Harvard Westlake Mork Neg
| Tournament | Round | Opponent | Judge | Cites | Round Report | Open Source | Edit/Delete |
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| Alta | 1 | East WH | Overing, Michael |
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| Alta | 3 | San Marino VL | Inglet, Sierra |
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| College Prep | 1 | Bentley KS | Shan, Panny |
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| College Prep | 3 | Nueva AK | Olson, Ryan |
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| College Prep | Octas | Harker SP | Tan, Felix and Leigh, Ryan and Ziaee, Samee |
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| Damus | 4 | Harker QC | Angus, Thomas |
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| Damus | 2 | Albany EK | Crucilla, Sarah |
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| Loyola | 4 | Peninsula KL | Leah Clark-Villanueva |
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| Loyola | Doubles | Danielle Dosch | Kris Kaya, Olivia Panchal, Arjun Tambe |
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| Loyola | 2 | Peninsula JL | Adam Bistagne |
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| Loyola | 2 | Peninsula JL | Adam Bistagne |
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| Yale | 1 | Success Academy SC | Zhou, Paul |
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| Tournament | Round | Report |
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| Alta | 1 | Opponent: East WH | Judge: Overing, Michael AC police brutaity |
| Alta | 3 | Opponent: San Marino VL | Judge: Inglet, Sierra NC Cap K T |
| College Prep | 1 | Opponent: Bentley KS | Judge: Shan, Panny AC Fem Rage |
| College Prep | 3 | Opponent: Nueva AK | Judge: Olson, Ryan AC Eudaemonia AFF |
| College Prep | Octas | Opponent: Harker SP | Judge: Tan, Felix and Leigh, Ryan and Ziaee, Samee 1AC Kant |
| Damus | 4 | Opponent: Harker QC | Judge: Angus, Thomas AC Court legitimacy and civil rights |
| Damus | 2 | Opponent: Albany EK | Judge: Crucilla, Sarah AC Kant |
| Yale | 1 | Opponent: Success Academy SC | Judge: Zhou, Paul NC SSD CP Elections DA Warming DA |
To modify or delete round reports, edit the associated round.
Cites
| Entry | Date |
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0 - AFC BadTournament: College Prep | Round: 3 | Opponent: Nueva AK | Judge: Olson, Ryan B. Violation: they read AFC C. Standards:
| 12/18/16 |
0 - Anti ethicsTournament: Damus | Round: 2 | Opponent: Albany EK | Judge: Crucilla, Sarah 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. Their framework arguments are another link – their ethics are colorblind and abstract from reality in a way in a way that is inaccessible to oppressed bodies – they serve as another hoop to jump through before we can engage in racism and are exactly what keeps that oppression prevalent. Curry 2 In the post-structuralist era, post-colonial thinking about racism specifically, and difference/otherness generally, has given a peculiar ameliorative function to discourse and the performance of “other-ed” identities. In this era, the dominant illusion is that discourse itself , an act that requires as its basis the recognition of the “other” as “similar,” is socially transformative—not only with regard to how the white subject assimilates the similitude of the “other-ed,” but as an actual activity gauged by the recognition by one white person or by a group of white people in any given scenario, is uncritically accepted and encouraged as anti-racist politics.. In actuality such discourse appeals, which necessitate—become dependent on—(white) recognition, function very much like the racial stereotype, in that the concept of the Black body being the expression and source of experience and phenomena (existential-phenomenological-theorization) is incarcerated by the conceptualization created the discursive catalyst yearning to be perceived by the white thing seeing the Black. Such appeals lend potentiality-hope-faith to the already present/demonstrated ignorance-racism-interest of the white individual, who in large part expresses the historical tone/epistemology of their racial group’s interest. When morality is defined, not by the empirical acts that demonstrate immorality, but the racial character of those in question, our ethics become nothing more than the apologetics of our tyrannical epoch. Ought implies a projected (futural) act. The word commands a deliberate action to reasonably expect the world to be able to sustain or support. For the Black thinker, the Black citizen-subject-slave-(in)human, ought is not rational but repressive. For the oppressed racialized thinker, the ethical provocation is an immediate confrontation with the impossibility of actually acting towards values like freedom, liberty, humanity, and life, since none of these values can be achieved concretely for the Black in a world controlled by and framed by the white. The options for ethical actions are not ethical in and of themselves, but merely the options the immorality of the racist world will allow, thus the oppressed is forced to idealize their ethical positions, eliminating the truth of their reality, and the peeling away the tyranny of white bodies, so that as the oppressed, the can ideally imagine an “if condition,” whereby they are allowed to ethical engage racism from the perspective of: “if whites were moral and respected the humanity of Blacks, then we can ethically engage in these behaviors. Unfortunately, this ought constraint only forces Blacks to consciously recognize the futility of ethical engagement, since it is in this ought deliberation that they recognize that their cognition of all values are dependent not on their moral aspirations for the world, but the determined by the will of white supremacy to maintain virtue throughout all ethical calculations. In short, Black ethical deliberation is censored so that it can only engage moral questions by asserting that whites are virtuous and hence capable of being ethically persuaded towards right action, hence all ethical question about racism, white supremacy and anti-Blackness is not about how Blacks think about the world, but what possibility the world allows Blacks to contemplate under the idea of ethics. These ethics, the ethics that result from this vitiated morality, are not arbiters of oppression at all. They are not a rational calculus that is capable of revealing a categorical imperative, rather they function as the Kantian constraints upon human experience; the synthetic apriori upon which the phenomena of whiteness is the landscape of thinking about Blackness under the Western anthropos. There is an implicit appeal to a hierarchy of being that is both empirical and universal—all man is superior to non-man. Hence, ethics emerges as the product of the overrepresentation of Western man thinking itself—projecting itself—into the future. These ethics, theorized away from the anti-Blackness not within it, only uphold an overdetermined virtue of whiteness. They hold within them no actual delineation between good or bad, only a Puritanical call to reason to turn its attention towards the other-ed created. This attention however relies on the perceptions and caricatures of Black torment that appeal to the whites’ self-assuring imagining of themselves, so that even when confronted with racism and their role as whites thinking about Black people incarcerated within a racist society and dying, these whites can claim that their conceptualization of racism itself, or (inter-sectionally) next to other injustices like poverty, sexism, homophobia, etc. makes them (whites) virtuous. It is the process of, the appeal to, “getting whites to recognize” (racist) oppression that allows the destruction of reality, Black death, to continue unabated, since it is the exact moment that whites are forced to engage racist problems in America, be it the anti-Black violence of American society, which animates the aversion of the justice system, the police state, the white citizenry, or the practice of American democracy itself—where the death of Black people/criminals/deviants/thugs remain normal and justified by whites—that they, the white(s) thinking about racism, get to impose upon Black reality, a racist moral maxim, namely that racism is not death and beyond –the end of--ethical calculus or moral evaluation, but ultimately contingent in America and of measurable consequence so much so that must be weighed next to the other democratic values that preserve this great white society: security, safety, individuality, property, profit, and freedom, the very values that when enacted by whites continue to perpetuate one ultimate end, the death of Blacks. The 1AC’s colorblindness is itself a form of racism – it acts to shut off conversations about oppression and only allows the voices of whites to be heard. Williams 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. Thus the alternative is to embrace anti-ethics; we must refuse the notion that historically racist institutions can help minorities and stop exploitation—fiat is illusory, so we need to destroy and demystify the concept of the white man and white virtue. Curry 3 Dr. Tommy J. Curry 13, Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Texas AandM, "In the Fiat of Dreams: The Delusional Allure of Hope, the Reality of Anti-Black Violence and the Demands of the Anti-Ethical", 2013. CC The shift out of our present conception of Man, out of our present “World System”—the one that places people of African descent and the ever-expanding global, transracial category of the homeless, jobless, and criminalized damned as the zero-most factor of Other to Western Man’s Self—has to be first and foremost a cultural shift, not an economic one. Until such a rupture in our conception of being human is brought forth, such “sociological” concerns as that of the vast global and local economic inequalities, immigration, labor policies, struggles about race, gender, class, and ethnicity, and struggles over the environment, global warming, and distribution of world resources, will remain status quo. ¶ 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. ¶ But such a reality can never be spoken or written about without fear. In order to preserve the possibility of being recognized by whites, be it as citizen-not-terrorist or as a scholar, colleague, human-not-angry-nigger, the Black philosopher, Blackened person must offer to whites vindication—acknowledgement that he recognizes and will speak of-write about whites as having the potentiality for virtue. The revolutionary activity, if that is how we understand the efforts to change the material-physical relationship between the oppressed and the oppressor, making one’s individual assertion of white inhumanity—the local act of critique—real and socially transformative beyond the dialogical (conversations between colleagues, within a discursive space, or disagreements between critics), is not convincing the white subject in dialogue with, the supposed rational ethical subject, that they-it can potentiality to be different, or better. This is a dead end appeal over-determined by trying to “win over,” “be recognized by,” the white subject. The revolutionary activity is to demonstrate as a matter of ontology (this is whiteness as is) that whiteness is irredeemable. In relativizing Western MAN, showing the ethnoclass limitation of Europe’s cultural invention, Black humanity is freed to begin thinking itself anew without the fear of falling into mimicry. In short, seeing whites as they are is the proof that Black consciousness has shifted our present conception of man and has found a new teleological/cultural orientation; an endarkening path towards a new humanity. The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater that best deconstructs power relations – pedagogical contexts like debate are uniquely political and your ballot promotes a true opportunity for change. Trifonas Trifonas, Peter. PEDAGOGIES OF DIFFERENCE: RETHINKING EDUCATION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE. New York, London. 2003. Domination and subordination, I imply that they are relations of power. In an educational context, the exercise of power is accomplished in interactions (i.e., in a social organization), manifesting itself as acts of exclusion, marginalization, silencing, and so forth. Thus, paying attention to how power operates along axes of gender, race, class, and ability (that is, recognizing that social differences are not given, but are accomplished in and through educational settings) is a step toward educational equity. What does the above discussion mean in the educational context? It means that in the interactions of teachers with students in the classroom, or in other contexts, attention needs to be directed toward how dominant and subordinate relations (be they based on race, gender, class, or ability) permeate these contexts and intersect in complicated ways to produce inequality and marginalization. The frequently used and well-meaning phrase, “I treat everyone the same, ” often used by teachers and administrators to indicate their lack of bias in a diverse educational setting, in fact masks unequal power relations. Similarly, educational policies that assume that people are the same or equal may serve to entrench existing inequality precisely because people enter into the educational process with different and unequal experiences. These attempts, well meaning though they may be, tend to render inequality invisible, and thus work against equity in education. In her exploration of white privilege in higher education in the United States, Frances Rains (1998), an aboriginal-Japanese American woman, states emphatically that these benign acts are disempowering for the minority person because they erase his or her racial identity. The denial of racism in this case is in fact a form of racism. Thus, in moving toward equity in education that allows us to address multiple and intersecting axes of difference and inequality, I recommend that we try to think and act “against the grain” in developing educational policies and handling various kinds of pedagogical situations. 5 To work against the grain is to recognize that education is not neutral; it is contested. Mohanty puts it as such: … Education represents both a struggle for meaning and a struggle over power relations. It is a central terrain where power and politics operate out of the lived culture of individuals and groups situated in asymmetrical social and political positions. (Mohanty 1990:184) We need to develop a critical awareness of the power dynamics operative in institutional relations-and of the fact that people participate in institutions as unequal subjects. Working against the grain is to take a proactive approach to understanding and acting upon institutional relations, whether in the classroom, in other interactions with students, or in policy development. Rather than overlooking the embeddedness of gender, race, class, ability, and other forms of inequality that shape our interactions, working against the grain makes explicit the political nature of education and how power operates to privilege, silence, and marginalize individuals who are differently located in the educational process. In her exploration of feminist pedagogy, Linda Briskin (1990) makes a clear distinction between nonsexist and antisexist education critical to our understanding here. She asserts that nonsexism is an approach that attempts to neutralize sexual inequality by pretending that gender can be made irrelevant in the classroom. Thus, for instance, merely asserting that male and female students should have equal time to speak-and indeed giving them equal time-cannot adequately rectify the endemic problem of sexism in the classroom. One of Briskin's students reported that in her political science tutorials that when the male students spoke, everyone paid attention. When a female student spoke, however, the class acted as if no one was speaking (13). Neutrality is an attempt to conceal the unequal distribution of power. An against the grain approach would acknowledge explicitly that we are all gendered, racialized, and differently constructed subjects who do not participate in interactional relations as equals. This goes beyond formulating sexism, racism, abilism, and class privilege in individualist terms and treating them as if they were personal attitudes. Terry Wolverton (1983) discovered the difference between nonracism and antiracism in her consciousness-raising attempt: I had confused the act of trying to appear not to be racist with actively working to eliminate racism. Trying to appear not racist had made me deny my racism, and therefore exclude the possibility of change. (191) Being against the grain means seeing inequality as systemic and interpersonal (rather than individual), and combatting oppression as a collective responsibility, not just as a personal attribute (so that somehow a person can cleanse herself or himself of sexism, racism, abilism, or class bias). It is to pay attention to oppression as an interactional property that can be altered (see Manners 1998). Roger Simon (1993) suggests, in his development of a philosophical basis for teaching against the grain, which shares many commonalities in how I think about an integrative approach to equity in education, that teaching against the grain is fundamentally a moral practice. By this he does not mean that teachers simply fulfill the mandate and guidelines of school authorities. He believes that teachers must expose the partial and imperfect nature of existing knowledge, which is constructed on the basis of asymmetrical power relations (for instance, who has the power to speak and whose voices are suppressed?). It is the responsibility of the teacher or educator to show how dominant forms of knowledge and ways of knowing constrict human capacities. In exposing the power relations integral to the knowledge construction process, the educator, by extension, must treat teaching and learning as a mutual and collaborative act between teachers and students. What may this ideal look like in practice? Marilyn Cochran-Smith (1991) also explores the notion of teaching against the grain in her research on how teachers and students worked together in a preservice program in the Philadelphia area. Borrowing from Gramsci's formulation that action is everyone's responsibility, she asserts that teaching is fundamentally a political activity. In practical terms, she outlines what it may mean to teach against the grain in an actual teaching and learning situation. Her succinct articulation is worth quoting at length: To teach against the grain, teachers have to understand and work both within and around the culture of teaching and the politics of schooling at their particular schools and within their larger school system and communities. They cannot simply announce better ways of doing things, as outsiders are likely to do. They have to teach differently without judging the ways other teach or dismissing the ideas others espouse…. They are not at liberty to publicly announce brilliant but excoriating critiques of their colleagues and the bureaucracies in which they labor. Their ultimate commitment is to the school lives and futures of the children with whom they live and work. Without condescension or defensiveness, they have to work with parents and other teachers on different ways of seeing and measuring development, connecting and dividing knowledge, and knowing about teaching and schooling. They have to be astute observers of individual learners with the ability to pose and explore questions that transcend cultural attribution, institutional habit, and the alleged certainty of outside experts. They have to see beyond and through the conventional labels and practices that sustain the status quo by raising unanswerable and often uncomfortable questions. Perhaps most importantly, teachers who work against the grain must name and wrestle with their own doubts, must fend off the fatigue of reform and depend on the strength of their individual and collaborative convictions that their work ultimately makes a difference in the fabric of social responsibility. (Cochran-Smith 1991:284-85) For me, to be against the grain is therefore to recognize that the routinized courses of action and interactions in all educational contexts are imbued with unequal distribution of power that produce and reinforce various forms of marginalization and exclusion. Thus, a commitment to redress these power relations (i.e., equity in education) involves interventions and actions that may appear “counter-intuitive.” 6 Undoing inequality and achieving equity in education is a risky and uncomfortable act because we need to disrupt the ways things are “normally” done. This involves a serious (and frequently threatening) effort to interrogate our privilege as well as our powerlessness. It obliges us to examine our own privilege relative though it may be, to move out of our internalized positions as victims, to take control over our lives, and to take responsibilities for change. It requires us to question what we take for granted, and a commitment to a vision of society built on reflection, reform, mutuality, and respect in theory and in practice. Teaching and learning against the grain is not easy, comfortable, or safe. It is protracted, difficult, uncomfortable, painful, and risky. It involves struggles with our colleagues, our students, as well as struggles within ourselves against our internalized beliefs and normalized behaviors. In other words, it is a lifelong challenge. However, as Simon (1993) puts it, teaching against the grain is also a project of hope. We engage in it with the knowledge and conviction that we are in a long-term collaborative project with like-minded people whose goal is to make the world a better place for us and for our children. 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 arti 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 objecti 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 de 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 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 bene ts from re ection on the moment in its larger, global signi 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 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-af 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. Debate is a speech act – debaters should be held accountable for their discourse in round. Vincent The question then becomes how does our discourse justify what we believe? For many debaters it is the gaming aspect of debate that allows us to assume that our speech can be disconnected from the speech act. The speech can be defined as the arguments that are placed on the flow, and is evaluated in the context of what is the most logical and rational argument to win the round. The critical distinction is the speech act, which is the performance of that discourse. It’s not what you say, but what you justify. Understanding the speech act requires critically assessing the ramifications of the debaters discourse. Debate is in and of itself a performance. To claim that it is not is to be divorced from the reality of what we do. We must evaluate what a debaters performance does and justifies. For white debaters it is easy to view the discourse as detached from the body. For those with privilege in debate, they are never forced to have their performance attached to them but instead their arguments are viewed as words on paper. They are taught to separate themselves from any ideologies and beliefs, and feel that there is no consequence to what they say. It becomes the way in which they justify what is deemed as “rational” and “logical” thought. The argument sounds like it will be competitive so it is read but it is deemed as just an argument. Judges evaluate this as just a speech. This becomes what I deem as a performance by the body, rather than a performance of the body. Performances by the body allow debaters to not be held accountable to the words they say. Words are seen as divorced from any meaning outside of the flow, versus the performance of the body where the words are attached to the body itself. Debaters often insert the performance by the body, when they make arguments that they claim that they do not believe, but think it is the best strategy for the round. This is a false assumption, since for black debaters meaning is always connected to their bodies. The best strategy should never be one that at the same time justifies acts of racism. | 12/18/16 |
0 - Rage BadTournament: College Prep | Round: 1 | Opponent: Bentley KS | Judge: Shan, Panny A) Fairness – their RoB arguments are self-serving to moot 6 minutes of AC offense. They force a restart on a ridiculously small question, which prevents us from weighing the case. Kills engagement and is a prereq to their RoB because they arbitrarily exclude our offense and forces a restart in the 1ar. B) Law is necessary – speaking the language of the law through reform can empower people to take back control over their own lives. We don’t have to endorse the law, but rather treat it as a tool to hold the powerful accountable. The valorization of rage as a political leads to a vicious cycle of repetitive violence Utilize rage as a means to mobilize ati-surveillance movements---targeted rage is key Lesage 85 Anger-filled politics prevents effective coalition-building and causes movement failure | 12/18/16 |
0 - T FrameworkTournament: College Prep | Round: 1 | Opponent: Bentley KS | Judge: Shan, Panny 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. Insert topic definitions Violation: They defend which isn’t the topic. Standards:
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: 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 - 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. 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. We solve all their offense - A. Arguments don’t injure people, but policies do—voting aff on this is censorship because it says we can’t even introduce ideas without harming them. Anderson 06 Amanda Anderson 6, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English at Brown University, Spring 2006, “Reply to My Critic(s),” Criticism, Vol. 48, No. 2, p. 281-290 Probyns piece is a mixture of affective fallacy, argument by authority, and bald ad hominem. There's a pattern here: precisely the tendency to personalize argument and to foreground what Wendy Brown has called "states of injury." Probyn says, for example, that she "felt ostracized by the books content and style." Ostracized? Argument here is seen as directly harming persons, and this is precisely the state of affairs to which I object. Argument is not injurious to persons. Policies are injurious to persons and institutionalized practices can alienate and exclude. But argument itself is not directly harmful; once one says it is, one is very close to a logic of censorship. The most productive thing to do in an open academic culture (and in societies that aspire to freedom and democracy) when you encounter a book or an argument that you disagree with is to produce a response or a book that states your disagreement. But to assert that the book itself directly harms you is tantamount to saying that you do not believe in argument or in the free exchange of ideas, that your claim to injury somehow damns your opponent's ideas. When Probyn isn't symptomatic, she's just downright sloppy. One could work to build up the substance of points that she throws out the car window as she screeches on to her next destination, but life is short, and those with considered objections to liberalism and proceduralism would not be particularly well served by the exercise. As far as I can tell, Probyn thinks my discussion of universalism is of limited relevance (though far more appealing when put, by others, in more comfortingly equivocating terms), but she's certain my critique of appeals to identity is simply not able to accommodate the importance of identity in social and political life. As I make clear throughout the book, and particularly in my discussion of the headscarf debate in France, identity is likely to be at the center of key arguments about life in plural democracies; my point is not that identity is not relevant, but simply that it should not be used to trump or stifle argument. In closing, I'd like to speak briefly to the question of proceduralism's relevance to democratic vitality. One important way of extending the proceduralist arguments put forth by Habeimas is to work on how institutions and practices might better promote participation in democratic life. The apathy and nonparticipation plaguing democratic institutions in the United States is a serious problem, and can be separated from the more romantic theoretical investments in a refusal to accept the terms of what counts as argument, or in assertions of inassimilable difference. With respect to the latter, which is often glorified precisely as the moment when politics or democracy is truly occurring, I would say, on the contrary democracy is not happening then-rather, the limits or deficiencies of an actually existing democracy are making themselves felt. Acknowledging struggle, conflict, and exclusion is vital to democracy, but insisting that exclusion is not so much a persistent challenge for modern liberal democracies but rather inherent to the modern liberal-democratic political form as such seems to me precisely to remain stalled in a romantic critique of Enlightenment. It all comes down to a question of whether one wants to work with the ideals of democracy or see them as essentially normative in a negative sense: this has been the legacy of a certain critique of Enlightenment, and it is astonishingly persistent in the left quarters in the academy. One hears it clearly when Robbins makes confident reference to liberalisms tendency to ignore "the founding acts of violence on which a social order is based." One encounters it in the current vogue for the work of Giorgio Agamben and Carl Schmitt. Saying that a state of exception defines modernity or is internal to the law itself may help to sharpen your diagnoses of certain historical conditions, but if absolutized as it is in these accounts, it gives you nothing but a negative diagnostic and a compensatory flight to a realm entirely other-the kind of mystical, Utopian impulse that flees from these conditions rather than confronts and fights them on terms that derive from the settled-if constantly evolving-normative basis of democratic modernity. If one is outraged by the flagrant disregard of democratic procedures in the current U.S. political regime, then one needs to be able to coherently say why democratic procedures matter, what principles underwrite them, and what historical movements and institutions have helped us to secure and support them. Argument as a critical practice and as a key component of democratic institutions and public debate has a vital role to play in such a task. B. T version of the AFF 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. | 12/18/16 |
JANFEB Critical Race TheoryTournament: College Prep | Round: 3 | Opponent: Nueva AK | Judge: Olson, Ryan 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. Rhetoric propagating free speech as the answer to social ills directly trades off with our ability to fight injustice. Free speech is a tool that courts wield in colorblind ways against people. Delgado and Stefancic ‘92 And, more speech is not better – speech tends to reinscribe power relations rather than break them down. Delgado and Yun ‘94 Turns the case – hate speech does real violence to people of color and necessarily locks in relationships of domination. Delgado and Stefacic ‘09 Anti-Blackness is the root cause of white supremacy and social oppression. It outweighs the case. Heitzeg 15 Heitzeg, Nancy A a Professor of Sociology and Director of the¶ interdisciplinary Critical Studies of Race/Ethnicity Program at St. Catherine¶ University, St. Paul, MN.. "On The Occasion Of The 50th Anniversary Of The Civil Rights Act Of 1964: Persistent White Supremacy, Relentless Anti-Blackness, And The Limits Of The Law." Hamline J. Pub. L. and Pol'y 36 (2015): 54. While all communities of color suffer from racism in general¶ and its manifestation in criminal justice in particular, “Black” has¶ been the literal and figurative counterpart of “white”. Anti-black¶ racism is arguably at the very foundation of white supremacy; the¶ two constitute the foundational book-ends for the legal, political and¶ every day constructions of race in the United States.12¶ For this¶ reason, in combination with the excessive over-representation of¶ African Americans in the criminal justice system and the prison¶ industrial complex, this analysis will largely focus on the ways in¶ which the law has been a tool for the oppression of African¶ Americans via the furtherance of white supremacy and antiblackness¶ in both law and practice.¶ While race has never reflected any biological reality, it is¶ indeed a powerful social and political construct. In the U.S. and¶ elsewhere, it has served to delineate “whiteness” as the “unraced”¶ norm – the “unmarked marker” – while hierarchically devaluing¶ “other” racial/ethnic categories with Blackness always as the antithesis.13¶ The socio-political construction of race coincides with the¶ age of exploration, the rise of “scientific” classification schemes, and¶ perhaps most significantly capitalism. In the United States, the¶ solidification of racial hierarchies cannot be disentangled from the capitalist demands for “unfree” labor and expanded private property.¶ By the late 1600s, race had been a marker for either free citizens or¶ slave property, and colonial laws had reified this decades before the¶ Revolutionary War.14 The question of slavery was at the center of¶ debates in the creation of the United States and is referenced no less¶ than ten times.15 By the time of the Constitutional Convention of¶ 1787, the racial lines defining slave and free had already been rigidly¶ drawn – white was “free” and black was “slave” – and the result¶ according to Douglass was this: “assume the Constitution to be what¶ we have briefly attempted to prove it to be, radically and essentially¶ pro-slavery”.¶ 16 The Three-Fifths Clause, the restriction on future¶ bans of the slave trade and limits on the possibility of emancipation¶ through escape were all clear indications of the significance of¶ slavery to the Founders. The legal enouncement of slavery in the¶ Constitution is one of the first of many “racial sacrifice covenants”¶ to come, where the interests of Blacks were sacrificed for the nation.¶ 17¶ The social and constitutional construction of white as free and¶ Black as slave has on-going political and economic ramifications.¶ According to Harris, whiteness not only allows access to property,¶ may be conceived of per se as “whiteness as property”.¶ 18 These¶ property rights produce both tangible and intangible value to those¶ who possess it; whiteness as property includes the right to profit and¶ to exclude, even the perceived right to kill in defense of the borders¶ of whiteness.19 As Harris notes:¶ The concept of whiteness was premised on white¶ supremacy rather than mere difference. “White” was¶ defined and constructed in ways that increased its¶ value by reinforcing its exclusivity. Indeed, just as whiteness as property embraced the right to exclude,¶ whiteness as a theoretical construct evolved for the¶ very purpose of racial exclusion. Thus, the concept¶ of whiteness is built on both exclusion and racial¶ subjugation. This fact was particularly evident¶ during the period of the most rigid racial exclusion,¶ as whiteness signified racial privilege and took the¶ form of status property.20¶ Conversely, Blackness is defined as outside of the margins of¶ humanity as chattel rather than persons, and defined outside of the¶ margins of civil society. Frank Wilderson, in “The Prison Slave as¶ Hegemonys (Silent) Scandal,” describes it like this: “Blackness in¶ America generates no categories for the chromosome of history, and¶ no data for the categories of immigration or sovereignty. It is an¶ experience without analog — a past without a heritage.”¶ 21 Directly¶ condemned by the Constitution in ways that other once excluded¶ groups (American Indians, women, immigrants, LGBTQ) were not,¶ Blackness as marked by slavery– as property not person - creates an¶ outsider status that makes future inclusion a daunting challenge.22 The alternative is to embrace the demand of abolitionism – we must recognize that whiteness operates subtly through hands-off policies that preserve the status quo. We choose to challenge the university system at the grassroots intersection with other liberation movements. Oparah 14 Oparah, Julia. Professor and Chair of Ethnic Studies at Mills College and a founding member of Black Women Birthing Justice "Challenging Complicity: The Neoliberal University and the Prison–Industrial Complex." The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent (2014). ¶ In my earlier work on the academic-prison-industrial complex, I suggested that activist scholars were producing and disseminating countercarceral knowledge by bringing academic research into alignment with the needs of social movements and interrogating and reorganizing relationships between prisoners and researchers in the free world.50 Given the history of epistemic and physical violence and exploitation of research subjects by the academy, such a reorganizing of relationships and accountabilities is clearly urgently needed. Yet no matter how radical and participatory our scholarship is, we ultimately fail to dismantle the academic-military-prison-industrial com- plex (academic-MPIC) if we address it only through the production of more knowledge. Since knowledge is a commodity, marketed through books, arti- cles, and conferences as well as patents and government contracts, the pro- duction of “better,” more progressive or countercarceral knowledge can also be co-opted and put to work by the academic-MPIC.¶ An abolitionist lens provides a helpful framework here. Antiprison schol- ars and activists have embraced the concept of abolition in order to draw attention to the unfinished liberation legislated by the Thirteenth Amend- ment, which abolished slavery “except as a punishment for a crime.”51 Aboli- tionists do not seek primarily to reform prisons or to improve conditions for prisoners; instead they argue that only by abolishing imprisonment will we free up the resources and imagine the possibility of more effective and less violent strategies to deal with the social problems signaled by harmful acts. While early abolitionists referred to themselves as prison abolitionists, more recently there has been a shift to prison-industrial complex abolitionism to expand the analysis of the movement to incorporate other carceral spaces— from immigrant detention centers to psychiatric hospitals—and to empha- size the role of other actors, including the police and courts, politicians, corporations, the media, and the military, in sustaining mass incarceration.52¶ How does an abolitionist lens assist us in assessing responses to the academic-MPIC? First, it draws our attention to the economic basis of the academic-MPIC and pushes us to attack the materiality of the militari- zation and prisonization of academia rather than limiting our interventions to the realm of ideas. This means that we must challenge the corporatization of our universities and colleges and question what influences and account- abilities are being introduced by our increasing collaboration with neoliberal global capital. It also means that we must dismantle those complicities and liberate the academy from its role as handmaiden to neoliberal globaliza- tion, militarism, and empire. In practice, this means interrogating our uni- versities’ and colleges’ investment decisions, demanding they divest from the military, security, and prison industries; distance themselves from military occupations in Southwest Asia and the Middle East; and invest instead in community-led sustainable economic development. It means facing allega- tions of disloyalty to our employers or alma maters as we blow the whistle on unethical investments and the creeping encroachment of corporate fund- ing, practices, and priorities. It means standing up for a vision of the liberal arts that neither slavishly serves the interests of the new global order nor returns to its elitist origins but instead is deeply embedded in progressive movements and richly informed by collaborations with insurgent and activ- ist spaces. And it means facing the challenges that arise when our divest- ment from empire has real impact on the bottom line of our university and college budgets. Andrea Smith, in her discussion of native studies, has argued that politi- cally progressive educators often adopt normative, colonial practices in the classroom, using pedagogical strategies and grading practices that rein- scribe the racialized and gendered regulation, policing, and disciplining that PIC abolitionists seek to end.53 In this sense, there could be no “postcarceral” academy. Certainly, sanctions for undergraduate and graduate students and faculty who challenge the university’s regular practices—from failing grades and expulsions to tenure denials and deportation—are systemically distrib- uted, along with rewards for those who can be usefully incorporated. Yet uni- versities and colleges also hold the seeds of a very different possible future, evoked, for example, by the universal admissions movement or by student strikes in Britain and Canada that demand higher education as a right, not a privilege of the wealthy. Rather than seeking to eradicate or replace higher educational institutions altogether, I suggest that we demand the popular and antiracist democratization of higher education.¶ The first step toward this radical transformation is the liberation of aca- demia from the machinery of empire: prisons, militarism, and corporations. Speaking of abolishing the white race, Noel Ignatiev argues that it is neces- sary for white people to make whiteness impossible by refusing the invisible benefits of membership in the “white club.”54 Progressive academics are also members of a privileged “club,” one that confers benefits in the form of a pay- check, health care, and other fringe benefits; social status; and the freedom to pursue intellectual work that we are passionate about. But we can also put our privilege to work by unmasking and then unsettling the invisible, symbi- otic, and toxic relationships that constitute the academic-MPIC.¶ Decoupling academia from its velvet-gloved master would begin the pro- cess of fundamental transformation. Without unfettered streams of income from corporations, wealthy philanthropists, and the military, universities and colleges would be forced to develop alternative fund-raising strategies, relationships, and accountabilities. Can we imagine a college administration aligned with local Occupy organizers to protest the state’s massive spend- ing on prisons and policing and demand more tax money for housing, edu- cation, and health care? Can we imagine a massive investment of time and resources by university personnel to solve the problem of how to decarcerate the nation’s prisons or end the detention of undocumented immigrants in order to fund universal access to higher education? Can we imagine a uni- versity run by and for its constituents, including students, kitchen and gar- den staff, and tenure-track and adjunct faculty? These are the possibilities opened up by academic-MPIC abolition. The role of the ballot is to interrogate the AFF’s scholarship using the lens of critical race theory. This makes the passage of the plan irrelevant. First, their refusal of minority voices is a conscious choice. Delgado 84 Delgado, Richard. "The imperial scholar: Reflections on a review of civil rights literature." University of Pennsylvania Law Review 132.3 (1984): 561-578. It does not matter where one enters this universe; one comes to the¶ same result: an inner circle of about a dozen white, male writers who¶ comment on, take polite issue with, extol, criticize, and expand on each¶ other's ideas." It is something like an elaborate minuet.¶ The failure to acknowledge minority scholarship extends even to¶ nonlegal propositions and assertions of fact. W.E. DuBois, deceased¶ Black historian, receives an occasional citation.5 Aside from him, little¶ else rates a mention. Higginbotham's monumental In the Matter of¶ Color' might as well not exist. The same is true of the work of Kenneth¶ Clark,1 Black psychologist and past president of the American¶ Psychological Association, and Alvin Poussaint,8 Harvard Medical¶ School professor and authority on the psychological impact of race. One¶ searches in vain for references to the powerful book by physicians Grier¶ and Cobbs, Black Rage,' or to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the¶ Earth,10 or even to writings of or about Martin Luther King, Jr.,1¶ "¶ Cesar Chavez, 2 and Malcolm X."3 When the inner circle writers need authority for a factual or social scientific proposition about race they¶ generally cite reports of the United States Commission on Civil¶ Rights1 4 or else each other.1 5¶ A single anecdote may help to illustrate what I mean. Recently a¶ law professor who writes about civil rights showed me, for my edification,¶ a draft of an article of his. It is, on the whole, an excellent article.¶ It extols the value of a principle I will call "equal personhood." Equal¶ personhood is the notion, implicit in several constitutional provisions¶ and much case law, that each human being, regardless of race, creed, or¶ color, is entitled to be treated with equal respect. To treat someone as¶ an outsider, a nonmember of human society, violates this principle and¶ devalues the self-worth of the person so excluded.¶ I have no quarrel with this premise, but, on reading the one hundred-plus¶ footnotes of the article, I noticed that its author failed to cite¶ Black or minority scholars, an exclusion from the community of kindred¶ souls as glaring as any condemned in the paper. I pointed this out¶ to the author, citing as illustration a passage in which he asserted that¶ unequal treatment can cause a person to suffer a withered self-concept.¶ Having just written an article on a related subject, 8 I was more or less¶ steeped in withered self-concepts. I knew who the major authorities¶ were in that area.¶ The professor's authority for the proposition about withered selfconcepts¶ was Frank Michelman, writing in the Harvard Law Review. I pointed out that although Frank Michelman may be a superb scholar¶ and teacher, he probably has relatively little first-hand knowledge¶ about withered self-concepts. I suggested that the professor add references¶ to such works as Kenneth Clark's Dark Ghetto1¶ " and Grier and¶ Cobbs's Black Rage,"' and he agreed to do so. To justify his selection of¶ Frank Michelman for the proposition about withered self-concept, the¶ author explained that Michelman's statement was "so elegant."¶ Could inelegance of expression explain the absence of minority¶ scholarship from the text and footnotes of leading law review articles¶ about civil rights? Elegance is, without question, a virtue in writing, in¶ conversation, or in. anything else in life. If minority scholars write inelegantly¶ and Frank Michelman writes elegantly, then it would not be¶ surprising if the latter were read and cited more frequently, and the¶ former less so. But minority legal scholars seem to have less trouble¶ being recognized and taken seriously in areas of scholarship other than¶ civil rights theory.19 If elegance is a problem for minority scholars, it¶ seems mainly to be so in the core areas of civil rights: affirmative action,¶ the equality principle, and the theoretical foundations of race relations¶ law.¶ In 1971, Judge Skelly Wright wrote an article entitled, Professor¶ Bickel, the Scholarly Tradition, and the Supreme Court.20 In the article,¶ Judge Wright took a group of scholars to task for their bloodless¶ carping at the Warren Court's decisions in the areas of racial justice¶ and human rights. He accused the group of missing the central point in¶ these decisions-their moral clarity and passion for justice-and labelled¶ the group's excessive preoccupation with procedure and institutional¶ role and its insistence that the Court justify every element of a¶ decision under general principles of universal application, a "scholarly tradition."'2 1¶ I think I have discovered a second scholarly tradition. It consists of¶ white scholars' systematic occupation of, and exclusion of minority¶ scholars from, the central areas of civil rights scholarship. The mainstream¶ writers tend to acknowledge only each other's work. It is even¶ possible that, consciously or not, they resist entry by minority scholars¶ into the field,2 2 perhaps counseling them, as I was counseled, to establish¶ their reputations in other areas of law. I believe that this "scholarly¶ tradition" exists mainly in civil rights; nonwhite scholars in other fields¶ of law seem to confront no such tradition.23 Second, a focus on political action assumes a kind of democratic liberalism that is inaccessible to marginalized voices. Refuse their demand for concrete state action. Lopez 03 López, Gerardo R. University of Utah, Salt Lake City "The (racially neutral) politics of education: A critical race theory perspective." Educational Administration Quarterly 39.1 (2003): 68-94. Unfortunately, the vast majority of tactics and mechanisms privileged in¶ the field emerge from a strong belief in the democratic process—providing a¶ somewhat optimistic take on the efficacy of political and civic participation.¶ Such strategies not only ignore the political fact that power and influence¶ largely remain the dominion of White, middle-class men (Marshall, 1997a),¶ but they also disregard the fact that the vast majority of underrepresented¶ groups do not largely participate in these kinds of political activity (Arax,¶ 1986; Bush, 1984; Flores and Benmayor, 1997; Gaventa, 1980; Preston,¶ Henderson, and Puryear, 1987). In other words, although these theories support¶ and strengthen our collective beliefs in democracy, political action, representational politics, influence, accountability, and the importance of a¶ whole host of input factors in the decision-making process, they nevertheless¶ fail to address why certain individuals fail to participate in the political process¶ altogether and/or how and why the “democratic” process itself¶ marginalizes and silences diverse peoples, their actions, and their perspectives¶ (Marshall, 1993a; Marshall et al., 1989).¶ Willis Hawley (1977) recognized the limitations of the field almost three¶ decades ago when he stated:¶ Whether one accepts Lasswell’s definition of “who gets what when and how”¶ or other such widely held and related conceptions that politics involves the authoritative¶ allocation of resources and values, my point is the same—political¶ scientists have been more interested in studying the political processes than¶ they have been in studying who receives what benefits from the political process.¶ (p. 319)¶ As Hawley suggested, scholars in the field are more concerned with “input”¶ and “process” factors, and not necessarily with the outcomes and effects of¶ the political process. The focus on one aspect, to the detriment of the other,¶ certainly has been a shortcoming in the field.¶ This is a critically important point, because the outcome of policy can be¶ tangible and identifiable (such as the effects of a public policy on a particular¶ group) or intangible and anomalous (such as people’s perceptions of the¶ political system). As Schram (1995) contended, the field disproportionately¶ suffers from an “overly instrumental view of rationality that masks its latent¶ biases” (p. 375). Certainly, the relentless belief in the effectiveness of political¶ and civic participation is itself a type of bias that is often taken for granted¶ by most scholars in the field.¶ Within the politics of education, we assume that all (legal) citizens of this¶ society have certain inalienable rights—including the right to vote to ensure¶ that government and policies work in their best interest. The field also¶ assumes that all individuals act in politically rational ways and, when necessary,¶ will assert their rights as citizens—through influence, power, conflict,¶ political pressure, voting, or some other mechanism—to minimize real and¶ opportunity costs.¶ Unfortunately, for the vast majority of people of color, the working poor,¶ women, gays/lesbians/bisexuals, and other marginalized groups—who are¶ constantly reminded on a daily basis that they are second-class citizens in this¶ country—the concept of rights is elusive. Their treatment, in historical and¶ contemporary times, attests to the fact that they have never been afforded¶ their full rights as citizens of this country (Delgado, 1997; Flores and¶ Benmayor, 1997; Guinier, 1991; Preston et al., 1987; Spann, 1995; Williams, 1995b). For people of color, their subordination has not only been socially¶ sanctioned but legally sanctioned as well:¶ As the “Other,” racial minorities have often been neither thought of nor treated¶ as Americans. Historically they have by a number of legal and informal means¶ been excluded from buying property in certain areas, prohibited from voting,¶ and restricted as to whom they could marry. In practice, full American citizenship¶ has been restricted to Whites. Over many years of struggle, rights have¶ been extended and the concept of who belongs to America has expanded. Even¶ so, racial and gender discrimination continue to create real differences in opportunities¶ and in people’s perception of their treatment. (Rosaldo and Flores,¶ 1997, p. 58)¶ If having rights is part of being an American citizen (Flores, 1997), then¶ clearly, racial minorities in the United States are far from full incorporation in¶ this regard. They may be equal members of society under the law—but socially,¶ politically, and economically, they are rendered one down by a racist¶ political and legal system that marginalizes them on an everyday basis. As¶ Slater and Boyd (1999) suggested, individuals can be members of the larger¶ polity but may not necessarily be afforded equal status in the larger polity.¶ Therefore, to suggest that all individuals have equal rights under the law¶ and have equal ability and potential to exercise those rights via political¶ action and/or influence—in other words, to suggest that all individuals, irrespective¶ of race or power, act in politically rational ways—is not only shortsighted¶ but disingenuous. It suggests the public space is racially neutral and¶ that contextual factors do not matter in the larger social and political arena. Third, Debate is a space in which racial identity can be understood—This dynamic is key to confronting racial domination and questioning the underlying aspects of negative racial identities. Reid-Brinkley 08 The attempts at educational reform are not limited to institutional actors such as the local, state, and federal governments. Non-profit organizations dedicated to alleviating the black/white achievement gap have also proliferated. One such organization, the Urban Debate League, claims that “Urban Debate Leagues have proven to increase literacy scores by 25, to improve grade-point averages by 8 to 10, to achieve high school graduation rates of nearly 100, and to produce college matriculation rates of 71 to 91.” The UDL program is housed in over fourteen American cities and targets inner city youths of color to increase their access to debate training. Such training of students defined as “at risk” is designed to offset the negative statistics associated with black educational achievement. The program has been fairly successful and has received wide scale media attention. The success of the program has also generated renewed 3 interest amongst college debate programs in increasing direct efforts at recruitment of racial and ethnic minorities. The UDL program creates a substantial pool of racial minorities with debate training coming out of high school, that college debate directors may tap to diversify their own teams. The debate community serves as a microcosm of the broader educational space within which racial ideologies are operating. It is a space in which academic achievement is performed according to the intelligibility of one’s race, gender, class, and sexuality. As policy debate is intellectually rigorous and has historically been closed to those marked by social difference, it offers a unique opportunity to engage the impact of desegregation and diversification of American education. How are black students integrated into a competitive educational community from which they have traditionally been excluded? How are they represented in public and media discourse about their participation, and how do they rhetorically respond to such representations? If racial ideology is perpetuated within discourse through the stereotype, then mapping the intelligibility of the stereotype within public discourse and the attempts to resist such intelligibility is a critical tool in the battle to end racial domination. | 12/18/16 |
NOVDEC Cap KTournament: Alta | Round: 3 | Opponent: San Marino VL | Judge: Inglet, Sierra 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/ 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 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 Second, the knowledge claims of the AC are the jumping off point for the debate – our framework provides a more reasonable neg burden. When a student turns in an F paper, no teacher has an obligation to write an entirely new paper to show it was bad – pointing out major academic deficiencies would justify failing the paper – the ballot asks who did the better debating, so if their analysis is wrong, they haven’t. Third, serial policy failure – policing is about culture. A refusal to stop and recognize the cultural underpinnings of the AFF dooms repeating the same failed policies that created the problem. . Smith 15 As others have already argued, it is important that we acknowledge the systemic relation between police as an oppressive force and their utilization and instrumentalism as an extension of the order of economic coercion and domination. “In spite of the prevalence of its brutality …/ in the end the institution of the police is but an extension of the more deeply rooted institution of property – which, in turn, is the manifestation of wealth and economic power (which, in a capitalist society, translates to political power as well). In light of this, in confronting racism it is insufficient (though nevertheless still crucial) to focus our efforts on the brutality of the police. The police is but the tip of the racist iceberg.”6¶ It is a mistake, in seeking police reform, to limit one’s campaign solely to the institution of police. Groups engaged in anti-oppression and racial struggle, like those engaged in anti-capitalist struggle, share in one way or another a common universal struggle against a system which runs against the well-being of all, against the prospect of actual democracy, equality and egalitarianism. This is not to take anything away from the particular suffering, conflict and fight experienced by black communities across the US. If Chris Hedges is right, moreover, in his observation that the “discontent in Ferguson, Athens, Cairo, Madrid and Ayotzinapa” and now Baltimore “is one discontent”, this is because the fundamental source of injustice that unites them all is an unjust social-political, economic system. Emerging revolts around the world by minority groups may ‘come in many colors, speak many languages and have many belief systems’, but the common antagonist is an economic system and political order which produces and reproduces the precise social coordinates of injustice, inequality, the legitimation of state violence, and fraudulent models of democracy.¶ Slavoj Žižek once observed, “the link between democracy and capitalism has been broken.”7 Perhaps this is true, if we consider the dominant narrative of democracy in terms of its capitalist conception. But I think it is more consistent with fact or reality to suggest that, instead of the link being broken between the two, democracy simply never was. The link was always, in reality, non-existent. That is to say underlying the recent evolution of the institutions and structures of western society is not a sudden broken link, as if there has unfolded some ultimate social betrayal of actual democratic content on a structural and systemic level. In spite of the ballot-box elections and right to vote, democratic capitalism has never been actually democratic. To put it differently: modern democracy, as a concept and as a thing, has always had less to do with the actual content of “democracy” as an egalitarian system of political-economic values than with the neglect of this content for its (mere) form. The concept of democracy today is really the leftover after the actual content (Equality, Egalitarianism, Justice, Rights, etc.) has been boiled away.8 This sentiment is expressed most clearly on the streets, where the chant ‘there can be no democracy in capitalism’ is frequently voiced. Even if only intuitively expressed at times, there is a profound truth underlining this statement, one which discloses the all too known yet incredibly cloudy reality of the fraudulent status of western democracy.¶ The sooner the fraudulent status of modern western democracy is comprehensively conceptualised as such, which includes challenging certain liberal resistances, might we begin to reframe the debate concerning the structural conflicts now prevalent under the rule of neoliberal policy. This point has particular relevance when it comes to understanding the recent uprisings in Baltimore as well as the conflicts in Ferguson and elsewhere. What we witnessed in the brutal killing of Freddie Gray and the mobilization of state violence in response to uprisings in Baltimore, “is symptomatic of the neoliberal, racist, punishing state emerging all over the world,” wherein one of the only modes “of control left by corporate-controlled societies is violence, but a violence that is waged against the most disposable such as immigrant children, protesting youth, the unemployed, the new precariat and black youth.”9 | 12/19/16 |
NOVDEC Civilian Review Board CPTournament: Damus | Round: 4 | Opponent: Harker QC | Judge: Angus, Thomas CRBs are a legitimate alternative to immunity reform- their decisions affect the ‘clearly established’ doctrine which solves the case without judicial change The CP Solves the Case
3. The CRB doesn’t have to work- it creates a deterrent effect 4. Civilian review is mutually exclusive and more efficient than court action The net benefit is Tech Shift | 11/7/16 |
NOVDEC Court Legitimacy Case TurnsTournament: Damus | Round: 4 | Opponent: Harker QC | Judge: Angus, Thomas
It is hard to deny that the more time police officers spend at trial defending their conduct, the less time they spend patrolling the streets, the more money their departments expend in their defense, and the more frequently the officers will second-guess certain behaviors in the heat of the moment. These drawbacks may well be justified for the sake of society's prevention of tortious and unreasonable conduct on the part of law enforcement agents. Nevertheless, police agencies, Supreme Court justices, and some scholars highlight the important role that qualified immunity can play in reducing unnecessary costs and in improving deterrence of crime. In its amicus brief in support of the Saucier petitioner, NAPO addressed several concerns related to costs and deterrence.47 It began by asserting that officers currently face too many lawsuits related to their conduct, litigation that generally is resolved in their favor and therefore wastes taxpayer time and money! It pointed to an "ever increasing number of lawsuits against law enforcement officers" and the threat that increase poses to the general public interest.49 The increased threat of lawsuits, according to this argument, deters effective police performance, thereby diminishing public safety: NAPO referred to Justice Scalia's assertion in Anderson v. Creighton5l that permitting frivolous lawsuits against law enforcement to go to trial "entails substantial social costs, including the risk that fear of personal monetary liability and harassing litigation will unduly inhibit officials in the discharge of their duties."·2 Several scholars echo NAPO's concerns. Richard Fallon and Daniel Meltzer describe the fears of the Supreme Court in Harlow v. Fitzgerald,53 explaining that such litigation works its evils by deterring officers through the threat of personal liability. Barbara Armacost notes that such liability begets poor law enforcement, which in turn harms the very people the officers are sworn to protect. 54 The chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Academy's Legal Instruction Unit echoes these sentiments. 55 Thus, at least in theory, the proliferation of lawsuits appears to involve serious risks to agents as well as the public. Of course, this entire edifice hangs on the assumption that law enforcement agents regularly face personal liability for their conduct when acting under color of law. Fallon and Meltzer challenge this premise. 57 They contend that in most situations, the police department and/or the officers' union make use of a legal defense fund while the officer need not expend a penny of his or her own.58 Thus, Fallon and Meltzer contend that the entire policy argument rests on a false assumption. Nonetheless, despite the unlikelihood of an officer facing personal liability, frivolous litigation imposes serious secondary costs on his or her conduct. First, contributions or premiums paid to a legal defense insurance plan will likely increase with the amount of litigation the officer faces. Second, the officer's career may endure a stain or stigma despite a victory on the merits of an excessive force case. Third, the department, as the officer's employer, may impose discipline, whether formal or informal, on any officer's involvement in litigation, whether successful or unsuccessful. Suspensions or unpaid leave may accompany lawsuits faced even by officers who are ultimately victorious in court. Thus, litigation indeed affects officers' conduct, in the heat of the moment, whether reasonably or not.59 This effect dovetails with a growing tendency toward "depolicing" that has become prevalent in several of America's urban cores.60 According to many officers, recent years have seen an increase in lawsuits and informal complaints brought against law enforcement, a correlate tendency in departments to steer officers away from necessarily risky conduct in do-or-die situations, and a concomitant decline in officer morale. 61 In 1981 in the State of California,"2 residents placed 8,686 complaints against peace officers, of which 1,552 or 18 were ultimately sustained.63 In 2000, Californians recorded 23,395 complaints, of which 2,395 or 10 were sustained. 64 This ballooning of claims - in particular unsuccessful ones65 - is as troubling as it is dramatic. The Oakland, California, Citizens Police Review Board ("CPRB") embodies this deterrent effect.66 This board provides an independent forum in which aggrieved citizens can register their complaints about police conduct. 67 At the same time, Detective Jesse H. Grant, who has had personal experience appearing before the CPRB, notes that complaints, more than 80 of which were not sustained in 2002, impose a serious deterrent effect on police conduct. 68 Officers now more than ever think twice and act conservatively - although not necessarily safely - when engaged in violent altercations with or apprehensions of dangerous suspects. 69 Ironically, the presence of entities like the CPRB undermines the justification for excessive force lawsuits to begin with: by providing an avenue for voicing grievances over police conduct, such boards obviate some of the need for civil actions. Moreover, they reflect the deterrent effect that wide-open public access to disciplinary bodies can breed. Thus, there exist significant reasons for the courts to grant some kind of immunity to law enforcement officials in order to ensure the contin-ued quality of their work. By increasing the threat of litigation, frivolous lawsuits can serve to deter officers' reasonable conduct, thus imperiling public safety and upending the delicate balance society seeks between forcefully fighting crime and respectfully treating all citizens. 3. Controversial decision coming that will harm the Court’s image either way it’s decided. Compton Herald ‘10/31
| 11/7/16 |
NOVDEC Hollow HopeTournament: Alta | Round: 1 | Opponent: East WH | Judge: Overing, Michael The aff sucks other minority rights movements into the courts. Kairys ‘10 Courts destroy the possibility of reform. NeJaime ‘12
The LGTBQ movement is crucial to end human suffering – o/w all their impx because we control the internal link. Tatchell ’89 | 12/3/16 |
NOVDEC T - eliminateTournament: Alta | Round: 3 | Opponent: San Marino VL | Judge: Inglet, Sierra
| 12/19/16 |
NOVDEC TPP DATournament: Damus | Round: 4 | Opponent: Harker QC | Judge: Angus, Thomas TPP is top of Obama’s priorities, PC is key. Creighton ‘10/27 (IF ACTOR IS COURTS) Court decisions are politicized – spur debate in Congress and reflects on Obama. Zeleny ‘10 The plan sparks congressional debate. Orenstein ‘16 Solves multiple extinction scenarios. Morimoto ‘15 Regional hegemony is key to stop nuke war. Rudd 11 Rudd 11 – Kevin Rudd, Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, “The Case for American Engagement in Asia: The Australian Perspective”, 9-15, http://foreignminister.gov.au/speeches/Pages/2011/kr_sp_110915.aspx?ministerid=2 THE GEO-STRATEGIC RAMIFICATIONS But as nations change, so too do relations between nations. The emergence of new powers inevitably brings new strategic complexity, as the power relativities of the 20th century give way to the new ones. Asia will be vulnerable to a host of strategic uncertainties, arising from the need for new powers to integrate into the global economic and political order, and for the established powers to accommodate them. The potential for misunderstanding — and the consequences of miscalculation — is also vast. Tensions like those we see in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, the Korean Peninsula and the Persian Gulf may become even more difficult to manage. Make no mistake: these aren’t just regional problems. Questions about the future of the South China Sea touch on every regional country’s future, given their global strategic and economic significance. This theme isn't new, but what I can tell you about this strategic shift is that we — Australia and the United States — will face it as allies. Sure, there is the possibility of instability in our region. But we've faced the possibility of conflict — and actual conflict — together in the past. Many different tests, circumstances and challenges have put the acid to our alliance since the ANZUS treaty was signed, 60 years ago. We've been reminded again that the only time the ANZUS treaty has been formally invoked was ten years ago this week — in response to the attacks on September 11. But military and intelligence cooperation with the US continues across a wide range of theatres within the framework of the Alliance. Here in San Francisco — where the ANZUS treaty was signed, all those years ago — I'm reminded that Australian and American servicemen and women have fought, flown, sailed and — I'm reliably informed — surfed together since the Pacific War. Today, that Alliance continues to grow in meaning and intensity. We are fighting together in Afghanistan; working together against global threats like piracy; and responding together to natural disasters across the region. For us, for our relationship, the end of the Cold War hasn’t meant a downgrading of the importance of our Alliance — if anything, it’s become more intense and more important. So as we face the challenges of the 21st Century — the challenges of the shift of power to Asia — we will do so together. We’re working together to ensure our forces are aligned in the right way to provide for the national security of our two countries, and to help us shape the emerging regional environment. Our forces have to be able to respond to the range of contingencies that can arise in our region, including humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. Increasingly, we aren’t just working with each other, but with other regional players. I'm not just talking about the Pacific, or the Asia-Pacific. The critical region for our future now extends to include the Indian Ocean as well. The growing strategic importance of the Indian Ocean starts with India's rise. India is the largest democracy in the world. Forecast to be the third largest economy in the world in coming decades, it is in the interest of both the United States and Australia for India to play the role of a major international power. For now, India’s focus remains South Asia. But its strategic weight is increasing with its increasing economic size and strength. India is increasingly looking east with interest, both for strategic and economic reasons, and because of long-standing cultural connections. But the importance of the Indian Ocean also lies in its unique role in maritime security and sea lines of communication for a much larger group of economies, both in Europe and Asia. Lying between the Middle East energy sources and the dynamic global engine room of Asia, its importance grows with each passing year. The pressures on the Gulf and West Indian Ocean choke points will intensify, as India grows and East Asian centres of growth remain reliant on Gulf energy and African resources. In the 21st Century, questions of resource, energy and food security are becoming more vital than ever. As Robert Kaplan says, the Indian Ocean is once again at the heart of the world, as it was in ancient and medieval times. THE ROLE OF THE UNITED STATES The United States has been a guarantor of security and economic prosperity in the Asia-Pacific for decades. But the 21st Century will demand more. As the world changes, it's even more critical that the US builds its engagement with our region. As the United States transitions back from tough and unforgiving wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it might seem tempting to resist the case for further international engagement. President Obama has already rightly intensified US involvement with East Asia. It remains the case, in one way or another, that the United States is vital in solving common problems collectively. No other power is able or willing to support essential global public goods — like the free movement of trade, capital and people around the world. Sea-lane security, regional security in critical regions like the Gulf, open markets, the reserve currency, deep and liquid capital markets — who else provides these global public goods? America has faced these questions before. On the eve of entry into World War II, Henry Luce's seminal editorial in Life magazine on the American Century was much more than a statement about relative power, as America assumed its position in the new order. It was a call for American leadership in international affairs. It is in America’s interest and the world’s interest to provide that leadership — because in its absence, the risks grow that we will see destabilisation that threatens us all. The interdependence of our economies has been shown clearly by the financial crisis, and a collapse in the conditions for open trade would be an economic disaster for all trading nations. I share President Obama's view that America can neither retreat from "responsibility as an anchor of global security" nor "confront... every evil that can be found abroad". But President Obama talked of the need for a "more centered course" — and that lies in a deep US engagement in Asia. I believe the vast majority of the countries of Asia welcome that continued and expanded American strategic role in our hemisphere. As Indonesia’s President Yudhoyono said in November 2008, as the financial crisis was wreaking havoc upon us, “none of these global challenges can be addressed by the world community without having America onboard. And conversely, none of these issues can be resolved by the United States alone.” And as Lee Kuan Yew said a year later, “the consensus in ASEAN is that the US remains irreplaceable in East Asia.” In the 21st Century, the US needs substantial, sophisticated, nimble engagement in the region. | 11/7/16 |
SEPTOCT Elections DATournament: Yale | Round: 1 | Opponent: Success Academy SC | Judge: Zhou, Paul Public popularity supports nuclear energy despite the Fukushima disaster – best polls prove WASHINGTON, D.C. -- A slim majority of Americans (51) now favor the use of nuclear energy for electricity in the U.S., while 43 oppose it. This level of support is similar to what Gallup found when it last measured these attitudes two years ago, but it is down from the peak of 62 five years ago. Current support is on the low end of what Gallup has found in the past 20 years, with the 46 reading in 2001 the only time that it sank lower. The high point in support for the use of nuclear power, in 2010, was recorded shortly after President Barack Obama announced that the federal government would provide loan guarantees for the construction of two nuclear reactors, the first to be built in the U.S. in three decades. Support has generally dropped since then. However, between 2011 and 2012, support was stable, with 57 favoring nuclear energy. This is notable given that Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster took place shortly after polling in 2011. That flips the election for the GOP – our link prices in other factors and we don’t need to win that Hillary gets the blame Needham 16 The Democratic presidential nominee will win the race for the presidency, but the election is shaping up as historically tight, according to a political model. Less than 11 months from Election Day, Moody’s Analytics is predicting that whomever lands the Democratic nomination will capture the White House with 326 electoral votes to the Republican nominee’s 212. Those results are heavily dependent on how swing states vote. The latest model from Moody’s reflects razor-thin margins in the five most important swing states — Florida, Ohio, Colorado, New Hampshire and Virginia. In each of those states, the Democratic advantage is less than 1 percentage point, well within the margin of error. The election model weighs political and economic strength in each state and determines the share of the vote that the incumbent party will win. The most important economic variable in the model is the growth in incomes in the two years leading up to the election. That factor captures the strength of the job market in each state, including job growth, hours worked, wage growth and the quality of the jobs being created. The model also factors in home and gasoline prices. So far, the strength of the economy has kept the model on track for the Democratic nominee. But the trajectory of the president’s approval rating also makes a difference in who could win the White House. If President Obama’s approval rating shifts only a little more than 4 percentage points, a bit more than the margin of error for many presidential opinion polls, the move could further cut into Democratic hopes to retain the White House. Growing concern about terrorism and other issues could dent Obama’s approval rating further. Usually, if the sitting president’s approval rating is improving in the year leading up the election, the incumbent party receives a boost. But in most elections, the president’s rating has declined in the lead-up to the election, favoring the challenger party. Trump strongly supports nuke power Follett 16 Andrew Follett, 2-20-2016, "Here’s Where The 2016 Candidates Stand On Nuclear Power," Daily Caller, http://dailycaller.com/2016/02/20/heres-where-the-2016-candidates-stand-on-nuclear-power/ The real estate mogul has made strong public statements supporting nuclear power, but tends to favor further development of natural gas. In the aftermath of the 2011 Japan Fukushima nuclear disaster, Trump told Fox News “nuclear is a way we get what we have to get, which is energy.” “I’m in favor of nuclear energy, very strongly in favor of nuclear energy,” Trump said. “If a plane goes down people keep flying. If you get into an auto crash people keep driving.” The permitting process for nuclear power needs to be reformed, Trump explained. He qualified this statement saying “we have to be careful” because nuclear power “does have issues.” Trump specified that he favored the development of natural gas over nuclear energy in the same interview: “we’re the Saudi Arabia times 100 of natural gas, but we don’t use it.” And, nuclear energy would become the key spinning factor for Republicans because of Clinton’s lack of support and Obama’s current policy – Republicans will pit nuclear power policy against Clinton regardless of her actual policy Siciliano 1/10 Siciliano 16John Siciliano, 1-10-2016, "The 2016 politics of nuclear energy," Washington Examiner, 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 That’s right: there is one singularly bad candidate for Native people who shows an ugly hate toward Native people and just shows a nastiness towards brown people in general. That’s right: Donald Trump. He’s kind of a scumbag. I laughed about it early on, “He doesn’t even believe what he’s saying.” And I still don’t think that he believes 90 of what he says—but it doesn’t matter. If you rile up enough racist/xenophobic/misogynistic energy—as he has done—things get dangerous. It changes the tone; America already struggles getting past it’s racist past. It certainly doesn’t need new bigots stirring the pot.¶ And even if Trump doesn’t believe the racist garbage that he spews, it still has a hateful effect and stirs up the genuinely racist folks within America. And it’s not just the toothless, uneducated masses that have latched onto Trump’s prejudiced dog-whistles (they have); the neo-conservative bigots who utilize passive aggressive race-neutral language to antagonize people of color also have heeded his call. ¶ Of course his hate speech toward brown skinned migrants is epic; he seems to despise our brothers and sisters to the south (who have more right to be on this continent than he does). Yet, he says that the Mexicans who come here “… have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”¶ Well damn. It’s no surprise that his hate speech inspired hate crimes by some Neanderthals in Boston against a homeless Latino man. When the men were arrested they said, “Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported.”¶ Idiots call this type of racism “Nativist,” but that’s an evil lie. Donald Trump is not Native to this land and it’s not Native people carrying out this hate. It’s other immigrants. White immigrants who don’t like brown immigrants. ¶ He’s kinda equal opportunity in his hate of people of color. When speaking about the Black Lives Matter movement, a movement dedicated to securing basic human rights for black folks in this nation, Trump said, “I think they’re trouble. I think they’re looking for trouble…And I think it’s a disgrace that they’re getting away with it.”¶ But even with his obvious distaste of Mexican folks and Black folks, he has the longest history of antagonizing Native people.¶ Obviously, there’s the history of Trump crying to Congress that American Indian casinos should be shut down because Indian casinos are going to create “…the biggest organized crime problem in the history of this country. Al Capone is going to look like a baby.” Then, there was Trump playing racial police about mixed members of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe saying "They don't look like Indians to me.” Additionally, recently Trump was kind enough to speak for Native people about the Washington Redskins franchise, saying , "I know Indians that are extremely proud of that name." (in fairness, Jeb Bush did this same thing—these over-privileged and rich white men love to speak for Native people). ¶ Trump also recently went on record to say that if he were elected President, “I will immediately approve the Keystone XL pipeline...” that tramples on the sacred sites and water supplies of many, many Native people. ¶ Bad news. ¶ There are plenty more examples. And while we don’t have absolute certainty as to who will be best for Native people in this upcoming election cycle, we do know who will be the worst for Native people, Mexicans and black folks. ¶ Thank you Donald Trump for making that clear. | 12/19/16 |
SEPTOCT Japan Regulations CPTournament: Loyola | Round: 2 | Opponent: Peninsula JL | Judge: Adam Bistagne The counterplan solves the accidents advantage – the reason the meltdown occurred was because of a lack of inspection flexibility. The counterplan strengthens regulations which avoids meltdowns. AP 16 | 12/19/16 |
SEPTOCT SSD CPTournament: Yale | Round: 1 | Opponent: Success Academy SC | Judge: Zhou, Paul The big question now is how long it will be until the plant can be decommissioned and what to do with the large quantities of radioactive waste that are being stored onsite. Terrorism risks with nuclear power My concern with nuclear power has always been more about terrorism than accidents during operation or storage. I continue to worry that terrorists could gain entry to nuclear plant operations and sabotage plants from the inside — disabling cooling systems and causing a meltdown. There is also a remote risk of unanticipated natural disasters causing meltdowns or radiation release, as we saw so vividly with the Fukushima Power Plant catastrophe in Japan in March, 2011. For more than 30 years, the nuclear industry in the U.S. and nuclear regulators have been going down the wrong path with waste storage — seeking a repository where waste could be buried deep in a mountain. Nevada’s Yucca Mountain was the place of choice until… it wasn’t. Any time we choose to put highly dangerous waste in someone’s backyard, it’s bound to cause a lot of controversy, even in a sparsely populated, pro-resource-extraction place like Nevada. NIMBY opposition can be boosted by people in powerful places, and in the case of Yucca Mountain, Nevada senator Harry Reid has played such a role. (He has been the Senate Majority Leader since 2006 and served prior to that as the Minority Leader and Democratic Whip.) Aside from NIMBYism, the problem with burying nuclear waste in a mountain (like Yucca Mountain) or salt caverns (like New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns — an earlier option that was pursued for a while in the 1970s) is that the maximum safety is provided at Day One, and the margin of safety drops continually from there. The safety of such storage sites could be compromised over time due to seismic activity (Nevada ranks fourth among the most seismically active states), volcanism (the Yucca Mountain ridge is comprised mostly of volcanic tuff, emitted from past volcanic activity), erosion, migrating aquifers, and other natural geologic actions. A better storage option I believe a much better solution for long-term storage of high-level radioactive waste is to bury it deep under the seabed in a region free of seismic activity where sediment is being deposited and the seafloor getting thicker. In such a site, the level of protection would increase, rather than decrease, over time. In some areas of seabed, more than a centimeter of sediment is being deposited annually. Compacted over time, such sediment deposition could be several feet in a hundred years, and in the geologic time span over which radioactive waste is hazardous, hundreds to thousands of feet of protective sedimentary rock would be formed. The oil and gas industry — for better or worse — knows a lot about drilling deep holes beneath a mile or two of ocean. I suspect that the deep-sea drilling industry would love such a growth opportunity to move into seabed waste storage, and I believe the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or other agencies could do a good job regulating such work. The waste could be placed in wells extending thousands of feet below the seabed in sedimentary rock in geologically stable regions. Let's say a 3,000-foot well is drilled beneath the seabed two miles beneath the surface of the ocean. Waste could be inserted into that well to a depth of 1,000 feet, and the rest of the well capped with 2,000 feet of concrete or some other material. Hundreds of these deep-storage wells could be filled and capped, and such a sub-seabed storage field could be designated as forever off-limits. Industry or the Department of Energy would have to figure out how to package such waste for safe handling at sea, since the material is so dangerous, but I believe that is a surmountable challenge. For example, perhaps the radioactive waste could be vitrified (incorporated into molten glass-like material) to reduce leaching potential into seawater should an accident occur at sea, and that waste could be tagged with radio-frequency emitters so that any lost containers could be recovered with robotic submarines in the event of such accidents. While I’m not an expert in any of this, I’ve looked at how much money taxpayers and industry have already poured into Yucca Mountain — about $15 billion by the time the Obama Administration terminated federal funding for it in 2010, according to Bloomberg News — and the estimates for how much more it would take to get a working waste storage facility of that sort operational had risen to about $96 billion by 2008, according to the U.S. Department of Energy at the time. I believe that sub-seabed storage would be far less expensive. Solves the aff ssd is able to isolate any radioactive nuclear waste from humans. Bala 2014 | 12/19/16 |
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