism and inevitably internalized as well as reproduced it in his employment life (and probably in his personal life as well). He was armed with it, so to speak, when he encountered and then killed Philando Castile, and I suspect this was true as well for Officer Darren Wilson of Ferguson, Missouri.

Our critique independently outweighs the case -  neoliberalism causes extinction and massive social inequalities – the affs single issue legalistic solution is the exact kind of politics neolib wants us to engage in so the root cause to go unquestioned. Farbod 15
 ( Faramarz Farbod , PhD Candidate @ Rutgers, Prof @ Moravian College, Monthly Review, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2015/farbod020615.html, 6-2)

Global capitalism is the 800-pound gorilla. The twin ecological and economic crises, militarism, the rise of the surveillance state, and a dysfunctional political system can all be traced to its normal operations. We need a transformative politics from below that can challenge the fundamentals of capitalism instead of today's politics that is content to treat its symptoms. The problems we face are linked to each other and to the way a capitalist society operates. We must make an effort to understand its real character. The fundamental question of our time is whether we can go beyond a system that is ravaging the Earth and secure a future with dignity for life and respect for the planet. What has capitalism done to us lately? The best science tells us that this is a do-or-die moment. We are now in the midst of the 6th mass extinction in the planetary history with 150 to 200 species going extinct every day, a pace 1,000 times greater than the 'natural' extinction rate.1 The Earth has been warming rapidly since the 1970s with the 10 warmest years on record all occurring since 1998.2 The planet has already warmed by 0.85 degree Celsius since the industrial revolution 150 years ago. An increase of 2° Celsius is the limit of what the planet can take before major catastrophic consequences. Limiting global warming to 2°C requires reducing global emissions by 6 per year. However, global carbon emissions from fossil fuels increased by about 1.5 times between 1990 and 2008.3 Capitalism has also led to explosive social inequalities. The global economic landscape is littered with rising concentration of wealth, debt, distress, and immiseration caused by the austerity-pushing elites. Take the US. The richest 20 persons have as much wealth as the bottom 150 million.4 Since 1973, the hourly wages of workers have lagged behind worker productivity rates by more than 800.5 It now takes the average family 47 years to make what a hedge fund manager makes in one hour.6 Just about a quarter of children under the age of 5 live in poverty.7 A majority of public school students are low-income.8 85 of workers feel stress on the job.9 Soon the only thing left of the American Dream will be a culture of hustling to survive. Take the global society. The world's billionaires control $7 trillion, a sum 77 times the debt owed by Greece to the European banks.10 The richest 80 possess more than the combined wealth of the bottom 50 of the global population (3.5 billion people).11 By 2016 the richest 1 will own a greater share of the global wealth than the rest of us combined.12 The top 200 global corporations wield twice the economic power of the bottom 80 of the global population.13 Instead of a global society capitalism is creating a global apartheid. What's the nature of the beast? Firstly, the "egotistical calculation" of commerce wins the day every time. Capital seeks maximum profitability as a matter of first priority. Evermore "accumulation of capital" is the system's bill of health; it is slowdowns or reversals that usher in crises and set off panic. Cancer-like hunger for endless growth is in the system's DNA and is what has set it on a tragic collision course with Nature, a finite category. Secondly, capitalism treats human labor as a cost. It therefore opposes labor capturing a fair share of the total economic value that it creates. Since labor stands for the majority and capital for a tiny minority, it follows that classism and class warfare are built into its DNA, which explains why the "middle class" is shrinking and its gains are never secure. Thirdly, private interests determine massive investments and make key decisions at the point of production guided by maximization of profits. That's why in the US the truck freight replaced the railroad freight, chemicals were used extensively in agriculture, public transport was gutted in favor of private cars, and big cars replaced small ones. What should political action aim for today? The political class has no good ideas about how to address the crises. One may even wonder whether it has a serious understanding of the system, or at least of ways to ameliorate its consequences. The range of solutions offered tends to be of a technical, legislative, or regulatory nature, promising at best temporary management of the deepening crises. The trajectory of the system, at any rate, precludes a return to its post-WWII regulatory phase. It's left to us as a society to think about what the real character of the system is, where we are going, and how we are going to deal with the trajectory of the system -- and act accordingly. The critical task ahead is to build a transformative politics capable of steering the system away from its destructive path. Given the system's DNA, such a politics from below must include efforts to challenge the system's fundamentals, namely, its private mode of decision-making about investments and about what and how to produce. Furthermore, it behooves us to heed the late environmentalist Barry Commoner's insistence on the efficacy of a strategy of prevention over a failed one of control or capture of pollutants. At a lecture in 1991, Commoner remarked: "Environmental pollution is an incurable disease; it can only be prevented"; and he proceeded to refer to "a law," namely: "if you don't put a pollutant in the environment it won't be there." What is nearly certain now is that without democratic control of wealth and social governance of the means of production, we will all be condemned to the labor of Sisyphus. Only we won't have to suffer for all eternity, as the degradation of life-enhancing natural and social systems will soon reach a point of no return.
The alternative is an embrace of class-consciousness as a method of critiquing neoliberalism’s grip on policing. LaVenia 15

Peter A. LaVenia PhD in Political Science from the University at Albany, SUNY. He is the Secretary of the NY State Green Party and manages Matt Funiciello’s campaign for Congress. JANUARY 16, 2015 “Police Behavior and Neoliberalism” http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/16/police-behavior-and-neoliberalism/

The cause of impotence on the part of elected officials even in the face of public intransigence by their own police forces lies rather within the socio-political landscape of declining US hegemony in the world-system and its byproduct, neoliberalism. The latter is too often a catch all explanation for Marxists and leftists trying to explain the current era, but here it makes sense. Policing in post-1980 America, roughly the beginnings of neoliberalism, are predicated on the “broken windows” theory first put into practice by NYC Police Commissioner Bill Bratton: crack down on working class behaviors now designated as unwanted or illegal, use the fines and fees from enforcing the criminalization of working class life to prop up municipal budgets gutted by tax cuts, offshoring, and underconsumption caused by wage stagnation. Interestingly the NYC police have essentially admitted as such during their slowdown and refusal to issue quality-of-life tickets over the past few weeks.¶ In conjunction with this politicians like de Blasio, assuming he actually would want to reform police behavior, find a distinct lack of allies in their own class (and parties) on this issue. Broken windows policing is popular with the financial elites and the ruling class because the money collected and produced by it means more progressive taxation that would otherwise fill the budget gaps of municipalities and states is avoided. It also has the consequence of splitting working people who might otherwise band together to demand – in a class conscious way – better living conditions, wages, and political power. Whites learn to be fearful of minority communities alternatively seen as both enemy and victim of circumstances, all the while needing the police and state to protect them. Of course maintaining this is crucial to legitimizing capitalism and preventing concerted resistance – that’s what the buildup of irrational attitudes of submission to authority do (to quote Chomsky) on the one hand, and on the other the racism inherent in the splitting of the US working class into white and minority groups.¶ There is, then, an implicit understanding by these mayors that their only allies in restraining the police would be working class Americans, and that to begin to do so would mean to put forward a broadly pro-worker agenda of higher wages, progressive taxation, restoring once-gutted social programs, and expanding the political power of the average worker. Quality-of-life problems will only be eliminated when their cause – ultimately capitalism – is, but by beginning to lift millions out of poverty and rebuilding communities the rationale for broken windows policing would begin to disappear. In another era, one with a faction of big business and finance capital willing to compromise on issues of wages and taxation, Mayor de Blasio and his peers would have found allies in the establishment. Now, the stark choice for the mayors and local pols on police behavior is to either acquiesce in one way or another or to throw in your lot with what would rapidly take on the characteristics of a working class political movement.¶ Nothing is likely to happen without protests and organization by labor and working Americans who demand not just an end to broken windows policing but the conditions that supposedly necessitated it in the first place. Crumbling infrastructure, decaying housing, bad schools, crappy jobs and low wages, lack of real health care, gutted social programs: these so-called broken windows that have been used to justify police militarization are the symptom of a rotten system. It is very hopeful indeed that protests against police brutality have sprung up across the United States, and could evolve into a movement to reject the neoliberal consensus. Until then we are likely to see nothing but equivocation by local officials and big city mayors.
The role of the judge is to be a critical analyst testing whether the underlying assumptions of the AFF are valid. This is a question of the whether the AFF scholarship is good – not the passage of the plan. 

First, neoliberalism sustains itself by operating by propagating a narrow lens of what it means to be ‘political.’ We situate the judge as a critical educator who steps back to evaluate the frames through which we view policy first. Blalock, JD, 2015
(Corinne, “NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CRISIS OF LEGAL THEORY”, Duke University, LAW AND CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS Vol. 77:71) MG from file
RECOVERING LEGAL THEORY’S RELEVANCE? The lens of neoliberalism not only allows one to see how these narratives fit together to reveal a larger rationality but also to understand why the solutions they propose fail to challenge or even escape that rationality. I address the three most prominent prescriptions being offered by critical legal scholars today: (1) a pragmatic turn to politics, (2) a return to more explicit normative and moral claims, and (3) acceptance in recognition that the decline is merely an ebb in the regular cycles of theory. A. Prescription: More Politics The most common prescription for recovering legal theory’s vibrancy is a greater participation in politics—scholars should eschew descriptive projects, especially those that might be used to bolster the conservative argument on an issue or in a case, as well as those critiques that appear purely academic, in favor of projects intended to influence the courts in progressive ways.134 One can certainly understand why this is a tempting prescription in light of the success of explicitly conservative legal theory and methods135 and concern that left-leaning legal academics have not taken up this charge.136 However, this demand for political engagement has unintended consequences: It legitimizes the current frameworks. As the Roberts Court further embraces neoliberal principles, persuading the Court means functioning within neoliberal logic and is therefore counterproductive for the revitalization of critical legal theory. Moreover, this political prescription tends to produce a reified notion of what counts as politics, limiting the political as well as intellectual potential of theoretical projects. For example, in the wake of the of the Court’s incremental move toward recognition of same-sex marriage in United States v. Windsor, 137 many progressive legal scholars have written on the subject hoping to nudge the Court toward full recognition. But in light of Nancy Fraser’s work, one should ask just what kind of recognition that would be—whether it would displace materialist claims or reify forms of identity.138 Full recognition of same-sex marriage is a destination toward which the Court is already heading and an area where the public discourse has largely already arrived. Emphasizing this area also participates in the ideology of erasure, leading many to believe that the current Court is making progressive interventions because it is progressive on identity and cultural issues, even though Windsor was handed down in a term in which the Court retrenched on significant materialist issues and embodied a number of blatantly neoliberal positions.139 Even if not writing for the Court, a legal scholar’s attempt to be useful to those in the profession who share her political goals risks constraining the legal profession and its own professional and disciplinary norms.140 In this way, the focus on concrete political effects helps foster legal thought’s “considerable capacity for resisting self-reflection and analysis,”141 which has only become more pronounced in the face of the neoliberalization of the academy as instrumental knowledge is increasingly privileged. When attempting to counter hegemony, what one needs to do is disrupt the legible—to expand the contours of what is considered political—not to accept the narrowly circumscribed zone of politics neoliberalism demarcates. Therefore, it is crucial not to judge critical legal scholarship according to whether its political impact is immediate or even known, and thus a turn to politics is not the remedy for legal theory’s marginalization. B. Prescription: More Normativity Some scholars recognize the danger of embracing a reified notion of politics that unwittingly reaffirms the status quo, and instead champion assertions of substantive morality to counteract the cold logics of pragmatism and efficiency.142 This proposed solution advocates a return to more substantive ideals of justice and equality. Although it may be true that change will ultimately require wresting these liberal and democratic ideals from neoliberalism and refilling their hollowed-out forms, this approach entails a number of pitfalls. The first is simply the inevitable question regarding moral claims: Whose morality is to be asserted? This question has created crisis on the left before, even producing some of the schisms among the crits recounted above. Neoliberalism does not have to contend with this issue—it foregrounds its formal nature and holds itself out as not needing to create a universal morality or set of values. More importantly, it claims to provide a structure in which one can keep one’s own substantive morals. Therefore, neoliberalism’s logic cannot be countered by moral claims without first disrupting its illusion of amorality. The ineffectiveness of the progressive critique of law and economics, based in claims of distributive justice and moral imperative, provides a clear example of how the neoliberal discourse can capture normative claims. The work of Martha McCluskey, one of the few legal scholars writing about neoliberalism in the domestic context over the last ten years, highlights the extent to which the “distributive justice” critique, which argues against the privileging of efficiency over equality and redistribution, fails to challenge the underlying logic.143 McCluskey illustrates how critics of law and economics who critique the approach’s inattention to redistribution have already ceded the central point, by arguing within the conventional views that “efficiency is about expanding the societal pie and redistribution is about dividing it.”144 “Neoliberalism’s disadvantage is not, as most critics worry, its inattention to redistribution, but to the contrary, its very obsession with redistribution as a distinctly seductive yet treacherous policy separate from efficiency.”145 In order to challenge this rationality, she explains, one cannot “misconstrue neoliberalism as a project to promote individual freedom and value-neutral economics at the expense of social responsibility and community morality.”146 One must instead recognize that neoliberalism has redefined social responsibility and community morality. Therefore, one must refuse the false dichotomy between the economic and cultural spheres (a division that allows the neoliberal discourse to displace cultural concerns to a moment after the economic concerns have been dealt with). Merely asserting the falsity of this separation is not sufficient. Neoliberalism has real effects in the world that strengthen its ideological claims.147 Therefore, it is not a struggle that can take place solely on the terrain of discourse or ideology. Like neoliberalism generally, law and economics does not hold itself out as infallible or as an embodiment of social ideals, but instead as the best society can do. It functions precisely on the logic that there is no alternative. Like Hayek’s theory, “law and economics is full of stories about how liberal rights and regulation designed to advance equality victimize the all-powerful market, undermining its promised rewards.”148 In light of this, it is a mistake to see neoliberalism as disavowing moral principles in favor of economic ones; it instead folds them into one another: “The Law and Economics movement is rooted in the moral ideal of the market as the social realization of individual liberty and popular democracy.”149 Neoliberalism’s approach presents itself not only as efficient, but also as just. Legal scholars need to recognize neoliberalism’s focus on the market is not only a form of morality, but also a powerful one. They cannot assume that in a battle of moralities the substantive communitarian ideal will win.150 Furthermore, the neoliberal framework, through its reconfiguration of the subject as an entrepreneur, justifies material inequalities—in contrast to liberalism’s mere blindness to them. Consequently, merely asserting the existence of material inequalities does not immediately undermine neoliberalism’s claims. Far from the engaged citizen who actively produces the polis in liberal theory, the neoliberal subject is a rational, calculating, and independent entity “whose moral autonomy is measured by her capacity for ‘self-care’—the ability to provide for her own needs and service her own ambitions.”151 The subject’s morality is not in relation to principles or ideals, but is “a matter of rational deliberation about costs, benefits, and consequences.”152 If efficiency is the morality of our time, the poor are cast not only as “undeserving” but also as morally bankrupt. Therefore, efficiency replaces not only political morality, but also all other forms of value. Therefore, critics are right that other forms of value have been crowded out; but the logic is deeper than they seem to realize. It goes beyond the scope of what is being done in the legal academy. It is a logic that organizes our time and therefore must be countered differently. More normativity is not the answer to legal theory’s marginalization because neoliberalism’s logic can accommodate even radically contradictory moralities under its claims of moral pluralism. Ethical claims of justice and community may need to be made, but one must first recognize that countering hegemony is harder than merely articulating an alternative; hegemony must be disrupted first. Disrupting neoliberalism’s logic thus entails not only recognizing that neoliberalism has a morality, but also taking that morality seriously. C. Prescription: Acceptance The final response of legal theorists to their field’s marginalization is to dismiss it as merely the regular ebb and flow of theory’s prominence.153 Putting it in terms of Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts, the contemporary moment is just the “normal science” of the paradigm brought about by the crits’ revolutionary moment in the 1970s and 1980s.154 The vitality, this narrative contends, will return when a competing paradigm emerges. There are several problems with this perspective on the decline. First, it entails an error in logic insofar as it takes an external perspective. Legal theory does not inevitably rise and fall but only according to the work being produced; or, to put it another way, this descriptive account of theory’s ebb can be a selffulfilling prophecy insofar as it decreases scholars’ motivation to pursue and receptivity toward theoretical projects. Second, legal scholars cannot be content with normal science when it has the kinds of consequences for democracy and economic inequality that neoliberal hegemony does. The Court is currently entrenching these principles at an unprecedented rate in areas of free speech, equal protection, and antitrust to name a few.155 At first, such acceptance appears to be what Janet Halley is advocating in “taking a break from feminism,”156 but upon closer inspection it is not. Halley is cautioning against the left’s nostalgia—concluding that operating under the banner of feminism and a preoccupation with “reviving” feminism looks backward instead of forward.157 Critical legal scholarship instead needs to be “self-critical” and to recognize that “how we make and apply legal theory arises out of the circumstances in which we recognize problems and articulate solutions.”158 Theory must arise from engagement with the current circumstances. Acceptance cannot be the solution; legal theory must produce the momentum to move forward. VII CONCLUSION: WHERE WE GO FROM HERE The way forward cannot entail a return to reified notions of theory any more than by a return to reified notions of politics. Critical legal scholars should not attempt to revitalize previous critical movements but, instead, reinvigorate the practice of critique within the legal academy. A. Why Critique Naming neoliberalism is necessary in order to counteract it. Without explicit identification, there can be no truly oppositional position. It also makes legible connections that would otherwise go unseen, as was the case with scholars writing about the decline. But there must also be a step beyond naming: critique. Critique means taking neoliberal rationality seriously. The approach must not be dismissive, merely pointing out neoliberalism’s inconsistencies, but instead must recognize that neoliberal rationality is inherently appealing. One cannot merely indict efficiency as contrary to more substantive values, but one also must recognize that efficiency is inextricably tied to beliefs about liberty, dignity, and individual choice, as well as corresponding beliefs about the capacities and limits of the state to effectuate change. No one is arguing that neoliberalism is the best of all possible worlds; in fact, its power comes precisely from abandoning such a claim. In recognizing its hegemonic status, legal scholars can understand the critical task as being more than just demystification. Neoliberal does not paper over inequalities after all; it justifies them. Ultimately, critique should function as a means of opening the conversation in ways that go beyond the picture of law painted by the Roberts Court—to refuse to allow the legal academy to be merely mimetic of a Court that is clearly embracing a neoliberal vision. Critique provides a means of thinking about law as not limited by what the markets can tolerate; it is the means through which one can discover a form of resistance that goes beyond nostalgia for the liberal welfare state. And finally, critique is simply a means of asserting that things can be different than they are in a world that constantly insists that there is no alternative.

Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 2 | Opponent: St Thomas Academy SK | Judge: Akhil Gandra
Counterplan Text: We advocate the entirety of the aff plan without the use of the words “structural violence”.

The counterplan is inherently competitive. Since we defend the entirety of the aff advocacy aside from a change in certain rhetoric a perm would be severance out of both the reps and the language of the 1AC.   

They misunderstand the meaning of the term “structural violence”. It is a specific term of art used in the sociological field of peace research that has been widely discredited by both critics and the terms creator.  

Structural violence” is a term coined by Johan Galtung, it refers to violence where no single decision maker is responsible- like poverty which results from the global economy. Gatlung 12
Galtung Institute 12
(https://www.galtung-institut.de/en/network/groups/anything-galtung/forum/topic/understanding-galtungs-violence-triangle-and-structural-violence/)

Theories of structural violence explore how political, economic and cultural structures result in the occurrence of avoidable violence, most commonly seen as the deprivation of basic human needs (will be discussed later). Structural theorists attempt to link personal suffering with political, social and cultural choices. Johan Galtung’s original definition included a lack of human agency; that is the violence is not a direct act of any decision or action made by a particular person but a result of an unequal distribution of resources.Here, we must also understand “institutional violence”. “Institutional violence” is often mistaken for structural violence, but this is not the case. “Institutional violence” should be used to refer to violence perpetrated by institutions like companies, universities, corporations, organisations as opposed to individuals. The fact that women are paid less at an establishment than men is an act of direct violence by that specific establishment. It is true that there is a relationship with structural violence as there is between interpersonal violence and structural violence. And Structural violence is the most problematic area to be addressed for conflict transformation.
Reliance on the vague concept of “structural violence” recreates oppression.  
Subpoint A: Theories of “structural violence” distract solutions to material conditions in favor of vague criticism of poorly defined systems. Existing structures will co-opt your criticism and the process trades off with more effective reforms.
1.Structural violence obscures analysis necessary to reduce poverty and violence- this card is on fire. Boulding 77
Kenneth Boulding, Prof Univ. of Michigan and UC Boulder,  Journal of Peace Research 1977; 14; 75 p.  Boulding p.   83-4

Finally, we come to the great Galtung metaphors of ’structural violence’ and ’positive peace’. They are metaphors rather than models, and for that very reason are suspect. Metaphors always imply models and metaphors have much more persuasive power than models do, for models tend to be the preserve of the specialist. But when a metaphor implies a bad model it can be very dangerous, for it is both persuasive and wrong. The metaphor of structural violence I would argue falls right into this category. The metaphor is that poverty, deprivation, ill health, low expectations of life, a condition in which more than half the human race lives, is ’like’ a thug beating up the victim and taking his money away from him in the street, -or it is ’like’ a conqueror stealing the land of the people and reducing them to slavery. The implication is that poverty and its associated ills are the fault of the thug or the conqueror and the solution is to do away with thugs and conquerors. While there is some truth in the metaphor, in the modem world at least there is not very much. Violence, whether of the streets and the home, or of the guerilla, of the police, or of the armed forces, is a very different phenomenon from poverty. The processes which create and sustain poverty are not at all like the processes which create and sustain violence, although like everything else in the world, everything is somewhat related to everything else. There is a very real problem of the structures which lead to violence, but unfortunately Galtung’s metaphor of structural violence as he has used it has diverted attention from this problem. Violence in the behavioral sense, that is, somebody actually doing damage to somebody else and trying to make them worse off, is a ’threshold’ phenomenon, rather like the boiling over of a pot. The temperature under a pot can rise for a long time without its boiling over, but at some threshold boiling over will take place. The study of the structures which underlie violence are a very important and much neglected part of peace research and indeed of social science in general. Threshold phenomena like violence are difficult to study because they represent ’breaks’ in the system rather than uniformities. Violence, whether between persons or organizations, occurs when the ’strain’ on a system is too great for its ‘strength’. The metaphor here is that violence is like what happens when we break a piece of chalk. Strength and strain, however, especially in social systems, are so interwoven historically that it is very difficulty to separate them. The diminution of violence involves two possible strategies, or a mixture of the two; one is the increase in the strength of the system, the other is the diminution of the strain. The strength of systems involves habit, culture, taboos, and sanctions, all these things, which enable a system to stand Increasing strain without breaking down into violence. The strains on the system are largely dynamic in character, such as arms races, mutually stimulated hostility, changes in relative economic position or political power, which are often hard to identify. Conflict of interest are only part of the strain on a system, and not always the most important part. It is very hard for people to know their interests, and misperceptions of interests take place mainly through the dynamic processes, not through the structural ones. It is only perceptions of interest which affect people’s behavior, not the ’real’ interests, whatever these may be, and the gap between perception and reality can be very large and resistant to change. However, what Galitung calls structural violence (which has been defined by one unkind commentator as anything that Galltung doesn’t like) was originally defined as any unnecessarily low expectation of life, an that assumption that anybody who dies before the allotted span has been killed, however unintentionally and unknowingly, by somebody else. The concept has been expanded to include all the problems off poverty, destitution, deprivation, and misery. These are enormously real and are a very high priority for research and action, but they belong to systems which are only peripherally related to the structures which, produce violence. This is not to say  that the cultures of violence and the cultures of poverty are not sometimes related, though not all poverty cultures are culture of violence, and certainly not all cultures of violence are poverty cultures. But the dynamics of poverty and the success or failure to rise out off ’it are of a complexity far beyond anything which the metaphor of structural violence can offer. While the metaphor of structural violence performed a ’service in calling attention to a problem, it may have done a disservice in preventing us from finding the answer.

2. Galtung’s theory of structural violence perpetuates the status quo of dominant states by offering an overly vague criticism of oppression. Lawler 89
Peter Lawler (1989) A question of values: A critique of Galtung's peace research, Interdisciplinary Peace Research: formerly Pacifica Review: Peace, Security and Global Change, 1:2, 27-55, DOI: 10.1080/14781158908412711 

In the late 1960's Galtung's foundational model of peace research was subjected to considerable criticism as part of a general upheaval within the peace research community. A group of young, mostly Scandinavian, radicals employed a neo-Marxist perspective to attack the assumptions of symmetry and ideological neutrality that formed the core of Galtung's argument (Schmid 1968, 1970; Olsen and Jarvad 1969; Eckhardt 1971; Dencik 1982). Though their primary target was American conflict research and its contribution to the analysis of the Vietnam War, they questioned also Galtung's assumption that the path to peace lay in the principles of integration and cooperation. For the radicals, Galtung's approach neglected the political-economy of relations between the developed and underdeveloped worlds and in its attempt to preserve a sym- metrical approach to violent conflict was guilty of 'idealistic universal- ism'. From the perspective of the oppressed, an argument for the further integration of the international system was tantamount to defending a status quo which reflected the interests of the dominant states and the beneficiaries of the world capitalist economy. Against this, the radicals called for a peace research that openly sided with the exploited and advocated the 'sharpening' of the various latent conflicts of interests that characterised global politics.

3. Resolving “structural violence” requires action by international powers, as they are the only bodies capable of amending existing “structures”. This reliance on current institutions preserves existing structures of dominance. Schmid 68
Peace Research and Politics; Herman Schmid; Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 217-232; 1968; Sage Publications; http://www.jstor.org/stable/423274

Peace research is an applied or 'oriented' science. An applied science has to be applied by somebody who has the power to apply it. In the case of peace research, this means there must be some kind of institutionalized link between peace re- searchers and decision-makers on the supranational level. Thus, the universalist ethos of peace research becomes operationalized into identification with the interests of the existing international system, that is the interests of those who have power 229 in the international system. So peace research becomes a factor supporting the status quo of the international power structure, providing the decision-makers of the system with knowledge for control, manipulation and integration of the system. That is the institutional aspect of peace research. The theoretical frame of reference dominating peace research closely cor- responds to the institutional needs: the peace researcher/specialist is trained in an ideology of internationalism; he has learned how to solve conflicts, how to integrate a system, how to avoid manifest organized violence, how to prevent major uprisings against the system; and he believes that what is good for the system is in the long run also good for its elements. His concept of peace is essentially a negative one, stressing the need for stable peace,38 and the 'common interest' he will have to fall back on is the avoidance of catastrophe. His positive concept of peace is not sui generis but a negation of his negative peace concept. The essence of peace research is concentrated in the concepts of control of the international sys- tem to prevent major breakdowns, and integration of the international system to make it more stable. That is the ideological aspect of peace research. The institutional and the ideological aspects presuppose and condition each other. To become applied, peace research must meet the needs of the decision- makers. To satisfy their concern about stable peace, peace researchers must ally themselves with the decision-makers of the international system. Given this situation, change of the system can not be advocated by peace research. Structural change would be a threat to the power-holders of the international system. Only adaptive change within the system is possible.

Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 4 | Opponent: Westwood RM | Judge: Lauren Burdt
Interpretation: The aff may only defend the limiting of qualified immunity for police officers. Lectric Law Library
http://www.lectlaw.com/def2/q063.htm

The defense of qualified immunity protects "government officials . . . from liability for civil damages insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known." Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800, 818 (1982). The rule of qualified immunity " `provides ample support to all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.' " Burns v. Reed, 500 U.S. 478, 494-95 (1991) (quoting Malley v. Briggs, 475 U.S. 335, 341 (1986)). "Therefore, regardless of whether the constitutional violation occurred, the officer should prevail if the right asserted by the plaintiff was not `clearly established' or the officer could have reasonably believed that his particular conduct was lawful." Romero v. Kitsap County, 931 F.2d 624, 627 (9th Cir. 1991) (emphasis added). Furthermore, "the entitlement is an immunity from suit rather than a mere defense to liability; .. . it is effectively lost if a case is erroneously permitted to go to trial." Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472 U.S. 511, 526 (1985).

Violation:
 

1. Extra T: The plan text explicitly says who will pay the liability – that’s not governed by QI

 
2. Border Patrol is not Police. My Pursuit
http://www.mypursuit.com/article-250/The_Differences_Between_a_Border_Patrol_and_a_Police_Officer_Career.html

Border Patrol is responsible for the safety of the borders, but within borders, Police Officers safeguard the citizens.  In contrast to border patrol officers, the police officers may be employed by the Federal, state or municipal government and is responsible for enforcing federal and state laws along with municipal ordinances.  They also help maintain peace in the community by keeping a check on anti-social elements.  A uniformed pro-active patrolling within the jurisdiction helps them control criminal activity and attend public calls for service.  They keep a documented record of their activities.
Standards:

Limits: Extra T and non topicality justifies an infinite number of unpredictable planks to affs that make neg prep impossible.  Limits is a voter. Rowland 84
(Robert C., Baylor U., “Topic Selection in Debate”, American Forensics in Perspective. Ed. Parson, p. 53-4)

The first major problem identified by the work group as relating to topic selection is the decline in participation in the National Debate Tournament (NDT) policy debate. As Boman notes: There is a growing dissatisfaction with academic debate that utilizes a policy proposition. Programs which are oriented toward debating the national policy debate proposition, so-called “NDT” programs, are diminishing both in scope and size. This decline in policy debate is tied, many in the work group believe, to excessively broad topics. The most obvious characteristic of some recent policy debate topics is extreme breadth. A resolution calling for regulation of land use literally and figuratively covers a lot of ground. National debate topics have not always been so broad. Before the late 1960s the topic often specified a particular policy change. The move from narrow to broad topics has had, according to some, the effect of limiting the number of students who participate in policy debate. First, the breadth of topics has all but destroyed novice debate. Paul Gaske argues that because the stock issues of policy debate are clearly defined, it is superior to value debate as a means of introducing students to the debate process. Despite this advantage of policy debate, Gaske believes that NDT debate is not the best vehicle for teaching beginners. The problem is that broad topics terrify novice debaters, especially those who lack high school debate experience. They are unable to cope with the breath of the topic and experience “negophobia,” the fear of debating negative. As a consequence, the educational advantages associated with teaching novice through policy debate are lost: “Yet all of these benefits fly out the window as rookies in their formative stage quickly experience humiliation at being caught without evidence or substantive awareness of the issues that confront them at a tournament.” The ultimate result is that fewer novices participate in NDT, thus lessening the educational value of the activity and limiting the number of debaters who eventually participate in more advanced divisions of policy debate. In addition to noting the effect on novices, participants argued that broad topics also discourage experienced debaters from continued participation in policy debate. Here, the claim is that it takes so much time and effort to be competitive on a broad topic that students who are concerned with doing more than just debate are forced out of the activity. Gaske notes, that “broad topics discourage participation because of insufficient time to do requisite research.” The final effect may be that entire programs wither cease functioning or shift to value debate as a way to avoid unreasonable research burdens. Boman supports this point: “It is this expanding necessity of evidence, and thereby research, which has created a competitive imbalance between institutions that participate in academic debate.” In this view, it is the competitive imbalance resulting from the use of broad topics that has led some small schools to cancel their programs. 

CX Checks Don’t solve
 

1. CI is a model for debate which means even if they solve individual cases, our interp is still better

2. 90 of understanding mechanisms for implementation is in the plan—failure to understand this process kills solvency and policy education. Elmore 80
(Prof. Public Affairs at University of Washington, PolySci Quarterly 79-80, p. 605)

The emergence of implementation as a subject for policy analysis coincides closely with the discovery by policy analysts that decisions are not self-executing. Analysis of policy choices matter very little if the mechanism for implementing those choices is poorly understood in answering the question, "What percentage of the work of achieving a desired governmental action is done when the preferred analytic alternative has been identified?" Allison estimated that in the normal case, it was about 10 percent, leaving the remaining 90 percent in the realm of implementation.

TVA
Drop the Debater
Competing interps

Tournament: Alta | Round: 4 | Opponent: San Marino ED | Judge: Paul Montreuil
Interpretation:  The aff must defend limiting qualified immunity for police officers.  

Limit has a variety of definitions, but they all mean “bound” not eliminate. COURT OF APPEALS OF MARYLAND 02
(SY-LENE OF WASHINGTON, INC. v. STARWOOD URBAN RETAIL II, LLC No. 132, September Term, 2002 COURT OF APPEALS OF MARYLAND 376 Md. 157; 829 A.2d 540; 2003 Md. LEXIS 455 July 29, 2003, Filed)
Definitions of the word "limit" include the following: (1) to assign within limits, to appoint, fix definitely, to specify; (2) to confine within limits, to set bounds to, to prohibit a person from something; (3) to border upon a country; (4) to beg within specified limits. Each of these definitions incorporates the concept of a boundary or restraint. To limit something is to define its extent, and in so doing, to quantify it. The suggestion that the concept of elimination is contained within the term limit conflicts with the idea that a limit defines an area or range.

B. Violation- the affirmative does not mandate a quantitative or qualitative restriction on qualified immunity, they eliminate it entirely 

1. Legal consensus- limit does not mean eliminate. COURT OF SPECIAL APPEALS OF MARYLAND 14
   (SIERRA CLUB, ET AL. v. DOMINION COVE POINT LNG, L.P. No. 2429, September Term, 2012 COURT OF SPECIAL APPEALS OF MARYLAND 216 Md. App. 322; 86 A.3d 82; 2014 Md. App. LEXIS 18; 44 ELR 20037 February 28, 2014, Filed)
   Before the Court of Appeals, the plaintiff argued that the lease was ambiguous and that parol evidence should be admitted to determine the parties' intent at the time the lease was signed. Id. at 165. The defendant countered, arguing that the plain language of the lease did not provide any upper or lower limit to the number of spaces that must be provided, and therefore, it could eliminate all the spaces. It also argued that because the language was clear, no parol evidence should be admitted. Id. at 166. The Court noted that HN11Go to this Headnote in the case.under the objective test of contract interpretation, if the written contract is clear the court will give effect to its plain meaning. It explained, however, that a contract is ambiguous if it could be "subject to more than one interpretation when read by a reasonably prudent person." Id. at 167. The Court then looked to the language of the contract, to answer the question  *18 of whether the term "limit" meant that the defendant could eliminate. Id. at 168. First, it reviewed the dictionary definition of the word "limit," and then addressed the parties' arguments regarding the various meanings of the term. After examining caselaw from other states, the Court concluded that the "limit" did not mean "eliminate" and ruled that the defendant could not deny plaintiff any parking spaces entirely. Id. at 169. The Court remanded the case back to the circuit court in order for it to consider parol evidence and determine the intended amount of spaces at the time of contracting. Id.

2. This case law represents broad precedent. COURT OF APPEALS OF ARIZONA 08
(COURT OF APPEALS OF ARIZONA, DIVISION ONE, DEPARTMENT E 2008 Ariz. App. Unpub. LEXIS 1013 May 1, 2008, Amended by Order Filed )
P34 We find support for our conclusion in Sy-Lene and Schuster. In Sy-Lene, the lease provided that the tenant would pay for each employee parking space as needed for its employees and provided that the "landlord reserves the right to limit the number of employee parking spaces to be provided Tenant". 829 A.2d at 543. After a dispute arose between the parties, the landlord told the retail tenant that it would provide no reduced-fee employee parking spaces. Id. The trial court dismissed the action and the special court of appeals affirmed, holding that the right to limit the number of spaces implicitly included the right to limit the number to zero. Id. at 543-45. The Maryland Court of Appeals granted a writ of certiorari and reversed. Id. at 544. The court of appeals held that the definition of the word "limit" did not incorporate the concept of elimination.  *23 Id. at 547. It then remanded the case to the trial court to determine the parties' intentions at the time of executing the lease as to what limit of spaces would be acceptable. Id. at 547-48.

Standards

1. Ground: Allowing the aff to abolish immunity access a different literature base over whether or not policing is a legitimate government function which fundamentally changes the focus of the debate and means none of our generics apply. Kills engagement because they never have to defend their aff against well researched objections

2. Jurisdiction: No definition of limit includes eliminate, its only justified by semantic gymnastics.  The topic could have been written to prohibit immunity but was not. They’ve failed their resolutional burden, you can vote negative on presumption

3. Legal precision: We cite an evolving case law from multiple courts proving a consensus that limit does not include eliminate. This makes our interpretation the most predictable - it’s a legal topic, we should focus on legal definitions over random dictionary cards or field contextual evidence with no intent to define. Predictability is key to advocacy skills – it’s the only way to ensure the aff has to defend their position.

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:
Competing interps
No RVIs:

Tournament: Loyola | Round: 3 | Opponent: Elite of Irvine | Judge: Cotan Lu
Counterplan Text: The insert aff actors will increase production of nuclear power through denatured molten salt reactors. Williams 16
Stephen Williams Software engineer and former technical writer.  Focuses now in many issues surrounding energy use, such as climate change, ocean acidification, energy poverty, and pollution. July 4, 2016. How Molten Salt Reactors Might Spell a Nuclear Energy Revolution, ZMEScience.com August 23, 2016 SH

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the International Energy Agency, the United Nations, the Obama Administration and even over 70 of climate scientists agree that we must ramp up nuclear power if we are going succeed in dealing with climate change. Because of its exceptional safety and low cost, perhaps MSR technology is a nuclear technology that most everyone can embrace.

MSRs create no longer-term radioactive waste and expend current waste stockpiles.  Williams 16
Stephen Williams Software engineer and former technical writer.  Focuses now in many issues surrounding energy use, such as climate change, ocean acidification, energy poverty, and pollution. July 4, 2016. How Molten Salt Reactors Might Spell a Nuclear Energy Revolution, ZMEScience.com August 23, 2016 SH

Conventional reactors use solid ceramic fuel rods containing enriched uranium. The fission of uranium in the fuel releases gases, such as xenon, which causes the fuel rods to crack. This cracking, in turn, makes it necessary to remove and replace the fuel rods well before most of the actinides (elements that remain radioactive for thousands of years) such as uranium have fissioned. This is why nuclear waste is radioactive for a very long time.¶ However, the actinides that remain in the cracked fuel rods is still an excellent source of fuel for reactors. France, for example, recycles the waste instead of burying it so that these actinides can be placed in new fuel rods and used to make more electricity.¶ Because MSRs use liquid fuel, the release of gases simply bubbles up, typically to an off-gas unit in the coolant loop (not shown in figure) where it can be removed. Since the liquid fuel is unaffected by the releases of gas, the fuel can be left in the reactor until almost all the actinides are fissioned, leaving only elements that are radioactive for a relatively short time (300 years or less). The result is that MSRs have no long term issue with regard to nuclear waste. Not only do MSRs not have a long term waste issue, they can be used to dispose of current stockpiles of nuclear waste by using those stockpiles as fuel. Even stockpiles of plutonium can be disposed of this way. In fact, conventional reactors typically use only 3-to-5 of the available energy in their fuel rods before the fuel rods must be replaced because of cracking. MSRs can use up most of the rest of the available fuel in these rods to make electricity.

Tournament: St Marks | Round: Octas | Opponent: Westwood RM | Judge: Panel
China is in decline and using nationalism to quell political dissent–US military presence is necessary to ensure a soft landing and avoid lashout
Kaplan 2016 - Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security
Robert, "Eurasia's Coming Anarchy," Foreign Affairs, March/April
As China asserts itself in its nearby seas and Russia wages war in Syria and Ukraine, it is easy to assume that Eurasia’s two great land powers are showing signs of newfound strength. But the opposite is true: increasingly, China and Russia flex their muscles not because they are powerful but because they are weak. Unlike Nazi Germany, whose power at home in the 1930s fueled its military aggression abroad, today’s revisionist powers are experiencing the reverse phenomenon. In China and Russia, it is domestic insecurity that is breeding belligerence. This marks a historical turning point: for the first time since the Berlin Wall fell, the United States finds itself in a competition among great powers.
Economic conditions in both China and Russia are steadily worsening. Ever since energy prices collapsed in 2014, Russia has been caught in a serious recession. China, meanwhile, has entered the early stages of what promises to be a tumultuous transition away from double-digit annual GDP growth; the stock market crashes it experienced in the summer of 2015 and January 2016 will likely prove a mere foretaste of the financial disruptions to come.
Given the likelihood of increasing economic turmoil in both countries, their internal political stability can no longer be taken for granted. In the age of social media and incessant polling, even autocrats such as Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin feel the need for public approval. Already, these leaders no doubt suffer from a profound sense of insecurity, as their homelands have long been virtually surrounded by enemies, with flatlands open to invaders. And already, they are finding it harder to exert control over their countries’ immense territories, with potential rebellions brewing in their far-flung regions.
The world has seen the kind of anarchy that ethnic, political, and sectarian conflict can cause in small and medium-size states. But the prospect of quasi anarchy in two economically struggling giants is far more worrisome. As conditions worsen at home, China and Russia are likely to increasingly export their troubles in the hope that nationalism will distract their disgruntled citizens and mobilize their populations. This type of belligerence presents an especially difficult problem for Western countries. Whereas aggression driven by domestic strength often follows a methodical, well-developed strategy—one that can be interpreted by other states, which can then react appropriately—that fueled by domestic crisis can result in daring, reactive, and impulsive behavior, which is much harder to forecast and counter.
As U.S. policymakers contemplate their response to the growing hostility of Beijing and Moscow, their first task should be to avoid needlessly provoking these extremely sensitive and domestically declining powers. That said, they cannot afford to stand idly by as China and Russia redraw international borders and maritime boundaries. The answer? Washington needs to set clear redlines, quietly communicated—and be ready to back them up with military power if necessary.

Any sign of weakness by the US risks Chinese domination of the SCS– then there is no turning back
Auslin 2/18 - resident scholar and the director of Japan Studies at AEI
Michael, "Asian escalation: Why China picked Woody Island for its first South China Sea missiles," www.aei.org/publication/asian-escalation-why-china-picked-woody-island-for-its-first-south-china-sea-missiles/
Woody Island, then, is a perfect stepping-stone for Beijing to methodically extend its network of militarized bases throughout its claimed territories in the South China Sea, and possibly beyond. If China places SAMs on its Spratly Islands possessions, joining the almost certain deployment of jet fighters on the larger islands, it will come close to covering the entire South China Sea, putting at risk freedom of overflight. Since no neighboring country can match its buildup or forcibly eject it from its new bases, China is betting that its moves will result in the neutralization of opposition over time. Beijing’s goal is to get all other capitals in the region to accept its predominant position in an area vital to the global economy, and which is transited by tens of thousands of ships per year and crossed by dozens of international air flights per day.
The result is a region whose balance of power is rapidly shifting. We are witnessing the creation of an environment where one nation may soon have the strength to assert its own claims over common waterways and airways, should it ever desire to do so. That would be serious blow to U.S. strategy, which since the end of World War II has sought to prevent the emergence of any one dominant power in Asia.
Should China achieve its goals, the result will not necessarily be war. Rather, it may well be the tacit recognition by all countries in one of the world’s most vital regions that might makes right, and that rules are determined simply by the strongest power. It is another mark of the growing global disorder that threatens the liberal international system.

The US Navy is the last line of defense against Xi going to war in order to stoke nationalism – even if it is not the case, allies perceive it that way and will militarize because of the plan
Kaplan 2016 - Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security
Robert, "Eurasia's Coming Anarchy," Foreign Affairs, March/April
Slow growth is also leading China to externalize its internal weaknesses. Since the mid-1990s, Beijing has been building a high-tech military, featuring advanced submarines, fighter jets, ballistic missiles, and cyberwarfare units. Just as the United States worked to exclude European powers from the Caribbean Sea beginning in the nineteenth century, China is now seeking to exclude the U.S. Navy from the East China and South China Seas. Its neighbors have grown worried: Japan, which views Chinese naval expansion as an existential threat, is shedding its pacifism and upgrading its forces, and Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Vietnam have modernized their militaries, too. What were once relatively placid, U.S.-dominated waters throughout the Cold War have become rougher. A stable, unipolar naval environment has given way to a more unstable, multipolar one.
But as with Russia, China’s aggression increasingly reflects its cresting power, as its economy slows after decades of acceleration. Annual GDP growth has dropped from the double-digit rates that prevailed for most of the first decade of this century to an official 6.9 percent in the third quarter of 2015, with the true figure no doubt lower. Bubbles in the housing and stock markets have burst, and other imbalances in China’s overleveraged economy, especially in its shadow banking sector, are legion.
Then there are the growing ethnic tensions in this vast country. To some degree, the Han-dominated state of China is a prison of various nations, including the Mongols, the Tibetans, and the Uighurs, all of whom have in varying degrees resisted central control. Today, Uighur militants represent the most immediate separatist threat. Some have received training in Iraq and Syria, and as they link up with the global jihadist movement, the danger will grow. In recent years, there has been a dramatic upsurge of bombings linked to Uighur separatism in the region of Guangxi, a transit point on the smuggling route Uighurs take to Vietnam—proof that terrorism will not be confined to minority areas in China’s west. Beijing has tried to pacify these movements with economic development—for example, proposing the Silk Road Economic Belt in Central Asia in order to undermine Uighur nationalism there. But if such immense projects falter because of China’s own slowing economy, separatism could explode into greater violence.
Even more so than Putin, Xi, with years of experience serving the Communist Party in interior China, must harbor few illusions about the depth of China’s economic problems. But that does not mean he knows how to fix them. Xi has responded to China’s economic disarray by embarking on an anticorruption drive, yet this campaign has primarily functioned as a great political purge, enabling him to consolidate China’s national security state around his own person. Since decisions are no longer made as collectively as before, Xi now has greater autonomy to channel domestic anxiety into foreign aggression. In the last three decades, China’s leadership was relatively predictable, risk averse, and collegial. But China’s internal political situation has become far less benign.
China’s ambitions reach further than Russia’s, but they have generated less concern in the West because they have been more elegantly applied. Whereas Putin has sent thugs with ski masks and assault rifles into eastern Ukraine, Xi’s aggression has involved much smaller, incremental steps, making it maddeningly difficulty for the United States to respond without appearing to overreact. He has sent his coast guard and merchant ships (rather than exclusively his navy) to harass Philippine warships, dispatched an oil rig into waters claimed by both China and Vietnam (but for only a few weeks), and engaged in land-reclamation projects on contested islands and reefs (but ones that are devoid of people). And since these acts of brinkmanship have taken place at sea, they have caused no hardship for civilians and practically no military casualties.
Other Chinese moves are less subtle. Besides expanding its maritime claims, China is building roads, railways, and pipelines deep into Central Asia and is promising to invest tens of billions of dollars in a transportation corridor that will stretch from western China across Pakistan to the Indian Ocean, where China has been involved in port projects from Tanzania to Myanmar (also called Burma). As China’s economic troubles worsen, the elegance of its aggression may wear off and be replaced by cruder, more impulsive actions. Xi will find it harder to resist the urge to use Asian maritime disputes to stoke nationalism, a force that brings a measure of cohesion to societies threatening to fragment.

US Naval presence is key to deter China from rapid expansion and ensures coop
Kaplan 2016 - Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security
Robert, "Eurasia's Coming Anarchy," Foreign Affairs, March/April
Planning for such contingencies does not mean planning a war of liberation, à la Iraq. (If China and Russia are ever to develop more liberal governments, their people will have to bring about change themselves.) But it does mean minimizing the possibility of disorder. To avoid the nightmarish security crises that could result, Washington will need to issue clear redlines. Whenever possible, however, it should communicate these redlines privately, without grandstanding. Although congressional firebrands seem not to realize it, the United States gains nothing from baiting nervous regimes worried about losing face at home.
In the case of Russia, the United States should demand that it stop initiating frozen conflicts. As Putin attempts to distract Russians from economic hardship, he will find it more tempting to stir up trouble in his neighborhood. Lithuania and Moldova probably top his list of potential targets, given their corrupt and easily undermined democratic governments. (Moldova is already nearing the point of political anarchy.) Both countries are also strategically valuable: Moldova could provide Russia with the beginning of a gateway to the Balkans, and Lithuania offers a partial land bridge to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. For Putin, frozen conflicts carry the advantage of being undeclared, reducing the odds of a meaningful Western response. That’s why the response must be in kind: if Putin makes behind-the-scenes moves in Lithuania or Moldova, the West should intensify sanctions against Russia and increase the tempo of military exercises in central and eastern Europe.
At the very least, NATO must dramatically ramp up intelligence sharing among eastern European countries and be ready to quickly deploy more aircraft, ground forces, and special operations forces to the region. The hundreds of U.S. soldiers, marines, and sailors stationed on a rotating basis in frontline NATO states of the former Warsaw Pact constitute such a small presence that they are unlikely to deter Russian aggression; several battalions or even a brigade is needed. More broadly, the United States will need to create a military tripwire—one that deters Russia from launching a limited strike across its borders but does so without provoking a crisis. Thus, the U.S. counter to Russia’s growing “anti-access/area-denial” capabilities in the highly populated Baltic region will have to be more fine-tuned than its response to China’s in the emptier South China Sea.
Washington also needs to set clear redlines with China. In the South China Sea, it cannot allow the country’s land-reclamation projects to graduate to the establishment of a so-called air defense identification zone—airspace where China reserves the right to exclude foreign aircraft—as the regime declared in the East China Sea in 2013. Such moves form part of a strategy of deliberate ambiguity: the more unclear and complex a military standoff becomes, the more threatened the United States’ maritime dominance will be. If China does announce such a zone in the South China Sea, Washington must respond by increasing U.S. naval activity in the vicinity and expanding military aid to regional allies. Already, the U.S. Navy has begun freedom-of-navigation operations, however halfhearted, within the 12-nautical-mile boundary of sovereign authority that China has claimed around its man-made islands. If these operations do not become regular and more explicit, China will not feel deterred.

Specifically submarines are key

Hussey 16
(http://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2016/09/19/the_us_nuclear_gambit_110083.html)
In addition, each sub missile would carry more warheads than needed to cover a target footprint thus carrying redundant warheads. The weight of the missile would also be heavier than optimum and this would reduce the target coverage of the missile as well as its range, requiring our submarines to operate in less geographic ocean area than is optimum, leaving them more vulnerable to detection. The navy has emphasized over and over again that the critical key to its deterrent value is the number of submarines available to the Commander in Chief not so much the total number of warheads. Too few submarines—which the Ploughshares plan would give us—wouldn’t work.
An arms race around the region incentivizes first strikes war
Haddick 2014 -an independent contractor at U.S. Special Operations Command
Robert, Fire on the Water, Naval Institute Press, p. 41-44
Of the ten known, suspected, and impending nuclear weapon states (the United States, Russia, United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel, and Iran), six have military forces in the Asia-Pacific region. Should the Global Trends Hobbesian scenario occur due to a withdrawal of the U.S. forward security presence, the number of nuclear weapon states would almost certainly rise. That outcome would assuredly result in greater instability, as multisided security competitions would very likely break out. Military planners in the region would have to defend against multiple and possibly shifting adversary alliance combinations. The addition of more nuclear players would result in the need for greater preparation and stockpiling by all, because previously safe levels of nuclear munitions would no longer be safe enough. New players would mean further reductions in warning time during crises. Some leaders might conclude that striking first at the hint of crisis is the only way to survive. Under the Hobbesian pathway, the odds of nuclear disaster would rise substantially. Should the United States withdraw its forward military presence, Japan has the capacity to rapidly become a large nuclear weapons state. Japan has decades of experience with its nuclear enterprise, which operates fifty electrical generation reactors and has fully developed nuclear fuel reprocessing facilities and expertise.11 Japan already possesses roughly nine tons of weapons-usable plutonium, enough for about two thousand nuclear weapons- more than the number of strategic nuclear weapons allowed on active service by the United States and Russia under the New START TreatyY In April2013 the Japanese government decided to proceed with the opening of the Rokkasho reprocessing facility, which will have the capacity to produce an additional nine tons of plutonium annually from spent fuel at Japan's nuclear power plants.13 As a world leader in industrial machining and electronics, there is no doubt that Japan also has the ability to manufacture the other exotic components of nuclear weapons. Japanese officials remind observers concerned about its nuclear capacity that the country's nuclear enterprise is closely supervised by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). But it is also the case that Japan already has all of the ingredients required to quickly become a major nuclear weapons state should a change in the security environment in the region compel its leaders to make that decision. Japan also already possesses the means to deliver nuclear warheads to targets anywhere in the region. Japan's civilian space agency has operated since 1955 and has deep experience with liquid- and solid-fuel missiles. Japan put its first satellite into Earth orbit in 1970 and has recorded scores of successful space launches.14 Japan's experience with satellite construction and its participation in the International Space Station program demonstrate the country's expertise with payloads, sensors, telemetry, and space maneuveringY Japan's current boosters, with the capacity to lift over ten tons into low earth orbit, show missile capacity easily exceeding that required for military intercontinental ballistic missiles. 16 In sum, Japan possesses the technical expertise and capacity to become an intercontinental missile power in short order, should a security vacuum created by a U.S. withdrawal from the region make that necessary. Although South Korea would take more time than Japan, it too could become a nuclear weapons state. Indeed, some political leaders there have recently agitated for this course. If such action is taken, these leaders may be responding to popular wishes; after North Korea detonated its third nuclear device in February 2013, two public opinion surveys in South Korea showed that 64 to 66 percent of those surveyed believed that South Korea should have its own nuclear arsenalY At the same moment, South Korean leaders pressed the U.S. government to modify an agreement between the two countries so that South Korea could build the same nuclear fuel reprocessing capacity that Japan has been allowed since the early 1980s. Such a capacity would allow South Korea to reprocess the spent fuel from its twenty-two nuclear power plants into weapons-grade plutonium.18 As with Japan, South Korea possesses the industrial and electronics expertise to fashion the other components required for deliverable nuclear weapons. South Korean officials deny that the government is interested in nuclear weapons and remind observers that the country's nuclear enterprise remains under IAEA supervision. But the country is just a few steps away from having the capacity to produce substantial amounts of bomb-grade nuclear material, a capability that a large majority of the public seems to support. South Korea recently demonstrated a new class of cruise missile with a one-thousand-kilometer range. In a 2013 exercise, the South Korean navy scored hits on targets with the new cruise missile launched from a destroyer and a submarine.19 During the 1980s the United States fitted similar cruise missiles with nuclear warheads, and Israel is thought to have done the same with its submarine-launched cruise missiles.20 Launched from ground positions inside South Korea, the missiles have the range to reach not only all of North Korea, but also Tokyo, Beijing, and Shanghai. When deployed on South Korean submarines, an even greater number of targets come in range. Thus, although South Korea would take longer than Japan, it already has most of the nuclear enterprise and missile capacity it needs to become an effective nuclear weapons state. Perhaps equally important for political leaders responsible for such a decision, the South Korean public backs such a move. It seems rational to surmise that the intensity of such a view would only increase should either the United States reduce its security presence or Japan acquire its own nuclear arsenal. India is already a substantial nuclear and missile power and has the capacity to further expand its capabilities and inventories. India is thought to have eighty to one hundred nuclear weapons based around plutonium cores (India conducted three underground nuclear tests in 1998). The nation also possesses up to 11.5 metric tons of reactor-grade plutonium in spent nuclear fuel which in theory could be reprocessed into enough bomb-grade plutonium for at least two thousand additional weaponsY India has an active missile program and is adding new missiles to its inventory that will allow India to deliver nuclear strikes across the Asian region. In April2012 India tested the Agni-5 missile, with additional testing in 2013_22 The missile has a range of five thousand kilometers-sufficient to reach targets throughout China and into the western Pacific. 23 India is also testing a submarine-launched ballistic missile, the deployment of which would increase the survivability of India's nuclear capacity. 24 India will thus soon have the capability to deliver military power into the western Pacific, should its interests require it to do so-a development policymakers and military planners in the region will have to take into account. Taiwan presents perhaps the least likely, but also the most provocative, case of nuclear weapons potential in the region. In the 1970s and again in the 1980s, Taiwan launched clandestine nuclear fuel reprocessing programs aimed at providing it with its own nuclear deterrent against mainland China. Both times, the United States forced Taiwan to abandon these programs.25 Taiwan has stored spent nuclear fuel at three two-unit nuclear power plants, which could be reprocessed into bomb-grade plutonium if Taiwan built a facility to do so, as it attempted to do clandestinely in the 1970s and 1980s. Taiwan also possesses the industrial and electronics expertise to assemble a deliverable nuclear weapon. Taiwan is developing an indigenously produced long-range land-attack cruise missile that in theory could be armed with a nuclear warhead. The missile, named Cloud Peak, has a range of 1,200 and possibly 2,000 kilometers and will be mounted on mobile transporters.26 The leadership in Beijing would view a decision by Taiwan to acquire nuclear weapons as highly provocative and quite possibly a casus belli. Beijing would likely view such a development as tantamount to a declaration of independence, something that Beijing in the past has stated it would resist with force. Under current circumstances, Taiwan appears to have no interest in this course. But a withdrawal of the U.S. security presence would be a different matter, especially if it led to nuclear and missile races elsewhere in the region. In that event a Taiwanese nuclear program could go from being a highly remote case to perhaps the most likely path to war in the region.

Tournament: Greenhill Round Robin | Round: 6 | Opponent: Kinkaid JY | Judge: Panel
Nuclear power is key to stable desalinization – demand is high and rising
IAEA 15 -- widely known as the world's "Atoms for Peace" organization within the United Nations family. Set up in 1957 as the world's centre for cooperation in the nuclear field, the Agency works with its Member States and multiple partners worldwide to promote the safe, secure and peaceful use of nuclear technologies, “New Technologies for Seawater Desalination Using Nuclear Energy,” IEAE TecDoc Series, 2015
 It is anticipated that by 2025, 33 of the world population, or more than 1.8 billion people, will live in countries or regions without adequate supplies of water unless new desalination plants become operational. In many areas, the rate of water usage already exceeds the rate of replenishment. Nuclear reactors have already been used for desalination on relatively small-scale projects. In total, more than 150 reactor-years of operating experience with nuclear desalination has been accumulated worldwide. Eight nuclear reactors coupled to desalination projects are currently in operation in Japan. India commissioned the ND demonstration project in the year 2008 and the plant has been in continuous operation supplying demineralised (DM) quality water to the nuclear power plant and potable quality to the reservoir. Pakistan has launched a similar project in 2010. However, the great majority of the more than 7500 desalination plants in operation worldwide today use fossil fuels with the attendant emission of carbon dioxide and other GHG. Increasing the use of fossil fuels for energy-intensive processes such as large-scale desalination plants is not a sustainable long-term option in view of the associated environmental impacts. Thus, the main energy sources for future desalination are nuclear power reactors and renewable energy sources such as solar, hydro, or wind, but only nuclear reactors are capable of delivering the copious quantities of energy required for large-scale desalination projects. Algeria is participating in an IAEA’s CRP in the subject related to “New technologies for seawater desalination using nuclear energy’’ with a project entitled “Optimization of coupling nuclear reactors and desalination systems for an Algerian site Skikda”. This project is a contribution to the IAEA CRP to enrich the economic data corresponding to the choice of technical and economical options for coupling nuclear reactors and desalination systems for specific sites in the Mediterranean region

Desalination is k2 provide for the world’s growing water demands
Johnston ’15 (Chris, mAY 27TH, staffwriter the guardian on global issues, “Desalination: the quest to quench the world's thirst for water”, Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/27/desalination-quest-quench-worlds-thirst-water~-~-ghs//sk)
The average Briton uses 150 litres of water a day; the average American gets through 570 litres of the stuff. The world is getting thirstier and the global demand for fresh water is rising by 640bn litres a year.¶ Population growth is one factor, not only the need for drinking water and sanitation but also the need to produce more food. Agriculture accounts for 70 of water use.¶ Even the push for biofuels to reduce consumption of fossil fuels has an unexpected consequence: between 1,000 and 4,000 litres of water are needed to produce just one litre of biofuel.¶ While reducing consumption is one way of helping to address the water crisis on an individual level, it is far from the complete solution. Something on a larger scale is also needed: desalination.¶ As climate change makes rainfall less predictable and droughts more common, a growing number of countries are turning to desalination. The term is used to refer to removing salt from both seawater and subterranean “brackish” water, as well as the treatment of waste water (aka sewerage) to make it drinkable.¶ Some environmentalists have long opposed desalination because of the energy the process demands, as well as other considerations such as the impact of sucking in large quantities of seawater from the ocean.¶ But technological advances in recent years have altered the equation. The most common form of desalination is reverse osmosis; it involves forcing water through cartridges that contain thin-film composite polyamide membranes, which trap salt and other impurities but allow the fresh water through.¶ Randy Truby, comptroller of the International Desalination Association, says that advances in manufacturing processes have allowed 450 sq ft of membrane to be crammed into each cartridge, compared with 300 sq ft when they first came on the market. But treating seawater still requires pressure of about 80 bar, 40 times more than car tyres. That is why treating seawater is more energy-intensive than brackish or waste water, which require less force.¶ The location of a seawater desalination plant also makes a difference, Truby adds: while the salt content of water off the coast of California is about 34,000 parts per million, the figure in the Middle East is more like 40,000.¶ No alternative¶ Saudi Arabia is the country that relies most on desalination – mostly of seawater. The US is in second place. It uses mainly brackish and waste water although later this year it will open one of the world’s largest seawater desalination plants in Carlsbad, San Diego.¶ Truby says: “In many places there is no alternative – certainly the Middle East and places like Singapore, the Canary Islands and the Caribbean have to look to the sea. Those that have a choice, like Europe and the US, China, Japan, will try conservation and re-use and brackish treatment and use seawater desalination as a way to top-up and provide some drought-proofing.”¶ The desalination plant in Carlsbad will use the reverse osmosis process to produce fresh water. Photograph: Gregory Bull/AP¶ Desalination remains about twice as expensive as treating rainwater or waste water, at about $3 (£1.95) per cubic metre, but the economics depend on a number of variables, explains Professor Raphael Semiat of Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa.¶ He says 3.5 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity are needed to desalinate 1 cubic metre of seawater – 1.3kWh to pump seawater to the plant and 2.2kWh for the reverse osmosis process.¶ Pumping a cubic metre of fresh water distances of more than 200km requires more energy than desalinating the same amount of seawater, according to Semiat. In addition, many plants produce the bulk of their water at night when there is less demand for electricity, and thus utilise power that would otherwise go to waste.¶ Philip Davies, reader in mechanical engineering and design at Aston University in Birmingham, argues that desalination is not an expensive way of producing drinking water.¶ He adds: “The trouble is most distribution systems don’t allow us to distinguish between drinking water or water used for sanitation. It’s also very difficult to put differential costing on water to reflect merits of its use, because at the end of the day you’ve got to make water affordable to everybody. There are much cheaper ways to economise on water than desalination … we should be re-using water for sanitation or irrigation.”¶ Davies points out that reverse osmosis is not ideal for developing countries because the maintenance of the membranes required to keep them running effectively is more problematic in a country like India.¶ Most desalination on the subcontinent is of brackish water that contains high levels of impurities, meaning the membranes can easily become clogged: “They are just filters and they get blocked up like anything else unless you have the right sort of pre-treatment.”¶ The expense of operating a desalination plant is another issue in developing countries. While NGOs can provide seed funding, they are less able to cover running costs.¶ One solution could be a micro-enterprise project Davies has been involved with near Jodhpur in India. As well as producing desalinated water, it generates incomes from farmers who pay to have their seeds pressed to produce castor oil, and provides refrigeration for ripening bananas.¶ There is also a growing effort to reduce the environmental impact of desalinating brackish water. The salt recovery rate is typically about 50, meaning that the waste salty brine is often injected back into the ground in places such as India and Pakistan.¶ Saltwater greenhouses¶ Such a strategy is not sustainable because it increases the salinity of soil or rivers further downstream. Davies says increasing the amount of salt being removed to between 70 and 90 solves that problem, but requires more energy – although he has devised a system of solar power to keep usage to a minimum.¶ The academic is also involved in a project in Somaliland, which faces the twin challenges of rapid population growth and limited water resources. It is one area using seawater greenhouses, which produce water for irrigation by pumping seawater into the greenhouse and piping it over honeycomb cardboard pads that provide a large area for evaporative cooling.¶ According to Charlie Paton, who founded Seawater Greenhouse Ltd two decades ago, a seawater greenhouse cools the air by up to 15 degrees and increases humidity to as much as 90 even in some of the world’s most arid places. Davies says they can reduce the amount of water needed to produce a kilogram of produce from hundreds to tens of litres.¶ Researchers continue to seek to improve the technology behind reverse osmosis. Adel Sharif, professor of water engineering and process innovation at the University of Surrey, co-developed a new form of desalination called manipulated osmosis in 2003.¶ Thames Water’s desalination plant at Beckton in east London can produce 150m litres of water a day. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images¶ He says the technique helps to remove impurities such as limescale before the reverse osmosis process, which reduces the amount of energy needed by as much as 30, as well as increasing the lifespan of the membranes and reducing maintenance costs.¶ The first plant using manipulated osmosis began operating in Gibraltar in March 2009. A second opened in Oman later that year, and another opened in 2010. The company founded by Sharif to commercialise the technology, Modern Water, is listed on the AIM stock market in London, but he admits it has struggled to win contracts and may end up being bought by a larger desalination player.¶ Many desalination companies are eyeing China, which has just 7 of the world’s freshwater but a fifth of its population. About 400 cities face serious water shortages and Beijing aims to quadruple its seawater desalination capacity to 3.6bn litres a day by 2020.¶ Even London now has a seawater desalination plant. The city and the southeast of England is a “water-stressed area”, says Simon Earl, head of water production for Thames Water. However, the plant is not routinely used and is there “in case of severe drought”, like the one that occurred in 2011 and 2012 after two dry winters.¶ Surprisingly, there is no wastewater recycling in London, although Earl says building that capacity – or a new reservoir or pumping water from other parts of Britain – are options for coping with rising demand.¶ As the world’s population continues to rise, the pressure on water resources are only going to increase. It is yet to be seen whether technological advances will be able to meet the demand.
Water shortages in developing countries reinforces poverty, famine, and structural violence – also independently the worse impact because it prevents any further progress
Cribb 10 (Julian Cribb is a Fellow of the Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering. He is former Director, National Awareness for CSIRO and Science Editor of The Australian newspaper. He was national foundation president of the Australian Science Communicators (ASC), president of the National Rural and Resources Press Club, a member of CSIRO advisory committees for agriculture, fisheries and entomology.  He has served as a Director of the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), the Crawford Fund, the Secretariat for International Landcare, CSIRO Publishing, the Australian Minerals and Energy Environment Foundation and the National Science and Technology Centre, Questacon. He was the creator of “Future Harvest” the global public awareness campaign for the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). Cribb, Julian. “Coming Famine : The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid It.” Berkeley, CA, USA: University of California Press, 2010. 15-6. ebrary collections. Ghs-kw)
Some observers also claim a link between food insecurity and terrorism, pointing out that hungry countries are among those most likely to furnish terrorism recruits. In 2002, heads of state from fifty countries met at a development summit in Mexico where they discussed the role of poverty and hunger as a breeding ground for terrorism. “No-one in this world can feel comfortable or safe while so many are suffering and deprived,” UN secretary general Kofi Annan told them. The president of the UN General Assembly, Han Seung-Soo, added that the world’s poorest countries were a breeding ground for violence and despair. The Peruvian president Alejandro Toledo added, “To speak of development is to speak also of a strong and determined fight against terrorism.” 10 Around the world many guerrilla and insurgent causes—such as Shining Path, the Tamil Tigers, and Abu Sayyaf—have claimed injustice in land ownership and use as one of their motivating causes. A lack of water is a key factor in encouraging terrorism. Mona El Kody, the chair of the National Water Research Unit in Egypt told the Third World Water Forum that living without an adequate level of access to water created a “non-human environment” that led to frustration, and from there to terrorism. “A non-human environment is the worst experience people can live with, with no clean water, no sanitation,” she said, adding that this problem was at its most acute in the Middle East, where 1 percent of the world’s freshwater is shared by 5 percent of the world’s population. Ms. El Kody added that inadequate water resources had the additive effect of reducing farming and food production, thereby increasing poverty—another factor that can lead to terrorism. 11 Most of the “new” conflicts are to be found in Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia—the result of a cycle of constant famine, deprivation, and periodic violence, leading in inevitable sequence to worse hunger, greater deprivation, and more vicious fighting. Food and economic insecurity and natural resource scarcities . . . can be major sources of conflict. When politically dominant groups seize land and food resources, deny access to other culturally or economically marginalized groups, and cause hunger and scarcities, violence often flares. In Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Sudan, food crises resulting from drought and mismanagement of agriculture and relief and development aid led to rebellion and government collapse, followed by even greater food shortfalls in ensuing years of conflict. Denial of the right to food has been linked to uprisings and civil war in Central America and Mexico. Food insecurity is also integral to civil conflicts in Asia. Competition for resources has generated cycles of hunger and hopelessness that have bred violence in Sri Lanka as well as Rwanda. 12 These afflicted regions are generally places disconnected from the global economic mainstream, where strong-man governments arise and just as quickly crumble, having only political quicksand on which to build a foundation for stability and progress. This is vital to an understanding of what is going wrong with global food production: in nearly all these countries, food is of the first importance, and only after you have enough food can you form a government stable enough to deliver water, health care, education, opportunity for women, justice, and economic development. By neglecting or reducing support for basic food production— as many have during the past twenty-five years—in order to spread aid across these equally deserving causes, the world’s aid donors may unintentionally have laid the foundation for future government failure and conflict.

Tournament: Greenhill Round Robin | Round: 6 | Opponent: Kinkaid JY | Judge: Panel
Clinton wins now but it’s close – NOW is the chance for Trump to pull ahead Russonello 9/16
Russonello, Giovanni. "Poll Shows Tight Race for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton." The New York Times. September 16, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/16/us/politics/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-poll.html. JD
*Methodology Underlined in the card
Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic nominee, has the support of 46 percent of likely voters nationwide, to 44 percent for Mr. Trump, the Republican, including those who said they were leaning toward a candidate. Looking more broadly at all registered voters, Mrs. Clinton holds a wider edge, 46 to 41 percent. In a four-way race, Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton are tied at 42 percent each. Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, has the support of 8 percent of likely voters, and the Green Party nominee, Jill Stein, takes 4 percent. The third-party candidates draw their strongest support from younger voters. Twenty-six percent of voters ages 18 to 29 say they plan to vote for Mr. Johnson, and another 10 percent back Ms. Stein. A little more than one in five political independents say they will vote for one of the third-party candidates. Discontent with the major party candidates is widespread. Among those who say they intend to vote for Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton, slightly more than half express strong support. The rest say that they harbor reservations about their candidate, or that they are simply voting to thwart the other nominee. Over all, just 43 percent of likely voters describe themselves as very enthusiastic about casting a ballot in November. Fifty-one percent of Mr. Trump’s supporters say they are very enthusiastic about voting; 43 percent of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters say they are very enthusiastic. The race has clearly grown tighter in recent weeks. National polling averages show that Mrs. Clinton’s margin over Mr. Trump has narrowed from eight points in early August to two points today. Mrs. Clinton found herself under attack last week for suggesting that half of Mr. Trump’s supporters held views that made them “deplorables,” and for her campaign’s attempts to conceal her pneumonia diagnosis. The Times/CBS News poll was conducted from Sept. 9 to 13, so many of those interviewed were aware of the controversies. Mr. Trump hired new campaign leadership in mid-August and has been more disciplined in his public statements. His poll numbers have been steadily rising. Mrs. Clinton continues to outpace Mr. Trump among women, nonwhites and younger voters, while Mr. Trump leads among whites, 57 to 33 percent. Among white women, the candidates are virtually tied: 46 percent for Mrs. Clinton and 45 percent for Mr. Trump. Mrs. Clinton’s support is notably strong among college graduates, particularly whites. She leads by 11 points among white likely voters with a college degree; if polling holds, she would be the first Democrat in 60 years to win among this group. This is the first Times/CBS News poll of the election cycle to include a measure of likely voters. The nationwide telephone survey reached 1,433 registered voters and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points. To achieve a sample that reflected the probable electorate, these voters were weighted by their responses to questions about voting history, attention to the campaign and likelihood of voting. With Mrs. Clinton sidelined by illness this week, Mr. Trump has vigorously pressed his case. He promoted a new plan to support working parents on Tuesday, and released a partial account of his medical status on Wednesday during a taping of “The Dr. Oz Show.”

Public popularity supports nuclear energy despite the Fukushima disaster – best polls prove
Riffkin 15 Gallup, Inc., 3-30-15, "U.S. Support for Nuclear Energy at 51," (http://www.gallup.com/poll/182180/support-nuclear-energy.aspx Gallup, WP

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
Vicki, The Hill, 1/21, “Moody’s model gives Dem candidate advantage in 2016,” http://thehill.com/policy/finance/266668-moodys-model-gives-dem-candidate-advantage-in-2016 Recut by WP
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. 

Trump strongly supports nuke power – means rollback
Follett 16 Andrew Follett, 2-20-2016, "Here’s Where The 2016 Candidates Stand On Nuclear Power," http://dailycaller.com/2016/02/20/heres-where-the-2016-candidates-stand-on-nuclear-power/  Daily Caller, WP

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 16John Siciliano, 1-10-2016, "The 2016 politics of nuclear energy," Washington Examiner , WP http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-2016-politics-of-nuclear-energy/article/2579855  

The presidential election may offer hope for a resurgence of interest in nuclear energy. And if a Republican wins the White House, it's more likely that the centerpiece of that effort, a controversial nuclear waste site at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, will move forward. Republicans stand for what they call the "law of the land," referring to the fact that Congress chose Yucca Mountain to be the nation's nuclear waste dump, and that has not changed despite President Obama's and congressional Democrats' success in upending the project and focusing instead on wind and solar power. But even with a president who favors nuclear energy, it will still prove difficult to build the site to take radioactive waste from nearly 100 power plants. Nuclear power is one of the cleanest forms of electricity, yet the question of what to do with waste continues to fester. Many people see Yucca Mountain as the answer, but opponents say it's unsafe. But both sides agree that building more nuclear plants hinges on waste disposal. It pits the administration against lawmakers and exposes a rift between the pro-nuke and anti-nuke wings of the environmental movement. A big barrier to the nuclear option is price. Ben Zycher, senior energy fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said new nuclear reactors cost far too much, especially since natural gas is so cheap. That could sideline nuclear energy and Yucca Mountain this election year. Yucca Mountain's main adversary, Nevada Democrat Harry Reid, is retiring from Congress at the end of the year, but Zycher said other Nevada officials will step into the breach. "It may be a case without Reid in the Senate the path would be eased, but that's not particularly obvious," he said. David McIntyre, spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, charged with licensing the dump, agrees, saying it "would be immensely difficult" to start back up after so many years of administration stalling. And Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton is "not going to endorse it," Zycher said. Litigation and 2016 Rod McCullum, the Nuclear Energy Institute's director of used fuel issues, calls managing nuclear waste the "most technically simple, but politically complicated things we do." It might arise in the presidential election because President Obama has stalled longstanding nuclear waste policy, defying Congress, many states and the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which designates Yucca Mountain as America's long-term nuclear waste repository. Obama's efforts to hamstring Yucca during his first term helped keep Reid loyal. But both are leaving Washington, and federal courts have ruled that the administration could not kill the Yucca project without congressional consent and while continuing to collect money from utilities and states to build it. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2013 dealt a blow to the administration by ordering the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to complete its work on licensing the facility, which it recently did despite Reid having choked off the commission's funding. McCullum said the commission has been "eeking" along.

Trump win means he will nuke ISIS – results in massive civilian casualties and Middle East destabilization. Hobbus 15
R. Hobbus 15, J.D., investigative journalist specializing in international politics, “Trump: I Will Absolutely Use A Nuclear Weapon Against ISIS,” 8/10, Real News Right Now, http://realnewsrightnow.com/2015/08/trump-i-will-absolutely-use-a-nuclear-weapon-against-isis/
NEW YORK, Ny. – In response to a question regarding his policy on ISIS, Republican presidential candidate and billionaire Donald Trump told Meet the Press on Sunday that as Commander-in-Chief, he would authorize the use of nuclear weapons to combat Islamic extremism. “Let’s face it, these people are barbarians,” Trump said. “And thanks to Obama’s failed policy in Iraq and Syria, they’re beheading Christians all over the world.” Mr. Trump said he’s already conferred with a number of high-level active military officials and has put together a comprehensive strategy to defeat the Islamic State within his first one hundred days in office. “It starts with the deployment of four or five of our Ohio-class nuclear submarines to the Persian Gulf,” Trump said. “We’re going to hit them and we’re going to hit them hard. I’m talking about a surgical strike on these ISIS stronghold cities using Trident missiles.” The Trident is a submarine-launched ballistic missile equipped with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, or MIRVs. With a payload of up to fourteen reentry vehicles, each carrying a 362-pound thermonuclear warhead with a yield of 100 kilotons, a single Trident has roughly seventy times the destructive power of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Trump’s plan to use thermonuclear weapons against ISIS-held areas such as the Syrian city of Al-Raqqah would result in an astronomically high number of civilian casualties, according to CNN military analyst Peter Mansoor. “Al-Raqqah alone has a population of over two hundred-thousand people, the vast majority of whom are not affiliated in any way with the Islamic State,” Mansoor said. “A strike of this magnitude would not only result in the loss of millions of innocent lives and infrastructure, but it would set diplomacy and stability in the region back at least a hundred years.”

ME war goes nuclear – causes extinction. Russel 9
Russell 9 – Senior Lecturer in the Department of National Security Affairs @ Naval Postgraduate School
James, “Strategic Stability Reconsidered: Prospects for Nuclear War and Escalation in the Middle East,” Online
Strategic stability in the region is thus undermined by various factors: (1) asymmetric interests in the bargaining framework that can introduce unpredictable behavior from actors; (2) the presence of non-state actors that introduce unpredictability into relationships between the antagonists; (3) incompatible assumptions about the structure of the deterrent relationship that makes the bargaining framework strategically unstable; (4) perceptions by Israel and the United States that its window of opportunity for military action is closing, which could prompt a preventive attack; (5) the prospect that Iran’s response to pre-emptive attacks could involve unconventional weapons, which could prompt escalation by Israel and/or the United States; (6) the lack of a communications framework to build trust and cooperation among framework participants.  These systemic weaknesses in the coercive bargaining framework all suggest that escalation by any the parties could happen either on purpose or as a result of miscalculation or the pressures of wartime circumstance. Given these factors, it is disturbingly easy to imagine scenarios under which a conflict could quickly escalate in which the regional antagonists would consider the use of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. It would be a mistake to believe the nuclear taboo can somehow magically keep nuclear weapons from being used in the context of an unstable strategic framework. Systemic asymmetries between actors in fact suggest a certain increase in the probability of war – a war in which escalation could happen quickly and from a variety of participants. Once such a war starts, events would likely develop a momentum all their own and decision-making would consequently be shaped in unpredictable ways. The international community must take this possibility seriously, and muster every tool at its disposal to prevent such an outcome, which would be an unprecedented disaster for the peoples of the region, with substantial risk for the entire world.

Tournament: Greenhill | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Lexington NB | Judge: Panel
Japan’s economy is on the brink now – slow growth means one push collapses the economy. AFP 9/8.
AFP (Agence France-Presse is an international news agency headquartered in Paris, France. Founded in 1944, AFP is the third largest news agency in the world, after the Associated Press and Reuters.), Japan economy barely grows in April-June: revised data, 9/8/16, http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/world/1081092/japan-economy-barely-grows-in-april-june-revised-data
Japan's economy barely grew in the April-June quarter, revised data showed Thursday, supplying the latest failing report card for the prime minister's policy blitz. Growth in the world's third-largest economy came in at 0.2 percent on-quarter, slightly better than a 0.0 percent preliminary estimate last month, as weak exports dented activity. On an annualised basis, the economy expanded a revised 0.7 percent, compared with a slight 0.2 percent expansion in the preliminary data. That is still off a 2.1 percent annualised growth rate seen in the first quarter of the year. Japanese officials are under pressure to deliver as economists increasingly write off Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's years-long bid to cement a lasting recovery, dubbed Abenomics. The Tokyo stock market opened lower shortly after the announcement of the revised data, with the benchmark Nikkei index falling 0.18 percent in the first minutes of trade. The dollar, meanwhile, was trading at 101.80 yen in early Tokyo trade compared with 101.73 yen in New York late Wednesday. The weak growth figures will heap pressure on the Bank of Japan for more action when it meets later this month. Tokyo recently announced a whopping 28 trillion yen ($275 billion) package aimed at kick-starting growth, after Britain's June vote to quit the European Union sent financial markets into a tailspin and sparked a rally in the yen. "Japan's economy is only managing this weak, fragile growth," Yasunari Ueno, chief market economist at Mizuho Securities, said in a commentary. "Exports are unlikely to be the engine of recovery. With corporate profits set to decline this year, it's tough to see wage growth spurring consumer spending or firms stepping up their own investments. "Another rise in the yen could tip the economy into a recession." The resurgent yen is threatening corporate Japan's bottom line -- aggravating broader concerns about growth. Investors tend to buy Japan's currency as a safe bet in times of turmoil or uncertainty. But it makes exporters less competitive overseas and hits their profits. The problem was highlighted recently as many of the country’s best-known firms, including Sony and Toyota, reported lower profits in the three months to June. Abe's plan -- a mix of massive monetary easing, government spending and red-tape slashing -- initially brought the yen down from record highs and set off a stock market rally. But promises to cut through red tape have been slower, and Abe's plan to buoy Japan's once-booming economy have looked increasingly unrealistic. His spend-for-growth policies have set Japan apart from some of its rich nation counterparts, including Germany, which has been reluctant to endorse them, seeing it as an ineffective way to stimulate the economy.

Nuclear energy is key to Japan’s economy – banning it would push them to recession. Bastasch 14.
Michael Bastasch, One Year Without Nuclear Power Has Japan Scrambling For Relief, 9/15/14, http://dailycaller.com/2014/09/15/one-year-without-nuclear-power-has-japan-scrambling-for-relief/
Greenpeace is celebrating the one-year anniversary of Japan idling its last nuclear power plant, calling it an “inspiring lesson for people across the globe.” But what Greenpeace fails to mention is that Japan’s energy economy has been in chaos since the last of about 50 nuclear reactors went idle last year in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. Since Fukushima, the Japanese economy has been hampered by rising energy costs and struggling electric utilities that have been propped up by government subsidies in order to keep the lights on amid rising power costs. In 2010, before the Fukushima nuclear incident, the total cost of power generation in Japan was 7.5 trillion yen. But after the Fukushima meltdown, power generation costs rose sharply to 9.6 trillion yen in 2011 and 10.6 trillion yen in 2012, according to a 2013 report by the Institute for Energy Economics, Japan. Why the huge price increase? After Fukushima, Japan began idling its nuclear power plants pending safety investigations, meaning the country began using more natural gas and oil — which are imported — to make up the slack. IEEJ estimates that relying more on imported gas and oil cost Japan 1.2 trillion yen between 2010 and 2012. Power prices could have risen higher, reports IEEJ, had power demand not fallen throughout the country, companies could have spent 3.6 trillion on power generation during that time. Greenpeace sees this as a good thing. They see the nuclear industry as one that has “sucked billions from taxpayers” and “has defied logical justification, whether it be judged on economic, environmental, security or human health grounds.”
Japanese economic collapse drags down the global economy and sparks Asian conflict. Auslin 09
Michael, Resident Scholar – American Enterprise Institute, “Japan's Downturn Is Bad News for the World”, Wall Street Journal, 2-17, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123483257056995903.html
If Japan's economy collapses, supply chains across the globe will be affected and numerous economies will face severe disruptions, most notably China's. China is currently Japan's largest import provider, and the Japanese slowdown is creating tremendous pressure on Chinese factories. Just last week, the Chinese government announced that 20 million rural migrants had lost their jobs. Closer to home, Japan may also start running out of surplus cash, which it has used to purchase U.S. securities for years. For the first time in a generation, Tokyo is running trade deficits -- five months in a row so far. The political and social fallout from a Japanese depression also would be devastating. In the face of economic instability, other Asian nations may feel forced to turn to more centralized -- even authoritarian -- control to try to limit the damage. Free-trade agreements may be rolled back and political freedom curtailed. Social stability in emerging, middle-class societies will be severely tested, and newly democratized states may find it impossible to maintain power. Progress toward a more open, integrated Asia is at risk, with the potential for increased political tension in the world's most heavily armed region. This is the backdrop upon which the U.S. government is set to expand the national debt by a trillion dollars or more. Without massive debt purchases by Japan and China, the U.S. may not be able to finance the cost of the stimulus package, creating a trapdoor under the U.S. economy. So far, Japan's politicians have been unable to find a way out of this mess. While another $53 billion stimulus package works its way through parliament, fully one-third of Japan's prefectures have instituted emergency economic stabilization measures. But the big issues elude short-term solutions. Though Japan's leaders are currently cutting back on military expenditures and domestic services, they're unable to agree on budgets or reform plans. They have no strategic road map for reining in the yen, opening up to international competition, or taking an economic leadership role in Asia that will promote growth and strengthen democratic, market-oriented societies. Things don't have to turn out this way. If Japan's leaders can craft a monetary policy that ends Japan's deflationary spiral by carefully expanding the money supply, recommit to structural reform, and halt the yen's rise, they can jump-start economic growth. They should also ignore the powerful domestic agriculture lobby and embrace a robust free-trade agenda, which would help them as well as the rest of Asia. Mrs. Clinton's visit cannot be a simple photo opportunity. This trip needs to result in a clear U.S.-Japan approach to restoring confidence and rebuilding a robust and open international system. Without action, Japan and America may go over the cliff together, dragging Asia and the world down with them.

Econ collapse leads to escalating instability and nuke war.  Harris and Burrows 09
Harris and Burrows, 9 – *counselor in the National Intelligence Council, the principal drafter of Global Trends 2025, member of the NIC’s Long Range Analysis Unit “Revisiting the Future: Geopolitical Effects of the Financial Crisis”, Washington Quarterly, http://www.twq.com/09april/docs/09apr_burrows.pdf)
Increased Potential for Global Conflict Of course, the report encompasses more than economics and indeed believes the future is likely to be the result of a number of intersecting and interlocking forces. With so many possible permutations of outcomes, each with ample opportunity for unintended consequences, there is a growing sense of insecurity. Even so, history may be more instructive than ever. While we continue to believe that the Great Depression is not likely to be repeated, the lessons to be drawn from that period include the harmful effects on fledgling democracies and multiethnic societies (think Central Europe in 1920s and 1930s) and on the sustainability of multilateral institutions (think League of Nations in the same period). There is no reason to think that this would not be true in the twenty-first as much as in the twentieth century. For that reason, the ways in which the potential for greater conflict could grow would seem to be even more apt in a constantly volatile economic environment as they would be if change would be steadier. In surveying those risks, the report stressed the likelihood that terrorism and nonproliferation will remain priorities even as resource issues move up on the international agenda. Terrorism’s appeal will decline if economic growth continues in the Middle East and youth unemployment is reduced. For those terrorist groups that remain active in 2025, however, the diffusion of technologies and scientific knowledge will place some of the world’s most dangerous capabilities within their reach. Terrorist groups in 2025 will likely be a combination of descendants of long established groups inheriting organizational structures, command and control processes, and training procedures necessary to conduct sophisticated attacks and newly emergent collections of the angry and disenfranchised that become self-radicalized, particularly in the absence of economic outlets that would become narrower in an economic downturn. The most dangerous casualty of any economically-induced drawdown of U.S. military presence would almost certainly be the Middle East. Although Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons is not inevitable, worries about a nuclear-armed Iran could lead states in the region to develop new security arrangements with external powers, acquire additional weapons, and consider pursuing their own nuclear ambitions. It is not clear that the type of stable deterrent relationship that existed between the great powers for most of the Cold War would emerge naturally in the Middle East with a nuclear Iran. Episodes of low intensity conflict and terrorism taking place under a nuclear umbrella could lead to an unintended escalation and broader conflict if clear red lines between those states involved are not well established. The close proximity of potential nuclear rivals combined with underdeveloped surveillance capabilities and mobile dual-capable Iranian missile systems also will produce inherent difficulties in achieving reliable indications and warning of an impending nuclear attack. The lack of strategic depth in neighboring states like Israel, short warning and missile flight times, and uncertainty of Iranian intentions may place more focus on preemption rather than defense, potentially leading to escalating crises. Types of conflict that the world continues to experience, such as over resources, could reemerge, particularly if protectionism grows and there is a resort to neo-mercantilist practices. Perceptions of renewed energy scarcity will drive countries to take actions to assure their future access to energy supplies. In the worst case, this could result in interstate conflicts if government leaders deem assured access to energy resources, for example, to be essential for maintaining domestic stability and the survival of their regime. Even actions short of war, however, will have important geopolitical implications. Maritime security concerns are providing a rationale for naval buildups and modernization efforts, such as China’s and India’s development of blue water naval capabilities. If the fiscal stimulus focus for these countries indeed turns inward, one of the most obvious funding targets may be military. Buildup of regional naval capabilities could lead to increased tensions, rivalries, and counterbalancing moves, but it also will create opportunities for multinational cooperation in protecting critical sea lanes. With water also becoming scarcer in Asia and the Middle East, cooperation to manage changing water resources is likely to be increasingly difficult both within and between states in a more dog-eat-dog world.

Tournament: Loyola | Round: 3 | Opponent: Elite of Irvine NM | Judge: Caton Lu
Phasing out nuclear power empirically increases use of coal and gas. Other forms of green energy are too expensive. Adler 16

Mother Jones; Bernie Sanders Wants to Phase Out Nuclear Power; Ben Adler; April 5, 2016, 6:00 AM; http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/04/grist-bernie-sanders-wants-to-phase-out-nuclear-power-plants

Is hastening nuclear power's demise a good idea? Holthaus, citing Nordhaus' frequent collaborator Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute, arguesthat if you ramp down nuclear too quickly, it will lead to an increase in the use of coal or gas.¶ "The net effect of nuclear retirements will generally be increasing emissions."¶ That's also the view of Devin Hartman, electricity policy manager for the R Street Institute, a center-right think tank, and a former energy market analyst at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. He points out that retired nuclear plants in the Northeast and California have been mostly replaced by increased natural gas usage. And in Japan and Germany, where the governments have been shutting down nuclear reactors since the Fukushima meltdown, coal use has spiked.¶ "Shutting down nuclear plants would create a little more demand for energy efficiency and renewables, but the net effect of nuclear retirements will generally be increasing emissions," Hartman says.¶ That's partly because there is excess coal- and gas-burning capacity in the current energy system. While generating an additional megawatt-hour of electricity from existing solar or wind facilities can be cheaper than burning coal, building a whole new set of wind turbines is more expensive than just feeding more gas into your existing gas-fired plant.¶ Holthaus cites a report from centrist think tank Third Way on US nuclear plant retirements; it projects that shuttered plants would lead to more natural gas usage and increased CO2 emissions.

MSRs are easier to make and mass-produce making them a cheaper alternative to burning coal. Williams 16
Stephen Williams Software engineer and former technical writer.  Focuses now in many issues surrounding energy use, such as climate change, ocean acidification, energy poverty, and pollution. July 4, 2016. How Molten Salt Reactors Might Spell a Nuclear Energy Revolution, ZMEScience.com August 23, 2016 SH

How do we get all 7 billion people on the planet (perhaps 9 billion by 2050) to agree to drastically cut their CO2 emissions? The answer: make it in their immediate self-interest by providing cheap C02-free energy, energy cheaper than they can get by burning coal.¶ MSRs can be made cheaply because they are simple compared to conventional reactors that have large pressurized containment domes and many engineered (and not inherent) and redundant safety systems. Having far few parts than conventional reactors, MSRs are inherently cheaper. This simplicity also allows MSRs to be small, which in turn makes them ideal for factory-based mass production (unlike conventional reactors). The cost efficiencies associated with mass production further drive down the cost and can make the ramp up of nuclear power much faster.

Turns and outweighs the case, nuclear power has saved more people than it’s killed  – natural gas causes more death per kilowatt and – our evidence is comparative and takes into account waste. Kharecha and Hansen 13

Pushker A. Kharecha and James E. Hansen Pushker Kharecha is an associate research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University’s Center for Climate Systems Research. James E. Hansen, Goddard’s former director, is an adjunct professor at the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University., Fossil Fuels Do Far More Harm Than Nuclear Power, APRIL 15, 2013, Earth Institute Coloumbia University EE

Using historical electricity production data and mortality and emission factors from the peer-reviewed scientific literature, we found that despite the three major nuclear accidents the world has experienced — at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima — nuclear power prevented an average of over 1.8 million net deaths worldwide between 1971-2009. This amounts to at least hundreds and more likely thousands of times more deaths than it caused. An average of 76,000 deaths per year were avoided between 2000-2009. Likewise, we calculate that nuclear power prevented an average of 64 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent net GHG emissions globally between 1971-2009. This is about 15 times more emissions than it caused. It is equivalent to the past 35 years or 17 years of CO2 emissions from coal burning in the US or China, respectively. In effect, nuclear energy production has prevented the building of hundreds of large coal-fired power plants. To compute potential future effects, we started with projected nuclear energy supply for 2010-2050 from an assessment by the UN International Atomic Energy Agency that takes into account the effects of the Fukushima accident. We assumed that all of this projected nuclear energy is canceled and replaced entirely by energy from either coal or natural gas. We calculated that this nuclear phaseout scenario would lead to an average of 420,000 to 7 million deaths and 80–240 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent net GHG emissions globally. This emissions range corresponds to 16-48 of the “allowable” cumulative CO2 emissions between 2012-2050 if the world chooses to aim for a target atmospheric CO2 concentration of 350 parts per million by around the end of this century. In other words, projected nuclear power could reduce the CO2 mitigation burden for meeting this target by as much as 16–48. The largest uncertainties and limitations of our analysis stem from the assumed values for impacts per unit electric energy produced. However, we emphasize that our results for both prevented mortality and prevented GHG emissions could be substantial underestimates, because (among other reasons) our mortality and emission factors are based on analysis of Europe and the US (respectively), and thus neglect the fact that fatal air pollution and GHG emissions from power plants in developing countries are on average substantially higher per unit energy produced than in developed countries. Our findings also have important implications for large-scale “fuel switching” to natural gas from coal or from nuclear. Although natural gas burning emits less fatal pollution and GHGs than coal burning, it is far deadlier than nuclear power, causing about 40 times more deaths per unit electric energy produced. Also, such fuel switching is practically guaranteed to worsen the climate problem for several reasons. First, carbon capture and storage is an immature technology and is therefore unlikely to constrain the resulting GHG emissions in the necessary time frame. Second, electricity infrastructure generally has a long lifetime (e.g., fossil fuel power plants typically operate for up to 50 years). Third, potentially usable natural gas resources (especially unconventional ones like shale gas) are enormous, containing many hundreds to thousands of gigatonnes of carbon (based on a recent comprehensive assessment. For perspective, the atmosphere currently contains about 830 gigatonnes of carbon, of which 200 gigatonnes are from industrial-era fossil fuel burning. We conclude that nuclear energy – despite posing several challenges, as do all energy sources – needs to be retained and significantly expanded in order to avoid or minimize the devastating impacts of unabated climate change and air pollution caused by fossil fuel burning.

Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 1 | Opponent: West KN | Judge: Rodrigo
Fission Technology Exist – countries are moving back towards it WNA 16
World Nuclear Association. "Nuclear Reactors and Radioisotopes for Space." Nuclear Reactors for Space. February 2016. Accessed August 22, 2016. http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-nuclear-applications/transport/nuclear-reactors-for-space.aspx. WHB
After a gap of several years, there is a revival of interest in the use of nuclear fission power for space missions. While Russia has used over 30 fission reactors in space, the USA has flown only one - the SNAP-10A (System for Nuclear Auxiliary Power) in 1965. Early on, from 1959-73 there was a US nuclear rocket programme – Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Applications (NERVA) – which was focused on nuclear power replacing chemical rockets for the latter stages of launches. NERVA used graphite-core reactors heating hydrogen and expelling it through a nozzle. Some 20 engines were tested in Nevada and yielded thrust up to more than half that of the space shuttle launchers. Since then, "nuclear rockets" have been about space propulsion, not launches. The successor to NERVA is today's nuclear thermal rocket (NTR). Another early idea was the US Project Orion, which would launch a substantial spacecraft - about 1000 tonnes - from the earth using a series of small nuclear explosions to propel it. The project was commenced in 1958 by General Atomics and was aborted in 1963 when the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty made it illegal, but radioactive fallout could have been a major problem. The Orion idea is still alive, as other means of generating the propulsive pulses are considered. The United Nations has an Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA)* implements decisions of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) set up in 1959 and now with 71 member states. UNOOSA recognises “that for some missions in outer space nuclear power sources are particularly suited or even essential owing to their compactness, long life and other attributes” and “that the use of nuclear power sources in outer space should focus on those applications which take advantage of the particular properties of nuclear power sources.” It has adopted a set of principles applicable “to nuclear power sources in outer space devoted to the generation of electric power on board space objects for non-propulsive purposes,” including both radioisotope systems and fission reactors.

Nuclear rockets are the most effective form of space travel – weight means better for cargo transport Zolfagharifard 16
Daily Mail; Nasa wants to use nuclear rockets to get to Mars: Space agency claims the technique is 'most effective way' of reaching red planet; Ellie Zolfagharifard; 20:39 EST, 18 March 2016; http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3499441/Nasa-wants-use-nuclear-rockets-Mars-Space-agency-claims-technique-effective-way-reaching-red-planet.html CE

Nuclear thermal propulsion is 'the most effective' way of sending humans to Mars. ¶ That's according to Nasa administrator and former astronaut, Charles Bolden, who made the statement when speaking to Congress this week. ¶ 'We are on a journey to Mars and most people believe that, in the end, nuclear thermal propulsion will be the most effective form of propulsion to get there,' he said. He didn't, however, expand on details on how quickly Nasa hoped the technology could get astronauts to Mars. ¶ HOW NUCLEAR PROPULSION WORKS¶ Nuclear rockets are rocket engines that use a nuclear fission reactor to heat propellant.¶ Fission entails the splitting of atoms of uranium in a nuclear reactor ¶ The idea is relatively simple; a nuclear reactor will be used, similar to the ones used for power generation today.¶ However, rather than using the reactor to heat water into steam, it will heat propellant instead and run it out of a rocket nozzle for thrust.¶ ¶ Nasa is betting on nuclear propulsion because it weighs almost half as much as a chemical rocket without reducing thrust. ¶ This means larger payloads of cargo can be carried on the spacecraft and they can also be made to travel far faster.¶ And unlike existing technology which uses defined trajectories, a nuclear engine also allows a spacecraft to manoeuvre throughout flight.¶ Nasa's announcement follows news earlier this week that Russia plans to test a nuclear engine in 2018.¶ It says the technology could help cosmonauts reach Mars in just six weeks. ¶ This compares to the 18 months spacecraft currently need to get to Mars, and could make Russia the first nation to land humans on the red planet. ¶ The $274 million project, which was originally overseen by the space agency RosCosmos in 2010, has now become the responsibility of nuclear group, Rosatom.¶ 'A nuclear power unit makes it possible to reach Mars in a matter of one to one and a half months, providing capability for manoeuvring and acceleration,' Sergey Kirienko, head of Rosatom told RT .

Fission is key to exploration and mining Palaszewski 06
 (October 2006, Bryan Palaszewski, Master of Science Degree in Mechanical Engineering, "Atmospheric Mining in the Outer Solar System,” http://mdcampbell.com/TM-2006-214122AtmosphericMining.pdf, ngoetz) WHB from File
Mining in the outer solar system is an important option for exploration and exploitation (refs. 5 to 10). Launching and transporting all of the materials for exploration from Earth is expensive and may make the idea of exploration untenable. The large reserves of atmospheric gases in the outer planets are an excellent resource for fuels and other life sustaining or colony building gases (ref. 10). The moons of the planets can be a great resource for oxygen, ceramic precursors, and metals. Outer planet moons, such as Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, may have reserves of liquid and frozen water. Specialized factories created in the outer solar system can leverage all of these resources and allow for extended stays in that cold, dark environment. In-Situ Resources Utilization Many decades of research have been focused on using the natural resources of the solar system to allow sustainable human exploration and exploitation of the environments of the planets and the Sun (refs. 4 to 23). Everything from preliminary experiments in propellant production to creation of human colonies in space has been proposed (refs. 11 to 23). Studies such as those of reference 10 have shown that the outer planets can provide the rich resources for interstellar exploration and the eventual human colonization of the galaxy. As human exploration is initiated in the outer solar system, the travel time and other natural hazards (planetary radiation belts, solar coronal mass ejections, etc.) will create new challenges for the explorers. In-situ resources will likely be a great asset in this exploration. Shielding from radiation can be created with rock from the moons or with hydrogen and other liquefied gases from the planetary atmospheres. High speed travel will be augmented by nuclear fission (ref. 24) and advanced future fusion propulsion (ref. 25), fueled by the atmospheric gases.

Access to the moon and beyond is key to human survival Cheetham and Pastuf 08
(Brad and Dan, Research Associate at the Goddard Space Flight Center NASA Academy students in Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Buffalo, “Lunar Resources and Development: A brief overview of the possibilities for lunar resource extraction and development,” http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/~cheetham/index_files/Moon20Paper20441.pdf) WHB from file
The Moon has helped define existence on Earth since life began. It is one of the most visible and important celestial bodies which humans and other animals ever see. The Earth and Moon are tied to each other and the destiny of the human race is critically dependent on the Moon. As the population of Earth grows and the available resources on earth dwindle, serious problems will begin to develop (Lewis 11). Future generations of the Earth require that the Moon be utilized just as today we require oil and previous generations required the discovery of the “New World” by Columbus to prosper. The Moon is approximately 240,000 miles from Earth. Its mass results in a force of gravity 1/6th of that felt on Earth. The Moon lacks an atmosphere, and as a result the surface has never been weathered and only experiences changes due to asteroid and meteor impacts. These impacts potentially leave rocks and evidence of early Earth that have been preserved for billions of years (Aeronautics). Furthermore, there exists, on the lunar surface, numerous valuable raw materials. As a result of these attributes the Moon presents endless value to humans both now and in the future. This paper will examine the various reasons for returning to the Moon permanently and begin to discuss the technical developments and solutions that will allow the beginning of the next phase of human expansion to begin.

Tournament: St Marks | Round: Octas | Opponent: Westwood RM | Judge: Panel
Nuclear subs are key to the US Japan security alliance
Takahashi, 15—Senior Fellow of the National Institute for Defense Studies and currently Deputy Director of the Office of Strategic Planning of Ministry of Defense in Tokyo (Sugio, “Rebuilding Deterrence: Post-2015 Defense Guidelines Challenges Facing the U.S. Japan Alliance”, http://project2049.net/documents/Takahashi_2015_Defense_Guidelines_Challenges_US_Japan_Alliance.pdf, dml)

The third implication relates to China’s modernization of its nuclear forces. Currently, the main pillar of China’s strategic nuclear force is its road-mobile ICBM. In addition, China is developing submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and ballistic missile nuclear submarines (SSBNs) to develop a maritime leg of its strategic nuclear force. China’s efforts to acquire a maritime strategic nuclear force are assumed to be intended for developing an invulnerable nuclear second-strike capability. However, China has already achieved this capability through land-based, road-mobile ICBMs. The development of SLBM/SSBN would add an invulnerable second strike capability, but would not be a game changer. A more serious potential game changer for regional security is how the U.S. responds to China’s nuclear modernization. If the U.S. officially accepts the existence of mutual vulnerability between the two countries it may cause deterioration of the regional security environment through the “stability-instabilityparadox.”
The “stability-instability-paradox” is a paradoxical situation in which mutual deterrence at the strategic level causes one party’s aggressive behavior at the regional level because that party feel assured that the counterpart would refrain from responding to their aggressive behavior to avoid escalation to a level of mutual destruction. If the U.S. explicitly accepts mutual vulnerability with China, this, when combined with China’s A2/AD capability, could cause China to feel that it has built a robust deterrent against the U.S. at the strategic level. China may be encouraged to increase its aggressive creeping expansion in the East China Sea and the South China Sea.
Enhancing Allied Deterrence
The U.S.-Japan alliance should reconstruct its deterrent at three levels to prepare countermeasures against these potential strategic effects of PLA modernization. First, the alliance should enhance the credibility of nuclear deterrence, and the U.S. should not explicitly accept the notion of mutual vulnerability with China. While China already has a certain degree of nuclear second strike capability against the U.S. with its roadmobile ICBMs, its nuclear strike capabilities are limited. China lacks the counter-force capability held by the U.S. and Russia. If the U.S. were to “admit” the U.S. and China are mutually vulnerable, it would be overlooking the qualitative asymmetrical advantage gained from its counter-force capability. Moreover, it may cause a “stability-instabilityparadox.” The current U.S. position on this issue, manifested in the latest Nuclear Posture Review of 2010, is ambiguous and along the lines of “neither confirm nor deny,” Chinese capabilities, while it explicitly implies mutual vulnerability with Russia. The continuation of this position is very important for regional deterrence.
Second, the alliance should work to find a solution to the competing demands of responding simultaneously both to creeping expansion and the A2/AD threat. To counter creeping expansion, significant forward presence is essential because the lack of forward presence would invite fait accompli based creeping expansion. Indeed, this kind of posture could be perceived as creating a “power vacuum.” From the perspective of countering the A2/AD threat, however, putting more forces on the frontline would not be wise because these frontline forces could be neutralized or destroyed by Chinese A2/AD capabilities. A light presence on the frontline and a heavier stand-off strike force outside of A2/AD ranges would be better-suited for this environment.
This dilemma has no easy solution. One of the answers to this conundrum is to enhance the resiliency of frontline forces through tactical dispersal. Another possible answer is to strengthen the coast guard to cope with creeping expansion without having a significant military force presence. Maybe the right answer is to combine these options. Alliance managers need to work hard to find the right capability portfolio and institutional division of labor to develop a solution to competing demands.

The existence of the US-Japan alliance is an impact filter – it contains every existential threat
Roos 2011
, Former ambassador to China and Technological Lawyer (John, “U.S. Japan Relations”, U.S. Embassy in Japan, 8/23/2011, http://web.a.ebscohost.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=2andsid=cfba6815-1430-41c7-bdfc-9cb5e3a9550b40sessionmgr4001andhid=4209andbdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#AN=69987377anddb=poh)GHS-SG
The U.S.-Japan alliance is the cornerstone of U.S. security interests in Asia and is fundamental to regional stability and prosperity. Despite the changes in the post-Cold War strategic landscape, the U.S.-Japan alliance continues to be based on shared vital interests and values. These include stability in the Asia-Pacific region, the preservation and promotion of political and economic freedoms, support for human rights and democratic institutions, and securing of prosperity for the people of both countries and the international community as a whole. Japan provides bases and financial and material support to U.S. forward-deployed forces, which are essential for maintaining stability in the region. Under the U.S.-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security, Japan hosts a carrier battle group, the III Marine Expeditionary Force, the 5th Air Force, and elements of the Army's I Corps. The United States currently maintains approximately 50,000 troops in Japan, about half of whom are stationed in Okinawa. Over the past decade the alliance has been strengthened through revised defense guidelines, which expand Japan's noncombatant role in a regional contingency, the renewal of the agreement on host nation support of U.S. forces stationed in Japan, and an ongoing process called the Defense Policy Review Initiative (DPRI). The DPRI redefines roles, missions, and capabilities of alliance forces and outlines key realignment and transformation initiatives, including reducing the number of troops stationed in Okinawa, enhancing interoperability and communication between the two countries' respective commands, and broadening cooperation in the area of ballistic missile defense. In February 2009 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then-Foreign Minister Hirofumi Nakasone signed the Guam International Agreement (GIA) in Tokyo. The GIA commits both nations to completing the transfer of approximately 8,000 U.S. Marines from bases in Okinawa to new facilities in Guam built with the assistance of Japan. In May 2010, the U.S. and Japanese Governments issued a joint statement that reaffirmed bilateral commitments to DPRI, including plans to transfer the capabilities of Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in Okinawa to the Futenma Replacement Facility (FRF) at Camp Schwab in the prefecture's northern area. The United States continues to work constructively with Japan on the implementation of these plans. On June 21, 2011, in Washington, the United States and Japanese Governments held a Security Consultative Committee meeting ("2+2") chaired by Secretary Clinton and then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, along with Foreign Minister Takeaki Matsumoto and Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa. The meeting, which marked the first 2+2 since the establishment of the DPJ-led government, issued a joint statement reaffirming the continuing importance of the alliance. More specifically, the statement outlined regional and global common strategic objectives and highlighted ways to strengthen security and defense cooperation. In the context of reconfirming both sides' commitment to U.S. force posture realignment, including initiatives in Okinawa, the 2+2 principals noted their decision in favor of a V-shaped runway configuration for the Futenma Replacement Facility. The 2+2 principals also issued accompanying statements on host nation support as well as cooperation in response to Japan's March 2011 earthquake. Because of the two countries' combined economic and technological impact on the world, the U.S.-Japan relationship has become global in scope. The United States and Japan cooperate on a broad range of global issues, including development assistance, combating communicable disease such as the spread of HIV/AIDS and avian influenza, and protecting the environment and natural resources. The countries also collaborate in science and technology in such areas as mapping the human genome, research on aging, and international space exploration. As one of Asia's most successful democracies and largest economies, Japan contributes irreplaceable political, financial, and moral support to U.S.-Japan diplomatic efforts. The United States consults closely with Japan and the Republic of Korea on policy regarding North Korea. The United States works closely with Japan and Australia under the auspices of the Trilateral Strategic Dialogue and the Security and Defense Cooperation Forum to exchange views and increase coordination on global and regional initiatives. In Southeast Asia, U.S.-Japan cooperation is vital for stability and for political and economic reform. Outside Asia, Japanese political and financial support has substantially strengthened the U.S. position on a variety of global geopolitical problems, including the Gulf, Middle East peace efforts, and the Balkans. Japan, which was a member of the United Nations Security Council for the 2009-2010 term, is an indispensable partner in the UN and the second-largest contributor to the UN budget. Japan broadly supports the United States on nonproliferation and nuclear issues.

Tournament: St Marks | Round: 2 | Opponent: Lynbrook YZ | Judge: David Dosch
Ukraine relies on nuclear power from Rosatom right now, but is currently shifting to non-Rosatom reactors – banning causes grid shutdown and dependency on Russia, which turns case Wesolowsky 2/8
Wesolowsky, Tony. "Thirty Years After Chernobyl, Ukraine Doubles Down On Nuclear Power." RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty. February 8, 2016. Accessed October 06, 2016. http://www.rferl.org/a/thirty-years-after-chernobyl-ukraine-doubles-down-nuclear-power/27539152.html. JD
Nearly 30 years after Chernobyl spewed nuclear dust across Europe and sparked fears of fallout around the globe, a strapped, war-torn Ukraine is opting for "upgrades" rather than shutdowns of its fleet of Soviet-era nuclear power reactors. Kyiv is planning to spend an estimated $1.7 billion to bring the facilities, many of which are nearing the end of their planned life spans, up to current Western standards. Ukrainian officials hope to further their energy independence from Moscow and potentially export some of the resulting electricity to Western Europe as part of an "EU-Ukraine Energy Bridge" that can further cement Kyiv's ties with Brussels. But can they allay fears, in Ukraine and beyond, that the plans will put Europe at risk of another Chernobyl? The project has the backing of the West, including a $600 million contribution split evenly between the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and Euratom, the EU's nuclear agency. "The project we support -- ourselves, the EBRD, and Euratom -- is actually about the country's energy independence, and essentially, survival. Because for the country, where nuclear power plants produce over 50 percent of electricity, this sector remains vital -- very, very important. This is a necessity," says Anton Usov, senior adviser for Eastern Europe and the Caucasus at the EBRD, an international institution funding projects in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. For Kyiv, keeping its nuclear power stations humming makes sense given the government's strategy to wean the country off Russian energy, namely gas. Ukraine is also making moves to end its dependence on Russia for the fuel powering the nuclear plants. Nuclear power accounts for around half of Ukrainian electricity. Enerhoatom, the state-run nuclear energy operator, runs 15 reactors at four nuclear power plants, including Europe's largest power plant at Zaporizhzhya, which houses five reactors. They are all equipped with pressurized reactors known by their Russian abbreviation, VVER, which are Russian-designed but an upgrade to the graphite-moderated RBMK reactors found at the decommissioned Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

Independently, high energy prices create energy poverty for already poor households. Lomborg 14
Bjorn Lomborg. “How Green Policies hurt the poor”. The Spectator. April 5, 2014. http://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/04/let-them-eat-carbon-credits/ AM
Britain’s environmentalists proudly announce that households have reduced their electricity consumption by almost 10 per cent since 2005.They seldom mention that this is helped by a 50 per cent increase in electricity prices, in part to pay for Britain increasing its share of renewables from 1.8 per cent to 4.6 per cent. Such a price increase of course hits the poorest hardest. As with many green taxes, it does so because it taxes a basic necessity that makes up a larger proportion of a small budget. Not surprisingly, higher energy prices mean the poor are forced to reduce their electricity consumption far more than the richest, who haven’t reduced their electricity consumption at all. Over the past five years, heating a home in the UK has become 63 per cent more expensive, while real wages have declined. Unsurprisingly, a greater number of poor households must spend more than 10 per cent of their income on energy, becoming what is known as energy poor. This category now covers some 17 per cent of all British households. Worse, because the elderly are typically poorer, energy poverty affects about a quarter of all households whose inhabitants are over 60. Deprived pensioners are spending their days riding heated buses to keep warm, while a third are leaving part of their homes cold. Stories of fuel poverty frequently appear in the press. A 75-year-old widow, Rita Young, has been quoted saying: ‘I’ve worked all my life. It doesn’t feel fair. People my age don’t want to put hats and scarves on in their homes, but there’s nothing we can do about it. I sit in a blanket, put on a hat and sometimes go to bed at 7.30 in the evening.’ She joins almost a million other pensioners who are forced to stay in bed longer to keep warm because of rising fuel bills.

Energy poverty creates hostilities between wealthy and poor people that causes conflict and mass structural violence. Aigbe 14

Omoruyi Aigbe, CONFLICT AND POVERTY IN AFRICA: THE EFFECT OF NATURAL RESOURCE AND LEADERSHIP, 7/25/14 VC

On April 15 2013, the United Nations’ Security Council met at the headquarter in New York, to discuss on preventing conflict in Africa; calling for a high priority to be given to addressing core root causes such as poverty, hunger, human rights abuses, marginalization and impunity. No doubt, conflicts rise where there is poor governance, human rights abuses and grievances over the unequal distribution of resources, wealth and power. Following up to that experts at the ’First Africa Union (AU), Regional Economic Communities (REC), Regional Mechanisms (RMs) For Conflict Prevention and Management’ met in Abuja Nigeria, under the auspices of ECOWAS in November of 2013, blaming poverty and underdevelopment as the root cause of conflicts in different parts of Africa, including the violence in Central African Republic (CAR), Somalia, Sudan and South Sudan. The problem of poverty is multidimensional; it goes beyond economics to include social, political, and cultural issues. Scholars like Laune Nathan (2003), John Burton (1997), Richard Sandbrook (1982) and Ted Gurr (1970) have in the past agreed that poverty is a result of lack of basic human needs, which lead to reactions that result in conflict. They are the proponent of human needs theory. However, Burton (ibid) argues that the denial of peoples’ biological needs and psychological needs that relate to growth and development are the drivers of conflict and instability in developing countries. Basic needs (such as food, water, shelter and health) unlike interest cannot be compromised or traded, concealed, or bargained for; an attempt to do this, leads to conflict. Robust evidence on the causes of conflict shows that low national incomes are almost always correlated with the occurrence of violence and conflict. According to Aristotle cited in Okanya (1996), “social strife and revolutions are not brought out by the conspiratorial or malignant nature of man; rather revolutions are derived from poverty and distributive injustice.” Consequently, when majority of people are poor and has no hope of ameliorating their condition, they are bound to be restive and seek recompense through violence, this is arguably the case of the Niger/Delta region in Nigeria. No regime can hold stability and peace when it is created on a sea of poverty (Okanya, Ibid). Conflict evidently brings poverty in as much as it brings destruction, violence, and hatred. Poverty, on the other hand, is a cause of conflict: when grievances are not handled properly, it is argued, poor people, who are restive, will stage an uprising (i.e Egypt and Tunisia), questioning government altogether and joining rebel groups, this may explain the strength of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Decline in the economy and extreme poverty may then underpin the tendencies to resort to violent unrest. Nevertheless, at the root of conflicts always lie multifaceted factors: inequality of political, social, economic and cultural opportunities among different groups, lack of democratic governance and effective leadership, absence of civil society and mechanism for non-violent conflict management. However, some actors argue that the current research on the poverty-development-conflict nexus seems not to have provided convincing evidence on the association between poverty and conflict, the correlation is often understood to be indirect at best.

Tournament: Loyola | Round: 3 | Opponent: Elite of Irvine NM | Judge: Cotan Lu
Nuclear power is currently progressing – many reactors are being built with only more planned. Groskopf ‘01/26
Christopher Groskopf – reporter. “New nuclear reactors are being built a lot more like cars.” Quartz. January 26, 2016. http://qz.com/581566/new-nuclear-reactors-are-being-built-a-lot-more-like-cars/ JJN
At its birth, nuclear power was a closely guarded national enterprise, only accessible to the most prosperous nations. But over the last 50 years it has evolved into a robust international market with a global supply chain. Not only are more countries starting or considering new nuclear plants, a great many more countries are contributing to their construction. According to data from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) 66 nuclear reactors are under construction around the world. Dozens more are in various stages of planning. The vast majority of new reactors are being built in China, which has invested in nuclear power in a way not seen since the United States and France first built out their capacity in the 1960’s and 70’s. China’s 2015 Five Year Plan calls for 40 reactors to be built by 2020 and as many as ten more are planned for every year thereafter. Fifteen other countries around the world are also building reactors. The Chinese sprint toward nuclear power is along a path toward becoming a major exporter of nuclear technology and expertise. In addition to adopting western designs, China also has its own reactor designs. Plants based on those designs are also under construction both China and in Pakistan. Other countries are considering them. At the same time China has upgraded its capacity to produce pressure vessels, turbines and other heavy manufacturing components—all of which it is expected to begin exporting. This sort of globalized manufacturing is nothing new: cars, airplanes and most other complicated machines are built in this way. However, it is new for reactors, which must be constructed on-site and rely on highly specialized parts. Those parts must be manufactured to tolerances well beyond what is required in other industries. In some cases even the equipment needed to creating them must be purpose-built. Consider, for example, the steel pressure vessel at the heart of the most common reactor designs. These vessels can only be created in the world’s largest steel presses—some of which exert more than 30,000 pounds of force. The vessels are forged out of solid steel ingots that may weigh more than a million pounds. Until recently there were only a handful of such presses in the world. Today there are at least 23, spread across 11 countries, according to the World Nuclear Association (WNA). Such specialization is not limited to heavy manufacturing. Nuclear reactors require thousands of other mechanical and electronic components, many of which are purpose-made. A brochure from the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) identifies hundreds of individual parts. (pdf) Even otherwise common products may need to meet extraordinarily fine tolerances. Standards require that steel elements relevant to safety are manufactured with exceptional “nuclear-grade steel.” According to another NEI list, the construction of a new reactor may require a total of: 500 to 3,000 nuclear grade valves 125 to 250 pumps 44 miles of piping 300 miles of electric wiring 90,000 electrical components According to Greg Kaser, who analyzes supply chains for the WNA, the market for nuclear components has been driven by US-based reactor companies, namely Westinghouse Electric Company. “The US can’t produce everything that’s required for a nuclear reactor anymore, so they have to go international,” Kaser told Quartz. Reactors based on Westinghouse’s AP1000 design are under construction in both the US and China. The parts for these reactors are sourced from all over the world. Many come from European companies that were originally created to supply domestic nuclear programs, but have since become important exporters. This trade in nuclear components is difficult to measure. Despite the specific qualifications of a nuclear-grade valve, it is still a valve and doesn’t necessarily show up in trade statistics as anything more. A great deal of trade is also in expertise. Engineers from China, Japan, South Korea and the United States frequently consult on (or lead) nuclear projects around the world. A 2014 WNA report (paywall) estimates that the total value of investments in new nuclear facilities through 2030 will be $1.2 trillion. But this nuclear globalization has not been greeted with enthusiasm everywhere. The 2011 nuclear contamination disaster at Fukushima, Japan, briefly stalled development of some projects and prompted Germany to begin shutting down all of its reactors. A decision by the UK to allow a Chinese company to develop new nuclear reactors in England has led to both domestic and international hand-wringing over the security implications. Others worry about about safety issues resulting from companies faking the certifications required for selling reactor components. In 2013, two South Korean nuclear reactors were shut down when it was discovered that they had installed cables with counterfeit nuclear certifications. This year the IAEA will update a procurement guide for plant operators that was published in 1996. (pdf) The new version will include a chapter specifically addressing counterfeit components. For the moment, it’s unlikely any of these concerns will be enough to slow the resurgent growth of the global nuclear industry. Though big nuclear companies often speak of localizing the supply chain—and keeping those jobs in their home country—international competition can drive down the price of building a reactor. In fact, the supply chain is likely to become even more important to the construction process in the future. New reactors being designed today are both smaller and more modular, and plans call for large sections of them to be assembled in factories and shipped to the site. If it sounds a lot like the assembly line at a automobile plant, that’s because it is. But of course, one small oversight or production flaw could make a much greater difference.

Newest studies prove – warming is real, anthropogenic, and almost certainly caused by emissions from fossil fuels. Phys ‘8/24
Phys.org. “Humans have caused climate change for 180 years: study.” Phys.org. August 24, 2016. Originally provided by Australia National University from Nature Journal. http://phys.org/news/2016-08-humans-climate-years.html JJN
An international research project has found human activity has been causing global warming for almost two centuries, proving human-induced climate change is not just a 20th century phenomenon. Lead researcher Associate Professor Nerilie Abram from The Australian National University (ANU) said the study found warming began during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution and is first detectable in the Arctic and tropical oceans around the 1830s, much earlier than scientists had expected. "It was an extraordinary finding," said Associate Professor Abram, from the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences and ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science. "It was one of those moments where science really surprised us. But the results were clear. The climate warming we are witnessing today started about 180 years ago." The new findings have important implications for assessing the extent that humans have caused the climate to move away from its pre-industrial state, and will help scientists understand the future impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the climate. "In the tropical oceans and the Arctic in particular, 180 years of warming has already caused the average climate to emerge above the range of variability that was normal in the centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution," Associate Professor Abram said. The research, published in Nature, involved 25 scientists from across Australia, the United States, Europe and Asia, working together as part of the international Past Global Changes 2000 year (PAGES 2K) Consortium. Associate Professor Abram said anthropogenic climate change was generally talked about as a 20th century phenomenon because direct measurements of climate are rare before the 1900s. However, the team studied detailed reconstructions of climate spanning the past 500 years to identify when the current sustained warming trend really began. Scientists examined natural records of climate variations across the world's oceans and continents. These included climate histories preserved in corals, cave decorations, tree rings and ice cores. The research team also analysed thousands of years of climate model simulations, including experiments used for the latest report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to determine what caused the early warming. The data and simulations pinpointed the early onset of warming to around the 1830s, and found the early warming was attributed to rising greenhouse gas levels. Co-researcher Dr Helen McGregor, from the University of Wollongong's School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, said humans only caused small increases in the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere during the 1800s. "But the early onset of warming detected in this study indicates the Earth's climate did respond in a rapid and measureable way to even the small increase in carbon emissions during the start of the Industrial Age," Dr McGregor said. The researchers also studied major volcanic eruptions in the early 1800s and found they were only a minor factor in the early onset of climate warming. Associate Professor Abram said the earliest signs of greenhouse-induced warming developed during the 1830s in the Arctic and in tropical oceans, followed soon after by Europe, Asia and North America. However, climate warming appears to have been delayed in the Antarctic, possibly due to the way ocean circulation is pushing warming waters to the North and away from the frozen continent.

Prohibiting nuclear power means warming can’t be solved – impracticality of renewables combined with a switch to coal only makes warming worse. Harvey ‘12
Fiona Harvey - award-winning environment journalist for the Guardian, used to work for financial times. “Nuclear power is only solution to climate change, says Jeffrey Sachs.” The Guardian. May 3, 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/may/03/nuclear-power-solution-climate-change JJN *bracketing in original
Combating climate change will require an expansion of nuclear power, respected economist Jeffrey Sachs said on Thursday, in remarks that are likely to dismay some sections of the environmental movement. Prof Sachs said atomic energy was needed because it provided a low-carbon source of power, while renewable energy was not making up enough of the world's energy mix and new technologies such as carbon capture and storage were not progressing fast enough. "We won't meet the carbon targets if nuclear is taken off the table," he said. He said coal was likely to continue to be cheaper than renewables and other low-carbon forms of energy, unless the effects of the climate were taken into account. "Fossil fuel prices will remain low enough to wreck low-carbon energy unless you have incentives and carbon pricing," he told the annual meeting of the Asian Development Bank in Manila. A group of four prominent UK environmentalists, including Jonathon Porritt and former heads of Friends of the Earth UK Tony Juniper and Charles Secrett, have been campaigning against nuclear power in recent weeks, arguing that it is unnecessary, dangerous and too expensive. Porritt told the Guardian: "It nuclear power cannot possibly deliver – primarily for economic reasons. Nuclear reactors are massively expensive. They take a long time to build. And even when they're up and running, they're nothing like as reliable as the industry would have us believe." But Sachs, director of the Earth Institute and professor of sustainable development at Columbia University in the US, said the world had no choice because the threat of climate change had grown so grave. He said greenhouse gas emissions, which have continued to rise despite the financial crisis and deep recession in the developed world, were "nowhere near" falling to the level that would be needed to avert dangerous climate change. He said: "Emissions per unit of energy need to fall by a factor of six. That means electrifying everything that can be electrified and then making electricity largely carbon-free. It requires renewable energy, nuclear and carbon capture and storage – these are all very big challenges. We need to understand the scale of the challenge." Sachs warned that "nice projects" around the world involving renewable power or energy efficiency would not be enough to stave off the catastrophic effects of global warming – a wholesale change and overhaul of the world's energy systems and economy would be needed if the world is to hold carbon emissions to 450 parts per million of the atmosphere – a level that in itself may be inadequate. "We are nowhere close to that – as wishful thinking and corporate lobbies are much more powerful than the arithmetic of climate scientists," he said.

Warming leads to extinction – multiple scenarios prove. Roberts ‘13
David Roberts - staff writer for Grist. “If you aren’t alarmed about climate, you aren’t paying attention.” Grist. January 10, 2013. http://grist.org/climate-energy/climate-alarmism-the-idea-is-surreal/ JJN
There was recently another one of those (numbingly familiar) internet tizzies wherein someone trolls environmentalists for being “alarmist” and environmentalists get mad and the troll says “why are you being so defensive?” and everybody clicks, clicks, clicks. I have no desire to dance that dismal do-si-do again. But it is worth noting that I find the notion of “alarmism” in regard to climate change almost surreal. I barely know what to make of it. So in the name of getting our bearings, let’s review a few things we know. We know we’ve raised global average temperatures around 0.8 degrees C so far. We know that 2 degrees C is where most scientists predict catastrophic and irreversible impacts. And we know that we are currently on a trajectory that will push temperatures up 4 degrees or more by the end of the century. What would 4 degrees look like? A recent World Bank review of the science reminds us. First, it’ll get hot: Projections for a 4°C world show a dramatic increase in the intensity and frequency of high-temperature extremes. Recent extreme heat waves such as in Russia in 2010 are likely to become the new normal summer in a 4°C world. Tropical South America, central Africa, and all tropical islands in the Pacific are likely to regularly experience heat waves of unprecedented magnitude and duration. In this new high-temperature climate regime, the coolest months are likely to be substantially warmer than the warmest months at the end of the 20th century. In regions such as the Mediterranean, North Africa, the Middle East, and the Tibetan plateau, almost all summer months are likely to be warmer than the most extreme heat waves presently experienced. For example, the warmest July in the Mediterranean region could be 9°C warmer than today’s warmest July. Extreme heat waves in recent years have had severe impacts, causing heat-related deaths, forest fires, and harvest losses. The impacts of the extreme heat waves projected for a 4°C world have not been evaluated, but they could be expected to vastly exceed the consequences experienced to date and potentially exceed the adaptive capacities of many societies and natural systems. my emphasis Warming to 4 degrees would also lead to “an increase of about 150 percent in acidity of the ocean,” leading to levels of acidity “unparalleled in Earth’s history.” That’s bad news for, say, coral reefs: The combination of thermally induced bleaching events, ocean acidification, and sea-level rise threatens large fractions of coral reefs even at 1.5°C global warming. The regional extinction of entire coral reef ecosystems, which could occur well before 4°C is reached, would have profound consequences for their dependent species and for the people who depend on them for food, income, tourism, and shoreline protection. It will also “likely lead to a sea-level rise of 0.5 to 1 meter, and possibly more, by 2100, with several meters more to be realized in the coming centuries.” That rise won’t be spread evenly, even within regions and countries — regions close to the equator will see even higher seas. There are also indications that it would “significantly exacerbate existing water scarcity in many regions, particularly northern and eastern Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, while additional countries in Africa would be newly confronted with water scarcity on a national scale due to population growth.” Also, more extreme weather events: Ecosystems will be affected by more frequent extreme weather events, such as forest loss due to droughts and wildfire exacerbated by land use and agricultural expansion. In Amazonia, forest fires could as much as double by 2050 with warming of approximately 1.5°C to 2°C above preindustrial levels. Changes would be expected to be even more severe in a 4°C world. Also loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services: In a 4°C world, climate change seems likely to become the dominant driver of ecosystem shifts, surpassing habitat destruction as the greatest threat to biodiversity. Recent research suggests that large-scale loss of biodiversity is likely to occur in a 4°C world, with climate change and high CO2 concentration driving a transition of the Earth’s ecosystems into a state unknown in human experience. Ecosystem damage would be expected to dramatically reduce the provision of ecosystem services on which society depends (for example, fisheries and protection of coastline afforded by coral reefs and mangroves.) New research also indicates a “rapidly rising risk of crop yield reductions as the world warms.” So food will be tough. All this will add up to “large-scale displacement of populations and have adverse consequences for human security and economic and trade systems.” Given the uncertainties and long-tail risks involved, “there is no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible.” There’s a small but non-trivial chance of advanced civilization breaking down entirely. Now ponder the fact that some scenarios show us going up to 6 degrees by the end of the century, a level of devastation we have not studied and barely know how to conceive. Ponder the fact that somewhere along the line, though we don’t know exactly where, enough self-reinforcing feedback loops will be running to make climate change unstoppable and irreversible for centuries to come. That would mean handing our grandchildren and their grandchildren not only a burned, chaotic, denuded world, but a world that is inexorably more inhospitable with every passing decade. Take all that in, sit with it for a while, and then tell me what it could mean to be an “alarmist” in this context. What level of alarm is adequate?

Tournament: St Marks | Round: Semis | Opponent: Montgomery WP | Judge: Panel
Nuclear power is currently progressing – many reactors are being built with only more planned. Groskopf ‘01/26
Christopher Groskopf – reporter. “New nuclear reactors are being built a lot more like cars.” Quartz. January 26, 2016. http://qz.com/581566/new-nuclear-reactors-are-being-built-a-lot-more-like-cars/ JJN
At its birth, nuclear power was a closely guarded national enterprise, only accessible to the most prosperous nations. But over the last 50 years it has evolved into a robust international market with a global supply chain. Not only are more countries starting or considering new nuclear plants, a great many more countries are contributing to their construction. According to data from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) 66 nuclear reactors are under construction around the world. Dozens more are in various stages of planning. The vast majority of new reactors are being built in China, which has invested in nuclear power in a way not seen since the United States and France first built out their capacity in the 1960’s and 70’s. China’s 2015 Five Year Plan calls for 40 reactors to be built by 2020 and as many as ten more are planned for every year thereafter. Fifteen other countries around the world are also building reactors. The Chinese sprint toward nuclear power is along a path toward becoming a major exporter of nuclear technology and expertise. In addition to adopting western designs, China also has its own reactor designs. Plants based on those designs are also under construction both China and in Pakistan. Other countries are considering them. At the same time China has upgraded its capacity to produce pressure vessels, turbines and other heavy manufacturing components—all of which it is expected to begin exporting. This sort of globalized manufacturing is nothing new: cars, airplanes and most other complicated machines are built in this way. However, it is new for reactors, which must be constructed on-site and rely on highly specialized parts. Those parts must be manufactured to tolerances well beyond what is required in other industries. In some cases even the equipment needed to creating them must be purpose-built. Consider, for example, the steel pressure vessel at the heart of the most common reactor designs. These vessels can only be created in the world’s largest steel presses—some of which exert more than 30,000 pounds of force. The vessels are forged out of solid steel ingots that may weigh more than a million pounds. Until recently there were only a handful of such presses in the world. Today there are at least 23, spread across 11 countries, according to the World Nuclear Association (WNA). Such specialization is not limited to heavy manufacturing. Nuclear reactors require thousands of other mechanical and electronic components, many of which are purpose-made. A brochure from the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) identifies hundreds of individual parts. (pdf) Even otherwise common products may need to meet extraordinarily fine tolerances. Standards require that steel elements relevant to safety are manufactured with exceptional “nuclear-grade steel.” According to another NEI list, the construction of a new reactor may require a total of: 500 to 3,000 nuclear grade valves 125 to 250 pumps 44 miles of piping 300 miles of electric wiring 90,000 electrical components According to Greg Kaser, who analyzes supply chains for the WNA, the market for nuclear components has been driven by US-based reactor companies, namely Westinghouse Electric Company. “The US can’t produce everything that’s required for a nuclear reactor anymore, so they have to go international,” Kaser told Quartz. Reactors based on Westinghouse’s AP1000 design are under construction in both the US and China. The parts for these reactors are sourced from all over the world. Many come from European companies that were originally created to supply domestic nuclear programs, but have since become important exporters. This trade in nuclear components is difficult to measure. Despite the specific qualifications of a nuclear-grade valve, it is still a valve and doesn’t necessarily show up in trade statistics as anything more. A great deal of trade is also in expertise. Engineers from China, Japan, South Korea and the United States frequently consult on (or lead) nuclear projects around the world. A 2014 WNA report (paywall) estimates that the total value of investments in new nuclear facilities through 2030 will be $1.2 trillion. But this nuclear globalization has not been greeted with enthusiasm everywhere. The 2011 nuclear contamination disaster at Fukushima, Japan, briefly stalled development of some projects and prompted Germany to begin shutting down all of its reactors. A decision by the UK to allow a Chinese company to develop new nuclear reactors in England has led to both domestic and international hand-wringing over the security implications. Others worry about about safety issues resulting from companies faking the certifications required for selling reactor components. In 2013, two South Korean nuclear reactors were shut down when it was discovered that they had installed cables with counterfeit nuclear certifications. This year the IAEA will update a procurement guide for plant operators that was published in 1996. (pdf) The new version will include a chapter specifically addressing counterfeit components. For the moment, it’s unlikely any of these concerns will be enough to slow the resurgent growth of the global nuclear industry. Though big nuclear companies often speak of localizing the supply chain—and keeping those jobs in their home country—international competition can drive down the price of building a reactor. In fact, the supply chain is likely to become even more important to the construction process in the future. New reactors being designed today are both smaller and more modular, and plans call for large sections of them to be assembled in factories and shipped to the site. If it sounds a lot like the assembly line at a automobile plant, that’s because it is. But of course, one small oversight or production flaw could make a much greater difference.

Warming is anthropogenic and can be stopped if we reduce emissions. Nuccitelli 8/15

Dana Nuccitelli 8/15/16 “Climate urgency: we've locked in more global warming than people realize” https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2016/aug/15/climate-urgency-weve-locked-in-more-global-warming-than-people-realize

So far humans have caused about 1°C warming of global surface temperatures, but if we were to freeze the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide at today’s levels, the planet would continue warming. Over the coming decades, we’d see about another 0.5°C warming, largely due to what’s called the “thermal inertia” of the oceans (think of the long amount of time it takes to boil a kettle of water). The Earth’s surface would keep warming about another 1.5°C over the ensuing centuries as ice continued to melt, decreasing the planet’s reflectivity.¶ To put this in context, the international community agreed in last year’s Paris climate accords that we should limit climate change risks by keeping global warming below 2°C, and preferably closer to 1.5°C. Yet from the carbon pollution we’ve already put into the atmosphere, we’re committed to 1.5–3°C warming over the coming decades and centuries, and we continue to pump out over 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year.¶ The importance of reaching zero or negative emissions¶ We can solve this problem if, rather than holding the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide steady, it falls over time. As discussed in the above video, Earth naturally absorbs more carbon than it releases, so if we reduce human emissions to zero, the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide will slowly decline. Humans can also help the process by finding ways to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and sequester it.¶ Scientists are researching various technologies to accomplish this, but we’ve already put over 500 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Pulling a significant amount of that carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it safely will be a tremendous challenge, and we won’t be able to reduce the amount in the atmosphere until we first get our emissions close to zero.¶ There are an infinite number of potential carbon emissions pathways, but the 2014 IPCC report considered four possible paths that they called RCPs. In one of these (called RCP 2.6 or RCP3-PD), we take immediate, aggressive, global action to cut carbon pollution, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels peak at 443 ppm in 2050, and by 2100 they’ve fallen back down to today’s level of 400 ppm. In two others (RCPs 4.5 and 6.0) we act more slowly, and atmospheric levels don’t peak until the year 2150, then they remain steady, and in the last (RCP8.5) carbon dioxide levels keep rising until 2250. As the figure below shows, in the first scenario, global warming peaks at 2°C and then temperatures start to fall toward the 1.5°C level, meeting our Paris climate targets. In the other scenarios, temperatures keep rising centuries into the future We don’t know what technologies will be available in the future, but we do know that the more carbon pollution we pump into the atmosphere today, the longer it will take and more difficult it will be to reach zero emissions and stabilize the climate. We’ll also have to pull that much more carbon out of the atmosphere. ¶ It’s possible that as in three of the IPCC scenarios, we’ll never get all the way down to zero or negative carbon emissions, in which case today’s pollution will keep heating the planet for centuries to come. Today’s carbon pollution will leave a legacy of climate change consequences that future generations may struggle with for the next thousand years.¶ Five years ago, the Australian government established a Climate Commission, which published a report discussing why we’re in the midst of the ‘critical decade’ on climate change:¶ The risks of future climate change – to our economy, society and environment – are serious, and grow rapidly with each degree of further temperature rise. Minimising these risks requires rapid, deep and ongoing reductions to global greenhouse gas emissions. We must begin now if we are to decarbonise our economy and move to clean energy sources by 2050. This decade is the critical decade.¶ Our is the first generation to understand the problems our carbon pollution is causing, and the last that can take the necessary action to prevent them from causing a climate destabilization. In addition to the Australian Climate Commission, 31 major scientific organizations recently warned policymakers that:¶ To reduce the risk of the most severe impacts of climate change, greenhouse gas emissions must be substantially reduced.¶ We have no excuse for inaction or complacency; the experts have clearly warned us. If we refuse to urgently act on this information, future generations will suffer the consequences of our failures today.
Prohibiting nuclear power means warming can’t be solved – impracticality of renewables combined with a switch to coal only makes warming worse. Harvey ‘12
Fiona Harvey - award-winning environment journalist for the Guardian, used to work for financial times. “Nuclear power is only solution to climate change, says Jeffrey Sachs.” The Guardian. May 3, 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/may/03/nuclear-power-solution-climate-change JJN *bracketing in original
Combating climate change will require an expansion of nuclear power, respected economist Jeffrey Sachs said on Thursday, in remarks that are likely to dismay some sections of the environmental movement. Prof Sachs said atomic energy was needed because it provided a low-carbon source of power, while renewable energy was not making up enough of the world's energy mix and new technologies such as carbon capture and storage were not progressing fast enough. "We won't meet the carbon targets if nuclear is taken off the table," he said. He said coal was likely to continue to be cheaper than renewables and other low-carbon forms of energy, unless the effects of the climate were taken into account. "Fossil fuel prices will remain low enough to wreck low-carbon energy unless you have incentives and carbon pricing," he told the annual meeting of the Asian Development Bank in Manila. A group of four prominent UK environmentalists, including Jonathon Porritt and former heads of Friends of the Earth UK Tony Juniper and Charles Secrett, have been campaigning against nuclear power in recent weeks, arguing that it is unnecessary, dangerous and too expensive. Porritt told the Guardian: "It nuclear power cannot possibly deliver – primarily for economic reasons. Nuclear reactors are massively expensive. They take a long time to build. And even when they're up and running, they're nothing like as reliable as the industry would have us believe." But Sachs, director of the Earth Institute and professor of sustainable development at Columbia University in the US, said the world had no choice because the threat of climate change had grown so grave. He said greenhouse gas emissions, which have continued to rise despite the financial crisis and deep recession in the developed world, were "nowhere near" falling to the level that would be needed to avert dangerous climate change. He said: "Emissions per unit of energy need to fall by a factor of six. That means electrifying everything that can be electrified and then making electricity largely carbon-free. It requires renewable energy, nuclear and carbon capture and storage – these are all very big challenges. We need to understand the scale of the challenge." Sachs warned that "nice projects" around the world involving renewable power or energy efficiency would not be enough to stave off the catastrophic effects of global warming – a wholesale change and overhaul of the world's energy systems and economy would be needed if the world is to hold carbon emissions to 450 parts per million of the atmosphere – a level that in itself may be inadequate. "We are nowhere close to that – as wishful thinking and corporate lobbies are much more powerful than the arithmetic of climate scientists," he said.

Empirically proven in Japan a ban on nuclear triggered a shift to coal. Follett 16
Follett, Andrew. (Energy and Science Reporter ) "The End Of Nuclear Power In Japan Is Bringing Back Coal." The Daily Caller. June 13, 2016. Accessed September 27, 2016. http://dailycaller.com/2016/06/13/the-end-of-nuclear-power-in-japan-is-bringing-back-coal/. SP

An analysis published Monday by Bloomberg states that coal power will become the largest source of electricity in Japan due to an effective ban on nuclear power. Nuclear power provided 29 percent of Japan’s total power output before 2011, but will decline to 13.6 percent by 2023 and 1.2 percent by 2040, according to the report. Japan got 24 percent of its electricity from coal in 2010 and the country plans to get more than a third of its power from coal by 2040. Japan previously shut down all of its nuclear reactors in the aftermath of the 2011 magnitude 9.0 earthquake, which triggered the Fukushima disaster. The country has since transitioned away from nuclear power. Prior to the disaster, Japan operated 54 nuclear power plants and the government planned to build enough reactors to provide 50 percent of the country’s electricity power. After the disaster, Japan pledged to effectively abandon nuclear power by the 2030s, replacing it mostly with wind or solar power, causing the price of electricity to rise by 20 percent. The transition to green energy hasn’t gone well and the country likely won’t meet its goals, according to the report. Japan remains a top importer of oil, coal and natural gas and the government estimated that importing fuel costs the country more than $40 billion annually. Japan’s current government sees a revival of nuclear power as critical to supporting economic growth and slowing an exodus of Japanese manufacturing to lower-cost countries, but has faced incredible pushback.

Warming leads to extinction – multiple scenarios prove. Roberts ‘13
David Roberts - staff writer for Grist. “If you aren’t alarmed about climate, you aren’t paying attention.” Grist. January 10, 2013. http://grist.org/climate-energy/climate-alarmism-the-idea-is-surreal/ JJN
There was recently another one of those (numbingly familiar) internet tizzies wherein someone trolls environmentalists for being “alarmist” and environmentalists get mad and the troll says “why are you being so defensive?” and everybody clicks, clicks, clicks. I have no desire to dance that dismal do-si-do again. But it is worth noting that I find the notion of “alarmism” in regard to climate change almost surreal. I barely know what to make of it. So in the name of getting our bearings, let’s review a few things we know. We know we’ve raised global average temperatures around 0.8 degrees C so far. We know that 2 degrees C is where most scientists predict catastrophic and irreversible impacts. And we know that we are currently on a trajectory that will push temperatures up 4 degrees or more by the end of the century. What would 4 degrees look like? A recent World Bank review of the science reminds us. First, it’ll get hot: Projections for a 4°C world show a dramatic increase in the intensity and frequency of high-temperature extremes. Recent extreme heat waves such as in Russia in 2010 are likely to become the new normal summer in a 4°C world. Tropical South America, central Africa, and all tropical islands in the Pacific are likely to regularly experience heat waves of unprecedented magnitude and duration. In this new high-temperature climate regime, the coolest months are likely to be substantially warmer than the warmest months at the end of the 20th century. In regions such as the Mediterranean, North Africa, the Middle East, and the Tibetan plateau, almost all summer months are likely to be warmer than the most extreme heat waves presently experienced. For example, the warmest July in the Mediterranean region could be 9°C warmer than today’s warmest July. Extreme heat waves in recent years have had severe impacts, causing heat-related deaths, forest fires, and harvest losses. The impacts of the extreme heat waves projected for a 4°C world have not been evaluated, but they could be expected to vastly exceed the consequences experienced to date and potentially exceed the adaptive capacities of many societies and natural systems. my emphasis Warming to 4 degrees would also lead to “an increase of about 150 percent in acidity of the ocean,” leading to levels of acidity “unparalleled in Earth’s history.” That’s bad news for, say, coral reefs: The combination of thermally induced bleaching events, ocean acidification, and sea-level rise threatens large fractions of coral reefs even at 1.5°C global warming. The regional extinction of entire coral reef ecosystems, which could occur well before 4°C is reached, would have profound consequences for their dependent species and for the people who depend on them for food, income, tourism, and shoreline protection. It will also “likely lead to a sea-level rise of 0.5 to 1 meter, and possibly more, by 2100, with several meters more to be realized in the coming centuries.” That rise won’t be spread evenly, even within regions and countries — regions close to the equator will see even higher seas. There are also indications that it would “significantly exacerbate existing water scarcity in many regions, particularly northern and eastern Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, while additional countries in Africa would be newly confronted with water scarcity on a national scale due to population growth.” Also, more extreme weather events: Ecosystems will be affected by more frequent extreme weather events, such as forest loss due to droughts and wildfire exacerbated by land use and agricultural expansion. In Amazonia, forest fires could as much as double by 2050 with warming of approximately 1.5°C to 2°C above preindustrial levels. Changes would be expected to be even more severe in a 4°C world. Also loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services: In a 4°C world, climate change seems likely to become the dominant driver of ecosystem shifts, surpassing habitat destruction as the greatest threat to biodiversity. Recent research suggests that large-scale loss of biodiversity is likely to occur in a 4°C world, with climate change and high CO2 concentration driving a transition of the Earth’s ecosystems into a state unknown in human experience. Ecosystem damage would be expected to dramatically reduce the provision of ecosystem services on which society depends (for example, fisheries and protection of coastline afforded by coral reefs and mangroves.) New research also indicates a “rapidly rising risk of crop yield reductions as the world warms.” So food will be tough. All this will add up to “large-scale displacement of populations and have adverse consequences for human security and economic and trade systems.” Given the uncertainties and long-tail risks involved, “there is no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible.” There’s a small but non-trivial chance of advanced civilization breaking down entirely. Now ponder the fact that some scenarios show us going up to 6 degrees by the end of the century, a level of devastation we have not studied and barely know how to conceive. Ponder the fact that somewhere along the line, though we don’t know exactly where, enough self-reinforcing feedback loops will be running to make climate change unstoppable and irreversible for centuries to come. That would mean handing our grandchildren and their grandchildren not only a burned, chaotic, denuded world, but a world that is inexorably more inhospitable with every passing decade. Take all that in, sit with it for a while, and then tell me what it could mean to be an “alarmist” in this context. What level of alarm is adequate?

Tournament: St Marks | Round: 5 | Opponent: Strake Jesuit CP RC | Judge: Eric Melin
They have purposefully left out a major part of Agamben’s work and fetishize his concept of “bare life”. This drive to engage dereliction reproduces anti blackness – you have a specific obligation to reject it independent of the kritik. Sexton 11
Sexton, Jared. "The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism." InTensions 5 (2011): 1-47. EE

In the same vein, and based on a reading of “raw life” as a synonym rather than an opening toward another frame of reference, Moten rails against what he sees in “a certain American reception of Agamben” as a “critical obsession with bare life” that “fetishizes the bareness of it all” (Moten 2008: 216 fn. 6).v What is unattended or forgotten in this “constant repetition of bare life,” which is how Moten reads this troubled and troubling reading of Fanon avec Agamben, is an engagement with Agamben’s (affirmative) notion of “form of life.” And here one is unfaithful to the best of Agamben if one’s theorization “separates life from the form of life,” just as one is unfaithful to the best of Foucault if one overlooks his “constant and unconcealed assumptions of life’s fugitivity” in support of a mistaken conviction that misattributes to the great French historian and political philosopher a thesis about the absoluteness of power (ibid). What links these two observations—a strife internal to black studies and a failure in the understanding of power—is a relation of mutual implication. A central point of “The Case of Blackness” obtains in a caution against and a correction of the tendency to depart from the faulty premise of black pathology and thereby carry along the discourse being criticized within the assumptions of the critique. If one misunderstands the nature of power in this way, then one will more than likely assume or, at least, agree to the pathology of blackness and vice versa. Chandler might identify this entanglement less with a problem of attitude and more with an error of judgment. Wilderson’s concurrence with the spirit of this gambit would, in turn, warn against the tendency to “fortify and extend the interlocutory life of widely accepted political common sense” and its theoretical underpinnings (Wilderson 2008: 36). However, before we adjudicate whether the authors of “Raw Life” or the dossier of articles that it introduces or, for that matter, Fanon himself truly suffer from “an explicatory velocity that threatens to abolish the distance between—which is also to say the nearness of” a whole range of conceptual pairs requiring a finer attunement to “their difference and its modalities” (Moten 2008: 182)—I think it paramount to adjudicate whether the fact that “blackness has been associated with a certain sense of decay” is, in the first instance, something that we ought to strain against as it strains against us. And even if, in the last instance, we decide to stay the course, need we mobilize a philosophy of life in order to do so?

The endpoint of the 1AC is the antiblack status quo – blackness is defined in terms of an ontological structural antagonism with white civil society that is reproduced by any attempt to use existing legal structures or philosophies.  Warren 13

Calvin Warren, Onticide: Toward an Afro-pessimistic Queer Theory" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association Annual Meeting, 2013.  NS

We could suggest that the term “black queer” dramatizes the fundamental tension in humanism itself, especially contemporary iterations of it: how to eradicate the violence that limits human potential, and expand the category of the human, when the violence rejected is absolutely necessary for the human to exist as such. In other words, humanism is caught in an ethical dilemma, or double-bind.  The “emancipatory meditations” against the violence that produces contingent experiences of unfreedom for humans also provides the grounding for the category of the human around which these meditations mobilize.  The “human” is a repository of violent practices and technologies that has crystalized over time. The ethical impulse is to resolve the tension within humanism, to wrest the “human” from the historical violence upon which it is founded. This ethical enterprise inevitably fails, for in the end, the human is nothing more than this very violence, rendering violence and the human mutually constitutive and coterminous. The experience of unfreedom (suffering) is the outcome of this violence. Making this suffering legible is the ethical drive of humanist thinking and the objective of a politics invested in “freedom.” Violence, humanity, unfreedom, and freedom constitute an unending cycle of desire, deferral, and despair.  This cycle of violence captures the tension in humanism that much of contemporary theory either attempts to resolve (Ethics) or wishes to abandon (divesture). The violence that constitutes the human and produces suffering is sustained through an ontological antagonism. The boundaries of the human are shored-up by this antagonism and without it, the human, and the world within which it lives, would cease to exist. The non-ontology of blackness secures the boundaries of the human; it delimits the coordinates of the human. Blackness is an exclusion that enables ontology.  In its exclusion from the realm of ontology, blackness is un-thinkable, innominate, and paradoxical. In essence, blackness exists to not exist—it embodies the most perplexing paradox that sustains ontology (or in psychoanalytic terms it is the Real of ontology). The field of Ethics, then, conceals a dirty secret: the ontological ground upon which it is situated is unethical. Ethics subverts itself, but it can only exist through this very subversion. All ethical discourses organized around the elimination of suffering or the experiences of freedom are imbricated in this unethicality. Blackness is both the life and death of humanism and its ethics, and for this reason, it lacks a legible grammar to articulate this dread. It is an incomprehensible suffering, or an unending injury not understood as legitimate injury. To take matters further, there would be no human suffering without the prior exclusion of blackness, but there would also be no world or human without this exclusion either. It is an unresolvable antagonism. 2  The term “black queer” is a philosophical conundrum, or problem space, precisely because it carries this antagonism, the ethical dilem- ma of humanism, within its discursive structure. 3 It brings two crises into juxtaposition creating somewhat of a theoretical fatality, a devas- tating crime scene. At the site of this fatality lies a mutilated, supine black body we cannot quite place within the symbolics of identity, politics, history, sociology, or law. In cases like these, we put “theory” and “philosophy” into service to figure out who did “it,” what was the murder weapon, and what was the injury—if we can even call it an injury. This situation frustrates the researcher (researcher as detective, philosopher, and medical examiner all at once) in that he lacks a coherent grammar to make this suffering legible, the assaulting party is more like a structural phenomenon, and the fatality is a precondition of the world itself. In this sense, the fatality is rendered banal, diurnal, and quotidian, as it sustains the very field of existence.

In its ontological absence the black is a fungible object open to gratuitous violence and void of relational capacity.  R.L. 13

R.L., WANDERINGS OF THE SLAVE: BLACK LIFE AND SOCIAL DEATH, 2013,
Mute Magazine  NS

For the Afro-pessimists, the black subject is exiled from the human relation, which is predicated on social recognition, volition, subjecthood, and the valuation of life itself. Thus black existence is marked as an ontological absence, posited as sentient object and devoid of any positive relationality, in contradistinction to the human subject’s presence. How does this negative relationality originate and maintain itself? Through a structural violence, which is the formative relation that positions the slave, making it the central ontological foundation of black existence: Structural vulnerability to appropriation, perpetual and involuntary openness, including all the wanton uses of the body … should be understood as the paradigmatic conditions of black existence in the Americas, the defining characteristics of New World anti-blackness. In short, the black, whether slave or ‘free,’ lives under the commandment of whites.10 Contrary to contingent applications of violence in accordance with legitimate cause (transgression of law, as repressive strategy, as reaction, etc.), violence against blacks is gratuitous, without any prior reason or justification. It is the direct relation of force as the basis of the slave relation, which essentially structures the disposession of black existence, an ontological disposession of being. This gratuitous violence, on the one hand, subjugates black existence to an irrational accumulation of bodies, and subsequently produces a condensed delimitation of blackness in space. Whether it was the owning and trading of slaves or the contemporary phenomena of the ghetto and mass incarceration, black existence is excluded and stockpiled as so many objects within a spatial boundary. In this condition, life is reduced to a statistical quantity, black existence is made exchangeable with any other. Therefore, on the other hand, black existence is also a fungible object, infinitely malleable in its content due to the abstraction of its quality and open for use for anyone who can claim subjecthood.11 These structural features come to their fullest expression in the contemporary scenario of police shootings. The endless stream of young black men shot by police borders on excess, demonstrating the pure interchangeability of such names as equivalents, meaning that such seemingly particular empirical cases are in actuality a general condition. Blackness is as devalued as it is susceptible to all aspects of material and social containment, control and debility. Yet, in these instances, even morally indignant liberals are complicit with anti-blackness by focusing on police shootings as a contingent rather than structural feature of black existence.

The position of blackness is the root cause of their idea of biopolitics – we control the internal link and only we have the correct starting point. Dillon 13
Stephen, “Fugitive Life: race, gender, and the rise of the neoliberal-carceral state”, P. 69-71

Chattel slavery is central to the contemporary politics of the market in addition to the politics of life and death in general. Indeed, terror’s constitutive relationship to the production and management of race began on the “floating dungeon” of the slave ship. As a paradigmatic technology of modernity, the slave ship—a machine that was simultaneously a prison, a factory, a market, and an instrument of warfare—and its social relations inaugurated the economic, discursive, and institutional life of transnational capitalism.136 The carceral, the imperial, and the industrial were intertwined in the biopolitical regulation of black life, the expansion of capital, and the production of blackness, whiteness, and white supremacy. The slave trade produced methods for controlling populations; disciplining, torturing, and immobilizing the body; regulating health and hygiene; and extending the market beyond the economic. Additionally, it produced regimes of race and racism wherein blackness was subjected to “open and absolute vulnerability,” making white life dependent upon black (living) death.137 In short, the slave trade inaugurated methods for ranking life and measuring value that have yet to be undone.138 We can position slavery and its various technologies of domination (ship, plantation, sexual violence, management of birth) as preceding Giorgio Agamben’s argument that the concentration camp is the paradigmatic figure of modernity.139 In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben argues that the juridico-political structure of the camp is a “hidden matrix of the politics in which we are still living.”140 For Agamben, the camp is the “new biopolitical nomos of our planet,” and our future resides in our ability to recognize the ways that the camp inhabits and drives the architecture of cities, airports, and the distribution of life and death across the globe. The camp is not a historical anomaly but a temporal and spatial structure that is continually brought back to life. That is, it may change name and shape but its function remains the same. As with Agamben’s call to see space, time, and power in a new way in order to make visible the camp’s possession of our everyday, I am arguing that we must learn to see the spirit of slavery in spectacles of racialized violence and death. In addition, we must also learn to recognize it in the operations that go by the names freedom, humanity, and democracy. Such a project requires an understanding that the biopolitics and necropolitics of slavery are not relegated to an amputated past, nor do they reside in a time progress will soon leave behind. Rather, the slave trade’s logics and technologies have intensified, expanded, and become more insidious. The past does more than repeat: it envelops, seduces, and multiplies.141 

Thus the alternative is to embrace the demand of the slave - the end of the world.  Wilderson 02

Frank Wilderson, The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal, resented at  Imprisoned Intellectuals   Conference Brown University, April 13th 2002.  NS

If we are to take Fanon at his word when he writes,   Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder  (37) then we must accept the fact that no other body functions in the Imaginary, the Symbolic, or the Real so completely as a repository of complete disorder as the Black body. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Real, for in its magnetizing of bullets the Black body functions as the map of gratuitous violence through which civil society is possible: namely, those other bodies for which violence is, or can be, contingent. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Symbolic, for Blackness in America generates no categories for the chromosome of History, no data for the categories of Immigration or Sovereignty; it is an experience without analog  a past, without a heritage. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Imaginary for   whoever says   rape   says Black,   (Fanon) , whoever says   prison   says Black, and whoever says   AIDS   says Black (Sexton)   the   Negro is a phobogenic object   (Fanon). Indeed and a phobogenic object and a past without a heritage and the map of gratuitous violence and a program of complete disorder. But whereas this realization is, and should be cause for alarm, it should not be cause for lament, or worse, disavowal  not at least, for a true revolutionary, or for a truly revolutionary movement such as prison abolition. If a social movement is to be neither social democratic, nor Marxist, in terms of the structure of its political desire then it should grasp the invitation to assume the positionality of subjects of social death that present themselves; and, if we are to be honest with ourselves we must admit that the   Negro   has been inviting Whites, and as well as civil society’s junior partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They have been, and remain today  even in the most anti-racist movements, like the prison abolition movement invested elsewhere. This is not to say that all oppositional political desire today is pro-White, but it is to say that it is almost always anti-Black  which is to say it will not dance with death. Black liberation, as a prospect, makes radicalism more dangerous to the U.S. Not because it raises the specter of some alternative polity (like socialism, or community control of existing resources) but because its condition of possibility as well as its gesture of resistance functions as a negative dialectic: a politics of refusal and a refusal to affirm, a program of complete disorder.   One must embrace its disorder, its incoherence and allow oneself to be elaborated by it, if indeed one’s politics are to be underwritten by a desire to take this country down.  If this is not the desire which underwrites one’s politics then through what strategy of legitimation is the word   prison   being linked to the word   abolition? What are this movement’s lines of political accountability? There’s nothing foreign, frightening, or even unpracticed about the embrace of disorder and incoherence. The desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by disorder and incoherence is not anathema in and of itself: no one, for example, has ever been known to say  gee-whiz, if only my orgasms would end a little sooner, or maybe not come at all.  But few so-called radicals desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by the disorder and incoherence of Blackness and the state of political movements in America today is marked by this very Negrophobogenisis:   gee-whiz, if only Black rage could be more coherent, or maybe not come at all.   Perhaps there’s something more terrifying about the joy of Black, then there is about the joy of sex (unless one is talking sex with a Negro). Perhaps coalitions today prefer to remain in-orgasmic in the face of civil society  with hegemony as a handy prophylactic, just in case. But if, through this stasis, or paralysis, they try to do the work of prison abolition  that work will fail; because it is always work from a position of coherence (i.e. the worker) on behalf of a position of incoherence, the Black subject, or prison slave. In this way, social formations on the Left remain blind to the contradictions of coalitions between workers and slaves. They remain coalitions operating within the logic of civil society; and function less as revolutionary promises and more as crowding out scenarios of Black antagonisms  they simply feed our frustration.  Whereas the positionality of the worker   be s/he a factory worker demanding a monetary wage or an immigrant or White woman demanding a social wage   gestures toward the reconfiguration of civil society, the positionality of the Black subject  be s/he a prison-slave or a prison-slave-in-waiting   gestures toward the disconfiguration of civil society: from the coherence of civil society, the Black subject beckons with the incoherence of civil war. A civil war which reclaims Blackness not as a positive value, but as a politically enabling site, to quote Fanon, of   absolute dereliction: a   scandal   which rends civil society asunder.  Civil war, then, becomes that unthought, but never forgotten understudy of hegemony. A Black specter waiting in the wings, an endless antagonism that cannot be satisfied (via reform or reparation) but must nonetheless be pursued to the death.

Recognizing that blackness is pathologized is key to embracing social life in social death – solves the case.  Sexton 11

Jared Sexton, ANTE-ANTI-BLACKNESS: AFTERTHOUGHTS, Cultural Studies Association Issue 1, 2011.  NS

Against the raceless credo, then, racism cannot be rejected without a dialectic in which humanity experiences a blackened world" (Gordon 1997: 67). What is this willingness to 'be' black, of choosing to be black affirmatively rather than reluctantly, that Gordon finds as the key ethical moment in Fanon? Elsewhere, in a discussion of W. E. B. Du Bois on the study of black folk, Gordon restates an existential phenomenological conception of the anti-black world developed across his first several books: "Blacks here suffer the phobogenic reality posed by the spirit of racial seriousness. In effect, they more than symbolize or signify various social pathologies – they become them. In our anti-black world, blacks are pathology" (Gordon 2000: 87). This conception would seem to support to Moten's contention that even much radical black studies scholarship sustains the association of blackness with a certain sense of decay and thereby fortifies and extends the interlocutory life of widely accepted political common sense. In fact, it would seem that Gordon deepens the already problematic association to the level of identity. And yet, this is precisely what Gordon argues is the value and insight of Fanon: he fully accepts the definition of himself as pathological as it is imposed by a world that knows itself through that imposition, rather than remaining in a reactive stance that insists on the heterogeneity between a self and an imago originating in culture.  Though it may appear counter-intuitive, or rather because it is counter-intuitive, this acceptance or affirmation is active; it is a willing or willingness, in other words, to pay whatever social costs accrue to being black, to inhabiting blackness, to living a black social life under the shadow of social death. This is not an accommodation to the dictates of the anti-black world.  The affirmation of blackness, which is to say an affirmation of pathological being, is a refusal to distance oneself from blackness in a valorization of minor differences that bring one closer to health, life, or sociality. Fanon writes in the first chapter of Black Skin, White Masks: "A Senegalese who learns Creole to pass for Antillean is a case of alienation. The Antilleans who make a mockery out of him are lacking in judgment" (Fanon 2008: 21). In a world structured by the twin axioms of white superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and black non-existence, a world structured by a negative categorical imperative – "above all, don’t be black" (Gordon 1997: 63) – in this world, the zero degree of transformation is the turn toward blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that "resides in the idea that 'I am thought of as less than human'" (Nyong'o 2002: 389). 22 In this we might create a transvaluation of pathology itself, something like an embrace of pathology without pathos. To speak of black social life and black social death, black social life against black social death, black social life as black social death, black social life in black social death – all of this is to find oneself in the midst of an argument that is also a profound agreement, an agreement that takes shape in (between) meconnaissance and (dis)belief. Black optimism is not the negation of the negation that is afro-pessimism, just as black social life does not negate black social death by vitalizing it. A living death is a much a death as it is a living. Nothing in afro-pessimism suggests that there is no black (social) life, only that black life is not social life in the universe formed by the codes of state and civil society, of citizen and subject, of nation and culture, of people and place, of history and heritage, of all the things that colonial society has in common with the colonized, of all that capital has in common with labor – the modern world system. 23 Black life is not lived in the world that the world lives in, but it is lived underground, in outer space. This is agreed. That is to say, what Moten asserts against afro-pessimism is a point already affirmed by afro-pessimism, is, in fact, one of the most polemical dimensions of afro-pessimism as a project: namely, that black life is not social, or rather that black life is lived in social death. Double emphasis, on lived and on death. That's the whole point of the enterprise at some level. It is all about the implications of this agreed upon point where arguments (should) begin, but they cannot (yet) proceed.  Wilderson's is an analysis of the law in its operation as "police power and racial prerogative both under and after slavery" (Wagner 2009: 243). So too is Moten's analysis, at least that just-less-than-half of the intellectual labor committed to the object of black studies as critique of (the anti-blackness of) Western civilization. But Moten is just that much more interested in how black social life steals away or escapes from the law, how it frustrates the police power and, in so doing, calls that very policing into being in the first place. The policing of black freedom, then, is aimed less at its dreaded prospect, apocalyptic rhetoric notwithstanding, than at its irreducible precedence. The logical and ontological priority of the unorthodox self-predicating activity of blackness, the "improvisatory exteriority" or "improvisational immanence" that blackness is, renders the law dependent upon what it polices. This is not the noble agency of resistance. It is a reticence or reluctance that we might not know if it were not pushing back, so long as we know that this pushing back is really a pushing forward. So, in this perverse sense, black social death is black social life. The object of black studies is the aim of black studies. The most radical negation of the anti-black world is the most radical affirmation of a blackened world. Afro-pessimism is "not but nothing other than" black optimism. 24

Framing issue. Their refusal to engage in discussions of the way that anti-blackness shapes the world will lose them this debate. Sexton 16
Jared Sexton, Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, associate professor of African American Studies and Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine, “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word,” Rhizomes issue 19,sections 1-8
- A shift away from politics of inclusion is the only real ethical move
- Pessimism is a political position that we need to use to understand the world 

1 Afro-Pessimism is a contemporary phenomenon, some may even scoff that it is trendy, but its political and intellectual evolution is considerably longer and its ethical bearings much broader than one might expect, and there is work yet to be done regarding a genealogy of its orientation and sensibility. No individual or collective effort, of course, springs forth whole cloth and yet the controversy that has accompanied the emergence of this discourse over the better part of the past decade has suffered greatly from a refusal—on the part of most critics and too many proponents as well—to follow the old Jamesonian edict to historicize the theoretical aim and object (Herman 2003). I only note the problem here, as the development of proper context would require far more space than available at present. The vacuum-packed controversy has been surprisingly pointed as a result, and it is easy to miss the true significance thereof between the epiphanic tone of recent acquaintance and the acrimony of recurrent denunciation. 2 Some part of the pace and extent of debate about Afro-Pessimism to date is no doubt due to the proliferation of social media platforms in the same moment when the professoriate groans under the intensified administrative command to turn research into output with eventual market value (including the market value of "civic engagement"); the subsequent migration of much previously refereed scholarly commentary to these less (or differently) regulated forums in search of greater and faster measurable impact and, for better or worse, readership beyond the ken of advanced higher education; and the increased if uneven porosity of deliberations among activists, artists, educators, journalists, non-profit workers, researchers, etc. afforded by the digitization of print culture and the growing access to recordings of conference panels, public lectures, radio interviews, and the like. It is no exaggeration to say that, as a result of this convergence of global economic restructuring and technological development, there are thousands of online conversations underway across Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe, especially among students and young scholars, adjudicating the relative merits of Afro-Pessimism. 3 But this much could be said about any number of topical discussions featured anywhere from chat rooms and microblogs to virtual meetings and TED talks. What accounts for the particular critical purchase and affective resonance of what I called elsewhere "a highly technical dispute in a small corner of the American academy" has more likely to do with a growing understanding of the common (which is not to say shared, much less identical) political conditions of diverse black life-worlds with respect to claims and practices of freedom. That common sense of things is bound to a terrible and terrifying acknowledgement of not only the tragic material and symbolic continuities everywhere revealed by the history of post-emancipation societies throughout the Diaspora, but also, more fundamentally, the uncontainable categorical sprawl of the epochal transformation that names the emergence of racial slavery as such. In this, the postulate of a free black - whether non-slave or former-slave - would appear as oxymoron. None of which should stop anyone from believing its true, that being the crux. If Afro-Pessimism has captured the imagination of certain black radical formations and suggested a critical idiom, provoking a basic rethinking among more than a few of their non-black counterparts by the way, it has also, and maybe for the same reasons, struck a nerve among others, all along the color line, who fear that open-minded engagement involves forsaking some of the most hard-earned lessons of the last generation. 4 The reticence expressed about the force and signification of Afro-Pessimism, which in some quarters has bloomed into open if largely uninformed resistance, has taken on the logic of preemptive strike. Though we have little engagement in print thus far, due in part to the recentness of the published literature, certain discussions are nonetheless afoot on the left "devoted to blaming pessimism for whatever crisis is thought to occupy us at the moment." Afro-Pessimism, in this case and on this count, is thought to be, in no particular order: a negative appraisal of the capabilities of black peoples, associating blackness with lack rather than tracing the machinations through which the association is drawn and enforced, even in the black psyche, across the longue durée; a myopic denial of overlapping and ongoing histories of struggle and a fatal misunderstanding of the operational dynamics of power, its general economy or micro-physics, reifying what should be historicized en route to analysis; a retrograde and isolationist nationalism, a masculinist and heteronormative enterprise, a destructive and sectarian ultra-leftism, and a chauvinist American exceptionalism; a reductive and morbid fixation on the depredations of slavery that superimposes the figure of the slave as an anachronism onto ostensibly post-slavery societies, and so on. 5 The last assertion, which actually links together all of the others, evades the nagging burden of proof of abolition and, moreover, fails to acknowledge that one can account for historically varying instances of anti-blackness while maintaining the claim that slavery is here and now. Most telling though is the leitmotif of offense, and the felt need among critics to defend themselves, their work, their principles and their politics against the perceived threat. In place of thoughtful commentary, we have distancing and disavowal. The grand pronouncement is offered, generally, without the impediment of sustained reading or attempted dialogue, let alone careful study of the relevant literature. The entire undertaking, the movement of thought it pursues, is apprehended instead as its lowest common denominator, indicted by proxy, and tried in absentia as caricature.1 6 Astonishingly, all of this refuses to countenance the rhetorical dimensions of the discourse of Afro-Pessimism (despite the minor detail that its principal author is a noted creative writer and its first major statement is found in an award-winning literary work of memoir) and the productive theoretical effects of the fiction it creates, namely, a meditation on a poetics and politics of abjection wherein racial blackness operates as an asymptotic approximation of that which disturbs every claim or formation of identity and difference as such.2 Afro-Pessimism is thus not against the politics of coalition simply because coalitions tend systematically to render supposed common interests as the concealed particular interests of the most powerful and privileged elements of the alliance. Foremost, Afro-Pessimism it seeks, in Wilderson's parlance, "to shit on the inspiration of the personal pronoun we" (143) because coalitions require a logic of identity and difference, of collective selves modeled on the construct of the modern individual, an entity whose coherence is purchased at the expense of whatever is cast off by definition. The subject of politics is essentially dividual and there is in effect always another intervention to be made on behalf of some aspect of the group excluded in the name of the proper.3 The ever-expansive inclusionary gesture must thus be displaced by another more radical approach: an ethics of the real, a politics of the imperative, engaged in its interminably downward movement. This daunting task entails making necessity out of virtue, as it were, willing the need for the black radical imagination and not just its revisable demand. If certain scholars whose work has been instructive or inspirational for Afro-Pessimism miss this point too, it may have something to do with the search for a method of gaining agency that, while rightly suspending the assumption of an a priori agent, nonetheless rushes past the hidden structure of violence that underwrites so many violent acts, whether spectacular or mundane. 7 Such may provide reassurance for those informed by the basic assumptions and animated by the esprit de corps of the theoretical orientations and conceptual frames in question, but it cannot be mistaken for an adequate defense of a disposition. We would do well, on this score, to heed Joshua Dienstag's rather germane suggestion in Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit that "some thought should be given to why this word functions so well as a gesture of dismissal" and, likewise, to "the routine use of 'pessimist' and its cognates as a casual intellectual put-down" (Dienstag 2006: x). For present purposes, Afro-Pessimism as epithet would be the obverse of the unasked question: Why has this discourse found its articulation now? Rather than simply motivating speculation about the psychological states and political commitments of theorists, commentators, students, advocates or adherents; the intervention and implications of Afro-Pessimism, however they are adjudged, "need to be addressed at the theoretical level at which they arose" (Dienstag 2001: 924). Dienstag writes further: Critics have often mistaken a depiction of the world for a choice about our future, as if scholars had rejoiced at the decline or decay they described. ... Yet, despite the abuse they attract pessimists keep appearing—and this should not be surprising since the world keeps delivering bad news. Instead of blaming pessimism, perhaps, we can learn from it. Rather than hiding from the ugliness of the world, perhaps we can discover how best to withstand it (Dienstag 2006: x).4 8 As if they rejoiced about the wrong things and, by contrast, failed to rejoice about the right ones. Why not turn this (moralistic) accusation into (political-intellectual) opportunity? Indeed, the moniker "Afro-Pessimism" emerges at a certain inaugural moment as the embrace of a critical outlook deemed, upon review, to be disappointing or discouraging to an ostensibly progressive, even modernist anti-racism (Hartman 2003). Détournement. Resignification. A simple enough term for withstanding the ugliness of the world—and learning from it—might be suffering and Afro-Pessimism is, among other things, an attempt to formulate an account of such suffering, to establish the rules of its grammar, "to think again about the position of the ex-slave," as Bryan Wagner puts it in his Disturbing the Peace, "without recourse to the consolation of transcendence" (Wagner 2009: 2). The difficulty has to do with the special force that the consolation of transcendence—be it cultural, economic, geographical, historical, political, psychological, sexual, social or symbolic—brings to bear on the activity of thinking, no less of speaking and writing, about those whose transcendence is foreclosed in and for the modern world.

Tournament: Greenhill | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Lexington NB | Judge: Panel
American attempts to control Japanese nuclear power reify US imperialism – only the US has the capability of having nuclear power and Japan is inferior. Broinowski ‘15
Adam Broinowski - an Australian Research Council postdoctoral research fellow at the school of Culture, History and Language in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. “Nuclear Imperialism.” Palgrave Macmillan. 8/10/2015. file:///Users/Jaya/Downloads/Nuclear_Imperialism.pdfJN ‘20
Another client state and one of the first to sign up to the American nuclear model was Japan. Often described as a Faustian bargain, with the aid of US agencies during the Occupation period and after (1945–52), the case for the peaceful uses of nuclear power exploited received ideas about the causes of Imperial Japan’s humiliating defeat – energy scarcity and superior American technology. Widely broadcast through national and local outlets including the Asahi, Chugoku, Mainichi, Nihon Keizai and Yomiuri newspapers (Takekawa 2012), for many, atomic energy was the ‘third fire’ which heralded a ‘second industrial revolution’. In order to transition Japan into a nuclear client, the US narrative of ‘the Japanese’ had to be reversed from fanatical and undivided devotees of Imperial Japan to model students of American democracy. Imbricated with Harry S. Truman’s ‘Campaign for Truth’ offensive against communism in 1950, a precedent of collaborating with high officials in the Japanese wartime regime selected for their potential as intelligence assets (including former secret police, biological and nuclear weapons researchers, mafia leaders) was established to contain the influence of the USSR. Practised by the US Embassy, US Information Service (USIS) and CIA after 1952, individuals such as Shōriki Matsutaro became ideal collaborators in overcoming Japanese society’s so-called ‘nuclear allergy’ and undermining the political left. Resuming his position as editor in chief of the Yomiuri shinbun after a stint at Sugamo prison as a suspected war criminal, Shōriki actively encouraged peaceful nuclear power as an apparently neutral opportunity for Japan to overcome its pariah status and renew itself as the technoscientific-industrial powerhouse of Asia. His influence expanded when he founded the commercial station Nippon Television in 1953 (with Shibata Hidetoshi as director), which broadcast the first professional all Japan baseball game. At the urging of a young Nakasone Yasuhiro recently returned from the US, a significant nuclear research and development budget was passed in 1953 and General Electric reactor blueprints for local manufacturing were acquired in 1954. At this critical juncture, in March 1954, when the path was laid for a nuclear-powered future, 23 Japanese fishermen on the Daigo Fukuryūmaru, among other fishing vessels and fish caught from the area, were exposed to the 15 megaton ‘Bravo shot’ hydrogen bomb test as part of Operation Castle on Bikini atoll. By the time the ship returned to port in Japan, one fisherman had died and the others had advanced symptoms of acute radiation sickness. Petitions by citizens of Tokyo and local governments saw the collection of 32 million signatures nationwide and 600 million worldwide by August 1954. Stout resistance from a nascent anti-nuclear movement led by the political left and trade unions converged in the first World Conference against Atomic and Hydrogen bombs in Hiroshima in 1955. The foundations for a ‘plutonium economy’ were already underway, however. Known as the ‘1955 system’, in that year the LDP (Jimintō) was founded, the Yomiuri cosponsored the Atoms for Peace exhibition in November, the US-Japan Atomic Energy Agreement was signed in December, and the Atomic Energy Basic Law was passed to found the Japanese Atomic Energy Commission (JAEC) in January 1956. Shôriki was appointed minister of atomic energy, chair of the JAEC, and head of the Science and Technology Agency. With Kishi Nobusuke, another rehabilitated war criminal, leading the LDP to victory in 1957, a pro-nuclear, pro-American conservative policy platform became the bedrock for extending and projecting US imperial policies throughout ‘free Asia’, in the name of containing communism. Seeing nuclear weapons as a way to stem the ‘human sea’ tactics of communist powers, Kishi stated that it was not unconstitutional to acquire tactical nuclear weapons in the defence of the nation and to (re)gain power in East Asia (Office of Intelligence Research 1957: 2). Along with the bad old days of the Japanese Empire, living memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were buried beneath the foundations of the new nation state.
Nuclear power is bound up with the global politics of nuclear weapons security – the aff is an instance where nuclear weapons states can perpetuate their power against non weapons states. Chung 14
CHUNG, ALEX H. "Postcolonial Perspectives on Nuclear Non-Proliferation." (2014).TF

Nuclear weapons were introduced to the world over 65 years ago by the United States with¶ the purpose of winning a war against the Axis powers of Japan and Germany (Daadler and¶ Lodal 2008, p. 80). The destructive nature of nuclear weapons presents a tremendous¶ existential threat to the safety and security of the world. In the words of Rajiv Gandhi,¶ addressing the UN General Assembly on 9 June 1988, “Nuclear war will not mean the death¶ of a hundred million people. Or even a thousand million. It will mean the extinction of four¶ thousand million: the end of life as we know it on our planet earth,” (Shultz et al. 2007, p. 2).¶ Accordingly, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) envisioned the end of nuclear¶ weapons, as the most universally accepted arms control agreement with 189 state members,¶ by recognising five Nuclear Weapon States (NWS) – the US, Russia, China, France, and¶ Britain (Peterson 2010). In return for the promise by all NWS states to completely disarm,¶ and assistance in the acquisition of civilian nuclear energy technology, all Non-Nuclear¶ Weapon States (NNWS) forever forego obtaining nuclear weapons, thereby preventing¶ horizontal proliferation with the stated goal of complete global nuclear disarmament¶ (Gusterson 1999, p. 113). It is significant to note that international institutions such as the¶ UN and the nuclear non-proliferation regime “are largely the product of interstate diplomacy¶ dominated by Western great powers,” (Barkawi and Laffey 2006, p. 331). The five NWS states¶ also hold the five permanent member seats on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC),¶ leading some to criticise the NPT for legitimising and institutionalising nuclear power at the¶ hands of the very few, and at the same time prohibiting the pursuit of nuclear security by the¶ rest of the world (Biswas 2001, p. 486; Biswas, forthcoming 2012). While there have been symbolic reductions in the nuclear stockpiles of the NWS states via bilateral and multilateral¶ treaties, the indefinite and unconditional extension of the NPT in 1995 continues to legitimise¶ the existence of nuclear weapons in the hands of the NWS/P-5, allowing them to modernise¶ their nuclear arsenals, and engage in vertical nuclear proliferation without interference from¶ the international community (Singh 1998, p. 41).¶ The exclusive nature of the NPT and the alignment of NWS status with the UNSC P-5 is¶ indicative of an international regime that perpetuates logics of colonial violence, oppression,¶ and inequity as represented by the emblematic clash between nuclear “haves” and nuclear¶ “have-nots” (Biswas 2001, p. 486; Peterson 2010). As such, the institutionalised demarcation¶ of NWS and NNWS states has led to accusations of “nuclear apartheid” (Biswas 2001, p.¶ 486; Singh 1998, p. 48). Put simply, “nuclear apartheid” highlights the material inequalities¶ in the distribution of global nuclear resources – “inequities that are written into,¶ institutionalised, and legitimised through some of the major arms-control treaties, creating an¶ elite club of nuclear ‘haves’ with exclusive rights to maintain nuclear arsenals that are to be¶ denied to the vast majority of nuclear ‘have nots’,” (Biswas 2001, p. 486). This is evidenced¶ by the United States having “worked diligently to preserve its nuclear supremacy” since¶ 1945; by attempting to keep the nuclear “secret” in perpetuity, by limiting America’s¶ European allies’ ability to command atomic weapons independently, and endeavouring,¶ unsuccessfully, to keep the Middle East and South Asia free of nuclear weapons (Maddock¶ cited in Rotter 2011, p. 1175).

This justifies exploitation of nations we view as other – this logic is genocidal and racist. Nuclear power is key because it allows us to ignore other countries as technologically inferior. Chung 14  
CHUNG, ALEX H. "Postcolonial Perspectives on Nuclear Non-Proliferation." (2014).TF

Unlike neorealists, liberals do not entirely disregard the existence of ‘weak’ states, but they¶ are merely of interest, “primarily as bearers of rights and objects of emancipation…for their¶ normative value in Western political theoretic terms,” (Barkawi and Laffey 2006, p. 333).¶ Whereas “realist approaches to security studies are Eurocentric in that they locate agency and¶ history with the great powers,” liberal approaches are equally Eurocentric, in addition to¶ defining the West “in ethical and progressive terms,” (Barkawi and Laffey 2006, p. 340). In¶ the Western imagination, discourse on nuclear proliferation is deeply entrenched in relation¶ to the Third World, dividing the world into states that can be trusted with nuclear weapons¶ and those that cannot (Gusterson 1999, p. 113). Liberals and conservatives alike hold the¶ following orthodox belief: “the proliferation of nuclear weapons to nuclear-threshold states in¶ the Third World, especially the Islamic world, would be enormously dangerous,” (Gusterson¶ 1999, p. 112). Nuclear apartheid is justified in the liberal mindset, since western democracies¶ have the moral imperative and ethical superiority to impose their will for the good of the¶ ‘other’. Edward Said asserts that Orientalist discourse demarcates the world in a binary opposition¶ that presents the ‘Orient’ as the mirror image of the West, “where ‘we’ are rational and¶ disciplined; ‘they are impulsive and emotional; where ‘we’ are modern and flexible, ‘they’¶ are slaves to ancient passions and routines; where ‘we’ are honest and compassionate, ‘they’¶ are treacherous and uncultivated,” (Gusterson 1999, p. 114). This Orientalist process has an¶ effect of creating an immense sense of ‘Otherness’ separating the Third World from liberal¶ Western democracies, thereby rationalising and internalising a sense of liberal ‘superiority’¶ (Gusterson 1999, p. 114). Empirically, this construct of ethical superiority in the liberal West¶ requires Orwellian self-delusion. As purported by Barkawi and Laffey (2006, p. 341), the¶ Holocaust presents a challenge to the liberal faith in the “Western myths of progress and¶ ethical superiority.” To maintain the Western belief in liberal superiority, the “sins of¶ Western civilisation” are displaced “onto an intrusive non-European Other…Germany, that¶ quintessentially Western society, somehow becomes not Western,” (Barkawi and Laffey 2006,¶ p. 341). Furthermore, the brutal and barbaric slaughter and loss of life amongst ‘natives’ was¶ a normative feature of European colonisation and expansion into the non-European world¶ (Barkawi and Laffey 2006, p. 343). As observed by Sven Lindqvist, “the Holocaust was¶ unique – in Europe. But the history of Western expansion in other parts of the world shows¶ many examples of total extermination of whole peoples,” (Barkwai and Laffey 2006, p. 343).¶ Liberal ideology legitimates domination over the Global South. This can be observed via¶ liberal Western discourse on nuclear proliferation as it “legitimates the nuclear monopoly of¶ the recognised nuclear powers,” (Gusterson 1999, p. 115). Much like neorealism, rationality¶ and objectivity is arbitrarily assigned to the West, while the Global South or ‘Third World’ is¶ considered to be subjective, irrational, or even ‘rogue’ and therefore incapable of the¶ responsibility of a nuclear arsenal. The inherent Eurocentricism in liberal ideology directly¶ results in a “taken-for-granted politics that sides with the rulers, with the powerful, with the¶ imperialists, and not with the downtrodden, the weak, the colonised, or the post-colonised,”¶ (Barkawi and Laffey 2006, p. 344)¶ For example, Iran has been demonised by the United States since the Iranian Revolution in¶ 1979, when citizens of the Islamic Republic laid siege to the US embassy compound in¶ Tehran, and took fifty-two American hostages for 444 days (Zenko 2012). Their suspected¶ nuclear weapons program and alleged sponsorship of terrorism have deemed them a ‘rogue¶ state’ (BBC 2001; Munoz 2012). US President Obama issued a warning to Iran in a¶ September 2012 speech to the UN General Assembly, stating unequivocally, “The United¶ States will do what we must to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon…It would¶ threaten the elimination of Israel, the security of Gulf nations and the stability of the global¶ economy,” (ABC News 2012). North Korea, an NPT non-signatory and nuclear state is¶ perceived to pursue “alien objectives which are normative anathema to the rest of the¶ ‘civilised’ international system,” leading to the assumption that the North Korean state is¶ acting fundamentally outside the norms of the global community, and is therefore clearly a¶ “rogue state” (Smith 2000, p. 115). Nicholas Eberstadt wrote that, “the North Korean¶ regime is the North Korean nuclear problem,” (Smith 2000, p. 118). These Eurocentric and racist assumptions in liberal IR theory have led to obvious and¶ problematic ‘double standards’ and inequities in the treatment of non-Western states,¶ exacerbated by the existing Northern dominated nuclear non-proliferation regime. While¶ Iran has suffered debilitating economic sanctions over suspicions of an unconfirmed¶ clandestine nuclear weapons program, Israel, one of only four NPT non-signatories, and the¶ sole state in the Middle East that actually possesses nuclear weapons, has remained free from¶ any meaningful, significant, or even symbolic international oversight (Steinbach 2011, p. 34).¶ Warren Kozak (2012) epitomises the unashamed and blatant Eurocentricism of the liberal¶ Western perspective on the issue of nuclear proliferation:¶ “Few people lost a wink of sleep over the American nuclear monopoly in the 1940sand¶ when the Saudis or Syrians or Egyptians have turned off their lights over the past¶ half-century, the last worry on their minds has been being blown to bits by an Israeli¶ nuclear bomb…the sound mind understands that Israel, the only stable democracy in¶ the Middle East, is also one of its few rational actors.”

Vote neg to reject the 1AC’s imperialist mindset and critically challenge the structures of imperialism that dominate society – that’s a pre-requisite to policy focus. McLaren and Kincheloe ‘08
Peter McLaren -  Professor in Critical Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire Democratic Project and International Ambassador for Global Ethics and Social Justice. Joe Kincheloe - professor and Canada Research Chair at the Faculty of Education, McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. “The Landscape of Qualitative Research.” Sage Publications. Page 407-409. 2008.
In this context, it is important to note that we understand a social theory as a map or a guide to the social sphere. In a research context, it does not determine how we see the world but helps us devise questions and strategies for exploring it. A critical social theory is concerned in particular with issues of power and justice and the ways that the economy; matters of race, class, and gender; ideologies; discourses; education; religion and other social institutuions; and cultural dynamics interact to construct a social system (Beck-Gernsheim, Butler, and Puigvert, 2003; Flecha, Gomez, and Puigvert, 2003). Thus, in this context we seek to provide a view of an evolving criticality or a reconceptualized critical theory. Critical theory is never static; it is always evolving, changing in light of both new theoretical insights and new problems and social circumstances. The list of concepts elucidating our articulation of critical theory indicates a criticality informed by a variety of discourses emerging after the work of the Frankfurt School. Indeed, some of the theoretical discourses, while referring to themselves as critical ,directly call into question some of the work of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse. Thus, diverse theoretical traditions have informed our understanding of criticality and have demanded understanding of diverse forms of oppression including class, race, gender, sexual, cultural, religious, colonial, and ability-related concerns. The evolving notion of criticality we present is informed by, while critiquing, the post-discourses – for example, postmodernism, poststrucuralism, and postcolonialism. In this context, critical theorists become detectives of new theoretical insights, perpetually searching for new and interconnected ways of understanding power and oppression and the ways they shape everyday life and human experience. In this context, criticality and the research it supports are always evolving, always encountering new ways to irritate dominant forms of power, to provide more evocative and compelling insights. Operating in this way, an evolving criticality is always vulnerable to exclusion from the domain of approved modes of research. The forms of social change it supports always position it in some places as an outsider, an awkward detective always interested in uncovering social structures, discourses, ideologies, and epistemologies that prop up both the status quo and a variety of forms of privilege. In the epistemological domain, white, male, class elitist, heterosexist, imperial, and colonial privilege often operates by asserting the power to claim objectivity and neutrality. Indeed, the owners of such privilege often own the “franchise” on reason and rationality. Proponents of an evolving criticality possess a variety of tools to expose such oppressive power politics. Such proponents assert that critical theory is well-preserved by drawing upon numerous liberatory discourses and including diverse groups of marginalized peoples and their allies in the nonhierarchical aggregation of critical analysts (Bello, 2003; Clark, 2002; Humphries, 1997). In the present era, emerging forms of neocolonialism and neo-imperialism in the United States move critical theorists to examine the ways American power operates under the cover of establishing democracies all over the world. Advocates of an evolving criticality argue – as we do in more detail later in this chapter – that such neo-colonial power must be exposed so it can be opposed in the United Stated and around the world. The American Empire’s justification in the name of freedom for undermining democratically elected governments from Iran (Kincheloe, 2004), Chile, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to Liberia (when its real purpose is to acquire geopolitical advantage for future military assaults, economic leverage in international markets, and access to natural resources) must be exposed by criticalists for what it is – a rank imperialist sham (McLaren, 2003a, 2003b; McLaren and Jaramillo, 2002; McLaren and Martin, 2003). Critical researchers need to view their work in the context of living and working in a nation-state with the most powerful military-industrial complex in history that is shamefully using the terrorist attacks of September 11 to advance a ruthless imperialist agenda fueled by capitalist accumulation by means of the rule of force (McLaren and Farahmandpur, 2003). Chomsky (2003), for instance, has accused the U.S. government of the “supreme crime” of preventive war (in the case of its invasion of Iraq, the use of military force to destroy an invented or imagined threat) of the type that was condemned at Nuremberg. Others, like historian Arthur Schlesinger (cited in Chomsky, 2003), have likened the invasion of Iraq to Japan’s “day of infamy,” that is, to the policy that impe-rial Japan employed at the time of Pearl Harbor. David G. Smith (2003) argues that such imperial dynamics are supported by particular epistemological forms. The United States is an epistemological empire based on a notion of truth that undermines the knowledges produced by those outside the good graces and benevolent authority of the empire. Thus, in the 21st century, critical theorists must develop sophisticated ways to address not only the brute material relations of class rule linked to the mode and relations of capitalist production and imperialist conquest (whether through direct military intervention or indirectly through the creation of client states) but also the epistemological violence that helps discipline the world. Smith refers to this vio-lence as a form of “information warfare” that spreads deliberate falsehoods about countries such as Iraq and Iran. U.S. corporate and governmental agents become more sophisticated in the use of such episto-weaponry with every day that passes.

The ROB is to endorse the best strategy to resist imperialist domination. Prefer since:

1. Fiat is illusory – representations are the only thing we take away from the round

2. Specifically in education we have an obligation to challenge imperialism – assuming their scholarship is innocent is what reproduces our impacts. Sachs 03
Aaron Sachs, “The Ultimate "Other": Post-Colonialism and Alexander Von Humboldt's Ecological Relationship with Nature”, History and Theory, December 2003 EE

There is no denying the value of the post-colonial critique and its relevance to all studies of travel and the environment. Post-colonialism, at its best, means recuperating the objects of the traveler’s gaze. In a world so profoundly shaped- damaged, I would argue-by colonialism and imperialism, it is imperative that scholars focus on celebrating the colonized, on hearing the voices of “others.” We must understand all the ways in which Western civilization has come to depend directly on forms of domination. Indeed, it makes perfect sense, as David Spurr has noted in The Rhetoric of Empire (1993), that “works once studied pri- marily as expressions of traditionally Western ideals are now also read as evidence of the manner in which such ideals have served in the historical process of colonization."'° The problem arises when scholars read Western texts only as evidence of complicity in colonialism. If Said can be said to have founded the post-colonial school with Orientalism, he also initiated its prejudices and ovemealousness. Refusing to admit any exceptions into Orienmlism‘s paradigm of the imperial Western gaze, he committed the same sin he so abhorred in his subjects: he essentialized all Westerners as essentialists. In order to salvage Said’s worth- while and penetrating critique of the West’s orientalism, then, as Bruce Robbins has wisely remarked, we need to “break down the false unity of ‘the West‘ and thus avoid the trap of a symmetrical ‘occidentalism.”"7 Surely not all Westerners were complicit in colonialism and imperialism to the same extent. A close analysis of Humboldt’s work reveals a complex, elusive character: there is ample evidence of the broad-thinking, liberal, republican abolitionist cel- ebrated in the popular biographies; there are also certain facts linking him to structures of domination. As Mary Louise Pratt has suggested, in the most sig- nificant critique of Humboldt to date,‘8 his entire expedition through Latin America can be seen as a fact-finding mission in service to the Spanish crown. In his writings he occasionally seemed to describe the productions of nature sim- ply as resources to be appropriated by colonial powers, and he was sometimes guilty of demeaning or even erasing the history and culture of the native peoples of the Americas. Yet he also suggested, in his journal, that “the very idea of a Colony is immoral.”19
3. AC imperialist mindset means policies always fail – they’re masking reality by claiming their imperialism is somehow helping society when they only reproduce violent impacts. Santos ‘03
Boaventura de Sousa Santos - Professor at the School of Economics at the University of Coimbra, Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School. “Collective Suicide?” Bad Subjects. April 2003. http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2003/63/santos.htmlJN ‘20

According to Franz Hinkelammert, the West has repeatedly been under the illusion that it should try to save humanity by destroying part of it. This is a salvific and sacrificial destruction, committed in the name of the need to radically materialize all the possibilities opened up by a given social and political reality over which it is supposed to have total power. This is how it was in colonialism, with the genocide of indigenous peoples, and the African slaves. This is how it was in the period of imperialist struggles, which caused millions of deaths in two world wars and many other colonial wars. This is how it was under Stalinism, with the Gulag, and under Nazism, with the Holocaust. And now today, this is how it is in neoliberalism, with the collective sacrifice of the periphery and even the semiperiphery of the world system. With the war against Iraq, it is fitting to ask whether what is in progress is a new genocidal and sacrificial illusion, and what its scope might be. It is above all appropriate to ask if the new illusion will not herald the radicalization and the ultimate perversion of the Western illusion: destroying all of humanity in the illusion of saving it. Sacrificial genocide arises from a totalitarian illusion manifested in the belief that there are no alternatives to the present-day reality, and that the problems and difficulties confronting it arise from failing to take its logic of development to ultimate consequences. If there is unemployment, hunger and death in the Third World, this is not the result of market failures; instead, it is the outcome of market laws not having been fully applied. If there is terrorism, this is not due to the violence of the conditions that generate it; it is due, rather, to the fact that total violence has not been employed to physically eradicate all terrorists and potential terrorists. This political logic is based on the supposition of total power and knowledge, and on the radical rejection of alternatives; it is ultra-conservative in that it aims to reproduce infinitely the status quo. Inherent to it is the notion of the end of history. During the last hundred years, the West has experienced three versions of this logic, and, therefore, seen three versions of the end of history: Stalinism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the plan; Nazism, with its logic of racial superiority; and neoliberalism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the market. The first two periods involved the destruction of democracy. The last one trivializes democracy, disarming it in the face of social actors sufficiently powerful to be able to privatize the state and international institutions in their favor. I have described this situation as a combination of political democracy and social fascism. One current manifestation of this combination resides in the fact that intensely strong public opinion, worldwide, against the war is found to be incapable of halting the war machine set in motion by supposedly democratic rulers. At all these moments, a death drive, a catastrophic heroism, predominates, the idea of a looming collective suicide, only preventable by the massive destruction of the other. Paradoxically, the broader the definition of the other and the efficacy of its destruction, the more likely collective suicide becomes. In its sacrificial genocide version, neoliberalism is a mixture of market radicalization, neoconservatism and Christian fundamentalism. Its death drive takes a number of forms, from the idea of "discardable populations", referring to citizens of the Third World not capable of being exploited as workers and consumers, to the concept of "collateral damage", to refer to the deaths, as a result of war, of thousands of innocent civilians. The last, catastrophic heroism, is quite clear on two facts: according to reliable calculations by the Non-Governmental Organization MEDACT, in London, between 48 and 260 thousand civilians will die during the war and in the three months after (this is without there being civil war or a nuclear attack); the war will cost 100 billion dollars, enough to pay the health costs of the world's poorest countries for four years.

Tournament: Loyola | Round: Octas | Opponent: Lynbrook HW | Judge: Panel
Russian threat constructions are rooted in western racism.  Jaeger 2k

(Øyvind, Peace and Conflict Studies 7.2, “Securitizing Russia: Discoursive Practice of the Baltic States,” http://shss.nova.edu/pcs/journalsPDF/V7N2.pdf#page=18)

The Russian war on Chechnya is one event that was widely interpreted in the Baltic as a ominous sign of what Russia has in store for the Baltic states (see Rebas 1996: 27; Nekrasas 1996: 58; Tarand 1996: 24; cf. Haab 1997). The constitutional ban in all three states on any kind of association with post-Soviet political structures is indicative of a threat perception that confuses Soviet and post- Soviet, conflating Russia with the USSR and casting everything Russian as a threat through what Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) call a discursive "chain of equivalence". In this the value of one side in a binary opposition is reiterated in other denotations of the same binary opposition. Thus, the value "Russia" in a Russia/Europe-opposition is also denoted by "instability", "Asia", "invasion", "chaos", "incitement of ethnic minorities", "unpredictability", "imperialism", "slander campaign", "migration", and so forth. The opposite value of these markers ("stability", "Europe", "defence", "order", and so on) would then denote the Self and thus conjure up an identity. When identity is precarious, this discursive practice intensifies by shifting onto a security mode, treating the oppositions as if they were questions of political existence, sovereignty, and survival. Identity is (re)produced more effectively when the oppositions are employed in a discourse of in-security and danger, that is, made into questions of national security and thus securitised in the Wæverian sense. In the Baltic cases, especially the Lithuanian National Security Concept is knitting a chain of equivalence in a ferocious discourse of danger. Not only does it establish "that the defence of Lithuania is total and unconditional," and that "should there be no higher command, self-controlled combat actions of armed units and citizens shall be considered legal." (National Security Concept, Lithuania, Ch. 7, Sc. 1, 2) It also posits that the power of civic resistance is constituted of the Nation’s Will and self-determination to fight for own freedom, of everyone citizen’s resolution to resist to an assailant or invader by all possible ways, despite citizen’s age and or profession, of taking part in Lithuania’s defence (National Security Concept, Lithuania, Ch. 7, Sc. 4). When this is added to the identifying of the objects of national security as "human and citizen rights, fundamental freedoms and personal security; state sovereignty; rights of the nation, prerequisites for a free development; the state independence; the constitutional order; state territory and its integrity, and; cultural heritage," and the subjects as "the state, the armed forces and other institutions thereof; the citizens and their associations, and; non governmental organisations,"(National Security Concept, Lithuania, Ch. 2, Sc. 1, 2) one approaches a conception of security in which the distinction between state and nation has disappeared in all-encompassing securitisation. Everyone is expected to defend everything with every possible means. And when the list of identified threats to national security that follows range from "overt (military) aggression", via "personal insecurity", to "ignoring of national values,"(National Security Concept, Lithuania, Ch. 10) the National Security Concept of Lithuania has become a totalising one taking everything to be a question of national security. The chain of equivalence is established when the very introduction of the National Security Concept is devoted to a denotation of Lithuania’s century-old sameness to "Europe" and resistance to "occupation and subjugation" (see quotation below), whereby Russia is depicted and installed as the first link in the discursive chain that follows. In much the same way the "enemy within" came about in Estonia and Latvia. As the independence-memory was ritualised and added to the sense of insecurity – already fed by confusion in state administration, legislation and government policy grappling not only with what to do but also how to do it given the inexperience of state institutions or their absence – unity behind the overarching objective of independence receded for partial politics and the construction of the enemy within. This is what David Campbell (1992) points out when he sees the practices of security as being about securing a precarious state identity. One way of going about it is to cast elements on the state inside resisting the privileged identity as the subversive errand boys of the prime external enemy. 

In particular, fear terrorist attacks in Belgium perpetuated western xenophobia and propogates a new imperialism that justifies war and mass killings. 

Catherine Shakdam “The Fascism-Industrial Complex: How Xenophobia and Nationalism Lead To War and Terror” April 11, 2016

Within days of the attacks on Belgium, the terrorists self-proclaimed faith — Islam — brought far-right flag bearers, and other proud xenophobes out of the woodwork to spill their Islamophobic venom and broadcast their racist agenda of ethno-sectarian segregation and ostracization.¶ If Americans thought the shameless racism of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump was bad, they weren’t counting on Europe’s very own fascist complex. Racism in Europe is not just a state of mind, or even a political banner. It has become an industry unto itself — a new vibrant sector in an otherwise tired global economy.¶ And here we were thinking Europe lost its entrepreneurship.¶ ¶ Europe’s dangerous demons¶ Sarcasm aside, Europe is indeed battling dangerous demons. Demons which the world, and mainly Europeans themselves, thought died long ago with the fall of Nazism in 1945 — back when Germany was gripped by a terrifying ideology that claimed millions of innocent lives.¶ Then, anti-Semitism was almost a state religion, a political truth professed and preached not just by state officials, but state institutions. The media also played a key role in popularizing, rationalizing and otherwise mainstreaming the hate of the Jews, the hate of this elusive “others” fascists are always so keen on targeting.¶ Today this hateful, sadistic nihilism is coming back to haunt the world. In this age of globalism, and globalization, fascism, too, has become a global brand.¶ And while hate might not be a new concept, state officials, industry leaders and other movers and shakers’ show a startling willingness to promote the cultural, ethnic and sectarian narratives which, in the end, might destroy the very freedom they claim to protect.¶ It would be wise to remember that fascism does not rhyme with civil liberties.¶ It was Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul that owns Fox News, in the wake of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack in France, who suggested that all Muslims share the guilt of terrorism. He stated: “Maybe most Moslems are peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible.”¶ Not only does this statement ignore many protests against terrorism in the Muslim world, but fast forward to 2016 and the rhetoric remains very much the same — if not even more sinister in undertones.¶ Take comments by Laurence Rossignol, France’s minister of family, children and women’s rights. In a Mar. 30 interview. Rossignol calmly stated that Muslim women who choose to wear the hijab are like “Negroes who accept slavery … Of course there are women who choose it the veil … There were American Negroes who were in favour of slavery.”¶ Who said colonialism was dead? Quite clearly the miasmas of imperialism and ethnocentrism survived America’s grand world democracy-building project and that little charter known as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.¶ But what’s truly behind Islamophobia? What if Islam is just a convenient scapegoat in a Middle Eastern game of thrones? What if, and it is a big IF, this rising fascism against all things Arab, Muslim or vaguely Islamic-looking is actually the manifestation of unfettered capitalism?¶ In other words, Muslims have become a target of choice not because of their faith, or their alleged potential link to radicalism, but because of their geography, and Western powers’ hunger for control in the Middle East. Fear and hate here have been engineered as conduits for imperialism — a mean to justify wars and mass killings.

The securitization of terrorism in Europe has resulted in rightest movement and mass marginalization of Muslims.
Taras, Raymond. "Approaching the End Times? The Securitization of Paris-and Beyond - Harvard International Review." Harvard International Review. 2015. Accessed September 11, 2016. http://hir.harvard.edu/approaching-the-end-times-the-securitization-of-paris-and-beyond/. SP

When we look for the causes of recent terrorism carried out by extremists claiming to act in the cause of Islam, whether it is the attack in Paris on the Charlie Hebdo editorial board or horrendous massacres in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, the role of deep historical structures cannot be ignored. These same structures also help explain why the West’s global war on terrorism targets primarily Muslim-majority countries. In 1095 Pope Urban II launched the first Crusade by lamenting: “You have heard what we cannot recount without deep sorrow how, with great hurt and dire sufferings our Christian brothers, members in Christ, are scourged, oppressed, and injured in Jerusalem, in Antioch, and in the other cities of the East….Holy men do not possess those cities; nay, base and bastard Turks hold sway over our brothers.” Today’s rising religious fanaticism cannot be understood without taking into account “a thousand years of history.” If we zero in on a single act of terror such as in Paris on “1/11,” more immediate causes appear. One favored by right-wing movements is that Muslim immigration into Europe has been on a scale larger than Europe’s capacity to absorb. Another suggested by some mainstream political parties is that efforts at the social and economic integration of Muslims have proved a failure and a “defeat” as former French President Nicolas Sarkozy said of multiculturalism in 2011. For Europe’s leaders, partnership with Muslim communities is urgent if Islamist extremists are to be defanged and a broader religiously-defined confrontation avoided. Frequently identified as a spoiler in efforts at cooperation are what have been variously described as populist, far right, anti-immigrant, radical, xenophobic, or racist political parties and movements. Traditional parties believe these may pose a threat to the status quo that perhaps exceeds that of lone-wolf terrorists. It is this perception of the danger of the “far right” that I wish to assess in the context of heated debates over Islam in Europe. The misrepresentation and alienation of immigration-skeptic groups stigmatizes and scapegoats tens of millions of European voters. They are held as a cause of religious tension by Europe’s political establishment—la casta, a corrupt political class which rules over the European Union in its own interests as Pablo Iglesias, head of Spain’s defiant Podemos movement has derogatorily labelled it. As political opposition shrinks following the forging of grand political coalitions, I argue, both Muslims and “nativists”—nationalists protective of traditional identities—become socially marginalized and politically alienated. While deep structures and shallow stereotypes of Muslims form the cultural context in which extremism develops, it is Europe’s entrenched elites which have been imposing counterproductive and unpopular policies adversely affecting Muslims and nativists alike that contribute to interethnic tensions. I begin by reviewing perceptions of Muslims in Europe, whether by imaginative writers of fiction or historians conducting time-series analyses. Then I consider which items in an analytical toolbox are most useful to understanding Muslims’ contested status in European societies. Next I document examples of Islamophobic narratives by prominent elite members to illustrate that a serious problem exists which needs fixing. I give special attention to the pivotal case of Germany whose postwar liberalism is now under attack. I conclude by highlighting the need for real political contestation and opposition in Europe, a deliberative democracy with a soul, which can fashion an organic body politic for Muslims and nativists alike.

Threats are constructed – their security discourse creates a self fulfilling prophecy that makes true understanding of structural causes behind “threats” impossible.  Mack 91

Dr. Mack, professor at Harvard Medical School, 1991, (John E., “The Psychodynamics of International Relationships” Vol 1 p. 58-59)

Attempts to explore the psychological roots of enmity are frequently met with an argument that, reduced to its essentials , goes something like this: “It’s very well to psychologize but my enemy is real. The Russians (or Germans, Arabs, Israelis, Americans) are armed, threaten us, and intend us harm. Furthermore, there are real struggles between us and them and differing national interests: competition over oil, land or scarce resources and genuine conflicts of values between our two nations (or political systems) It is essential that we be strong and maintain a balance of superiority of (military and political) power, lest the other side take advantage of our weakness.” This argument is neither wrong nor right, but instead simply limited. It fails to grapple with a critical distinction that informs the entire subject. Is the threat really generated by the enemy as it appears to be at any given moment, or is it based on one’s own contribution to the threat, derived from distortion of perception by provocative words and actions in a cycle of enmity and externalization of responsibility? In sum, the enemy IS real, but we have not learned to identify our own role in creating that enemy or in elaborating the threatening image we hold of the other group or country and its actual intentions or purposes. “we never see our enemy’s motives and we never labor to asses his will with anything approaching objectivity.”

Security is an ontological condition based on the desire to control and manage states of being – this makes endless violence inevitable and destroys value to life.  Burke 07

Burke 7 — Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations in the University of New South Wales (Anthony, Theory and Event, Volume 10, Issue 2, 2007, “Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason,” Project MUSE)

This essay develops a theory about the causes of war -- and thus aims to generate lines of action and critique for peace -- that cuts beneath analyses based either on a given sequence of events, threats, insecurities and political manipulation, or the play of institutional, economic or political interests (the 'military-industrial complex'). Such factors are important to be sure, and should not be discounted, but they flow over a deeper bedrock of modern reason that has not only come to form a powerful structure of common sense but the apparently solid ground of the real itself. In this light, the two 'existential' and 'rationalist' discourses of war-making and justification mobilised in the Lebanon war are more than merely arguments, rhetorics or even discourses. Certainly they mobilise forms of knowledge and power together; providing political leaderships, media, citizens, bureaucracies and military forces with organising systems of belief, action, analysis and rationale. But they run deeper than that. They are truth-systems of the most powerful and fundamental kind that we have in modernity: ontologies, statements about truth and being which claim a rarefied privilege to state what is and how it must be maintained as it is. I am thinking of ontology in both its senses: ontology as both a statement about the nature and ideality of being (in this case political being, that of the nation-state), and as a statement of epistemological truth and certainty, of methods and processes of arriving at certainty (in this case, the development and application of strategic knowledge for the use of armed force, and the creation and maintenance of geopolitical order, security and national survival). These derive from the classical idea of ontology as a speculative or positivistic inquiry into the fundamental nature of truth, of being, or of some phenomenon; the desire for a solid metaphysical account of things inaugurated by Aristotle, an account of 'being qua being and its essential attributes'.17 In contrast, drawing on Foucauldian theorising about truth and power, I see ontology as a particularly powerful claim to truth itself: a claim to the status of an underlying systemic foundation for truth, identity, existence and action; one that is not essential or timeless, but is thoroughly historical and contingent, that is deployed and mobilised in a fraught and conflictual socio-political context of some kind. In short, ontology is the 'politics of truth'18 in its most sweeping and powerful form. I see such a drive for ontological certainty and completion as particularly problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, when it takes the form of the existential and rationalist ontologies of war, it amounts to a hard and exclusivist claim: a drive for ideational hegemony and closure that limits debate and questioning, that confines it within the boundaries of a particular, closed system of logic, one that is grounded in the truth of being, in the truth of truth as such. The second is its intimate relation with violence: the dual ontologies represent a simultaneously social and conceptual structure that generates violence. Here we are witness to an epistemology of violence (strategy) joined to an ontology of violence (the national security state). When we consider their relation to war, the two ontologies are especially dangerous because each alone (and doubly in combination) tends both to quicken the resort to war and to lead to its escalation either in scale and duration, or in unintended effects. In such a context violence is not so much a tool that can be picked up and used on occasion, at limited cost and with limited impact -- it permeates being. This essay describes firstly the ontology of the national security state (by way of the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt and G. W. F. Hegel) and secondly the rationalist ontology of strategy (by way of the geopolitical thought of Henry Kissinger), showing how they crystallise into a mutually reinforcing system of support and justification, especially in the thought of Clausewitz. This creates both a profound ethical and pragmatic problem. The ethical problem arises because of their militaristic force -- they embody and reinforce a norm of war -- and because they enact what Martin Heidegger calls an 'enframing' image of technology and being in which humans are merely utilitarian instruments for use, control and destruction, and force -- in the words of one famous Cold War strategist -- can be thought of as a 'power to hurt'.19 The pragmatic problem arises because force so often produces neither the linear system of effects imagined in strategic theory nor anything we could meaningfully call security, but rather turns in upon itself in a nihilistic spiral of pain and destruction. In the era of a 'war on terror' dominantly conceived in Schmittian and Clausewitzian terms,20 the arguments of Hannah Arendt (that violence collapses ends into means) and Emmanuel Levinas (that 'every war employs arms that turn against those that wield them') take on added significance. Neither, however, explored what occurs when war and being are made to coincide, other than Levinas' intriguing comment that in war persons 'play roles in which they no longer recognises themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance'. 21 What I am trying to describe in this essay is a complex relation between, and interweaving of, epistemology and ontology. But it is not my view that these are distinct modes of knowledge or levels of truth, because in the social field named by security, statecraft and violence they are made to blur together, continually referring back on each other, like charges darting between electrodes. Rather they are related systems of knowledge with particular systemic roles and intensities of claim about truth, political being and political necessity. Positivistic or scientific claims to epistemological truth supply an air of predictability and reliability to policy and political action, which in turn support larger ontological claims to national being and purpose, drawing them into a common horizon of certainty that is one of the central features of past-Cartesian modernity. Here it may be useful to see ontology as a more totalising and metaphysical set of claims about truth, and epistemology as more pragmatic and instrumental; but while a distinction between epistemology (knowledge as technique) and ontology (knowledge as being) has analytical value, it tends to break down in action. The epistemology of violence I describe here (strategic science and foreign policy doctrine) claims positivistic clarity about techniques of military and geopolitical action which use force and coercion to achieve a desired end, an end that is supplied by the ontological claim to national existence, security, or order. However in practice, technique quickly passes into ontology. This it does in two ways. First, instrumental violence is married to an ontology of insecure national existence which itself admits no questioning. The nation and its identity are known and essential, prior to any conflict, and the resort to violence becomes an equally essential predicate of its perpetuation. In this way knowledge-as-strategy claims, in a positivistic fashion, to achieve a calculability of effects (power) for an ultimate purpose (securing being) that it must always assume. Second, strategy as a technique not merely becomes an instrument of state power but ontologises itself in a technological image of 'man' as a maker and user of things, including other humans, which have no essence or integrity outside their value as objects. In Heidegger's terms, technology becomes being; epistemology immediately becomes technique, immediately being. This combination could be seen in the aftermath of the 2006 Lebanon war, whose obvious strategic failure for Israelis generated fierce attacks on the army and political leadership and forced the resignation of the IDF chief of staff. Yet in its wake neither ontology was rethought. Consider how a reserve soldier, while on brigade-sized manoeuvres in the Golan Heights in early 2007, was quoted as saying: 'we are ready for the next war'. Uri Avnery quoted Israeli commentators explaining the rationale for such a war as being to 'eradicate the shame and restore to the army the "deterrent power" that was lost on the battlefields of that unfortunate war'. In 'Israeli public discourse', he remarked, 'the next war is seen as a natural phenomenon, like tomorrow's sunrise.' 22 The danger obviously raised here is that these dual ontologies of war link being, means, events and decisions into a single, unbroken chain whose very process of construction cannot be examined. As is clear in the work of Carl Schmitt, being implies action, the action that is war. This chain is also obviously at work in the U.S. neoconservative doctrine that argues, as Bush did in his 2002 West Point speech, that 'the only path to safety is the path of action', which begs the question of whether strategic practice and theory can be detached from strong ontologies of the insecure nation-state.23 This is the direction taken by much realist analysis critical of Israel and the Bush administration's 'war on terror'.24 Reframing such concerns in Foucauldian terms, we could argue that obsessive ontological commitments have led to especially disturbing 'problematizations' of truth.25 However such rationalist critiques rely on a one-sided interpretation of Clausewitz that seeks to disentangle strategic from existential reason, and to open up choice in that way. However without interrogating more deeply how they form a conceptual harmony in Clausewitz's thought -- and thus in our dominant understandings of politics and war -- tragically violent 'choices' will continue to be made. The essay concludes by pondering a normative problem that arises out of its analysis: if the divisive ontology of the national security state and the violent and instrumental vision of 'enframing' have, as Heidegger suggests, come to define being and drive 'out every other possibility of revealing being', how can they be escaped?26 How can other choices and alternatives be found and enacted? How is there any scope for agency and resistance in the face of them? Their social and discursive power -- one that aims to take up the entire space of the political -- needs to be respected and understood. However, we are far from powerless in the face of them. The need is to critique dominant images of political being and dominant ways of securing that being at the same time, and to act and choose such that we bring into the world a more sustainable, peaceful and non-violent global rule of the political. Friend and Enemy: Violent Ontologies of the Nation-State In his Politics Among Nations Hans Morgenthau stated that 'the national interest of a peace-loving nation can only be defined in terms of national security, which is the irreducible minimum that diplomacy must defend with adequate power and without compromise'. While Morgenthau defined security relatively narrowly -- as the 'integrity of the national territory and its institutions' -- in a context where security was in practice defined expansively, as synonymous with a state's broadest geopolitical and economic 'interests', what was revealing about his formulation was not merely the ontological centrality it had, but the sense of urgency and priority he accorded to it: it must be defended 'without compromise'.27 Morgenthau was a thoughtful and complex thinker, and understood well the complexities and dangers of using armed force. However his formulation reflected an influential view about the significance of the political good termed 'security'. When this is combined with the way in which security was conceived in modern political thought as an existential condition -- a sine qua non of life and sovereign political existence -- and then married to war and instrumental action, it provides a basic underpinning for either the limitless resort to strategic violence without effective constraint, or the perseverance of limited war (with its inherent tendencies to escalation) as a permanent feature of politics. While he was no militarist, Morgenthau did say elsewhere (in, of all places, a far-reaching critique of nuclear strategy) that the 'quantitative and qualitative competition for conventional weapons is a rational instrument of international politics'.28 The conceptual template for such an image of national security state can be found in the work of Thomas Hobbes, with his influential conception of the political community as a tight unity of sovereign and people in which their bodies meld with his own to form a 'Leviathan', and which must be defended from enemies within and without. His image of effective security and sovereignty was one that was intolerant of internal difference and dissent, legitimating a strong state with coercive and exceptional powers to preserve order and sameness. This was a vision not merely of political order but of existential identity, set off against a range of existential others who were sources of threat, backwardness, instability or incongruity.29 It also, in a way set out with frightening clarity by the theorist Carl Schmitt and the philosopher Georg Hegel, exchanged internal unity, identity and harmony for permanent alienation from other such communities (states). Hegel presaged Schmitt's thought with his argument that individuality and the state are single moments of 'mind in its freedom' which 'has an infinitely negative relation to itself, and hence its essential character from its own point of view is its singleness': Individuality is awareness of one's existence as a unit in sharp distinction from others. It manifests itself here in the state as a relation to other states, each of which is autonomous vis-a-vis the others...this negative relation of the state to itself is embodied in the world as the relation of one state to another and as if the negative were something external.30 Schmitt is important both for understanding the way in which such alienation is seen as a definitive way of imagining and limiting political communities, and for understanding how such a rigid delineation is linked to the inevitability and perpetuation of war. Schmitt argued that the existence of a state 'presupposes the political', which must be understood through 'the specific political distinction...between friend and enemy'. The enemy is 'the other, the stranger; and it sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in an extreme case conflicts with him are possible'.31 The figure of the enemy is constitutive of the state as 'the specific entity of a people'.32 Without it society is not political and a people cannot be said to exist: Only the actual participants can correctly recognise, understand and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict...to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent's way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one's own form of existence.33 Schmitt links this stark ontology to war when he states that the political is only authentic 'when a fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of men, particularly to the whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship...in its entirety the state as an organised political entity decides for itself the friend-enemy distinction'.34 War, in short, is an existential condition: the entire life of a human being is a struggle and every human being is symbolically a combatant. The friend, enemy and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy.35 Schmitt claims that his theory is not biased towards war as a choice ('It is by no means as though the political signifies nothing but devastating war and every political deed a military action...it neither favours war nor militarism, neither imperialism nor pacifism') but it is hard to accept his caveat at face value.36 When such a theory takes the form of a social discourse (which it does in a general form) such an ontology can only support, as a kind of originary ground, the basic Clausewitzian assumption that war can be a rational way of resolving political conflicts -- because the import of Schmitt's argument is that such 'political' conflicts are ultimately expressed through the possibility of war. As he says: 'to the enemy concept belongs the ever-present possibility of combat'.37 Where Schmitt meets Clausewitz, as I explain further below, the existential and rationalistic ontologies of war join into a closed circle of mutual support and justification. This closed circle of existential and strategic reason generates a number of dangers. Firstly, the emergence of conflict can generate military action almost automatically simply because the world is conceived in terms of the distinction between friend and enemy; because the very existence of the other constitutes an unacceptable threat, rather than a chain of actions, judgements and decisions. (As the Israelis insisted of Hezbollah, they 'deny our right to exist'.) This effaces agency, causality and responsibility from policy and political discourse: our actions can be conceived as independent of the conflict or quarantined from critical enquiry, as necessities that achieve an instrumental purpose but do not contribute to a new and unpredictable causal chain. Similarly the Clausewitzian idea of force -- which, by transporting a Newtonian category from the natural into the social sciences, assumes the very effect it seeks -- further encourages the resort to military violence. We ignore the complex history of a conflict, and thus the alternative paths to its resolution that such historical analysis might provide, by portraying conflict as fundamental and existential in nature; as possibly containable or exploitable, but always irresolvable. Dominant portrayals of the war on terror, and the Israeli-Arab conflict, are arguably examples of such ontologies in action. Secondly, the militaristic force of such an ontology is visible, in Schmitt, in the absolute sense of vulnerability whereby a people can judge whether their 'adversary intends to negate his opponent's way of life'.38 Evoking the kind of thinking that would become controversial in the Bush doctrine, Hegel similarly argues thAT:  ...a state may regard its infinity and honour as at stake in each of its concerns, however minute, and it is all the more inclined to susceptibility to injury the more its strong individuality is impelled as a result of long domestic peace to seek and create a sphere of activity abroad. ....the state is in essence mind and therefore cannot be prepared to stop at just taking notice of an injury after it has actually occurred. On the contrary, there arises in addition as a cause of strife the idea of such an injury...39 Identity, even more than physical security or autonomy, is put at stake in such thinking and can be defended and redeemed through warfare (or, when taken to a further extreme of an absolute demonisation and dehumanisation of the other, by mass killing, 'ethnic cleansing' or genocide). However anathema to a classical realist like Morgenthau, for whom prudence was a core political virtue, these have been influential ways of defining national security and defence during the twentieth century and persists into the twenty-first. They infused Cold War strategy in the United States (with the key policy document NSC68 stating that 'the Soviet-led assault on free institutions is worldwide now, and ... a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere')40 and frames dominant Western responses to the threat posed by Al Qaeda and like groups (as Tony Blair admitted in 2006, 'We could have chosen security as the battleground. But we didn't. We chose values.')41 It has also become influential, in a particularly tragic and destructive way, in Israel, where memories of the Holocaust and (all too common) statements by Muslim and Arab leaders rejecting Israel's existence are mobilised by conservatives to justify military adventurism and a rejectionist policy towards the Palestinians. On the reverse side of such ontologies of national insecurity we find pride and hubris, the belief that martial preparedness and action are vital or healthy for the existence of a people. Clausewitz's thought is thoroughly imbued with this conviction. For example, his definition of war as an act of policy does not refer merely to the policy of cabinets, but expresses the objectives and will of peoples: When whole communities go to war -- whole peoples, and especially civilized peoples -- the reason always lies in some political situation and the occasion is always due to some political object. War, therefore, is an act of policy.42 Such a perspective prefigures Schmitt's definition of the 'political' (an earlier translation reads 'war, therefore, is a political act'), and thus creates an inherent tension between its tendency to fuel the escalation of conflict and Clausewitz's declared aim, in defining war as policy, to prevent war becoming 'a complete, untrammelled, absolute manifestation of violence'.43 Likewise his argument that war is a 'trinity' of people (the source of 'primordial violence, hatred and enmity'), the military (who manage the 'play of chance and probability') and government (which achieve war's 'subordination as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone') merges the existential and rationalistic conceptions of war into a theoretical unity.44 The idea that national identities could be built and redeemed through war derived from the 'romantic counter-revolution' in philosophy which opposed the cosmopolitanism of Kant with an emphasis on the absolute state -- as expressed by Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Bismarkian Realpolitik and politicians like Wilhelm Von Humbolt. Humbolt, a Prussian minister of Education, wrote that war 'is one of the most wholesome manifestations that plays a role in the education of the human race', and urged the formation of a national army 'to inspire the citizen with the spirit of true war'. He stated that war 'alone gives the total structure the strength and the diversity without which facility would be weakness and unity would be void'.45 In the Phenomenology of Mind Hegel made similar arguments that to for individuals to find their essence 'Government has from time to time to shake them to the very centre by war'.46 The historian Azar Gat points to the similarity of Clausewitz's arguments that 'a people and a nation can hope for a strong position in the world only if national character and familiarity with war fortify each other by continual interaction' to Hegel's vision of the ethical good of war in his Philosophy of Right.47 Likewise Michael Shapiro sees Clausewitz and Hegel as alike in seeing war 'as an ontological investment in both individual and national completion...Clausewitz figures war as passionate ontological commitment rather than cool political reason...war is a major aspect of being.'48 Hegel's text argues that war is 'a work of freedom' in which 'the individual's substantive duty' merges with the 'independence and sovereignty of the state'.49 Through war, he argues, the ethical health of peoples is preserved in their indifference to the stabilization of finite institutions; just as the blowing of the winds preserves the sea from the foulness which would be the result of a prolonged calm, so the corruption in nations would be the product of a prolonged, let alone 'perpetual' peace.50 Hegel indeed argues that 'sacrifice on behalf of the individuality of the state is a substantial tie between the state and all its members and so is a universal duty...if the state as such, if its autonomy, is in jeopardy, all its citizens are duty bound to answer the summons to its defence'.51 Furthermore, this is not simply a duty, but a form of self-realisation in which the individual dissolves into the higher unity of the state: The intrinsic worth of courage as a disposition of mind is to be found in the genuine, absolute, final end, the sovereignty of the state. The work of courage is to actualise this end, and the means to this end is the sacrifice of personal actuality. This form of experience thus contains the harshness of extreme contradictions: a self-sacrifice which yet is the real existence of one's freedom; the maximum self-subsistence of individuality, yet only a cog playing its part in the mechanism of an external organisation; absolute obedience, renunciation of personal opinions and reasonings, in fact complete absence of mind, coupled with the most intense and comprehensive presence of mind and decision in the moment of acting; the most hostile and so most personal action against individuals, coupled with an attitude of complete indifference or even liking towards them as individuals.52 A more frank statement of the potentially lethal consequences of patriotism -- and its simultaneously physical and conceptual annihilation of the individual human being -- is rarely to be found, one that is repeated today in countless national discourses and the strategic world-view in general. (In contrast, one of Kant's fundamental objections to war was that it involved using men 'as mere machines or instruments'.53) Yet however bizarre and contradictory Hegel's argument, it constitutes a powerful social ontology: an apparently irrefutable discourse of being. It actualises the convergence of war and the social contract in the form of the national security state. Strategic Reason and Scientific Truth By itself, such an account of the nationalist ontology of war and security provides only a general insight into the perseverance of military violence as a core element of politics. It does not explain why so many policymakers think military violence works. As I argued earlier, such an ontology is married to a more rationalistic form of strategic thought that claims to link violent means to political ends predictably and controllably, and which, by doing so, combines military action and national purposes into a common -- and thoroughly modern -- horizon of certainty. Given Hegel's desire to decisively distil and control the dynamic potentials of modernity in thought, it is helpful to focus on the modernity of this ontology -- one that is modern in its adherence to modern scientific models of truth, reality and technological progress, and in its insistence on imposing images of scientific truth from the physical sciences (such as mathematics and physics) onto human behaviour, politics and society. For example, the military theorist and historian Martin van Creveld has argued that one of the reasons Clausewitz was so influential was that his 'ideas seemed to have chimed in with the rationalistic, scientific, and technological outlook associated with the industrial revolution'.54 Set into this epistemological matrix, modern politics and government engages in a sweeping project of mastery and control in which all of the world's resources -- mineral, animal, physical, human -- are made part of a machinic process of which war and violence are viewed as normal features. These are the deeper claims and implications of Clausewitzian strategic reason. One of the most revealing contemporary examples comes from the writings (and actions) of Henry Kissinger, a Harvard professor and later U.S. National Security Adviser and Secretary of State. He wrote during the Vietnam war that after 1945 U.S. foreign policy was based 'on the assumption that technology plus managerial skills gave us the ability to reshape the international system and to bring about domestic transformations in emerging countries'. This 'scientific revolution' had 'for all practical purposes, removed technical limits from the exercise of power in foreign policy'.55 Kissinger's conviction was based not merely in his pride in the vast military and bureaucratic apparatus of the United States, but in a particular epistemology (theory of knowledge). Kissinger asserted that the West is 'deeply committed to the notion that the real world is external to the observer, that knowledge consists of recording and classifying data -- the more accurately the better'. This, he claimed, has since the Renaissance set the West apart from an 'undeveloped' world that contains 'cultures that have escaped the early impact of Newtonian thinking' and remain wedded to the 'essentially pre-Newtonian view that the real world is almost entirely internal to the observer'.56 At the same time, Kissinger's hubris and hunger for control was beset by a corrosive anxiety: that, in an era of nuclear weapons proliferation and constant military modernisation, of geopolitical stalemate in Vietnam, and the emergence and militancy of new post-colonial states, order and mastery were harder to define and impose. He worried over the way 'military bipolarity' between the superpowers had 'encouraged political multipolarity', which 'does not guarantee stability. Rigidity is diminished, but so is manageability...equilibrium is difficult to achieve among states widely divergent in values, goals, expectations and previous experience' (emphasis added). He mourned that 'the greatest need of the contemporary international system is an agreed concept of order'.57 Here were the driving obsessions of the modern rational statesman based around a hunger for stasis and certainty that would entrench U.S. hegemony: For the two decades after 1945, our international activities were based on the assumption that technology plus managerial skills gave us the ability to reshape the international system and to bring about domestic transformations in "emerging countries". This direct "operational" concept of international order has proved too simple. Political multipolarity makes it impossible to impose an American design. Our deepest challenge will be to evoke the creativity of a pluralistic world, to base order on political multipolarity even though overwhelming military strength will remain with the two superpowers.58 Kissinger's statement revealed that such cravings for order and certainty continually confront chaos, resistance and uncertainty: clay that won't be worked, flesh that will not yield, enemies that refuse to surrender. This is one of the most powerful lessons of the Indochina wars, which were to continue in a phenomenally destructive fashion for six years after Kissinger wrote these words. Yet as his sinister, Orwellian exhortation to 'evoke the creativity of a pluralistic world' demonstrated, Kissinger's hubris was undiminished. This is a vicious, historic irony: a desire to control nature, technology, society and human beings that is continually frustrated, but never abandoned or rethought. By 1968 U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the rationalist policymaker par excellence, had already decided that U.S. power and technology could not prevail in Vietnam; Nixon and Kissinger's refusal to accept this conclusion, to abandon their Cartesian illusions, was to condemn hundreds of thousands more to die in Indochina and the people of Cambodia to two more decades of horror and misery.59 In 2003 there would be a powerful sense of déja vu as another Republican Administration crowned more than decade of failed and destructive policy on Iraq with a deeply controversial and divisive war to remove Saddam Hussein from power. In this struggle with the lessons of Vietnam, revolutionary resistance, and rapid geopolitical transformation, we are witness to an enduring political and cultural theme: of a craving for order, control and certainty in the face of continual uncertainty. Closely related to this anxiety was the way that Kissinger's thinking -- and that of McNamara and earlier imperialists like the British Governor of Egypt Cromer -- was embedded in instrumental images of technology and the machine: the machine as both a tool of power and an image of social and political order. In his essay 'The Government of Subject Races' Cromer envisaged effective imperial rule -- over numerous societies and billions of human beings -- as best achieved by a central authority working 'to ensure the harmonious working of the different parts of the machine'.60 Kissinger analogously invoked the virtues of 'equilibrium', 'manageability' and 'stability' yet, writing some six decades later, was anxious that technological progress no longer brought untroubled control: the Westernising 'spread of technology and its associated rationality...does not inevitably produce a similar concept of reality'.61 We sense the rational policymaker's frustrated desire: the world is supposed to work like a machine, ordered by a form of power and governmental reason which deploys machines and whose desires and processes are meant to run along ordered, rational lines like a machine. Kissinger's desire was little different from that of Cromer who, wrote Edward Said: ...envisions a seat of power in the West and radiating out from it towards the East a great embracing machine, sustaining the central authority yet commanded by it. What the machine's branches feed into it from the East -- human material, material wealth, knowledge, what have you -- is processed by the machine, then converted into more power...the immediate translation of mere Oriental matter into useful substance.62 This desire for order in the shadow of chaos and uncertainty -- the constant war with an intractable and volatile matter -- has deep roots in modern thought, and was a major impetus to the development of technological reason and its supporting theories of knowledge. As Kissinger's claims about the West's Newtonian desire for the 'accurate' gathering and classification of 'data' suggest, modern strategy, foreign policy and Realpolitik have been thrust deep into the apparently stable soil of natural science, in the hope of finding immovable and unchallengeable roots there. While this process has origins in ancient Judaic and Greek thought, it crystallised in philosophical terms most powerfully during and after the Renaissance. The key figures in this process were Francis Bacon, Galileo, Isaac Newton, and René Descartes, who all combined a hunger for political and ontological certainty, a positivist epistemology and a naïve faith in the goodness of invention. Bacon sought to create certainty and order, and with it a new human power over the world, through a new empirical methodology based on a harmonious combination of experiment, the senses and the understanding. With this method, he argued, we can 'derive hope from a purer alliance of the faculties (the experimental and rational) than has yet been attempted'.63 In a similar move, Descartes sought to conjure certainty from uncertainty through the application of a new method that moved progressively out from a few basic certainties (the existence of God, the certitude of individual consciousness and a divinely granted faculty of judgement) in a search for pure fixed truths. Mathematics formed the ideal image of this method, with its strict logical reasoning, its quantifiable results and its uncanny insights into the hidden structure of the cosmos.64 Earlier, Galileo had argued that scientists should privilege 'objective', quantifiable qualities over 'merely perceptible' ones; that 'only by means of an exclusively quantitative analysis could science attain certain knowledge of the world'.65 Such doctrines of mathematically verifiable truth were to have powerful echoes in the 20th Century, in the ascendancy of systems analysis, game theory, cybernetics and computing in defense policy and strategic decisions, and in the awesome scientific breakthroughs of nuclear physics, which unlocked the innermost secrets of matter and energy and applied the most advanced applications of mathematics and computing to create the atomic bomb. Yet this new scientific power was marked by a terrible irony: as even Morgenthau understood, the control over matter afforded by the science could never be translated into the control of the weapons themselves, into political utility and rational strategy.66 Bacon thought of the new scientific method not merely as way of achieving a purer access to truth and epistemological certainty, but as liberating a new power that would enable the creation of a new kind of Man. He opened the Novum Organum with the statement that 'knowledge and human power are synonymous', and later wrote of his 'determination...to lay a firmer foundation, and extend to a greater distance the boundaries of human power and dignity'.67 In a revealing and highly negative comparison between 'men's lives in the most polished countries of Europe and in any wild and barbarous region of the new Indies' -- one that echoes in advance Kissinger's distinction between post-and pre-Newtonian cultures -- Bacon set out what was at stake in the advancement of empirical science: anyone making this comparison, he remarked, 'will think it so great, that man may be said to be a god unto man'.68 We may be forgiven for blinking, but in Bacon's thought 'man' was indeed in the process of stealing a new fire from the heavens and seizing God's power over the world for itself. Not only would the new empirical science lead to 'an improvement of mankind's estate, and an increase in their power over nature', but would reverse the primordial humiliation of the Fall of Adam: For man, by the fall, lost at once his state of innocence, and his empire over creation, both of which can be partially recovered even in this life, the first by religion and faith, the second by the arts and sciences. For creation did not become entirely and utterly rebellious by the curse, but in consequence of the Divine decree, 'in the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread'; she is now compelled by our labours (not assuredly by our disputes or magical ceremonies) at length to afford mankind in some degree his bread...69 There is a breathtaking, world-creating hubris in this statement -- one that, in many ways, came to characterise western modernity itself, and which is easily recognisable in a generation of modern technocrats like Kissinger. The Fall of Adam was the Judeo-Christian West's primal creation myth, one that marked humankind as flawed and humbled before God, condemned to hardship and ambivalence. Bacon forecast here a return to Eden, but one of man's own making. This truly was the death of God, of putting man into God's place, and no pious appeals to the continuity or guidance of faith could disguise the awesome epistemological violence which now subordinated creation to man. Bacon indeed argued that inventions are 'new creations and imitations of divine works'. As such, there is nothing but good in science: 'the introduction of great inventions is the most distinguished of human actions...inventions are a blessing and a benefit without injuring or afflicting any'.70 And what would be mankind's 'bread', the rewards of its new 'empire over creation'? If the new method and invention brought modern medicine, social welfare, sanitation, communications, education and comfort, it also enabled the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust and two world wars; napalm, the B52, the hydrogen bomb, the Kalashnikov rifle and military strategy. Indeed some of the 20th Century's most far-reaching inventions -- radar, television, rocketry, computing, communications, jet aircraft, the Internet -- would be the product of drives for national security and militarisation. Even the inventions Bacon thought so marvellous and transformative -- printing, gunpowder and the compass -- brought in their wake upheaval and tragedy: printing, dogma and bureaucracy; gunpowder, the rifle and the artillery battery; navigation, slavery and the genocide of indigenous peoples. In short, the legacy of the new empirical science would be ambivalence as much as certainty; degradation as much as enlightenment; the destruction of nature as much as its utilisation. Doubts and Fears: Technology as Ontology If Bacon could not reasonably be expected to foresee many of these developments, the idea that scientific and technological progress could be destructive did occur to him. However it was an anxiety he summarily dismissed: ...let none be alarmed at the objection of the arts and sciences becoming depraved to malevolent or luxurious purposes and the like, for the same can be said of every worldly good; talent, courage, strength, beauty, riches, light itself...Only let mankind regain their rights over nature, assigned to them by the gift of God, and obtain that power, whose exercise will be governed by right reason and true religion.71 By the mid-Twentieth Century, after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, such fears could no longer be so easily wished away, as the physicist and scientific director of the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer recognised. He said in a 1947 lecture: We felt a particularly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting and in the end in large measure achieving the realization of atomic weapons...In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no over-statement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge they cannot lose.72 Adam had fallen once more, but into a world which refused to acknowledge its renewed intimacy with contingency and evil. Man's empire over creation -- his discovery of the innermost secrets of matter and energy, of the fires that fuelled the stars -- had not 'enhanced human power and dignity' as Bacon claimed, but instead brought destruction and horror. Scientific powers that had been consciously applied in the defence of life and in the hope of its betterment now threatened its total and absolute destruction. This would not prevent a legion of scientists, soldiers and national security policymakers later attempting to apply Bacon's faith in invention and Descartes' faith in mathematics to make of the Bomb a rational weapon. Oppenheimer -- who resolutely opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb -- understood what the strategists could not: that the weapons resisted control, resisted utility, that 'with the release of atomic energy quite revolutionary changes had occurred in the techniques of warfare'.73 Yet Bacon's legacy, one deeply imprinted on the strategists, was his view that truth and utility are 'perfectly identical'.74 In 1947 Oppenheimer had clung to the hope that 'knowledge is good...it seems hard to live any other way than thinking it was better to know something than not to know it; and the more you know, the better'; by 1960 he felt that 'terror attaches to new knowledge. It has an unmooring quality; it finds men unprepared to deal with it.'75 Martin Heidegger questioned this mapping of natural science onto the social world in his essays on technology -- which, as 'machine', has been so crucial to modern strategic and geopolitical thought as an image of perfect function and order and a powerful tool of intervention. He commented that, given that modern technology 'employs exact physical science...the deceptive illusion arises that modern technology is applied physical science'.76 Yet as the essays and speeches of Oppenheimer attest, technology and its relation to science, society and war cannot be reduced to a noiseless series of translations of science for politics, knowledge for force, or force for good. Instead, Oppenheimer saw a process frustrated by roadblocks and ruptured by irony; in his view there was no smooth, unproblematic translation of scientific truth into social truth, and technology was not its vehicle. Rather his comments raise profound and painful ethical questions that resonate with terror and uncertainty. Yet this has not prevented technology becoming a potent object of desire, not merely as an instrument of power but as a promise and conduit of certainty itself. In the minds of too many rational soldiers, strategists and policymakers, technology brings with it the truth of its enabling science and spreads it over the world. It turns epistemological certainty into political certainty; it turns control over 'facts' into control over the earth. Heidegger's insights into this phenomena I find especially telling and disturbing -- because they underline the ontological force of the instrumental view of politics. In The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger's striking argument was that in the modernising West technology is not merely a tool, a 'means to an end'. Rather technology has become a governing image of the modern universe, one that has come to order, limit and define human existence as a 'calculable coherence of forces' and a 'standing reserve' of energy. Heidegger wrote: 'the threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already affected man in his essence.'77 This process Heidegger calls 'Enframing' and through it the scientific mind demands that 'nature reports itself in some way or other that is identifiable through calculation and remains orderable as a system of information'. Man is not a being who makes and uses machines as means, choosing and limiting their impact on the world for his ends; rather man has imagined the world as a machine and humanity everywhere becomes trapped within its logic. Man, he writes, 'comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall...where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile Man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth.'78 Technological man not only becomes the name for a project of lordship and mastery over the earth, but incorporates humanity within this project as a calculable resource. In strategy, warfare and geopolitics human bodies, actions and aspirations are caught, transformed and perverted by such calculating, enframing reason: human lives are reduced to tools, obstacles, useful or obstinate matter. This tells us much about the enduring power of crude instrumental versions of strategic thought, which relate not merely to the actual use of force but to broader geopolitical strategies that see, as limited war theorists like Robert Osgood did, force as an 'instrument of policy short of war'. It was from within this strategic ontology that figures like the Nobel prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling theorised the strategic role of threats and coercive diplomacy, and spoke of strategy as 'the power to hurt'.79 In the 2006 Lebanon war we can see such thinking in the remark of a U.S. analyst, a former Ambassador to Israel and Syria, who speculated that by targeting civilians and infrastructure Israel aimed 'to create enough pain on the ground so there would be a local political reaction to Hezbollah's adventurism'.80 Similarly a retired Israeli army colonel told the Washington Post that 'Israel is attempting to create a rift between the Lebanese population and Hezbollah supporters by exacting a heavy price from the elite in Beirut. The message is: If you want your air conditioning to work and if you want to be able to fly to Paris for shopping, you must pull your head out of the sand and take action toward shutting down Hezbollah-land.'81 Conclusion: Violent Ontologies or Peaceful Choices? I was motivated to begin the larger project from which this essay derives by a number of concerns. I felt that the available critical, interpretive or performative languages of war -- realist and liberal international relations theories, just war theories, and various Clausewitzian derivations of strategy -- failed us, because they either perform or refuse to place under suspicion the underlying political ontologies that I have sought to unmask and question here. Many realists have quite nuanced and critical attitudes to the use of force, but ultimately affirm strategic thought and remain embedded within the existential framework of the nation-state. Both liberal internationalist and just war doctrines seek mainly to improve the accountability of decision-making in security affairs and to limit some of the worst moral enormities of war, but (apart from the more radical versions of cosmopolitanism) they fail to question the ontological claims of political community or strategic theory.82 In the case of a theorist like Jean Bethke Elshtain, just war doctrine is in fact allied to a softer, liberalised form of the Hegelian-Schmittian ontology. She dismisses Kant's Perpetual Peace as 'a fantasy of at-oneness...a world in which differences have all been rubbed off' and in which 'politics, which is the way human beings have devised for dealing with their differences, gets eliminated.'83 She remains a committed liberal democrat and espouses a moral community that stretches beyond the nation-state, which strongly contrasts with Schmitt's hostility to liberalism and his claustrophobic distinction between friend and enemy. However her image of politics -- which at its limits, she implies, requires the resort to war as the only existentially satisfying way of resolving deep-seated conflicts -- reflects much of Schmitt's idea of the political and Hegel's ontology of a fundamentally alienated world of nation-states, in which war is a performance of being. She categorically states that any effort to dismantle security dilemmas 'also requires the dismantling of human beings as we know them'.84 Whilst this would not be true of all just war advocates, I suspect that even as they are so concerned with the ought, moral theories of violence grant too much unquestioned power to the is. The problem here lies with the confidence in being -- of 'human beings as we know them' -- which ultimately fails to escape a Schmittian architecture and thus eternally exacerbates (indeed reifies) antagonisms. Yet we know from the work of Deleuze and especially William Connolly that exchanging an ontology of being for one of becoming, where the boundaries and nature of the self contain new possibilities through agonistic relation to others, provides a less destructive and violent way of acknowledging and dealing with conflict and difference.85 My argument here, whilst normatively sympathetic to Kant's moral demand for the eventual abolition of war, militates against excessive optimism.86 Even as I am arguing that war is not an enduring historical or anthropological feature, or a neutral and rational instrument of policy -- that it is rather the product of hegemonic forms of knowledge about political action and community -- my analysis does suggest some sobering conclusions about its power as an idea and formation. Neither the progressive flow of history nor the pacific tendencies of an international society of republican states will save us. The violent ontologies I have described here in fact dominate the conceptual and policy frameworks of modern republican states and have come, against everything Kant hoped for, to stand in for progress, modernity and reason. Indeed what Heidegger argues, I think with some credibility, is that the enframing world view has come to stand in for being itself. Enframing, argues Heidegger, 'does not simply endanger man in his relationship to himself and to everything that is...it drives out every other possibility of revealing...the rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.'87 What I take from Heidegger's argument -- one that I have sought to extend by analysing the militaristic power of modern ontologies of political existence and security -- is a view that the challenge is posed not merely by a few varieties of weapon, government, technology or policy, but by an overarching system of thinking and understanding that lays claim to our entire space of truth and existence. Many of the most destructive features of contemporary modernity -- militarism, repression, coercive diplomacy, covert intervention, geopolitics, economic exploitation and ecological destruction -- derive not merely from particular choices by policymakers based on their particular interests, but from calculative, 'empirical' discourses of scientific and political truth rooted in powerful enlightenment images of being. Confined within such an epistemological and cultural universe, policymakers' choices become necessities, their actions become inevitabilities, and humans suffer and die. Viewed in this light, 'rationality' is the name we give the chain of reasoning which builds one structure of truth on another until a course of action, however violent or dangerous, becomes preordained through that reasoning's very operation and existence. It creates both discursive constraints -- available choices may simply not be seen as credible or legitimate -- and material constraints that derive from the mutually reinforcing cascade of discourses and events which then preordain militarism and violence as necessary policy responses, however ineffective, dysfunctional or chaotic. The force of my own and Heidegger's analysis does, admittedly, tend towards a deterministic fatalism. On my part this is quite deliberate; it is important to allow this possible conclusion to weigh on us. Large sections of modern societies -- especially parts of the media, political leaderships and national security institutions -- are utterly trapped within the Clausewitzian paradigm, within the instrumental utilitarianism of 'enframing' and the stark ontology of the friend and enemy. They are certainly tremendously aggressive and energetic in continually stating and reinstating its force. But is there a way out? Is there no possibility of agency and choice? Is this not the key normative problem I raised at the outset, of how the modern ontologies of war efface agency, causality and responsibility from decision making; the responsibility that comes with having choices and making decisions, with exercising power? (In this I am much closer to Connolly than Foucault, in Connolly's insistence that, even in the face of the anonymous power of discourse to produce and limit subjects, selves remain capable of agency and thus incur responsibilities.88) There seems no point in following Heidegger in seeking a more 'primal truth' of being -- that is to reinstate ontology and obscure its worldly manifestations and consequences from critique. However we can, while refusing Heidegger's unworldly89 nostalgia, appreciate that he was searching for a way out of the modern system of calculation; that he was searching for a 'questioning', 'free relationship' to technology that would not be immediately recaptured by the strategic, calculating vision of enframing. Yet his path out is somewhat chimerical -- his faith in 'art' and the older Greek attitudes of 'responsibility and indebtedness' offer us valuable clues to the kind of sensibility needed, but little more. When we consider the problem of policy, the force of this analysis suggests that choice and agency can be all too often limited; they can remain confined (sometimes quite wilfully) within the overarching strategic and security paradigms. Or, more hopefully, policy choices could aim to bring into being a more enduringly inclusive, cosmopolitan and peaceful logic of the political. But this cannot be done without seizing alternatives from outside the space of enframing and utilitarian strategic thought, by being aware of its presence and weight and activating a very different concept of existence, security and action.90 This would seem to hinge upon 'questioning' as such -- on the questions we put to the real and our efforts to create and act into it. Do security and strategic policies seek to exploit and direct humans as material, as energy, or do they seek to protect and enlarge human dignity and autonomy? Do they seek to impose by force an unjust status quo (as in Palestine), or to remove one injustice only to replace it with others (the U.S. in Iraq or Afghanistan), or do so at an unacceptable human, economic, and environmental price? Do we see our actions within an instrumental, amoral framework (of 'interests') and a linear chain of causes and effects (the idea of force), or do we see them as folding into a complex interplay of languages, norms, events and consequences which are less predictable and controllable?91 And most fundamentally: Are we seeking to coerce or persuade? Are less violent and more sustainable choices available? Will our actions perpetuate or help to end the global rule of insecurity and violence? Will our thought?

The alternative is to reject the AFF’s security representations as a critical intellectual labor that makes imagination of a more peaceful future possible.  Neocleous 08

Neocleous 8 — Prof of Government @ Brunel University; London (Mark, Critique of Security, pg. 184-5)

Anyone well versed in history or with experience of university life will know about the shameful ways in which large numbers of academics have elevated venality into the cardinal academic virtue, complying with the demands of those in power and the wishes of those with money: witness the political scientists, historians, anthropologists, geographers, cartographers, sociologists, linguists and many others who reworked their disciplines according to the principles and myths, and the principle myths, of fascism.' 'Academic life under fascism', notes Christopher Hutton, 'is a dismal ... episode in an unedifying story of relations between the modem academic and the state, and between academics and power both within and outside the university. But this part of the history of fascism is merely the worst moment in the wider and equally unedifying story of relations between academics and the state more generally, merely one way m which intellectuals have kowtowed to the principles and myths, and the principle myths, concerning security and the state. Spouting the jargon of security and enthralled by the trappings of power, their intellectual labour consists of nothing less than attempts to write hand-books for the princes of the new security state. The death of countless numbers in a more 'efficient' bombing of a city, the stationing of troops halfway around the World in order to bring to an end any attempt at collective self-determination, the use of military machines against civilians, the training of police forces in counter-insurgency practices, but more than anything the key concepts and categories used to explain and justify these things - all defended, supported and even ‘improved” by security intellectuals for whom, ultimately, intelIecua1 labour boils down to little more than the question of the most efficient manner. In which to achieve the security demanded by the state and bourgeois order. In rationalizing the political and corporate logic of security, the security intellectual conceals the utter irrationality of the system as a whole. The security intellectual then is nothing less than the security ideologue, peddling the fetish of our time. The only way out of such a dilemma, to escape the fetish, is perhaps to eschew the logic of security altogether - to reject it as so ideologically loaded in favour of the state that any real political thought other than the authoritarian and reactionary should be pressed to give it up, That is clearly something that can not be achieved within the limits of bourgeois thought and thus could never even begin to be imagined by the security intellectual. It is also something that the constant iteration of the refrain ‘this is an insecure world’ and reiteration of one fear, anxiety and insecurity after another will also make it hard to do, but it is something that the critique of security suggests we may have to consider if we want a political way out of the impasse of security. This impasse exists because security has now become so all-encompassing that it marginalizes all else, most notably the constructive conflicts, debates and discussions that animate political life. The constant prioritizing of a mythical security as a political end - as the political end - constitutes a rejection of politics in any meaningful sense of the term. That is, as a mode of action in which differences can be articulated, in which the conflicts and struggles that arise from such differences can be fought for and negotiated, in which people might come to believe that another world is possible - that they might transform the world and in turn be transformed. Security politics simply removes this; worse, it removes it while purportedly addressing it. In so doing it suppresses all issues of power and turns political questions into debates about the most efficient way to achieve ‘security’, despite the fact that we are never quite told - never could be told – what might count as having achieved it. Security politics is, in this sense, an anti-politics,” dominating political discourse in much the same manner as the security state tries to dominate human beings, reinforcing security fetishism and the monopolistic character of security on the political imagination. We therefore need to get beyond security politics, not add yet more ‘sectors to it in a way that simply expands the scope of the state, and legitimizes state intervention in yet more and more areas of our lives. Simon Dalby reports a personal communication with Michael Williams, co-editor of the important text Critical Security Studies, in which the latter asks: if you take away security, what do you put in the hole that’s left behind? But I’m inclined to agree with Dalby: maybe there is no hole. The mistake has been to think that there is a hole and that this hole needs to be filled with a new vision or revision of security in which it is re-mapped or civilised or gendered or humanised or expanded or whatever. All of these ultimately remain within the statist political imaginary, and consequently end up re-affirming the state as the terrain of modem politics, the grounds of security. The real task is not to fill the supposed hole with yet another vision of security, but to fight for an alternative political language which takes us beyond the narrow horizon of bourgeois security and which therefore does not constantly throw us into the arms of the state. That’s the point of critical politics: to develop a new political language more adequate to the kind of society we want. Thus while much of what I have said here has been of a negative order, part of the tradition of critical theory is that the negative may be as significant as the positive in setting thought on new paths. For if security really is the supreme concept of bourgeois society and the fundamental thematic of liberalism, then to keep harping on about insecurity and to keep demanding ‘more security’ (while meekly hoping that this increased security doesn’t damage our liberty) is to blind ourselves to the possibility of building real alternatives to the authoritarian tendencies in contemporary politics. To situate ourselves against security politics would allow us to circumvent the debilitating effect achieved through the constant securitizing of social and political issues, debilitating in the sense that ‘security’ helps consolidate the power of the existing forms of social domination and justifies the short-circuiting of even the most democratic forms. It would also allow us to forge another kind of politics centered on a different conception of the good. We need a new way of thinking and talking about social being and politics that moves us beyond security. This would perhaps be emancipatory in the true sense of the word. What this might mean, precisely, must be open to debate. But it certainly requires recognizing that security is an illusion that has forgotten it is an illusion; it requires recognising that security is not the same as solidarity; it requires accepting that insecurity is part of the human condition, and thus giving up the search for the certainty of security and instead learning to tolerate the uncertainties, ambiguities and ‘insecurities’ that come with being human; it requires accepting that securitizing an issue does not mean dealing with it politically, but bracketing it out and handing it to the state; it requires us to be brave enough to return the gift.
The role of the ballot is to critically interrogate the 1AC’s security representations – that’s a pre requisite to evaluating the consequences of the plan so they do not get to weigh the case:
 

1.  Representations must precede policy discussion – they determine what is politically thinkable.  Crawford 02

Crawford 02 — Neta, PhD MA MIT, BA Brown, Prof. of poli sci at boston univ.   Argument and Change in World Politics, p. 19-21

Coherent arguments are unlikely to take place unless and until actors, at least on some level, agree on what they are arguing about. The at least temporary resolution of meta-arguments- regarding the nature of the good (the content of prescriptive norms); what is out there, the way we know the world, how we decide between competing beliefs (ontology and epistemology); and the nature of the situation at hand( the proper frame or representation)- must occur before specific arguments that could lead to decision and action may take place. Meta-arguments over epistemology and ontology, relatively rare, occur in instances where there is a fundamental clash between belief systems and not simply a debate within a belief system. Such arguments over the nature of the world and how we come to know it are particularly rare in politics though they are more frequent in religion and science. Meta-arguments over the “good” are contests over what it is good and right to do, and even how we know the good and the right. They are about the nature of the good, specifically, defining the qualities of “good” so that we know good when we see it and do it. Ethical arguments are about how to do good in a particular situation. More common are meta-arguments over representations or frames- about how we out to understand a particular situation. Sometimes actors agree on how they see a situation. More often there are different possible interpretations. Thomas Homer-Dixon and Roger karapin suggest, “Argument and debate occur when people try to gain acceptance for their interpretation of the world”. For example, “is the war defensive or aggressive?”. Defining and controlling representations and images, or the frame, affects whether one thinks there is an issue at stake and whether a particular argument applies to the case. An actor fighting a defensive war is within international law; an aggressor may legitimately be subject to sanctions. Framing and reframing involve mimesis or putting forward representations of what is going on. In mimetic meta-arguments, actors who are struggling to characterize or frame the situation accomplish their ends by drawing vivid pictures of the “reality” through exaggeration, analogy, or differentiation. Representations of a situation do not re-produce accurately so much as they creatively re-present situations in a way that makes sense. “mimesis is a metaphoric or ‘iconic argumentation of the real.’ Imitating not the effectivity of events but their logical structure and meaning.” Certain features are emphasized and others de-emphasized or completely ignored as their situation is recharacterized or reframed. Representation thus becomes a “constraint on reasoning in that it limits understanding to a specific organization of conceptual knowledge.” The dominant representation delimits which arguments will be considered legitimate, framing how actors see possibities. As Roxanne Doty argues, “the possibility of practices presupposes the ability of an agent to imagine certain courses of action. Certain background meanings, kinds of social actors and relationships, must already be in place.” If, as Donald Sylvan and Stuart Thorson argue, “politics involves the selective privileging of representations, “it may not matter whether one representation or another is true or not. Emphasizing whether frames articulate accurate or inaccurate perceptions misses the rhetorical import of representation- how frames affect what is seen or not seen, and subsequent choices. Meta-arguments over representation are thus crucial elements of political argument because an actor’s arguments about what to do will be more persuasive if their characterization or framing of the situation holds sway. But, as Rodger Payne suggests, “No frame is an omnipotent persuasive tool that can be decisively wielded by norm entrepreneurs without serious political wrangling.” Hence framing is a meta-argument.

2.  Serial policy failure – without prior questioning the AFF reproduces the same bad results.  Dillon 2k

Dillon and Reid 2K — (Michael, Professor of Politics – University of Lancaster, and Julian, Lecturer in International Relations – King’s College, “Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex Emergency”, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, January / March, 25(1))

More specifically, where there is a policy problematic there is expertise, and where there is expertise there, too, a policy problematic will emerge. Such problematics are detailed and elaborated in terms of discrete forms of knowledge as well as interlocking policy domains. Policy domains reify the problematization of life in certain ways by turning these epistemically and politically contestable orderings of life into "problems" that require the continuous attention of policy science and the continuous resolutions of policymakers. Policy "actors" develop and compete on the basis of the expertise that grows up around such problems or clusters of problems and their client populations. Here, too, we may also discover what might be called "epistemic entrepreneurs." Albeit the market for discourse is prescribed and policed in ways that Foucault indicated, bidding to formulate novel problematizations they seek to "sell" these, or otherwise have them officially adopted. In principle, there is no limit to the ways in which the management of population may be problematized. All aspects of human conduct, any encounter with life, is problematizable. Any problematization is capable of becoming a policy problem. Governmentality thereby creates a market for policy, for science and for policy science, in which problematizations go looking for policy sponsors while policy sponsors fiercely compete on behalf of their favored problematizations. Reproblematization of problems is constrained by the institutional and ideological investments surrounding accepted "problems," and by the sheer difficulty of challenging the inescapable ontological and epistemological assumptions that go into their very formation. There is nothing so fiercely contested as an epistemological or ontological assumption. And there is nothing so fiercely ridiculed as the suggestion that the real problem with problematizations exists precisely at the level of such assumptions. Such "paralysis of analysis" is precisely what policymakers seek to avoid since they are compelled constantly to respond to circumstances over which they ordinarily have in fact both more and less control than they proclaim. What they do not have is precisely the control that they want. Yet serial policy failure--the fate and the fuel of all policy--compels them into a continuous search for the new analysis that will extract them from the aporias in which they constantly find themselves enmeshed. 35 Serial policy failure is no simple shortcoming that science and policy--and policy science--will ultimately overcome. Serial policy failure is rooted in the ontological and epistemological assumptions that fashion the ways in which global governance encounters and problematizes life as a process of emergence through fitness landscapes that constantly adaptive and changing ensembles have continuously to negotiate. As a particular kind of intervention into life, global governance promotes the very changes and unintended outcomes that it then serially reproblematizes in terms of policy failure. Thus, global liberal governance is not a linear problem-solving process committed to the resolution of objective policy problems simply by bringing better information and knowledge to bear upon them. A nonlinear economy of power/knowledge, it deliberately installs socially specific and radically inequitable distributions of wealth, opportunity, and mortal danger both locally and globally through the very detailed ways in which life is variously (policy) problematized by it.

Tournament: Loyola | Round: 6 | Opponent: Brentwood WJ | Judge: Joseph Barquin
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:
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. WNA 16
   “Emerging Nuclear Energy Countries,” World Nuclear Association, July 2016.
   Over 45 countries are actively considering embarking upon nuclear power programs.¶ These range from sophisticated economies to developing nations.¶ The front runners are UAE, Turkey, Vietnam, Belarus, and Poland.¶ Nuclear power is planned in over 20 countries which do not currently have it, and under some level of consideration in over 20 more (in a few, consideration is not necessarily at government level). For countries listed immediately below in bold, nuclear power prospects are more fully dealt with in specific country papers:¶ In Europe: Italy, Albania, Serbia, Croatia, Portugal, Norway, Poland, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Ireland, Turkey.¶ In the Middle East and North Africa: Gulf states including UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait, Yemen, Israel, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Sudan.¶ In west, central and southern Africa: Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Namibia.¶ In Central and South America: Cuba, Chile, Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia, Peru, Paraguay.¶ In central and southern Asia: Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka¶ In SE Asia: Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Myanmar, Australia, New Zealand.¶ In east Asia: North Korea.
   2.  Core Controversy
   there’s strong, equitable, and recent literature for the debate over blanket bans for nuclear power. Herbst 07
   “New Debate Over Nuclear Option,” Moira Herbst, 3/26/07, Bloomberg.
   In recent years, as prices for oil have surged and concerns over global warming have grown, experts around the world have debated ways to develop alternatives to traditional energy, from using corn for ethanol to harnessing wind for electricity. And governments from India to Britain to the U.S. are considering whether to make more use of a long-standing, but controversial energy source: nuclear power.¶ In the U.S., politicians as diverse as President George W. Bush and onetime rival Al Gore have expressed interest in expanding nuclear power (see BusinessWeek.com, 3/21/07, "Gore Rings a Green Alarm"). A key reason is nuclear power's reputation for being clean, because such plants typically don't generate the carbon dioxide that contributes to global warming. Just this month, Exelon (EXC) won approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for a site on which they could build the first new U.S. nuclear power plant since 1979.¶ The controversy, of course, has long been over the hazards of using radioactive materials to produce energy. Twenty-eight years ago this week, on Mar. 28, 1979, an accident at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania sparked protests against nuclear plants in the U.S. The movement was solidified seven years later by the Chernobyl meltdown in the Soviet Union. Environmental groups such as the Sierra Club remain staunchly opposed to nuclear power.

D.  Vote on substantive engagement:
Drop the debater on T:
Competing interps
No RVIs:

Tournament: Loyola | Round: 2 | Opponent: Mountain View DZ | Judge: Felix Tan
A. Interp – The affirmative must defend the hypothetical implementation the 1AC as a policy option.
“Resolved” in front of the resolution mandates a policy action. Parcher
(Jeff, Fmr. Debate Coach at Georgetown University, February, http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200102/0790.html)
(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.

And OED defines ought as “Used to indicate a desirable or expected state”
OED (Oxford Dictionary, Online Dictionary, "Ought”, No date.  

B. Violation – The affirmative defends .

C. Standards – 

1. Core Controversy –
   
   2. Advocacy skills – we don’t become equipped to talk about nuclear power in the way experts who discuss nuclear power actually talk about it. This means we are both unprepared to engage with the literature on the topic but also become bad advocates for energy policy.  Independent voter – they make debate impossible and exclusionary. Steve 07
   (Anonymous member of Black Block and Active Transformation who lives in East Lansing, MI, Date Last Mod. Feb 8, 2007 http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/global/a16dcdiscussion.htm)
   The root of the lack of strategy problem is a general problem within the North American anarchist movement. We get caught up in tactical thinking without establishing clear goals. We need to elaborate how our actions today fit into a plan that leads to the destruction of the state and capitalism, white supremacy and patriarchy. Moving away from strictly tactical thinking toward political goals and long term strategy needs to be a priority for the anarchist movement. No longer can we justify a moralistic approach to the latest outrage - running around like chickens with their heads cut off. We need to prioritize developing the political unity of our affinity groups and collectives, as well as developing regional federations and starting the process of developing the political principles that they will be based around (which will be easier if we have made some headway in our local groups). The NorthEastern Federation of Anarchist Communists (NEFAC) is a good example of doing this. They have prioritized developing the political principles they are federated around. The strategies that we develop in our collectives and networks will never be blueprints set in stone. They will be documents in motion, constantly being challenged and adapted. But without a specific elaboration of what we are working toward and how we plan to get there, we will always end up making bad decisions. If we just assume everyone is on the same page, we will find out otherwise really quick when shit gets critical. Developing regional anarchist federations and networks is a great step for our movement. We should start getting these things going all over the continent. We should also prioritize developing these across national borders, which NEFAC has also done with northeastern Canada. Some of the errors of Love and Rage were that it tried to cover too much space too soon, and that it was based too much on individual membership, instead of collective membership. We need to keep these in mind as we start to develop these projects. One of the benefits of Love and Rage was that it provided a forum among a lot of people to have a lot of political discussion and try to develop strategy in a collective way. This, along with mutual aid and security, could be the priorities of the regional anarchist federations. These regional federations could also form the basis for tactical leadership at demonstrations. Let me first give one example why we need tactical teams at large demos. In DC the Black Block amorphously made the decision to try to drive a dumpster through one of the police lines. The people in front with the dumpster ended up getting abandoned by the other half of the Black Block who were persuaded by the voice of the moment to move elsewhere. The people up front were in a critical confrontation with police when they were abandoned. This could be avoided if the Black Block had a decision making system that slowed down decision making long enough for the block to stay together. With this in mind we must remember that the chaotic, decentralized nature of our organization is what makes us hard to police. We must maximize the benefits of decentralized leadership, without establishing permanent leaders and targets. Here is a proposal to consider for developing tactical teams for demos. Delegates from each collective in the regional federation where the action is happening would form the tactical team. Delegates from other regional federations could also be a part of the tactical team. Communications between the tactical team and collectives, affinity groups, runners, etc. could be established via radio. The delegates would be recallable by their collectives if problems arose, and as long as clear goals are elaborated ahead of time with broader participation, the tactical team should be able to make informed decisions. An effort should be made to rotate delegates so that everyone develops the ability. People with less experience should be given the chance to represent their collectives in less critical situations, where they can become more comfortable with it. The reality is that liberal politics will not lead to an end to economic exploitation, racism, and sexism. Anarchism offers a truly radical alternative. Only a radical critique that links the oppressive nature of global capitalism to the police state at home has a chance of diversifying the movement against global capitalism. In order for the most oppressed people here to get involved the movement must offer the possibility of changing their lives for the better. A vision of what "winning" would look like must be elaborated if people are going to take the risk with tremendous social upheaval, which is what we are calling for. We cannot afford to give the old anarchist excuse that "the people will decide after the revolution" how this or that will work. We must have plans and ideas for things as diverse as transportation, schooling, crime prevention, and criminal justice. People don't want to hear simple solutions to complex questions, that only enforces people's opinions of us as naive. We need practical examples of what we are fighting for. People can respond to examples better than unusual theory. While we understand that we will not determine the shape of things to come, when the system critically fails someone needs to be there with anti-authoritarian suggestions for how to run all sorts of things. If we are not prepared for that we can assume others will be prepared to build up the state or a new state.

3. Ground – policy and philosophical analysis both require analysis of how values manifest themselves in contemporary society. Taebi 11

Taebi, Behnam. "Ethics of Nuclear Power: How to Understand Sustainability in the Nuclear Debate." NUCLEAR POWER–DEPLOYMENT, OPERATION AND SUSTAINABILITY (2011): 129.TF

I presented the notion of sustainable development as a moral value and elaborated on its¶ relationship with intergenerational justice. Following Barry, I argued that we should sustain¶ future generation’s opportunity for well-being insofar as that can be accomplished with the¶ available energy resources and their vital interests. I then introduced a set of moral values¶ which, in combination with each other, comprise the overarching value of sustainability.¶ The values ‘environmental friendliness’, ‘public health and safety’ and ‘security’ together¶ safeguard the vital interests of future generation; the values ‘resource durability’ and¶ ‘economic viability’ help to sustain future well-being.¶ The impacts of different nuclear fuel cycles were then assessed according to how they affect¶ the values presented. In this operationalization process, we took into consideration the fact¶ that the values could relate to the interests of different groups of people belonging to different¶ generations. The two existing fuel cycles were then compared according to their values; the¶ open fuel cycle could best be associated with short-term benefits and the closed fuel cycle with¶ long-term benefits and the accompanying short-term costs. All of this gives rise to an¶ intergenerational conflict of interests between those alive today and future generations.¶ The ranking of these values with regard to their moral relevance requires thorough public¶ and political discourse. This is particularly relevant when assessing the desirability of new¶ technology. Even though technology has no inherent moral relevance, it does help improve¶ other values. In a moral discussion on what we ought to do for future generations, it is¶ important to first be aware of what we can do, technologically speaking. This is the added¶ value of this type of applied ethics in which solutions can be proposed within the realm of¶ technological realities and in the light of technological progress. Indeed, the impacts of these¶ new technologies should then be assessed in the ethical field of tension of sustainability, as¶ has been proposed here. It is then worthwhile considering how other values will be affected¶ by the introduction of this technology?¶ When it comes to policy-making for nuclear power deployment, we need to address several¶ ethical issues regarding our relationship with posterity and the intergenerational distribution¶ of benefits and burdens. Therefore, policies on nuclear power should be accompanied by¶ thorough moral analysis. One possible conclusion arising from such analysis could be that we,¶ the present generations who are enjoying the lion’s share of the benefits of nuclear power,¶ should remain responsible for dealing with its waste. This supports the application of PandT¶ that reduces the waste lifetime and therefore also the potential future burdens. Before PandT can¶ be introduced, decades of research and development still need to take place. Several¶ technological challenges, both in the development of reprocessing technologies and in the¶ development of fast reactors still have to be surmounted and the development and ultimate¶ deployment of PandT will create considerable burdens (including certain economic burdens) for¶ contemporaries. So, if the result of the moral discussion is that we want to be able to apply¶ PandT, then this technology should be high on the research agenda so that it can become a¶ serious alternative in the near future; one that is both technically feasible and economically¶ affordable. The decision-maker should be aware of the technological state-of-the-art and of the¶ cost that the development of a certain technology, desirable or not, creates for the present¶ generation. This paper aims to contribute to that awareness.

B. Turn Ground 

D.  Vote on substantive engagement:  

Drop the debater on T:

Competing interps 

No RVIs:

Tournament: St Marks | Round: Octas | Opponent: Westwood RM | Judge: Panel
A.  Interp:  The aff must defend that all countries prohibit the production of all nuclear power. To clarify, they can’t advocate a reactor or subset of of nuclear power be banned

Counterplans that prohibit nuclear power for all plants accept for one or a subset of plants are theoretically illegitimate. 

Cambridge Dictionary defines prohibit as:
Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary, “prohibit,” Cambridge University Press.
To prohibit is also to prevent something by making it impossible: Loud music prohibited serious conversation.

B.  Violation:  They specify only subamarines

C.  Standards:

1.  Limits
   D.  Vote on substantive engagement:  
   Drop the debater on T:
   Competing interps
   No RVIs:

Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 6 | Opponent: Harrison LC | Judge: Kyle Fennessy
A: If the AFF specifies more than one country to prohibit the production of nuclear power, they must defend action by an international body or the expansion of an existing agreement that sets explicit standards for how countries regulate and enforce the ban on nuclear power. 

B: They spec ……

1. Utopian Fiat:
   2. Limits:
   Vote on advocacy skills –
   Drop the debater:
   Competing interps
   No RVIs: