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Tournament: x | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x Easiest way would be facebook Email is amb3rwang@gmail.com
9/10/16
JANFEB- Gag Orders AC
Tournament: UH | Round: 1 | Opponent: Strake Jesuit | Judge: Parker Kelly This aff contains args about sexual assault. Please message me on facebook or notify me before round if you would like me to read a different aff and I happily will.
Vanessa and many other survivors of sexual assault seek protection from colleges- yet what they are left with gag orders- issues of silence that will result in punishment if broken. Kingkade ‘15, Tyler, 7/22/15, Huffington Post Breaking the Silence, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sexual-assault-victims-punishment_us_55ada33de4b0caf721b3b61c/ A neighbor overheard Vanessa and her boyfriend shouting and the sound of something — her body, it turns out — hitting the dorm room wall one night in May 2014. The neighbor reported the fight to a residential assistant, who then reported it to Columbia University officials. ¶ As a result, Vanessa, who asked to use a pseudonym for privacy reasons, was called into a meeting the following week with a university official overseeing sexual violence cases at Columbia.¶ The university wanted to investigate the incident, but Vanessa did not want to make a report. She was not ready to admit that she was in a violent relationship. “I kept holding off on the investigation, waiting for him to get his shit together, and that never happened,” Vanessa said.¶ Despite Vanessa’s unwillingness to participate in an investigation, the university imposed a no-contact order between Vanessa her and her boyfriend. Columbia officials told her that the university would consider punishing her if she broke the no-contact order, according to emails obtained by The Huffington Post — even though she was the one suspected to be in an abusive relationship. The punishment, officials said, could be as severe as suspension.¶ Vanessa and her boyfriend were still dating, so neither abided by the directive. But that meant that when Vanessa finally was ready to have her boyfriend’s behavior investigated, she couldn’t bring her case to the university, because that would have meant admitting that she had violated the order. ¶ Colleges issue no-contact orders as a tool to protect victims from their alleged assailants, and apply confidentiality rules to prevent students from airing the school’s dirty laundry. Several students told HuffPost they were threatened with possible suspension if they violated what they consider to be gag orders.¶ Indeed, in a number of cases, colleges issued veiled threats of punishment to survivors of reported sexual assaults, often telling them to keep their cases hush-hush in phrasing that some experts believe may violate federal law. ¶ “Even if they never carry out the threat, the fact is that it’s chilling the speech of a lot of victims,” said Adam Goldstein, an attorney at the Student Press Law Center, an independent watchdog group that has long been concerned with college-imposed gag orders.¶ These threats have prevented sexual violence victims from getting protection from their universities or from police, made it difficult to get emotional support from friends and to discuss their experiences in public, shielded the colleges from outside scrutiny and, in some cases, simply made victims feel like they were the ones on trial. In Vanessa’s case, she says the threat of punishment for breaking the no-contact order pushed her even further into her boyfriend’s arms, since the rule prevented him from getting checked in to visit her at her dorm. Instead, Vanessa spent more time off-campus with him, which she now admits was “dangerous” because the university couldn’t protect her there. ¶ One student at Pace University complained last year that the no-contact order she and her alleged assailant were issued made her feel even more victimized. The directives stipulated that they could not talk about the case to friends on campus, which she felt was effectively a gag order.¶ “In a sense, it was blackmailing me to keep quiet,” the Pace student said.¶ Colby Bruno, senior legal counsel at the Victim Rights Law Center in Boston, says the way colleges are applying no-contact orders, placing an equal onus on both students, is misguided.¶ “They think if we don’t do this to both people, then we are in violation of our obligations under Title IX to be equitable,” he said. “That’s not the case.”¶ At Pomona College in California, alleged victims are told they cannot share the name of the accused person, what their sanctions are or what came up in the investigation.¶ Yenli Wong, a recent Pomona graduate, said that during her senior year she had wanted to write a blog piece for HuffPost about being sexually assaulted, but didn’t want to get in trouble for breaking the school’s confidentiality rules about the investigation that had taken place. Wong had no intention of revealing her assailant’s name — she just wanted to tell her story. But the school had previously told her that breaking the gag order would open her up to disciplinary charges.¶ In an email, Pomona Dean Miriam Feldblum told Wong that her blog post could “refer to specific relevant policy sections in the Handbook, such as ‘non-consensual sexual contact,’” but could not disclose details from the “alleged policy violation statement.”¶ Wong says Feldblum’s response was nonsensical to her, because it didn’t explain whether the blog post would be considered a violation of the gag order.¶ “I felt very trapped and was extremely worried that the college might punish me if I spoke out about what happened to me,” Wong said.
This past spring, the U.S. Department of Education released the names of 77 schools that are currently under investigation for their mishandling of rape and sexual assault cases. The list of colleges stretches from coast to coast, including Harvard, UC Berkeley, Florida State, Yale, and Princeton, just to name a few. Many have been found guilty of blatantly falsifying their records of campus assault in order to avoid negative attention so they can raise funds from alumni and wealthy donors and avoid losing Title IX funding. This often leaves students in the dark about the risks of their schools. And when students report complaints about rape or sexual assault, they often face an unresponsive bureaucracy. For example, Columbia University student Emma Sulkowicz alleges she was raped in her dorm room. She eventually reported the incident to university officials, but the university ultimately dismissed the case. So Emma recently began lugging her mattress around campus until her rapist is held accountable. More students have been joining in carrying mattresses around campus. Building a mass movement of visible protests like these, or better yet, even larger protests, can pressure college administrators to take this issue seriously. Together, we need to demand real community intervention that provides effective monitoring and rehabilitation. Clear and concise education, training, and awareness programs should be mandatory for all students and staff. We also need to overhaul the legal system, which currently handles sexual offenders and victims with gross ineptitude and neglect. To truly address violence against women, we need to go further and tackle the root cause of women’s oppression. Sexual assault is the inevitable by-product of a sexist, capitalist society based on inequality, exploitation, and domination – a profit-driven society in which women are reduced to mere sex objects a thousand times a day in the media and men are taught to compete for wealth, power, and masculinity. Ultimately, we need to establish a democratic socialist society based on equality and cooperation so that the systemic exploitation, oppression, and inequality inherent in capitalism will no longer distort human relationships and the world would be a much safer place for women.
Violence after assaults continue because of negligence of inspecting causes and experiences. Ahrens ‘06, Courtney E., Being Silenced, The Impact of Negative Social Relations on the Disclosure of Rape, Original Paper, 11/9/06, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1705531/pdf/10464_2006_Article_9069.pdf Unlike other crimes such as burglary and assault, rape survivors must prove not only that the crime did in fact occur, but that they had no role in its occurrence (Burt, 1980; Pollard, 1992; Ward, 1995). But, for most survivors, no matter what they did or how they behave, they are likely to be blamed for the assault. For some survivors, this blame may be so traumatizing that they are effectively silenced by the negative reactions they receive. Sadly, when rape survivors are silenced by negative reactions, their experiences and perspectives are concealed and our ability to identify the causes and consequences of rape are obscured. Such silences thereby obstruct our ability to engage in social change. A first step toward unearthing these untold stories may be to We must understand how and why rape survivors are silenced. Results suggested that rape survivors are silenced by a range of negative reactions including blaming, ineffective, insensitive, and inappropriate responses. Specific reactions appeared to be more common from different support providers, however. For example, being blamed, receiving insensitive reactions, and experiencing ineffective disclosures were particularly common among survivors who turned to formal community systems (especially the legal and medical systems). These experiences are consistent with previous research which has documented high levels of victim blame, doubt, insensitivity, and refusal of services by community system personnel (Campbell et al., 1999; Madigan and Gamble, 1991; Filipas and Ullman, 2001). Such reactions may stem from organizational features of these systems. In an examination of unresponsive treatment of rape survivors by both legal and medical personnel, Martin and Powell (1994) argue that the organizational frameworks guiding these systems’ activities are oriented towards the needs of the organization rather than the needs of survivors. They suggest that the needs of the systems and rape survivors may run counter to one another. Whereas the survivor needs to be believed and supported, the legal system needs to win cases and the emergency room needs to treat emergent patients. These conflicting needs often result in insensitive and unresponsive treatment of rape survivors (Martin and Powell, 1994). In the current study, survivors described police, medical staff, counselors, and pastors who laughed at their account of the assault, were cold and unsympathetic, and overtly blamed them for the assault. For three of the survivors in the current study, being silenced was a direct result of the accumulation of blaming, insensitive, and ineffective reactions from community system personnel which led them to question the effectiveness of disclosure.
Title IX is the reason colleges enforce gag orders- they’re unclear about whether or not the law mandates they enforce it so they do for fears of losing funds. Soave 15, Robby Soave, July 23, 2016, Hit and Run Blog, reason.com http://reason.com/blog/2015/07/23/universities-think-title-ix-also-require If one needs any additional evidence that university rape adjudication processes are farcical travesties of justice—for both accused students and accusers—look no further than this Huffington Post report on gag orders as a tool for administrators to silence alleged victims.¶ HuffPost Senior Editor Tyler Kingkade compiled numerous examples of students at different colleges who reported sexual assault to the administration only to be told they were prohibited from speaking—in public or private—about their troubles:¶ Yenli Wong, a recent Pomona graduate, said that during her senior year she had wanted to write a blog piece for HuffPost about being sexually assaulted, but didn't want to get in trouble for breaking the school's confidentiality rules about the investigation that had taken place. Wong had no intention of revealing her assailant’s name -- she just wanted to tell her story. But the school had previously told her that breaking the gag order would open her up to disciplinary charges.¶ In an email, Pomona Dean Miriam Feldblum told Wong that her blog post could "refer to specific relevant policy sections in the Handbook, such as 'non-consensual sexual contact,'" but could not disclose details from the "alleged policy violation statement."¶ Wong says Feldblum's response was nonsensical to her, because it didn't explain whether the blog post would be considered a violation of the gag order.¶ "I felt very trapped and was extremely worried that the college might punish me if I spoke out about what happened to me," Wong said.¶ Pomona went further than that: Without prompting, the school warned Wong's boyfriend, Julien Breistroff, that if he disclosed information about the case, he, too, would be opened up to disciplinary charges, according to emails provided to HuffPost. ¶ Free speech is indeed imperiled at Pomona College when administrators don’t merely prevent participants in a dispute from talking about their ordeal—the also and try to limit the conversation by going after anyone who might have knowledge of it.¶ In another example—this one at Columbia University—neighbors overheard a couple arguing, and reported this to the university. Administrators then imposed a no-contact order between the two, even though the woman (who later admitted she was in an abusive relationship) had refused to cooperate in any kind of investigation or formally accuse her boyfriend.¶ Why are universities censoring their students and meddling in private affairs when they haven’t been invited to do so? The culprit is the same federal gender equality law that makes the sexual assault adjudication process a Kafka-esque hell for accused students: Title IX.¶ Since no one seems to have has a very good understanding of what Title IX actually requires—including and especially the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, the agency that enforces the law—universities live in perpetual fear of losing federal funding because they accidentally violated it. To safeguard themselves against the legal and financial ramifications of ending up on OCR’s bad side, many administrators interpret Title IX as broadly as possible—more broadly than OCR, in fact—to the detriment of due process and free speech rights for students and faculty. This is the kind of regulatory environment that produces witch hunts against people like Northwestern University’s Laura Kipnis; it also led City University of New York officials to erroneously conclude that they had to police the use of gendered pronouns.¶ The gag orders are a byproduct of Title IX compliance as well:¶ Colby Bruno, senior legal counsel at the Victim Rights Law Center in Boston, says the way colleges are applying no-contact orders, placing an equal onus on both students, is misguided.¶ "They think if we don't do this to both people, then we are in violation of our obligations under Title IX to be equitable," he said. "That's not the case."¶ Bruno’s comment suggests to me that he would prefer, or believes that Title IX requires, one-sided gag orders. This strikes me as much worse: shouldn’t an accused student have the same right to speak his mind as his accuser does?¶ The stark reality that anti-rape activists have trouble admitting is this: universities will never be on their side. They are not in the business of dispensing justice; they are in the business of protecting their brand and financial resources, which means insulating themselves from the consequences of crossing the feds. As a result, compliance—rather than justice, fairness, or due process—is the paramount goal of the campus adjudication process.¶ Neither accusers nor the accused are well-served by such an environment. But instead of reforming aspects of the process—gag orders, for instance—to be even more one-sided, universities should be stripped of their obligation to handle rape disputes entirely. The criminal justice system, flawed though it may be, is still a better arbiter than Columbia University or Pomona College.
Thus the plan: Public colleges and universities in the United States ought not restrict constitutionally protected speech from enforcement of gag orders. I’ll clarify in CX. LeBouef 15, Trisha LeBouef, 6/16/15http:www.splc.org/blog/splc/2015/06/colleges-cannot-enforce-gag-orders-on-sexual-assault-victims The U.S. Department of Education, the agency charged with enforcing FERPA, has ruled multiple times that sexual assault victims who speak about their cases do not violate FERPA, and that colleges cannot enforce gag orders on victims.¶ Congress amended FERPA in the 1990 Student Right-to-Know Act specifically to provides that the outcomes of sexual assault cases are not protected by FERPA when shared with the victim. And federal Clery Act regulations -- regulations that implement the federal campus crime awareness statute -- require that the outcome of a disciplinary case involving a sex offense be disclosed to both accuser and accused.¶ In a 2008 ruling involving the University of Virginia, the Department of Education stated that a university “cannot require an accuser to agree to abide by its non-disclosure policy, in writing or otherwise, as a precondition to accessing judicial proceeding outcomes and sanction information under the Clery Act.” That means colleges that threaten students with discipline for talking about their own sexual assault cases are in violation of federal law.¶ FERPA applies to education records that are maintained by an agency or institution. Student speech, however, is not an education record, so speech between student journalists and sexual assault victims by definition cannot violate FERPA. In the same way, any student newspaper that quotes sexual assault victims as part of its reporting does not violate FERPA.
Not enforcing gag orders bring survivors liberation. Menchaca- Bagnulo 15, Ashleen, The Paradox of Title IX: Fighting Sexual Assault on Campus, The Witherspoon Institute, March 24, 2015, Resident Fellow with the Naval Academy’s Vice Admiral James B. Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership, http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2015/03/14366/ Of course, even given the complicating factors of delays in reporting and repeat offenders, there is most definitely the possibility of specious allegations and regretted encounters. Slate recently published an excellent article on the jeopardizing of due process for accused students who find themselves subject to the Title IX process. The student profiled in the article was falsely accused, and he paid a high price, even though many witnesses attested to the consensual nature of the sex act.¶ We cannot possess the knowledge to distinguish miscommunications and next-day regrets from authentic sexual assault. By its nature, sexual assault is nearly always a case of he said/she said. Even if the woman comes with marks or tears on her body, even if specimens are collected from her following the alleged assault, there is always the possibility that the sex was consensual yet rough. And it is apparent that—even with witnesses to the consensual nature of the act—a man can still find himself condemned as a rapist though he did no wrong.¶ This is where the appeal of Title IX is the strongest: it possesses a limited scope. Title IX is described as a “learning centered” “educational process” within the university community that examines whether campus policies have been violated and distributes consequences if they have. “For behaviors that may violate college policies and the law,” the Association for Student Conduct Administration advises, “victims are encouraged to pursue criminal procedures if they seek outcomes beyond the jurisdiction of what the campus can offer or impose.”¶ Title IX provides a space for the assaulted to air their grievance without the humiliation of testifying in open court, and it protects the falsely accused from having their names defamed in the papers and to juries. The process takes place within the safety net of a university setting, where the worst fate is shunning or an expulsion that is not listed on the accused’s transcript.¶ This is also where the paradox of Title IX is most apparent. Sexual assault is a crime, and universities are not courts. Despite its attractions, the great fault of Title IX lies in the fact that it has enough teeth to causes serious loss to an innocent student unjustly censured, but not enough bite to stop serious predators from enrolling in other universities and finding a new crop of victims. Described in the Slate article as a “powerful” tool for women, it is not so much powerful as it is pliable, subject to the competence of school officials and the potential for untruthfulness in either the accuser or the accused.¶ Steps toward Reform¶ It is not clear that Title IX is not an adequate solution to the problem of sexual assault on campuses. Even if it is a prudent stopgap, reforms are still needed for it to operate in a just way. These reforms include clear communication of the steps for reporting rape at universities, the openly offered option of going to the police with the claim, the prevention of repeat offenders' re-entering the educational system, and the separation of the interests of the university from the officials responsible for carrying out Title IX.¶ Aside from reforming Title IX, other steps can be taken to help minimize the occurrence of sexual assault. Organizations such as the Love and Fidelity Network, which seeks to model healthy relationships for college-aged men and women, are growing exponentially. Bystander intervention is proving to be a popular model for the reduction of sexual assault on campus, and training in such intervention should be encouraged.¶ An equally powerful tool is for college-aged men to be taught to hold and express the view that sexual assault is a contemptible and unmasculine behavior that does not carry with it the luster of “conquest.” Furthermore, pre-emptively educating potential victims of sexual assault to disassociate their feelings of shame from their actual self-worth may increase the reliability of reporting and decrease the time of delay.¶ In many ways, the focus on false allegations and the issue of the criminalization of male sexuality can be a strength as we sort through the problem of campus sexual assault. Yet it is important to remember that these critiques do not offer the whole picture. As we keep an eye on the way that sexual assault allegations can go wrong, let us also examine the attitudes that contribute to sexual assault and deliberate about the policies that best protect victims—both the assaulted and the falsely accused.
Speaking about the issue is necessary for healing and for recognition of campus shortcomings. Birdsell 14, Bonnie (2014) "Reevaluating Gag Orders and Rape Shield Laws in the Internet Age: How Can We Better Protect Victims?," Seton Hall Legislative Journal: Vol. 38: Iss. 1, Article 4. Available at: http://scholarship.shu.edu/shlj/vol38/iss1/4 Prohibiting a victim from telling his or her story, or even from discussing the details of a court case, is detrimental not only from a constitutional perspective but from a psychological one.122 The process of sharing the details of such a traumatic event and the legal proceedings surrounding it often helps victims to address the violence they have suffered and thus, help them to heal.123 The mental and physical effects of rape, and the lingering after-effects of rape, often go much deeper than the act itself.124 Rape, and the apprehension and memory thereof, manifests in the mind as frequent sense of dread, nagging, and anxiety, which instills in many women a necessary mindset of constant vigilance.125 The stories that victims share with their loved ones, the media, or other victims can give these individuals the chance to define the event for themselves.126 In a sense, it is a method of taking control over an event the victim actually had no control over.127 This kind of self-definition is important for victims in general, but it is especially important for victims of rape and sexual assault, who have historically been shamed and silenced by the rest of society. Allowing victims to have a voice and to use that voice is crucial to the positive progression of society.129 It is essential to make legislators aware of victims’ discontent with the laws governing this area so that they in their capacity as lawmakers may fully understand the suitability or unsuitability of their laws in a real-world context.130 In fact, it is absolutely central to the legal system to recognize its shortcomings in order for there to be a possibility of propelling it forward.131 It is critical for both victims and legislators that victims tell their stories, and that their stories are heard by people in a position to provide assistance.1
Speaking about sexual assault on campus can help facilitate change. Kaufman 15, Rachael L., "Talking About Rape on A College Campus" (2015). College of William and Mary Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 199. http://publish.wm.edu/honorstheses/199 It is evident that at a national and local level, individuals believe that language in college policies can be useful in creating change to campus climates with regard to sexual assault. While William and Mary’s policy presents a revised, holistic way of defining and discussing sexual assault, it is clear that the student body does not reap the benefits that such a policy could potentially offer. The policy serves as the College’s main use of language with regard to the issue of sexual assault, as its other efforts are more concerned with creating safe spaces for survivors and using different methods of data collection to assess the climate both quantitatively and qualitatively. Therefore, if used in accordance with student ideologies about language’s relation to social action, this policy could play a significant role in facilitating change on campus. For instance, the publicized use of an administrative policy in sexual assault education and prevention efforts on campus could address negative perceptions that currently exist about the administration not caring about or supporting survivors of sexual assault. Furthermore, in the next section, I will discuss my concluding thoughts about my research as a whole. I will specifically address my Kaufman 53 personal recommendations about using language effectively in sexual assault policy, education, and prevention.
Discussion helps stymie rape culture and provide recovery tactics. Dockterman 14, Eliana, 3/14/14, Rape Victims Talk About Why They Tweeted Their Stories, TIME, http://time.com/25150/rape-victims-talk-about-tweeting-their-experiences-publicly/ A spontaneous conversation about sexual assault on social media sparks a debate over whether public sharing helps victims heal or hurts them.¶ JoAnne Cusick was wearing a pink floral sundress and jelly sandals when she was sexually assaulted at the age of eight by a group of neighborhood boys. Believing that she was to blame, she kept the secret for nine years until she told a priest about the attack during confession. He assured her that she was innocent in the eyes of God, and the eyes of the world.¶ Twenty-eight years later, Cusick, now a 37-year-old nurse living in Colorado, shared that secret on social media joining hundreds of other victims who tweeted their stories of assault. These women (and a number of men) were responding to a simple question that went viral on Twitter Wednesday night asking victims what they were wearing when they were assaulted. Within hours, a long list of outfits—ranging from sweatshirts to pajamas to bathing suits—accompanied by stories of rape and assault filled Twitter feeds, replacing the normal news items and GIFs.¶ The huge response ignited a conversation on social media and blogs among victims and health professionals as to whether sharing stories on highly public, semi-anonymous social media forums could be a healthy step in the recovery process—a way to make those who’ve been assaulted feel less alone, less stigmatized and shamed. Or does sharing leave survivors open to online shaming and undermine a more traditional route of coping, like therapy?¶ The debate started when Christine Fox, a young woman who tweets under the handle @steenfox, got into an argument on Twitter with someone a follower who insisted that women who wear revealing outfits are at fault if they are sexually assaulted. Fox invited those on the social media network who had been victims of rape or sexual assault to tweet the outfits they wore at the time of the attack in hopes of convincing this man not to victim blame.¶ “I was trying to make him understand that it absolutely does not make a difference, and that the responsibility does not lie on women,” she told The Root. Over the next several hours, Fox received hundreds of replies. With the users’ permission, she retweeted stories as she received them.¶ The campaign of sorts took on another life when Adrienne Simpson from Philadelphia, who has never been a victim of sexual assault, saw the conversation on Twitter and thought that it could take on a new visual format. “I am a marketer, so I think in campaigns and imagery,” she tells TIME. “I was thinking they need pictures with this because that’s what’s going to drive home the idea that you can have on corduroy pants and a camouflage shirt—there’s nothing remotely sexual about that—and this can still happen to you.”¶ She created five images from the texts of five tweets that caught her attention: the camouflage shirt and cords a 15-year-old had been wearing; a school uniform (buttoned-up polo, knee-length khaki shorts) worn by a 13-year-old; a sundress a 19-year-old was wearing to Church on Sunday when she was raped by her 50-year-old minister; jeans and a hoodie for a 22-year-old girl who was acting as a designated driver at a party and whose soda was roofied; and—the one that got the most retweets all night—the Barney pajamas worn by a seven-year-old when she was raped.¶ She added a hashtag: #RapeHasNoUniform. “I think as a victim, when you speak out, you want it to matter. The bigger this gets, the more it matters. I think it should be an organized, public campaign.”¶ But without expecting attention or publicity, many just tweeted in the hopes of helping others. “The assault had nothing to do with anything I did. And I think hearing one survivor being able to say that is a good for people who may still be blaming themselves,” Cusick tells TIME. She has shared her story with friends before, and says she felt comfortable opening up on Twitter.¶ Sarah Webster said she tweeted with a similar motive. Webster has tweeted about her assault in the past and says that nothing is too private for her to share on her account, which is focused on sex and body image. During the course of the Twitter conversation, the question of whether most assailants are strangers or not arose, and Webster decided it was important to share her story. Webster says she was raped by someone she was very close to and hoped her experience would show others that even those you trust can be perpetrators. “I was sexually assaulted by someone I knew, and at the time I wasn’t wearing anything at all. It was in my home by someone who was never supposed to do that to me,” she says. “I wanted to contribute another side of the story.”¶ Scott Berkowitz, the President and Founder of the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) was not surprised that seeing so many people share the same experience on Twitter motivated people to share their stories for the first time. “Having this whole community of other people who have been through something similar can be really empowering for people,” he says. “I think there’s safety in numbers. We see that in a lot of scenarios with sexual assault survivors. When there’s allegations, say, against a particular priest that becomes public, suddenly many other people who were abused by that person are okay with coming forward.”¶ Those who posted compared the spontaneous movements to Take Back the Night and Slut Walk—two organized campaigns that have aimed to create safe environments for rape victims to share their stories, debunk the notion of victim blaming and restore safety to campuses and neighborhoods. The popularity of such projects proves that large groups of victims speaking out can bolster other survivors’ confidence. But unlike past movements, this one took place on social media, which can be simultaneously both anonymous and extremely public.¶
Rape perpetuates sexism and patriarchal norms and speaking out about it is a key way to fight against it. SEP, Feminist Perspective of Rape, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-rape/#RapRac Rape is unquestionably a gendered crime: 91 of rape victims are female, while almost 99 of perpetrators are male (Greenfield 1997). In light both of these numbers and of rape's broader ideological dynamics and social consequences, feminists have long contended that rape harms not only its individual victims, but also women as a class. Brison, for instance, calls rape “gender-motivated violence against women, which is perpetrated against women collectively, albeit not all at once and in the same place” (2002, 98). Understanding how rape harms women as a group requires analyzing it not only as an individual act but also as an institution—that is, a structured social practice with distinct positions and roles, and with (explicit or implicit) rules that define who may (or must) do what under what circumstances (Card 1991). Feminists have highlighted the ways in which the institution of rape reinforces the group-based subordination of women to men: for instance, by making women fearful, and by enforcing patriarchal dictates both about proper female behavior and about the conditions of male sexual entitlement to women's bodies. As Burgess-Jackson puts it, “Rape—the act and the practice—subjugates an entire class of individuals (women) to another (men) …. every woman, qua woman, is wronged by it” (2000, 289).¶ Feminists have long claimed that, in patriarchal cultures, rape is not anomalous but paradigmatic—that it enacts and reinforces, rather than contradicting, widely shared cultural views about gender and sexuality. As Dworkin puts it, “rape is not committed by psychopaths or deviants from our social norms—rape is committed by exemplars of our social norms …. Rape is no excess, no aberration, no accident, no mistake—it embodies sexuality as the culture defines it” (1976, 45–46). A core dynamic of patriarchal sexuality, on this view, is the normalizing and sexualizing of male (or masculine) control and dominance over females (or the feminine). This dynamic finds expression in a number of beliefs about what is natural, acceptable, and even desirable in male-female sexual interaction: that the male will be persistent and aggressive, the female often reluctant and passive; that the male is invulnerable, powerful, hard, and commanding, and that women desire such behavior from men; that “real men” are able to get sexual access to women when, where, and how they want it; that sexual intercourse is an act of male conquest; that women are men's sexual objects or possessions; and that men “need” and are entitled to sex.
FW
In order for morality to be act functional, it must be able to recognize subjective differences between individuals. Absent an examination of differences, ethics becomes a tool to dominate and is useless as an impartial guide to action. Young: Young, Iris Marion. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1990. Print. CM Some feminist and postmodern writers have suggested that a denial of difference structures Western reason, where difference means particularity, the heterogeneity of the body and affectivity, or the inexhaustibility of linguistic and social relations without a unitary, undifferentiated origin. This book seeks to show how such a denial of difference contributes to social group oppression, and to argue for a politics that recognizes rather than represses difference. Thus Chapter 4 argues that the ideal of impartiality, a keystone of most modern moral theories and theories of justice, denies difference. The ideal of impartiality suggests that all moral situations should be treated according to the same rules. By claiming to provide a standpoint, which all subjects can adopt, it denies the difference between subjects. By positing a unified and universal moral point of view, it generates a dichotomy between reason and feeling. Usually expressed in counterfactuals, the ideal of impartiality expresses an impossibility. It serves at least two ideological functions, moreover. First, claims to impartiality feed cultural imperialism by allowing the particular experience and perspective of privileged groups to parade as universal. Second, the conviction that bureaucrats and experts can exercise their decision making power in an impartial manner legitimates authoritarian hierarchy. Impartiality, I also suggest in Chapter 4, has its political counterpart in the ideal of the civic public. Critical theory and participatory democratic- theory share with the liberal theory they challenge a tendency to suppress difference by conceiving the polity as universal and unified, This universalist ideal of the civic public has operated to effectively exclude from citizenship persons identified with the body and feeling—women, Jews, Blacks, American Indians, and so on. A conception of justice, which challenges institutionalized domination and oppression, should offer a vision of a heterogeneous public that acknowledges and
2 impacts:
Controls the internal link to any ethical system- ethics cannot operate if they exclude voices because they would be incomplete and arbitrary. Arbitrariness is a side constraint on ethical theories, because if they could exclude voices they would never be able to be a guide to action because they wouldn’t be able to prescribe consistent rules. 2. Excluding voices reinforces hierarchies which inherently privileges the have’s in society over the have not’s- that inhibits meaningful decision-making because it rests on a flawed assumptions that have been normalized. That means including voices in is the only way to create ethical rules. Any conception of ethics requires inclusion of all voices and rejection of bias and universality. Only a feminist ethic takes into account social contexts and includes marginalized voices in ethical deliberations. Warren ‘90, Karen J. "The power and the promise of ecological feminism." Environmental Ethics 12.2 (1990): 125-146. Associate Professor of Philosophy at Macalester College SK A feminist ethic involves a twofold commitment to critique male bias in ethics wherever it occurs, and to develop ethics which are not male-biased. Sometimes this involves articulation of values (e.g., values of care, appropriate trust, kinship, friendship) often lost or under-played in mainstream ethics." Sometimes it involves engaging in theory building by pioneering in new directions or by revamping old theories in gender sensitive ways. What makes the critiques of old theories or conceptualizations of new ones "feminist" is that they emerge out of sex-gender analyses and reflect whatever those analyses reveal about gendered experience and gendered social reality. As I conceive feminist ethics in the pre-feminist present, it rejects attempts to conceive of ethical theory in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, because it assumes that there is no essence (in the sense of some trans historical, universal, absolute abstraction) of feminist ethics. While attempts to formulate joint necessary and sufficient conditions of a feminist ethic are unfruitful, nonetheless, there are some necessary conditions, what I prefer to call" boundary conditions," of a feminist ethic. These boundary conditions clarify some of the minimal conditions of a feminist ethic without suggesting that feminist ethics has some ahistorical essence. They are like the boundaries of a quilt or collage. They delimit the territory of the piece without dictating what the interior, the design, the actual pattern of the piece looks like. Because the actual design of the quilt emerges from the multiplicity ofvoices of women in a cross-cultural context, the design will change overtime. It is not something static. What are some of the boundary conditions of a feminist ethic? First, nothing can become part of a feminist ethic-canbe part of the quilt-that promotes sexism, racism, classism, or any other "isms" of social domination. Of course, people may disagree about what counts as a sexist act, racist attitude, classist behavior. What counts as sexism, racism, or classism may vary cross-culturally. Still, because a feminist ethic aims at eliminating sexism and sexist bias, and (as I have already shown) sexism is intimately connected in conceptualization and in practice to racism, classism, and naturism, a feminist ethic must be anti-sexist,anti-racist, anti-classist, anti-naturist and opposed to any "ism"which presupposes or advances a logic of domination. Second, a feminist ethic is a contextualist ethic. A contextualist ethic is one which sees ethical discourse and practice as emerging from the voices of people located in different historical circumstances. A contextualist ethic is properly viewed as a collage or mosaic, a tapestry of voices that emerges out of felt experiences. Like any collage or mosaic, the point is not to have one picture based on a unity of voices, but a pattern which emerges out of the very different voices of people located in different circumstances. When a contextualist ethic is feminist, it gives central place to the voices of women. Third, since a feminist ethic gives central significance to the diversity of women's voices, a feminist ethic must be structurally pluralistic. rather than unitary or reductionistic. It rejects the assumption that there is "one voice." in terms of which ethical values, beliefs, attitudes, and conduct can be assessed. Fourth, a feminist ethic reconceives ethical theory as theory in process which will change over time. Like all theory,a feminist ethic is based on some generalizations. Nevertheless, the generalizations associated with it are themselves a pattern of voices within which the different voices emerging out of concrete and alternative descriptions of ethical situations have meaning. The coherence of a feminist theory so conceived is given within a historical and conceptual context, i.e., within a set of historical, socioeconomic circumstances. (including circumstances of race, class, age, and affectional orientation) and within a set of basic beliefs,values, attitudes, and assumptions about the world. Fifth, because a feminist ethic is contextualist, structurally pluralistic, and "in-process, "one way to evaluate the claims of a feminist ethic is in terms of their inclusiveness: those claims (voices, patterns of voices) are morally and epistemologically favored (preferred, better, less partial, less biased)which are more inclusive of the felt experiences and perspectives of oppressed persons. The condition of inclusiveness requires and ensures that the diverse voices of women (as oppressed persons) will be given legitimacy. in ethical theory building. It thereby helps to minimize empirical bias., e.g., bias rising from faulty or false generalizations based on stereotyping, too smalla sample size, or a skewed sample. It does so by ensuring that any generalizations which are made about ethics and ethical decision making include-indeed cohere with-the patterned voices of women." Sixth, a feminist ethic makes no attempt to provide an "objective" point of view., since it assumes that in contemporary culture there really is no such point of view. As such, it does not claim to be "unbiased" in the sense of "value-neutral" or "objective." However, it does assume that whatever bias it has as an ethic centralizing the voices of oppressed persons is a better bias.-"better" because it is more inclusive and therefore less partial.-that those which exclude those voices. 26 Seventh, a feminist ethic provides a central place for values typically unnoticed, underplayed, or misrepresented in traditional ethics, e.g., values of care, love, friendship, and appropriate trust. Again, it need not do this at the exclusion of considerations of rights, rules, or utility. There may be many contexts in which talk of rights or of utility is useful or appropriate. For instance, in contracts or property relationships, talk of rights may be useful and appropriate. In deciding what is cost-effective or advantageous to the most people, talk of utility may be useful and appropriate. In a feminist qua contextualist ethic, whether or not such talk is useful or appropriate depends on the context; other values (e.g., values of care, trust, friendship) are not viewed as reducible. to or captured solely in terms of such talk. And in academic settings like debate we ought to examine and deconstruct power relations through feminist pedagogy to highlight subjectivity and develop the skills necessary to break down male bias. The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater that best allows for inclusion through a feminist lens. Scering ‘97, Grace E. Sikes. "Themes of a critical/feminist pedagogy: Teacher education for democracy." Journal of teacher education 48.1 (1997): 62-68. Journal of teacher education, themes of a critical feminist pedagogy SK As a guide for a curriculum correlating democracy with critical/ feminist pedagogy, connected knowing emphasizes an expanded base for school knowledge and the development or students’ responsibilities to themselves, their peers, children and adults. Critical knowing needs to be at the core of issues and practices related to the power dynamics within schools… Young people also need clear instructions to help them visualize democratic values with a broader societal and global context. (Goodman 1992). Emphasis on caring and responsibility linked to democracy may develop values and attitudes undergirding production of critical and connected knowledge. The dominant white male epistemology emphasizing dichtomization of social life apart from private values and the distancing of individual from others causes the failure to relate caring and responsibility to democracy. in traditional schooling. Maher (1987) maintains that gendered (feminist) and liberation (critical) models of pedagogy complement one another because the gendered models tend to ignore the personal domain. Leck (1987) acknowledges that a heightened awareness of gender is insufficient for changing the masculine paradigm of schooling but that liberation theory is a model for praxis, the intersection of theory, practice and action. (Giroux, 1988). Yet critical/ feminist pedagogy is more than an extended liberation theory or a part of liberation theory (Giroux, 1988). It has the potential to affect the top-down educational stance of liberationist theorists. Feminist pedagogy may be able to move liberationist theorists to a full recognition of their own risk as they work in interrelationships within the limits of his dualistic, hierarchal and patriarchal paradigm. And paradoxically, without such systematic consciousness-raising among liberation theorists who are not primarily defined as doing feminist pedagogy, it would be unlikely that educators would recognize the role of patriarchy as an educational paradigm.
1/6/17
MARAPR- IPV AC
Tournament: TFA State | Round: 1 | Opponent: Any | Judge: Any The role of the ballot is to endorse a positive strategy that challenges the dominant ideology of gender violence. Nicholson 89
Nicholson, Carol. "Postmodernism, feminism, and education: The need for solidarity." Educational Theory 39.3 (1989): 197-205.
Most feminists are not ….curriculum and our civilization
Debate is a heuristic for social change. It’s a safe space to fight for our rights and empowers us with the skills to take that fight into the real world. Giroux: ‘06 Henry A. America on the edge: Henry Giroux on politics, culture, and education. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. PESH AK The National Association of Urban Debate Leagues (UDLs) ….e, and collective responsibility.
In order for morality to be act functional, it must be able to recognize subjective differences between individuals. Absent an examination of individual differences, ethics becomes a tool to dominate and is useless as an impartial guide to action. Young: Young, Iris Marion. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1990. Print. CM Some feminist and postmodern ….should offer a vision of a heterogeneous public that acknowledges and affirms group differences.
Material conditions come first, Matsuda Matsuda 88 (Mari, Associate Professor of Law, University of Hawaii, “When the First Quail Calls: Multiple Consciousness as Jurisprudential Method”, 11 Womxn's Rts. L. Rep. 7 1989) The multiple consciousness I urge lawyers to attain is ….mainstream debates about law and theory
Part 2 is Harms
The majority of homeless womxn are homeless because of Intimate partner Violence. Shelters don’t solve in the long run and they often face discrimination from landlords. NCADV, Coalition Against Domestic Violence, a national leader in the effort to create and influence Federal legislation that positively affects the lives of domestic violence victims and children. http://www.ncdsv.org/images/NCADV_DomesticViolenceAndHousing.pdf
¶ Because a victim of domestic ….victims of domestic violence.
IPV brings economic barriers to survivors. Assistance is necessary. Baker et al 10 Domestic violence, housing instability, and homelessness: A review of housing policies and program practices for meeting the needs of survivors, 2010, Charlene K. Baker a, ⁎, Kris A. Billhardt b , Joseph Warren c , Chiquita Rollins c , Nancy E. Glass d a Department of Psychology, 2530 Dole Street, Sakamaki C400, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, Honolulu, HI 96822, United States b Volunteers of America – Oregon, Home Free, United States c Multnomah Department of County Human Services, United States d Johns Hopkins University, United States http://b.3cdn.net/naeh/416990124d53c2f67d_72m6b5uib.pdf As womxen attempt ….women from public housing (Martin and Stern, 2005).
IPV threatens one’s agency and ability to form collective resistance. O’Doherty 15 O’Doherty, Lorna Jane Ph.D. in Applied Psychology, Coventry University, et al. "Fractured Identity in the Context of Intimate Partner Violence Barriers to and Opportunities for Seeking Help in Health Settings." Violence against women (2015). IPV produces fear and self-doubt; …of the barriers facing women in finding pathways to safety
Thus Plan: The United States Federal Government ought to guarantee the right to housing for survivors of intimate partner violence. I’ll clarify in CX. Paglione 6, Guilia, Domestic Violence and Housing Rights: A Reinterpretation of the Right to Housing Author(s): Giulia Paglione Source: Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Feb., 2006), pp. 120-147 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20072726 Accessed: 06-03-2017 23:51 UTC Domestic violence IPV clearly ….to housing needs to be brought to the surface.
Part 3 is Solvency Giving the right to housing allows escape from abusive relationships. Paglione 6, Guilia, Domestic Violence and Housing Rights: A Reinterpretation of the Right to Housing Author(s): Giulia Paglione Source: Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Feb., 2006), pp. 120-147 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20072726 Accessed: 06-03-2017 23:51 UTC The biased and male-…. affected persons and groups."32
The mere passing of the plan gives recognition to survivors to empower them and give them agency. Gandhi et al 11, Ankita Gandhi, Social Impact Research (SIR) is the independent research department of Root Cause,¶ a research and consulting firm dedicated to mobilizing the nonprofit, public, and¶ business sectors to work collaboratively in a new social impact market. Modeled¶ after private sector equity research firms, SIR conducts research on social issues and¶ independent analysis of program performance to provide leaders and funders with the¶ rigorous, actionable information they need to make strategic decisions about creating¶ and investing in social impact. http://www.rootcause.org/docs/Resources/Research/Empowering-Victims-of-Domestic-Violence/Empowering20Victims20of20Domestic20Violence-20Social20Issue20Report.pdf Empowerment theory underpins services …Department of Health and Human Services.22
Preventing intimate partner violence is key to challenging the patriarchy. Johnson writes, Michael P. Johnson Department of Sociology. Two Types of Violence Against Women in the American Family: Identifying Patriarchal Terrorism and Common Couple Violence. Paper presented at the annual meetings of the National Council on Family Relations, Irvine, CA, November 1999. He then argued that these differences in the patterns …all of the other means at his disposal.
3/9/17
NOVDEC- ADA
Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 1 | Opponent: Newark Science | Judge: Grant Laverty Part One is Harms: Currently, police are justified in their actions to kill those deemed as they “dangerous” which perpetuates existing oppressive ideologies- that causes spillover to everyday citizens.
In the name of security, the worst violence, police violence, is normalized. This violence - especially when the victim is racialized, socially disadvantaged, disabled and/or Mad - is perceived as legitimate, necessary, and justified from the perspective of the state, rather than being viewed as excessive. In all the cases mentioned in this article, a decontextualized narrative emerges whereby officers state they had no other option but to kill the victim. Police excuses - they were protecting the public, they thought they saw a weapon, they were threatened by the 3- inch blade or were feeling threatened by an unarmed person - have negated accountability and due process and legitimatized police violence. This legitimacy is ingrained into the foundation of our social structure, evident by jury members repeatedly and consistently deeming officers not guilty, even after they have been confronted with evidence that clearly demonstrates the inconsistencies within the officer’s statements. These police killings are not an error or an unfortunate outcome; they are an element of police power, a legitimized practice of the state and of the social order that authorizes it. Without accountability a pattern is clearly being repeated: officers attempt to force a subject to comply, which then reduces the individual to an object, this justifies using a higher level of force required relative to the resistance of the suspect and the fabrication of situations that lack legitimacy. Police violence is therefore not solely a matter of the legal system; it is part of police procedure. These killings are committed within a specific cultural structure: a racist, sanist, and ableist collectivity, in which institutional solidarity protects officers with procedure. After every killing, police procedure is merely a performance to the cultural norm rather than to a judicial process (Martinot, 2012). Despite police receiving the highest amount of public support due to their visibility, research has also shown that in recent years, police support is waning (Karabel, 2015). The role of police officers is to serve and protect; responsibility and accountability should come along with the gun and badge, a standard society is now starting to demand. The over-arching purpose of lethal demands for police compliance is to reinforce and stabilize their policing status position in society through forced recognition: police commands and dictates are unquestionable, set in motion by fear and criminal, if ignored. The positionality of the police grants them the power to target certain marginalized populations, direct their actions through the imposition of lethal threats for compliance, and to recreate explanatory narratives that justify any and all actions that surface from non-compliance in any number of incidents. The trend of impunity granted to police after committing a forced attrition of a Mad person reinforces the stereotypes surrounding this population as being criminal and pathological; when the person is also racialized, the prejudices multiply (Mack, 2014). The exact number of racialized people killed by the Toronto police is unknown as race-based statistics on this matter are not kept by Statistics Canada, the police, the Ministry, or the police watchdog; yet, the data collected from the discriminatory and racist practice of carding individuals certainly is (Gillis, 2015). Carding, otherwise known as ‘street checks’, was a controversial profiling practice by police. The complaints against carding, however, were largely a result of the police profiling of racialized minorities. This unconstitutional and arbitrary form of detention was so much a problem that the Ontario legislature banned carding practices as a matter of law. Police resisted these laws, in particular the Peel region, where data shows that people who are black were three times as likely than whites to be stopped (Grewal, 2015). Although Ontario did away with carding practices of racial minorities, this type of profiling raises questions regarding what society’s ‘acceptable’ limits of profiling are. This is not a technical problem, police violence and the impunity officers are granted for committing these acts is an institutional divide between who is granted humanity and those who are deprived of it. It is not a separation of state and people, rather, it is a political and social refusal to grant equality and human status to racialized people with disabilities and racialized Mad folks. Police violence is part of social violence, as the social institutions supposedly existing to protect members of the public from criminal violence, fundamentally produce that violence. Police violence and state killings are explicitly conjoined with the existing social structure that authorizes police power. To simply reject police violence and state killings is merely patchwork. In order to change our current situation, social structures must be dismantled through critiquing late-capitalism ideology and the construction of established concepts and norms of power, oppression and privilege.
Although acts like the Americans with Disabilities Act have been implemented to protect disabled people from the brutal hands of the state, defenses like qualified immunity still allow violence to be inflicted without repercussions. Gildin '99 (Gary S. Gildin, Professor of Law, The Dickinson School of Law of the Pennsylvania State University. B.A. 1973, University of Wisconsin; J.D. 1976, Stanford Law School. "DIS-QUALIFIED IMMUNITY FOR DISCRIMINATION AGAINST THE DISABLED" University of Illinois Law Review, 1999 The United States Congress has endeavored to guarantee the equal participation of the disabled in all aspects of American life through the passage of three statutes-the Rehabilitation Act of 1973,1 the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA),2 and the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA) (hereinafter "The Acts").3 Consistent with Chief Justice Marshall's admonition that "the very essence of civil liberty certainly consists in the right of every individual to claim the protection of the laws, whenever he receives an injury,"4 under these acts aggrieved individuals may bring an action for damages against an individual government official who intentionally discriminates based upon disability.5 This damage remedy is an essential component of the trilogy of disability statutes, as it compensates the victim for the harm caused by discrimination and deters government officials from engaging in the proscribed discrimination. The vitality of the damage remedy, however, has been imperilled by a line of lower federal court decisions permitting public officials to propound qualified immunity as a defense to suits for damages brought under the disability discrimination statutes.6 This immunity shields individual government actors from accountability for intentional discrimination in all circumstances where it was not "clearly established" that the statutes proscribed the conduct in the particular factual circumstances presented.' Even where the unlawfulness of the official's act was "clearly established," damages nonetheless will not be awarded if the official proves either (a) he did not know and should not have known of the right, or (b) he did not know and should not have known that his conduct violated the right.' If the defense of qualified immunity is accepted under the disability statutes, in most instances it can be expected that plaintiffs will be barred from recovering damages against government officials. In construing qualified immunity under 42 U.S.C. § 19839 (the 1871 CivilRights Act from which courts have borrowed immunity for the disability discrimination statutes °) the United States Supreme Court has declared that qualified immunity protects "all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law."'" Furthermore, at least one federal court of appeals has presumed "that qualified immunity protects government actors is the usual rule; only in exceptional cases will government actors have no shield against claims made against them in their individual capacities."'2 This article contends that the defense of qualified immunity may not be asserted in actions for damages brought under the Acts. Congress did not confer qualified immunity in the text of any of the disability discrimination statutes, even though at the time of their enactment Congress was well aware of how to make clear its intent to grant immunity. 3 In addition, implying immunity is contrary to the legislative history of the Acts, which plainly prescribes that the Acts are to be liberally construed to provide disabled individuals with broad remedies should they suffer discrimination.14
Thus the Plan: The United States federal government will limit qualified immunity for police officers under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Gildin continues, The courts that have allowed a qualified immunity defense to be erected by government officials sued for intentional discrimination have not attempted to reconcile the defense with the text and legislative history of the Acts. Instead, without analysis the courts have reflexively extended the qualified immunity available in actions for constitutional violations filed under 42 U.S.C. § 1983.15 Transmuting immunity from § 1983 to the disability discrimination statutes is entirely inappropriate for three reasons. First, the Acts are independent congressional measures that were not modeled after § 1983.16 Second, the fact that qualified immunity under § 1983 originated in state common law confirms that § 1983 immunity is inapplicable to actions brought under the Acts.17 In the era in which the disability discrimination statutes were enacted, statutes had supplanted the common law as the source of immunity in state law. Under the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution,18 these state statutes cannot immunize officials who transgress the dictates of federal statutes, nor did Congress so intend. Finally, even under its broad power to fashion remedies for implied causes of action, the judiciary may not legislate a qualified immunity defense that Congress did not intend for actions under the Acts.
Litigation is key to making real change- historically proven. Prevents police from targeting the disabled and starts viewing their lives as worthy of not criminalizing.
Auner 16, Thomas J. Auner, For the Protection of Society's Most Vulnerable, the ADA Should Apply to Arrests, 49 Loy. L.A. L. Rev. 335 (2016). Available at: http://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/llr/vol49/iss1/10
When courts deem the ADA applicable to specific situations,¶ public and private entities typically respond by making the necessary¶ changes to comply with the law. For example, in 1986, prior to the¶ passage of the ADA, 51 percent of employers made efforts to¶ reasonably accommodate employees with disabilities.97 In 1995,¶ after Congress enacted the ADA, this figure rose to 81 percent.98 Yet,¶ some entities have resisted complying with the ADA until they are¶ sued.99 For example, disabled transportation users sued the paratransit program100 in Los Angeles County for failing to reasonably accommodate riders by frequently arriving late.101 The litigation provided the paratransit system with the necessary incentive to change, which resulted in substantial improvements.102 Similarly, police departments located within jurisdictions that apply the ADA to arrest situations will be forced to substantially improve training, or face potential liability under the ADA.103 Programs that train police officers to respond appropriately to mentally ill persons allow police departments to comply with the ADA, but more importantly, and will tangibly improve the safety of the mentally ill. 104
Qualified immunity prevents police officers from being held accountable for their actions and continue to allow violence to happen- means it’s key to prevent violence
Drew Carbado 16, Honorable Harry Pregerson Professor of Law, UCLA, “Blue-on-Black Violence: A Provisional Model of Some of the Causes,” Georgetown Law Journal Vo. 104, 2016. A similar dynamic is at play in the civil process as well. Here, too, police officers can escape accountability. Here, too, part of the problem is that actors in the civil process-judges and juries-translate that violence into justifiable force by concluding that the officer's conduct was reasonable. And here, too, explicit and implicit biases can inform a judge or jury's determination that it was reasonable for an officer to think that a black male suspect posed a serious risk of harm or death to the police officer. 188 2. Point 5: Qualified Immunity and Indemnification a. QualifiedImmunity: Perhaps a more fundamental barrier to holding police officers accountable in the civil process is the doctrine of qualified immunity.189 That the purpose of this doctrine is to protect "all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law ' 9° is already a strong signal that the doctrine functions to protect police officers from liability. To understand the broader scope of the problem, a brief discussion of the doctrine of qualified immunity is necessary. Victims of police violence can sue police officers under Section 1983, a civil rights statute that permits plaintiffs to sue governmental officials for violating statutory or constitutional rights.191 In the excessive force context, plaintiffs typically assert that a police officer's use of force violated the plaintiff's Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable seizures. 192 Police officers can defend against such suits by asserting the defense of qualified immunity. 19 3 Whether an officer prevails on this defense turns on whether that officer can show that (a) his/her conduct did not violate the plaintiff's constitutional rights, or (b) assuming that his/her conduct did violate a constitutional right, that the right was not clearly established at the time the officer acted. 194 With respect to whether the officer's conduct violated the plaintiff's constitu- tional rights, the standard, as in the criminal context, centers on reasonableness: whether a reasonable officer would have believed that the use of force was necessary.195 And, as in the criminal context, juries will often defer to an officer's claim that he/she employed deadly force because he/she feared for his/her life. 19 6 Moreover, implicit and explicit biases can inform their decision 197 making. With respect to the "clearly established" doctrine, there are two problems with the standard. First, courts often avoid deciding the question of whether the officer's conduct violated the Constitution and rule instead on whether the constitutional right in question was clearly established.198 The Supreme Court has made clear that lower courts are free to proceed in this way, 99 making it relatively easy for courts to make the defense of qualified immunity available to a police officer without having to decide whether the officer violated a constitutional right.200 This avoidance compounds the extent to which the law is unsettled. And, the greater the uncertainty about the law, the greater the doctrinal space for a police officer to argue that particular rights were not "clearly established" at the time the officer acted.20 1 In other words, the more courts avoid weighing in on the substantive question of whether police conduct violates the Constitution, the more leeway police officers have to argue that their conduct did not violate a clearly established right. Consider, for example, Stanton v. Sims. 20 2 There, the Court avoided the question of whether an officer's entrance into a yard to effectuate the arrest of a misdemeanant violated the Fourth Amendment, but ruled that the right to avoid such an intrusion was not clearly established.20 3 Unless and until the Supreme Court expressly rules that, absent exigent circumstances, one has a right to be free from warrantless entry into one's yard, courts will likely grant qualified immunity in cases involving such arrests.20
Limited qualified immunity within civil law also leads to closer examination of cases and holds police to a higher threshold. This is key to reform and compensation to victims. Mary M.Cheh 96,Professor of Law, George Washington University “Are Lawsuits an Answer to Police Brutality?” in William A. Geller and Hans Toch, “Police Violence: Understanding and Controlling Police Abuse of Force,” Yale University Press, 1996. By contrast, the civil law, because of its greater flexibility and scope, has the potential to serve as the instrument of systemic reform. In adjusting rights and settling wrongs, civil remedies generally offer distinct advantages over criminal sanctions. First, a victim of police misconduct can sue on his or her own behalf and not need to await the government’s decision to go forward. Second, an injured party need not overcome the heightened procedural protections afforded the criminally accused. For example, a plaintiff can prevail under a preponderance of evidence standard rather than proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Third, although the civil law, like the criminal law, can punish via its potential for imposition of punitive damages, the civil law provides compensation to victims who have been harmed by police misconduct. Recompense is beneficial in itself, and damage awards can spur reform if the costs of misbehavior are high. Fourth, civil lawsuits permit broad discovery of information and may provide a means to uncover police misbehavior and stir public reaction. Finally, the civil law offers various possibilitiess for framing relief which go beyond punishment or compensation and include remediation. That is, the civil law offers equitable relief, via court injunction and specific orders, that can force a deficient department not only to pay for harm caused but to reform so that the harm is not likely to be repeated.
The plan problematizes a particular structural and embedded form of discrimination- key step to realize ableism embedded in the police state. Brodin, RACHEL. “REMEDYING A PARTICULARIZED FORM OF DISCRIMINATION: WHY DISABLED PLAINTIFFS CAN AND SHOULD BRING CLAI.” UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA LAW REVIEW. 2005. Web. October 07, 2016. http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1296andcontext=penn_law_ review. Discrimination against disabled individuals during arrests is a particularly structural and embedded form of discrimination, and it often goes unrecognized. An officer who is taught to use force when confronted with what she perceives as a threat may apply that knowledge when responding to a mentally or physically disabled person, not realizing that by treating this person the same way that she treats others, she may in fact be failing to reasonably accommodate his disability, and thereby discriminate against him.254 Section 1983 actions, whether or not they result in a successful judgment for a plaintiff, will not by themselves send a sufficient message to police departments and state and local governments that they must change their practices to accommodate people with disabilities and provide training for their officers in how to respond to the needs of the disabled. Actions under the ADA will send precisely such a message.
The affirmative is a shift in orientation, which is necessary against the ableist assumptions of society. Cherney, James L. (Wayne State University, Department of Communications, Assistant Professor)"The rhetoric of ableism." Disability Studies Quarterly 31.3 (2011). Recognizing ableism requires a shift in orientation, a perceptual gestalt framed by the filter of the term "ableism" itself. The same texts that broadcast "Ableism!" to those oriented to perceive it are usually read innocently even when viewed from a liberal, humanitarian, or progressive perspective. Ableism is so pervasive that it is difficult to identify until one begins to interrogates the governing assumptions of well-intentioned society. Within the space allowed by these rhetorical premises, ableism appears natural, necessary, and ultimately moral discrimination required for the normal functioning of civilization. Consider a set of stairs. An ableist culture thinks little of stairs, or even sees them as elegant architectural devices—especially those grand marble masterpieces that elevate buildings of state. But disability rights activists see stairs as a discriminatory apparatus—a "no crips allowed" sign that only those aware of ableism can read—that makes their inevitable presence around government buildings is a not-so-subtle statement about who belongs in our most important public spaces. But the device has become so accepted in our culture that the idea of stairs as oppressive technology will strike many as ludicrous. Several years ago when I began to study ableism, a professor—unconvinced of the value of the project—questioned my developing arguments by pointing to a set of steps and exclaiming, "Next you'll be telling me that those stairs discriminate!" He was right. The professor's surprise suggests that commonplace cultural assumptions support themselves because the very arguments available against them seem unwarranted and invalid. Interrogating stairs was such an outrageous idea that a simple reductio ad absurdum argument depicted the critique of ableism as a fallacy. As an ingrained part of the interpretive frameworks sanctioned by culture, ableism gets reinforced by the everyday practice of interpreting and making sense of the world. Using this idea of what ableism does at the intersection of rhetoric and ideology, I next develop a way of understanding how it operates. I argue that this way of conceiving ableist thinking as rhetorical practice identifies potential approaches for challenging ableism.
This will spillover to changes even outside of the ADA- changes society’s perception on the disabled body by bringing awareness to discrimination. Brodin 2, RACHEL. “REMEDYING A PARTICULARIZED FORM OF DISCRIMINATION: WHY DISABLED PLAINTIFFS CAN AND SHOULD BRING CLAI.” UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA LAW REVIEW. 2005. Web. October 07, 2016. http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1296andcontext=penn_law_ review. Although the law pertaining to failure to train claims under the¶ ADA is fairly undeveloped, courts in cases such as Jackson have been¶ receptive to such claims.247 As these cases demonstrate, failure to train¶ claims epitomize the advantages of pleading actions under the ADA:¶ first by helping a disabled plaintiff to prove the claim, and then by¶ enabling her to procure an appropriate remedy. By molding a claim¶ to fit the particularized rights violation, a plaintiff may increase the¶ likelihood that she will succeed in her claim and receive a remedy that¶ responds most appropriately to the violation.248 Pleading a claim to fit¶ the rights violation in question more closely also brings important additional¶ benefits. By pushing courts to develop more detailed standards¶ for determining questions of law pertaining to the interaction¶ between disabled persons and law enforcement officials, plaintiffs will¶ encourage the creation of a body of disability-rights law that courts¶ may apply even in non-ADA contexts. In addition, more frequent¶ ADA claims for police misconduct may bring about modifications to¶ policies and practices, which will help focus and strengthen them the standards¶ for such policies and practices in the context of Section 1983¶ claims.
Framework
First,The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater that best undermines structures of violence- structural violence excludes certain individuals from the moral sphere, meaning it’s impossible to create a coherent moral code without resolving issues of structural violence, Winter and Leighton: |Deborah DuNann Winter and Dana C. Leighton. Winter|Psychologist that specializes in Social Psych, Counseling Psych, Historical and Contemporary Issues, Peace Psychology. Leighton: PhD graduate student in the Psychology Department at the University of Arkansas. Knowledgable in the fields of social psychology, peace psychology, and justice and intergroup responses to transgressions of justice “Peace, conflict, and violence: Peace psychology in the 21st century.” Finally, to recognize the operation of structural violence forces us to ask questions about how and why we tolerate it, questions which often have painful answers for the privileged elite who unconsciously support it. A final question of this section is how and why we allow ourselves to be so oblivious to structural violence. Susan Opotow offers an intriguing set of answers, in her article Social Injustice. She argues that our normal perceptual cognitive processes divide people into in-groups and out-groups.Those outside our group lie outside our scope of justice.Injustice that would be instantaneously confronted if it occurred to someone we love or know is barely noticed if it occurs to strangers or those who are invisible or irrelevant. We do not seem to be able to open our minds and our hearts to everyone, so we draw conceptual lines between those who are in and out of our moral circle. Those who fall outside are morally excluded, and become either invisible, or demeaned in some way so that we do not have to acknowledge the injustice they suffer. Moral exclusion is a human failing, but Opotow argues convincingly that it is an outcome of everyday social cognition. To reduce its nefarious effects, we must be vigilant in noticing and listening to oppressed, invisible, outsiders. Inclusionary thinking can be fostered by relationships, communication, and appreciation of diversity. Like Opotow, all the authors in this section point out that structural violence is not inevitable if we become aware of its operation, and build systematic ways to mitigate its effects.Learning about structural violence may be discouraging, overwhelming, or maddening, but these papers encourage us to step beyond guilt and anger, and begin to think about how to reduce structural violence. All the authors in this section note that the same structures (such as global communication and normal social cognition) which feed structural violence, can also be used to empower citizens to reduce it. In the long run, reducing structural violence by reclaiming neighborhoods, demanding social justice and living wages, providing prenatal care, alleviating sexism, and celebrating local cultures, will be our most surefooted path to building lasting peace. Two, Putting disability at the center of our discussion is central to change the way it’s represented and conceived.
Bérubé 03Michael, Paterno Family Professor in Literature at Pennsylvania State University, “Citizenship and Disability”, Spring It is striking, nonetheless, that so few leftists have understood disability in these terms. Disability is not the only area of social life in which the politics of recognition are inseparable from the politics of redistribution; other matters central to citizenship, such as immigration, reproductive rights, and criminal justice, are every bit as complex. Nonetheless, our society's representations of disability are intricately tied to, and sometimes the very basis for, our public policies for "administering" disability. And when we contemplate, in these terms, the history of people with cognitive and developmental disabilities, we find a history in which "representation" takes on a double valence: first, in that people who were deemed incapable of representing themselves were therefore represented by a socio-medical apparatus that defined—or, in a social-constructionist sense, created—the category of "feeblemindedness"; and second, in the sense that the visual and rhetorical representations of "feebleminded" persons then set the terms for public policy. One cannot plausibly narrate a comprehensive history of ideas and practices of national citizenship in the post-Civil War United States without examining public policy regarding disability, especially mental disability, all the more especially when mental disability was then mapped onto certain immigrant populations who scored poorly on intelligence tests and were thereby pseudo-scientifically linked to criminality. And what of reproductive rights? By 1927, the spurious but powerful linkages among disability, immigration, poverty, and criminality provided the Supreme Court with sufficient justification for declaring involuntary sterilization legal under the Constitution. THERE IS AN obvious reason why disability rights are so rarely thought of in terms of civil rights: disability was not covered in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And as Anita Silvers points out, over the next twenty-five years, groups covered by civil rights law sometimes saw disability rights as a dilution of civil rights, on the grounds that people with disabilities were constitutively incompetent, whereas women and minorities faced discrimination merely on the basis of social prejudice. Silvers writes, "to make disability a category that activates a heightened legal shield against exclusion, it was objected, would alter the purpose of legal protection for civil rights by transforming the goal from protecting opportunity for socially exploited people to providing assistance for naturally unfit people." The passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990 did add disability to the list of stigmatized identities covered by antidiscrimination law, but thus far the ADA has been interpreted so narrowly, and by such a business-friendly judiciary, that employers have won over 95 percent of the suits brought under the act. Perhaps if plaintiffs with disabilities had won a greater number of cases over the past thirteen years, the conservative backlash against the ADA-currently confined to a few cranks complaining about handicapped parking spaces and a wheelchair ramp at a Florida nude beach-would be sufficiently strong as to spark a movement to repeal the law altogether. But then again, perhaps if the law were read more broadly, more Americans would realize their potential stake in it. In 1999, for instance, the Supreme Court ruled on three lower-court cases in which people with "easily correctable" disabilities—high blood pressure, nearsightedness—were denied employment. In three identical 7-2 decisions, the Court found that the plaintiffs had no basis for a suit under the ADA precisely because their disabilities were easily correctable. As disability activists and legal analysts quickly pointed out, this decision left these plaintiffs in the ridiculous situation of being too disabled to be hired but somehow not disabled enough to be covered by the ADA; or, to put this another way, plaintiffs' "easily correctable" disabilities were not so easily correctable as to allow them access to employment. One case involved twin sisters who were denied the opportunity to test as pilots for United Airlines on the grounds that their eyesight did not meet United's minimum vision requirement (uncorrected visual acuity of 20/100 or better without glasses or contacts) even though each sister had 20/20 vision with corrective lenses (Sutton v. United Airlines, Inc.); another involved a driver/mechanic with high blood pressure (Murphy v. United Parcel Service); the third involved a truck driver with monocular vision (20/200 in one eye) who in 1992 had received a Department of Transportation waiver of the requirement that truck drivers have distant visual acuity of 20/40 in each eye as well as distant binocular acuity of 20/40 (Albertson's, Inc. v. Kirkingburg). Because, as Silvers argues, "litigation under the ADA commonly turns on questions of classification rather than access," all three plaintiffs were determined to have no standing under the law. The question of whether any of them was justly denied employment was simply not addressed by the Court. Indeed, in writing her opinion for the majority, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor explicitly refused to consider the wider question of "access," noting that 160 million Americans would be covered by the ADA if it were construed to include people with "easily correctible" disabilities (under a "health conditions approach"), and since Congress had cited the number 43 million in enacting the law, Congress clearly could not have intended the law to be applied more widely. "Had Congress intended to include all persons with corrected physical limitations among those covered by the Act, it undoubtedly would have cited a much higher number of disabled persons in the findings," wrote O'Connor. "That it did not is evidence that the ADA's coverage is restricted to only those whose impairments are not mitigated by corrective measures." It is possible to object that O'Connor's decision was excessively literalist, and that the potential number of Americans covered by the ADA is, in any case, quite irrelevant to the question of whether a woman can fly a plane when she's got her glasses on. But I've since come to believe that the literalism of the decision is an indirect acknowledgment of how broad the issues at stake here really are. If the ADA were understood as a broad civil rights law, and if it were understood as a law that potentially pertains to the entire population of the country, then maybe disability law would be understood not as a fringe addition to civil rights law but as its very fulfillment. Rights can be created, reinterpreted, extended, and revoked. The passage of the ADA should therefore be seen as an extension of the promise of democracy, but only as a promise: any realization of the potential of the law depends on its continual reinterpretation. For the meaning of the word, just as Wittgenstein wanted us to believe (in order that we might be undeceived about how our words work), lies in its use in the language. Similarly, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1975 (originally the Education for All Handicapped Children Act) was not some kind of breakthrough discovery whereby children with disabilities were found to be rights-bearing citizens of the United States after all, and who knew that we'd had it all wrong for 199 years? On the contrary, the IDEA invented a new right for children with disabilities, the right to a "free and appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment." And yet the IDEA did not wish that right into being overnight; the key terms "appropriate" and "least restrictive" had to be interpreted time and again, over the course of fifteen years, before they were understood to authorize "full inclusion" of children with disabilities in "regular" classrooms. Nothing about the law is set in stone. The only philosophical "foundation" underlying the IDEA and its various realizations is our own collective political will, a will that is tested and tested again every time the Act comes up for reauthorization. Jamie Bérubé currently has a right to an inclusive public education, but that right is neither intrinsic nor innate. Rather, Jamie's rights were invented, and implemented slowly and with great difficulty. The recognition of his human dignity, enshrined in those rights, was invented. And by the same token, those rights, and that recognition, can be taken away. While I live, I promise myself that I will not let that happen, but I live with the knowledge that it may: to live any other way, to live as if Jamie's rights were somehow intrinsic, would be irresponsible. Of course, many of us would prefer to believe that our children have intrinsic human rights and human dignity no matter what; irrespective of any form of human social organization; regardless of whether they were born in twentieth-century Illinois or second-century Rome or seventh-century central Asia. But this is just a parent's—or a philosophical foundationalist's-wishful thinking. For what would it mean for Jamie to "possess" rights that no one on earth recognized? A fat lot of good it would do him. My argument may sound either monstrous or all too obvious: if, in fact, no one on earth recognized Jamie's human dignity, then there would in fact be no human perspective from which he would be understood to possess "intrinsic" human dignity. And then he wouldn't have it, and so much the worse for the human race. In one respect, the promise of the IDEA, like the promise of the ADA, is clear: greater inclusion of people with disabilities in the social worlds of school and work. But in another sense the promise is unspecifiable; its content is something we actually cannot know in advance. For the IDEA does not merely guarantee all children with disabilities a free appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment. Even more than this, it grants the right to education in order that persons with disabilities might make the greatest possible use of their other rights-the ones having to do with voting, or employment discrimination, or with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. IDEA is thus designed to enhance the capabilities of all American children with disabilities regardless of their actual abilities-and this is why it is so profound a democratic idea. Here again I'm drawing on Nancy Fraser, whose theory of democracy involves the idea of "participatory parity," and the imperative that a democratic state should actively foster the abilities of its citizens to participate in the life of the polity as equals. Fraser's work to date has not addressed disability, but as I noted above, it should be easy to see how disability is relevant to Fraser's account of the politics of recognition and the politics of redistribution. This time, however, I want to press the point a bit harder. Fraser writes as if the promise of democracy entails the promise to enhance participatory parity among citizens, which it does, and she writes as if we knew what "participatory parity" itself means, which we don't. (This is why the promise of disability rights is unspecifiable.) LET ME EXPLAIN. First, the idea of participatory parity does double duty in Fraser's work, in the sense that it names both the state we would like to achieve and the device by which we can gauge whether we're getting there. For in order to maintain a meaningful democracy in which all citizens participate as legal and moral equals, the state needs to judge whether its policies enhance equal participation in democratic processes. Yet at the same time, the state needs to enhance equal participation among its citizens simply in order to determine what its democratic processes will be. This is not a meta-theoretical quibble. On the contrary, the point is central to the practical workings of any democratic polity. One of the tasks required of democrats is precisely this: to extend the promise of democracy to previously excluded individuals and groups some of whom might have a substantially different understanding of "participatory parity" than that held by previously dominant groups and individuals. Could anything make this clearer than the politics of disability? Imagine a building in which political philosophers are debating, in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the value and the purpose of participatory parity over against forms of authoritarianism or theocracy. Now imagine that this building has no access ramps, no Braille or large-print publications, no American Sign Language interpreters, no elevators, no special-needs paraprofessionals, no in-class aides. Contradictory as such a state of affairs may sound, it's a reasonably accurate picture of what contemporary debate over the meaning of democracy actually looks like. How can we remedy this? Only when we have fostered equal participation in debates over the ends and means of democracy can we have a truly participatory debate over what "participatory parity" itself means. That debate will be interminable in principle, since our understandings of democracy and parity are infinitely revisable, but lest we think of deliberative democracy as a forensic society dedicated to empyreal reaches of abstraction, we should remember that debates over the meaning of participatory parity set the terms for more specific debates about the varieties of human embodiment. These include debates about prenatal screening, genetic discrimination, stem-cell research, euthanasia, and, with regard to physical access, ramps, curb cuts, kneeling buses, and buildings employing what is now known as universal design. Leftists and liberals, particularly those associated with university humanities departments, are commonly charged with being moral relativists, unable or unwilling to say (even after September 11) why one society might be "better" than another. So let me be especially clear on this final point. I think there's a very good reason to extend the franchise, to widen the conversation, to democratize our debates, and to make disability central to our theories of egalitarian social justice. The reason is this: a capacious and supple sense of what it is to be human is better than a narrow and partial sense of what it is to be human, and the more participants we as a society can incorporate into the deliberation of what it means to be human, the greater the chances that that deliberation will in fact be transformative in such a way as to enhance our collective capacities to recognize each other as humans entitled to human dignity. As Jamie reminds me daily, both deliberately and unwittingly, most Americans had no idea what people with Down syndrome could achieve until we'd passed and implemented and interpreted and reinterpreted a law entitling them all to a free appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment. I can say all this without appealing to any innate justification for human dignity and human rights, and I can also say this: Without a sufficient theoretical and practical account of disability, we can have no account of democracy worthy of the name. Perhaps some of our fellow citizens with developmental disabilities would not put the argument quite this way; even though Jamie has led me to think this way, he doesn't talk the way I do. But those of us who do participate in political debates, whether about school funding in a specific district or about the theory and practice of democracy at its most abstract, have the obligation to enhance the abilities of our children and our fellow citizens with disabilities to participate in the life of the United States as political and moral equals with their nondisabled peers-both for their own good, and for the good of democracy, which is to say, for the good of all of us.
Three, Reject low-probability high-magnitude impacts — “1 doctrine” kills decisionmaking since any action has some risk, so avoiding risk freezes action and prevents change. Their risks are constructed to preserve the status quo — it’s the same strategy used to block the civil rights movement, arguing that change would be risky.
Four, discussions cannot be based on ideal theory- we must engage in policy discussions that deal with real world consequences, Curry.Dr. Tommy J. urry 1 The Cost of a Thing: A Kingian Reformulation of a Living Wage Argument in the 21st Century. 2014 Despite the pronouncement of debate as an activity and intellectual exercise pointing to the real world consequences of dialogue, thinking, and (personal) politics when addressing issues of racism, sexism, economic disparity, global conflicts, and death, many of the discussions concerning these ongoing challenges to humanity are fixed to a paradigm which sees the adjudication of material disparities and sociological realities as the conquest of one ideal theory over the other. In “Ideal Theory as Ideology,” Charles Mills outlines the problem contemporary theoretical-performance styles in policy debate and value-weighing in Lincoln-Douglass are confronted with in their attempts to get at the concrete problems in our societies. At the outset, Mills concedes that “ideal theory applies to moral theory as a whole (at least to normative ethics as against metaethics); since ethics deals by definition with normative/prescriptive/evaluative issues, it is set against factual/descriptive issues.” At the most general level, the conceptual chasm between what emerges as actual problems in the world (e.g.: racism, sexism, poverty, disease, etc.) and how we frame such problems theoretically—the assumptions and shared ideologies we depend upon for our problems to be heard and accepted as a worthy “problem” by an audience—is the most obvious call for an anti-ethical paradigm, since such a paradigm insists on the actual as the basis of what can be considered normatively. Mills, however, describes this chasm as a problem of an ideal-as-descriptive model which argues that for any actual-empirical-observable social phenomenon (P), an ideal of (P) is necessarily a representation of that phenomenon. In the idealization of a social phenomenon (P), one “necessarily has to abstract away from certain features” of (P) that is observed before abstraction occurs. ¶This gap between what is actual (in the world), and what is represented by theories and politics of debaters proposed in rounds threatens any real discussions about the concrete nature of oppression and the racist economic structures which necessitate tangible policies and reorienting changes in our value orientations. As Mills states: “What distinguishes ideal theory is the reliance on idealization to the exclusion, or at least marginalization, of the actual,” so what we are seeking to resolve on the basis of “thought” is in fact incomplete, incorrect, or ultimately irrelevant to the actual problems which our “theories” seek to address. Our attempts to situate social disparity cannot simply appeal to the ontologization of social phenomenon—meaning we cannot suggest that the various complexities of social problems (which are constantly emerging and undisclosed beyond the effects we observe) are totalizable by any one set of theories within an ideological frame be it our most cherished notions of Afro-pessimism, feminism, Marxism, or the like. At best, theoretical endorsements make us aware of sets of actions to address ever developing problems in our empirical world, but even this awareness does not command us to only do X, but rather do X and the other ideas which compliment the material conditions addressed by the action X. As a whole, debate (policy and LD) neglects the need to do X in order to remedy our cast-away-ness among our ideological tendencies and politics. How then do we pull ourselves from this seeming ir-recoverability of thought in general and in our endorsement of socially actualizable values like that of the living wage? It is my position that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s thinking about the need for a living wage was a unique, and remains an underappreciated, resource in our attempts to impose value reorientation (be it through critique or normative gestures) upon the actual world. In other words, King aims to reformulate the values which deny the legitimacy of the living wage, and those values predicated on the flawed views of the worker, Blacks, and the colonized (dignity, justice, fairness, rights, etc.) used to currently justify the living wages in under our contemporary moral parameters.
Five State engagement is inevitable—learning to speak the language of power creates the only possibility of social change debate can offer. This is best served by imagining the consequences of policy. Coverstone 05 Alan Coverstone (masters in communication from Wake Forest, longtime debate coach) “Acting on Activism: Realizing the Vision of Debate with Pro-social Impact” Paper presented at the National Communication Association Annual Conference November 17th 2005 JW 11/18/15 An important concern emerges when Mitchell describes reflexive fiat as a contest strategy capable of “eschewing the power to directly control external actors” (1998b, p. 20). Describing debates about what our government should do as attempts to control outside actors is debilitating and disempowering. Control ofthe USgovernment isexactlywhat an active, participatorycitizenry issupposed to be allabout.After all, if democracy means anything, it means that citizensnot only have the right, they also bear the obligation to discussand debatewhat the government should be doing.Absent thatdiscussion and debate, much of the motivation forpersonal politicalactivism is also lost. Those who have co-opted Mitchell’s argument for individual advocacy often quickly respond that nothing we do in a debate round can actually change government policy, and unfortunately, an entire generation of debaters has now swallowed this assertion as an article of faith. The best most will muster is, “Of course not, but you don’t either!” The assertion that nothing we do in debate has any impact on government policy is one that carries the potential to undermine Mitchell’s entire project. If there is nothing we can do in a debate round to change government policy, then we are left with precious little in the way of pro-social options for addressing problems we face. At best, we can pursue some Pilot-like hand washing that can purify us as individuals through quixotic activism but offer little to society as a whole. It is very important to note that Mitchell (1998b) tries carefully to limit and bound his notion of reflexive fiat by maintaining that because it “views fiat as a concrete course of action, it is bounded by the limits of pragmatism” (p. 20). Pursued properly, the debates that Mitchell would like to see are those in which the relative efficacy of concrete political strategies for pro-social change is debated. In a few noteworthy examples, this approach has been employed successfully, and I must say that I have thoroughly enjoyed judging and coaching those debates. The students in my program have learned to stretch their understanding of their role in the political process because of the experience. Therefore, those who say I am opposed to Mitchell’s goals here should take care at such a blanket assertion. However, contest debate teaches students to combine personal experience with the language of political power. Powerful personalnarratives unconnected to political power areregularly co-optedby those who do learn the language of power. One need look no further than the annual state of the Union Address where personal story after personal story is used to support the political agenda of those in power. The so-calledrole-playingthat public policy contest debates encouragepromotes active learning ofthe vocabulary and levers ofpower in America. Imagining the ability to use our own arguments to influence government action is one of the great virtues of academic debate. Gerald Graff (2003) analyzed the decline of argumentation in academic discourse and found a source of student antipathy to public argument in an interesting place. I’m up against…their aversion to the role of public spokesperson that formal writing presupposes. It’s as if such students can’t imagine any rewards for being a public actor or even imagining themselves in such a role. This lack of interest in the public sphere may in turn reflect a loss of confidence in the possibility that the arguments we make in public will have an effect on the world. Today’s students’ lack of faith in the power of persuasion reflects the waning of the ideal of civic participation that led educators for centuries to place rhetorical and argumentative training at the center of the school and college curriculum. (Graff, 2003, p. 57) The power to imagine public advocacy that actually makes a difference is one of the great virtues of the traditional notion of fiat that critics deride as mere simulation.Simulationof success in the public realmisfar more empoweringto students thancompletely abandoningall notions of personalpower in the face ofgovernmentalhegemonyby teaching students that “nothing they can do in a contest debate can ever make any difference in public policy.” Contest debating is well suited to rewarding public activism if it stops accepting as an article of faith that personal agency is somehow undermined by the so-called role playing in debate. Debate is role-playing whether we imagine government action or imagine individual action. Imaginingmyself starting asocialist revolutionin America is no less of a fantasy thanimagining myself makinga difference on Capitol Hill.Furthermore, both fantasies influenced my personal and political development virtually ensuring a life of active, pro-social, political participation. Neither fantasy reduced the likelihood that I would spend my life trying to make the difference I imagined.One fantasyactually does make a greater difference: the one thatspeaks the language ofpolitical power. The otherfantasy disables prevents actionby making one a laughingstock to those who wield the language of power. Fantasy motivates and role-playing trains through visualization. Until we can imagine it, we cannot really do it. Role-playing without question teaches students to be comfortable with the language of power, and that language paves the way for genuine and effective political activism. Debates over the relative efficacy of politicalstrategiesfor pro-social changemust confront governmental powerat some point. There is a fallacy in arguing that movements represent a better political strategy than voting and person-to-person advocacy. Sure, a full-scale movement would be better than the limited voice I have as a participating citizen going from door to door in a campaign, but so would full-scale government action. Unfortunately, the gap between my individual decision to pursue movement politics and the emergence of a full-scale movement is at least as great as the gap between my vote and democratic change. They both represent utopian fiat. Invocation of Mitchell to support utopian movement fiat is simply not supported by his work, and too often, such invocation discourages the concrete actions he argues for in favor of the personal rejectionism that under girds the political cynicism that is a fundamental cause of voter and participatory abstention in America today.
11/19/16
SEPTOCT- Disclosure Theory
Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 4 | Opponent: Sunset RB | Judge: Akhil Gandra A Interpretation: At the 2016 Greenhill Fall Classic, debaters must, on the page with their name and the school they attend, disclose all taglines, full citations, and the first and last three words of the pieces of evidence read in their cases on the NDCA wiki at least one hour before the round if they have read that case before.
Greenhill Tournament Invite 2016 As mentioned in the opening letter, those attending the Greenhill Fall Classic are guests of Greenhill School and its coaching staff. While we value different pedagogical perspectives, at this event, we are unwavering in our perspective on the value of openness. Openness promotes comprehension and preparation, which are critical components for effective clash and better debates. As the host of an early season tournament, we feel particularly compelled to promote an environment that facilitates better debates for the students involved. As competitors for the rest of the season, we appreciate that competitive drives can run into conflict with openness. Finding the appropriate balance between the learning environment and the competitive environment deserves continued consideration. We have decided that a willingness to take part in a collective case list – in both spirit and in practice – is an essential characteristic to accepting the invitation to our event. Case lists enhance the pedagogical and competitive goals of openness by allowing students to better understanding their opponents’ arguments which is an essential component to quality clash and better debates. *If you cannot agree with the stipulation below, we respectfully ask that you explore other competitive opportunities on this weekend. Those that DO attend, yet attempt to evade/ignore our requests, will be asked to leave. Participation in the Greenhill Fall Classic, and its benefits like mutual preference judging, is a privilege, not a right.* It is also our belief that teams/debaters have an affirmative obligation to update the wiki as new arguments are run throughout the tournament. To clarify, this is a requirement/expectation to compete.
B Violation: My opponent hasn’t posted cites: I can provide screen shots if necessary. C Net Benefits: 1 Research – disclosure increases research and gets rid of anti-educational arguments because debaters are forced to prepare cases knowing that people will have answers AND people get the opportunity to research answers to disclosed cases. Nails 13 - (Jacob I am a policy debater at Georgia State University. I debated LD for 4 years for Starr's Mill High School (GA) and graduated in 2012. "A Defense of Disclosure (Including Third-Party Disclosure)" http://nsdupdate.com/2013/a-defense-of-disclosure-including-third-party-disclosure-by-jacob-nails/) GHSGB I fall squarely on the side of disclosure. I find that the largest advantage of widespread disclosure is the educational value it provides. First, disclosure streamlines research. Rather than every team and every lone wolf researching completely in the dark, the wiki provides a public body of knowledge that everyone can contribute to and build off of. Students can look through the different studies on the topic and choose the best ones on an informed basis without the prohibitively large burden of personally surveying all of the literature. The best arguments are identified and replicated, which is a natural result of an open marketplace of ideas. Quality of evidence increases across the board. In theory, the increased quality of information this could trade off with quantity. If debaters could just look to the wiki for evidence, it might remove the competitive incentive to do one’s own research. Empirically, however, the opposite has been true. In fact, a second advantage of disclosure is that it motivates research. Debaters cannot expect to make it a whole topic with the same stock AC – that is, unless they are continually updating and frontlining it. Likewise, debaters with access to their opponents’ cases can do more targeted and specific research. Students can go to a new level of depth, researching not just the pros and cons of the topic but the specific authors, arguments, and adovcacies employed by other debaters. The incentive to cut author-specific indicts is low if there’s little guarantee that the author will ever be cited in a round but high if one knows that specific schools are using that author in rounds. In this way, disclosure increases incentive to research by altering a student’s cost-benefit analysis so that the time spent researching is more valuable, i.e. more likely to produce useful evidence because it is more directed. In any case, if publicly accessible evidence jeopardized research, backfiles and briefs would have done LD in a long time ago. Lastly, and to my mind most significantly, disclosure weeds out anti-educational arguments. I have in mind the sort of theory spikes and underdeveloped analytics whose strategic value comes only from the fact that the time to think of and enunciate responses to them takes longer than the time spent making the arguments themselves. If theory spikes these arguments were made on a level playing field where each side had equal time to craft answers, they would seldom win rounds, which is a testimony to the real world applicability (or lack thereof) of such strategies. A model in which arguments have to withstand close scrutiny to win rounds creates incentive to find the best arguments on the topic rather than the shadiest. Having transitioned from LD to policy where disclosure is more universal, I can say that debates are more substantive, developed, and responsive when both sides know what they’re getting into prior to the round. The educational benefits of disclosure alone aren’t likely to convince the fairness-outweighs-education crowd, but I’ve learned over the course of many theory debates that most of that crowd has a very warped and confusing conception of fairness. Debaters who produce better research are more deserving of a win. Debaters who can make smart arguments and defend them from criticism should win out over debaters who hide behind obfuscation. That so many rounds these days are resolved on frivolous theory and dropped, single-sentence blips suggests that wins are not going to the “better debaters” in any meaningful sense of the term. The structure of LD in the status quo doesn’t incentivize better debating. Research skills is a voter because it’s key to our ability to a actually learn about the topic and become engaged in the real world and b process large amounts of information, which is a necessary portable skill in the digital age. 2 Clash – Disclosure is the best method for increasing clash in debates because it allows debaters to substantively engage positions rather than relying on sketchy tricks to avoid the discussion. It also allows for more specific clash because debaters can see specific arguments disclosed instead of trying to link generic arguments in. That’s a voter because a specific education also helps our ability to learn about the topic and engage in the real world and b clash is key to advocacy skills since it forces us to defend positions, which we need to actually promote social change to fix screwed up things in the real world. 3. Tournament Rules – it’s in the tournament rules, we read the card above. You should lose for not updating the wiki. It was in the tournament invite so predictable and reasonable. It doesn’t matter if it violates team policy, this was a precondition to attend this tournament, so independent of fairness or education, they should use. D Implication: Drop the debater on theory. 1 It’s the same thing as dropping the argument in this case since the argument is the entire case that wasn’t disclosed 2 It’s not what you do, it’s what you justify—voting for me sets a precedent in favor of a positive model of debate—wins and losses determine the direction of activity 3 Deterrence—Dropping the debater will be best because it shows that they can’t run positions that could spread through the community and harm debate as a whole. 4 Drop the debater specifically for not disclosing because there’s no way to rectify the abuse—going and forcing them to disclose now won’t fix the lack of education we get from this round.
No RVIs- 1) RVIs incentive unfair debate. If theory is an RVI then I am put into a double bind, either I lose on the substantive debate to a position that is clearly unfair, or I run theory and lose on theory. Uniquely bad for this shell- will just incentivize them to break whatever debate rule they want/
2) Fallacy of denying the antecedent. Abusive practices ought to be voted down not that fair practices ought to be voted for.
3) RVIs disincentive running theory to check back actual abuse because if I lose theory I lose the round, perpetuating abuse. And this isn’t solved by just running better theory, because the winner of a theory debate is chosen by who is more technical.
9/17/16
SEPTOCT- Hauntology AC
Tournament: Grapevine | Round: 1 | Opponent: Winston Churchill JL | Judge: Nathan Johnston Part 1 is the Tale of Destruction World War 2: A desire for an ending
200,000: The number of civilian deaths
2: The number of nuclear bombs dropped
Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Two Japanese cities forever impacted
The bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were praised as the almighty saviors to America because it led to Japanese surrender in World War II.
Steele 1, , Diana. "America's Reaction to the Atomic Bomb." Dickinson College. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Apr. 2012. http://users.dickinson.edu/~history/product/steele/seniorthesis.htm Hailed as the ender of the war and the reason the Japanese surrendered without an invasion was, the atomic bomb's destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki received very little praise from the America public, at least in print that is. From the time of the atomic bombings until the end of the year, only a few letters or editorials were written in direct praise of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One of the first appeared on 16 August in The New York Times in a response to a letter printed on the 11 August. William O. Morse of Greenwich, Connecticut wrote in a letter to the editor, a response to the letter from William Church Osborn. He writes "It is my opinion that only a minority will concur in that verdict eventually we shall feel shame toward the atomic bomb and certainly on my own behalf I want to protest vigorously against even an implication of being included among the 'we' who subscribe to any such view."25 Morse then reveals that he has no sympathy for the victims of the bombs, saying it "is precisely what war is today. . . a senseless, dirty, brutal operation."26 He goes on to justify the bombing of Hiroshima by concurring with the official statements given by President Truman that "Hiroshima is (or was) a manufacturing and distribution center and the military purpose of bombing it is obvious. . . . We, as a nation, are not to blame for the monstrous advances made in the science of war, nor that women, and indeed the whole civilian population, being quite as essential to its waging as the fighting men themselves, have become the objects of its merciless fury."27 Finally, he concludes his praise of the atomic bomb and United States government by writing: "That our Government had the courage, the foresight and the wisdom to resolve as it did the challenge of the grave decision which confronted it need never, as I see it, bring the red blush of shame to any American, but rather a sense of thankfulness and pride."28 Few others, however, were as clearly unremorseful for the deaths of the Japanese civilian as Morse. Others were more subtle, using language to convey their feelings instead of saying outright the Japanese deserved to die. Irving H. Flamm of Chicago, Illinois wrote to Time magazine, believing that the atomic bomb had done much for mankind and should be praised for doing such an incredible job at it. He saw the atomic bomb as having "in one fell swoop, struck down three enemies of human progress. It destroyed the hopes of the Jap fascists and their followers; it shattered the illusions of the isolationists; and it all but demolished the silly argument that governmental planning is ineffective and incompatible with democracy. It was public investment and government planning--the kind of planning that we rejected in peacetime--that enabled us to discover the instrument which finally smashed the last hopes of those who still think in terms of superior and inferior people, predatory individualism, and unrestrained aggressiveness."29 When referring to "those who still think in terms of superior and inferior," Flamm was referring to the "Jap fascists" who finally received what they deserved. Although the American public was not quick to publicly state their opinions on the destruction of human life in Japan in letters such as these, the support behind the dropping of the bomb was overwhelming. When the American people were asked in a Gallup Poll taken from 10-15 August 1945 whether or not they approved or disapproved of the use of atomic bombs on Japanese cities, 85 percent approved, ten percent disapproved and five had no opinion.30 Then when asked if the development of the atomic bomb was a good or bad thing, 69 percent said it was a good thing, 17 percent said it was bad, and 14 percent had no opinion.31 This was asked just eighteen days after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan and two weeks after the second. After this date, no further Gallup Polls were taken concerning the approval of Americans of the atomic bomb; however, later unofficial polls taken in December showed that support for the atomic bomb had not decreased from the August Gallup Poll figures and Americans still felt that the atomic bombing of Japan was a good decision.
The bombings of Japan were the result of American imperialism- Japan was practically already beat in WW2- Nuclear bombs were entirely unnecessary, but the US wanted to be a dominant force post WW2 to maintain its status as a hegemon- to impose its will upon the world. The US’ imperialist agenda rendered non-white bodies disposable in the quest for global dominance.
Cannon ’03, Fighting for Socialism in the “American Century” (c) Resistance Books 2001 (c) Resistance Books 2001 ISBN 1876646217; Published by Resistance Books 23 Abercrombie St, Chippendale NSW 2008, Permission for on-line publication provided by Resistance Books for use by the James P. Cannon Internet Archive in 2003., https://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1945/hiroshima.htm In the Times today there is a report from the Tokyo radio about Nagasaki which states that “the centre of the once thriving city has been turned into a vast devastation, with nothing left except rubble as far as the eye could see”. Photographs showing the bomb damage appeared on the front page of the Japanese newspaper Mainichi. The report says: “One of these pictures revealed a tragic scene 10 miles away from the centre of the atomic air attack”, where farm houses were either crushed down or the roofs torn asunder. The broadcast quoted a photographer of the Yamaha Photographic Institute, who had rushed to the city immediately after the bomb hit, as having said: “For Nagasaki is now a dead city, all the areas being literally razed to the ground. Only a few buildings are left, standing conspicuously from the ashes.” The photographer said that “the toll of the population was great and even the few survivors have not escaped some kind of injury.” So far the Japanese press has quoted only one survivor of Hiroshima.¶ In two calculated blows, with two atomic bombs, American imperialism killed or injured half a million human beings. The young and the old, the child in the cradle and the aged and infirm, the newly married, the well and the sick, men, women, and children—they all had to die in two blows because of a quarrel between the imperialists of Wall Street and a similar gang in Japan.¶ This is how American imperialism is bringing civilisation to the Orient. What an unspeakable atrocity! What a shame has come to America, the America that once placed in New York harbour a Statue of Liberty enlightening the world. Now the world recoils in horror from her name. Even some of the preachers who blessed the war have been moved to protest. One said in an interview in the press: “America has lost her moral position.” Her moral position? Yes. She lost that all right. That is true. And the imperialist monsters who threw the bombs know it. But look what they gained. They gained control of the boundless riches of the Orient. They gained the power to exploit and enslave hundreds of millions of people in the Far East. And that is what they went to war for—not for moral position, but for profit.¶ Another preacher quoted in the press, reminding himself of something he had once read in the Bible about the meek and gentle Jesus, said it would be useless to send missionaries to the Far East anymore. That raises a very interesting question which I am sure they will discuss among themselves. One can imagine an interesting discussion taking place in the inner circles of the House of Rockefeller and the House of Morgan, who are at one and the same time—quite by accident of course—pillars of finance and pillars of the church and supporters of missionary enterprises of various kinds. “What shall we do with the heathens in the Orient? Shall we send missionaries to lead them to the Christian heaven or shall we send atomic bombs to blow them to hell?” There is a subject for debate, a debate on a macabre theme. But in any case, you can be sure that where American imperialism is involved, hell will get by far the greater number of the customers.¶ American imperialism has brought upon itself the fear and hatred of the whole world. American imperialism is regarded throughout the world today as the enemy of mankind. The First World War cost 12 million dead. Twelve million. The Second World War, within a quarter of a century, has already cost not less than 30 million dead; and there are not less than 30 million more to be starved to death before the results of the war are totalled up.¶ What a harvest of death capitalism has brought to the world! If the skulls of all of the victims could be brought together and piled into one pyramid, what a high mountain that would make. What a monument to the achievements of capitalism that would be, and how fitting a symbol of what capitalist imperialism really is. I believe it would lack only one thing to make it perfect. That would be a big electric sign on the pyramid of skulls, proclaiming the ironical promise of the Four Freedoms. The dead at least are free from want and free from fear. But the survivors live in hunger and terror of the future.
Rhetorical silence concerning Japan lives on today- failure to examine the past makes confronting future nuclear use inevitable.
Steele 2, , Diana. "America's Reaction to the Atomic Bomb." Dickinson College. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Apr. 2012. http://users.dickinson.edu/~history/product/steele/seniorthesis.htm The majority of American citizens were ignorant of the facts of nuclear energy and the effects that it has on people. They did not know that hundred, even thousands of Japanese men, women, and children would die each day from the resulting radiation sickness from the two nuclear bombs or that thousands more would die in years to come from cancer and leukemia. A vast amount of information surrounding the atomic bombings was suppressed by the United States' military as being militarily sensitive, when in actuality, the government did not want the public to know the incredible amount of suffering and destruction it had brought on the average Japanese citizen. However, the government and military are not entirely responsible for the lack of knowledge the average American had concerning the atomic bombs. Americans did not "probe for the truth behind the bomb, or even ask tough questions about what we were being told. We seem to have preferred the myth. Few wished even to see whether there might be something behind the troubling information which somehow kept seeping out."95 It was far easier for the average American to live in ignorance than face the harshness of enlightenment. The result was an incredible silence among the American public in regards to the atomic weapon. The silence, however, was compromising in itself. As Gar Alperovitz wrote, "To be silent about the past is to accept the decision silently, with no challenge. It is thereby also to sustain and silently nurture the idea that nuclear weapons can and should be used or threatened to be used. To confront Hiroshima requires that if we choose to be silent we know what it means to be silent--to be acquiescent."96 By their silence, the Americans directly following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki became as comparable in the resulting destruction and horror as the scientists who invented it and the men who let the bombs drop from their airplanes' doors. Thus the average American after World War II became like the average German during World War II: guilty by silence. ¶
Part 2 is the Advocacy
Vote affirmative to prohibit the production of nuclear power in order to honor those affected by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. The mythical narrative of war successes, and the courageous, democracy-loving American hero buries, destroys, and manipulates the specters of the past, a constant war to eliminate the ghosts of 1945 that preserve the true realities of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks.
Lazare explains Hiroshima’s mayor Kazumi Matsui wish in ‘15, Sarah Lazare, August 6, 2015, reporting about the 70th anniversary of the bomb in Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park, staff writier, “70 Years After Bombing Hiroshima Calls to Abolish Nuclear Weapons”, Common Dreams, http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/08/06/70-years-after-bombing-hiroshima-calls-abolish-nuclear-weapons As tens of thousands gathered in Hiroshima on Thursday to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the U.S. dropping of the atomic bomb, people from Japan and across the globe urged world leaders to honor the lives of those killed and wounded by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, we must abolishing nuclear weapons once and for all.¶ A bell rang in Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park where a massive crowd, with heads bowed, held a moment of silence at 8:15 AM to mark the exact instant the bomb was dropped.Roughly 150,000 people were killed in the bombing and aftermath. The U.S. military followed the attack on Hiroshima by dropping a second atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, which killed approximately 75,000 people.¶ "To coexist we must abolish the absolute evil and ultimate inhumanity that are nuclear weapons," declared Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui in a speech at the ceremony. "Now is the time to start taking action."¶ Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who has advocated a nuclear power restart overmajority public opposition, also called for the and nuclear disarmament at the ceremony, which was attended by representatives of over 100 countries. Meanwhile, protesters werereportedly blocked from attending the memorial by police.¶ In a meeting with survivors of the bombing following the ceremony, Abe was skewered forhis efforts to undo pacifist components of the country's constitution and embrace military buildup. "These bills will bring the tragedy of war to our nation once again," said 86-year-old Yukio Yoshioka. "They must be withdrawn."¶ Moreover, some drew a direct line between the horrors of the atomic bombings and the more recent Fukushima nuclear meltdown.¶ "The horror of these bombings should be taken as a warning of the threats of nuclear weapons, but instead, the government is locking Japan into a nuclear future. Whether for military or civil purposes, nuclear energy is never peaceful. It carries the threat of nuclear weapons development, and as the 2011 Fukushima disaster demonstrated to the world, nuclear energy is and neither safe, nor clean," said Junichi Sato, Greenpeace Japan Executive Director, in a statement released Thursday.¶ "The trauma felt by Japanese people after the Fukushima accident—and also by thousands of people affected by other nuclear disasters, such as Chernobyl—should never again be endured, which is why we firmly believe that peace—not war—is the best form of self defence," Sato added.¶ Many are also calling on the U.S.—the only country to ever drop a nuclear bomb on civilian populations—to is also called to embrace disarmament and reverse its ongoing nuclear buildup. Part 3 is Solvency
The Hiroshima bombing led to the widespread usage of nuclear power which is why prohibiting the production of nuclear power is necessary to honor the victims wholeheartedly.
The Legal Dictionary, No Date http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Nuclear+Power Nuclear Power¶ A form of energy produced by an atomic reaction, capable of producing an alternative source of electrical power to thatsupplied by coal, gas, or oil.¶ The dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, by the United States in 1945 initiated the ¶ atomic age. Nuclear energy immediately became a military weapon of terrifying magnitude. For the physicists who worked on the atom bomb, the promise of nuclear energy was not solely military. They envisioned nuclear power as a safe, clean, cheap, and abundant source of energy that would end society's dependence on fossil fuels. At the end of World War II, leaders called for the peaceful use of nuclear energy.
We need to prohibit nuclear power to honor victims and ensure that this manmade catastrophe never occurs again---only total prohibition solves
Goodman ’15, Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan, August 5, 2015, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 70 Years After the Atomic Bombs Were Dropped, truthdig.com, http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/hiroshima_and_nagasaki_70_years_after_the_atomic_bombs_were_dropped_2015080 The world changed irrevocably 70 years ago, on Aug. 6, 1945, when the United States dropped the first nuclear weapon in history on the civilian population of Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, the second and, to date, final atomic weapon used against human targets was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. Hundreds of thousands were killed. Many were horrifically burned, and thousands suffered the long-term impacts of radiation poisoning. Survivors of those two horrible blasts, called “hibakusha” in Japanese, still live, and still recount their experiences. While the world has avoided nuclear attacks since those two days in 1945, the potential for nuclear devastation is forever hanging over us. Born from the ashes of those two awful bomb blasts, however, was a nuclear abolition movement that still wages a peaceful campaign to eliminate these weapons.¶ “I was a child at the age of 10 ... when Japan experienced the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Kenzaburo Oe told me in Tokyo last year. Now 80 years old, Oe is the 1994 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and is one of Japan’s most highly respected intellectuals and humanitarians. “At the time, what was a great shock to me, but also my mother, our families, all the people at that time, was of course the atomic bomb. This was a greater catastrophe than anything we had ever known.”¶ For all of his great writings, known around the world, Oe said it is his greatest shame that he never wrote a novel about the atomic bombings. He gives great credit to the wounded survivors for keeping the stories alive: “Japan was under U.S. military occupation, and at that time it was not possible for the hibakusha, which is what we call the survivors of the atomic bombs, to create any kind of organization of their own. And five years following the bombings was when they were first able to create their own organization. At that time, their lone slogan was to never allow this to be repeated, never to allow any more hibakusha to be created.”¶ The hibakusha have served as the core of the Japanese peace movement ever since, taking as their symbol the origami peace crane. Sadako Sasaki was a 2-year-old girl when Hiroshima was leveled by the bomb. Sadako lived, but at the age of 12 was diagnosed with leukemia, one of the diseases caused by the bomb’s lingering radiation. A friend in the hospital told her that if she folded 1,000 origami cranes, she would be granted a wish. Hoping to defeat her disease, she began making the intricate paper cranes. She died on Oct. 25, 1955.¶ The peace movement in Japan still lives, though, as people there organize to abolish nuclear weapons, but also to eliminate nuclear power plants. Oe told the French newspaper Le Monde, ““Hiroshima must be engraved in our memories: It’s a catastrophe even more dramatic than natural disasters, because it’s man-made ... by showing the same disregard for human life in nuclear power stations, it is the worst betrayal of the memory of the victims of Hiroshima.” The movement to permanently shut down Japan’s fleet of nuclear power plants seemed on the verge of success after the Fukushima disaster in March 2011. The conservative government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that came to power after the disaster, however, has vowed to revive nuclear power there, restarting dormant plants and even building new ones.
The plan has a risk of solvency- public support has spilled up into political consensus- the mayor of Hiroshima agrees with activists and survivors that the plan is an effective method to demonstrate remorse for America’s past atrocities with nuclear power and confront historical and current policies that are haunted by imperialism that perpetuates a culture of exploitation and oppression.
Part 4 is Framing
The hauntological approach of the aff is key- the ghost disrupts current notions of the state- - reveals to us the cruelty of the state and reminds us that we are constructed from past events.
Auchter ’12, Jessica Auchter, March 2012, Ghostly Politics: Statecraft, Monumentalization, and a Logic of Haunting, Arizona State University, https://repository.asu.edu/attachments/93467/content/tmp/package-sHM4ah/Auchter_asu_0010E_11492.pdf It bears mentioning here that this is not a treatise on which memorialization is appropriate or not. I do not impose this. I merely try to track the fragments of ghosts. Neither is looking for haunting about looking for death. Death is everywhere, particularly as a result of the processes of conflict and war that so often form the basis of a focus on international politics. And it is not about ghosts as the individual spirits of those who have died. The ghost of the state also lingers in the exercise of power to construct identity, narrative, and order.65 Hauntings are rather about specific kinds of social and political and even economic practices that are themselves imbued with tension and contestation. They are about an alternative way of viewing that takes into account the ghostly, which exists and operates on the margins of what is generally considered traditional politics. Traditional politics is the state apparatus, the rational, the visible. The specter disrupts this notion of visibility, because it is by nature¶ invisible through traditional means. Indeed it further disrupts this schema because¶ we cannot see it, while it looks at us and sees us not see it even as it is there. This¶ spectral asymmetry disrupts all specularity. ‘We do not see who looks at us.’66¶ So the specter also represents that which is often invisible to us about how the¶ state functions: the mechanisms of statecraft, of ordering and limiting and of¶ identity construction. It represents that which is invisible to us about the power¶ relations involved in performances of statecraft in identity construction through¶ the way narratives are constructed about past events.¶ 67 This is partially because¶ these events are in fact not past in a linear conception of time, as evidenced by the¶ lingering traces of ghosts. We need not view ghosts either as simply traces. They¶ are as wholly existential as you or I, and indeed remind us that our own existence¶ and our own identities are precarious, constructed, and at the margins of political¶ life as much as those of ghosts.
Policies are racist which is why they allow genocide to happen to lives deemed unvaluable. Only through a hauntological examination can we uncover these flaws.
This is the condition that Agamben says we find ourselves in today, a blurring of life and death itself, and a thorough penetration of state power in all facets of life. Interestingly, Foucault defines one of the features of biopolitics as the¶ gradual disqualification of the death, the way in which death shifted from a¶ spectacle to something private, shameful, and taboo. Death was hidden away¶ because it marked a status of being beyond sovereign power.¶ 79 But this is no¶ longer the case in the contemporary emergence of thanatopolitics, according to¶ Agamben. What Agamben offers here by exploring the merging of sovereign¶ power and biopower is precisely an opening into what power the sovereign has over death and the discourses at work that have rendered death depoliticized.¶ Therefore what we are seeing in the exercise of contemporary politics is not¶ simply sovereign power, or the right to let live and make die, or simply biopower,¶ the right to make live and let die, but a thanatopolitical merging of the two in the¶ right to make live and make die, the incursion of the sovereign in the decision¶ about not only who lives and who dies, but what it means to live and die.¶ Charlotte Epstein characterizes this as a feature of contemporary statecraft that is¶ evident in the war-on-terror, which she argues has stripped security to its bare¶ essentials: literally life and death itself.80¶ This relies on Foucault’s conception of biopolitics, and his conclusion that¶ racism in fact explains how contemporary biopolitics operates. Racism, as¶ Foucault explains it, is the underlying sentiment for genocidal politics such as the¶ Holocaust, precisely because it operates at the biological level to differentiates¶ between lives that count and lives that are not lives at all. The racism function¶ tells us that if you want to live, the other must die. The death of the other is¶ posited as that which not only guarantees my safety, but also makes my life¶ healthier.81 Foucault aptly argues that death in this instance need not be simply¶ rote killing, but can involve exposure to death, increasing the risk of death,¶ expulsion, rejection, and political death.¶ 82 Judith Butler draws on this notion to¶ elaborate ungrievable lives, lives considered to be already ontologically dead because they are placed outside of the realm of sovereign power even while they¶ are subject to the at time extremely brutal exercise of this same sovereign power.¶ Butler’s notion of precarious life examines the idea that certain lives are¶ considered more legitimately grievable than others; that is, we value specific lives¶ (and deaths) more than others. She analyzes this in the context of 9/11, the wars¶ in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Israel-Palestinian conflict, to argue that certain¶ lives are framed utilizing nationalist and familial narratives, which forecloses our¶ capacity to mourn in global dimensions. This is because we are unable to¶ conceive of certain lives as lives. The media and the state establish the narratives¶ by which the human being in its grievability is established.83 My task is to¶ explore the intersection of the ordering mechanisms of statecraft with the¶ construction of identity through narratives constructing the grievability of lives,¶ and perhaps, the way in which statecraft is haunted by these ungrievable lives. I did not seek out ghosts or hauntings for this project. My journey started¶ with memorials and political contestation over construction of memorials. But as¶ I looked at this phenomenon, I began to notice traces of ghosts, to notice the¶ effects of hauntings, and to become interested in tracing them and their political¶ effects. I began to notice that my writings themselves were haunted with the¶ underlying current that there was something important about these hauntings that¶ needed to be explored. My field work in Rwanda and my explorations of the USMexico¶ border and the 9/11 memorial imaginary only affirmed that these¶ hauntings were of political importance and worth exploring and enabled me to be able to tell the story. These hauntings, evident through the construction of space¶ and political inscription on the body, impact the way we think about concepts¶ such as sovereignty, power, and citizenship. Though this project takes finding ghosts as its aim, my goal is in fact not¶ to make ghosts known. Rendering ghosts intelligible would be to appropriate¶ them within a logic of visibility, to render them visible according to an external¶ logic which seeks to reinforce the lines between life and death, grievable and¶ ungrievable. Indeed some have referred to ghosts as ‘hovering between life and¶ death, presence and absence.’84 But in fact ghosts do not hover between life and¶ death. There is no between because ghosts exist prior to ontology, prior to the¶ construction of the dichotomy of life and death. If there is no life and there is no¶ death, ghosts cannot hover between the two. Hauntology allows us to look for¶ ghosts in places other than the marginalized interstices of international politics,¶ and acknowledge their hauntings in life, in death, and in the very ontological¶ construction of meaning of life and death, and the power at play that is implicated¶ in drawing these lines. The task here, then, is to trace the political effects of¶ haunting and hauntings, and acknowledge that there may be some bodies and¶ some ghosts that are unknowable, but that this is itself a hauntological status with¶ political significance and disrupts the previously accepted order of knowledge. It¶ is an ethical practice undertaken here: to find ghosts without rendering them¶ visible and knowable within a logic that replicates the subjugation and marginalization of specters and the construction of certain lives and bodies as¶ ungrievable.
The 1AC allows us to recognize our past mistake and express grievances to the lives lost.
Auchter ’12, Jessica Auchter, March 2012, Ghostly Politics: Statecraft, Monumentalization, and a Logic of Haunting, Arizona State University, https://repository.asu.edu/attachments/93467/content/tmp/package-sHM4ah/Auchter_asu_0010E_11492.pdf This repetitive construction of the mirror maintains the division between¶ self and other perpetrated by the mirror function. The mirror makes the ultimate¶ distinction: between living and dead, to decide what is worthy of life and what¶ counts as nearly invisible or invisible (deathly, spectral). But this distinction is¶ itself made using human instrumentality: the mirror is itself a human instrument.¶ What the specter demonstrates to us is that this ultimate distinction between living and dead is not ultimate after all. What counts as worthy of life, as grievable life in Butler’s terms, is a socially constructed decision. The ungrievable lives continue to haunt as specters, to disrupt frameworks of spectrality, that which distinguishes a life of value from one without, one which may as well be dead, and as a result to disrupt frameworks of statecraft. Marilyn Ivy refers to ghosts as indicators that the structure of remembering through memorialization is not completely effective. What this means is that the line between life and death that remembering the dead institutes is not secure.72 Indeed, Derrida’s project of deconstruction, according to Antonio Negri, is precisely about ‘a radical questioning of the problem of life and death.’7 This mirror function, derived from Lacanian psychoanalysis, reveals the¶ basis of the politics of recognition, how we recognize ourselves and indeed how¶ we recognize (or do not recognize) others. It allows for exploration of how the¶ line between life and death is socially constructed. Bringing in ghosts, then, or¶ that which is perceived as invisible in the mirror, allows for exploration of¶ marginalized or ungrievable lives, and indeed how power is implicated in the¶ construction of the line between life and death. It reveals the logic of haunting¶ underlying contemporary statecraft which relies on the construction of¶ subjectivity through decisions about life and death itself. Statecraft, then, must¶ decide on which lives are lives precisely in order to function, in order to craft the state. To paraphrase Tom Lewis, the ghost, the specter, ‘surfaces as the figure of¶ undecideability that must be exorcized as the Other if a being is to be acquired.’74Thus the exploration undertaken by this dissertation of ghosts and¶ hauntings is not simply one focused on the dead. It also focuses on the logic of¶ haunting, that construction of the lines that delineate life from death, grievable¶ lives from ungrievable lives. It focuses on the use of haunting as a political tool¶ to delineate those worthy lives and worthy stories, and on the marginalization of¶ lives considered to be less valuable or grievable, but also on the way the¶ ungrievable and unmemorializable lives still haunt us, even if we don’t notice it at¶ first. This project is an attempt to not only trace the relationship between¶ haunting and statecraft, but also to listen to these lives and these voices, to try to¶ pay attention to the things we should, ethically, be haunted by, to examine and¶ recover these marginalized and ungrievable lives. What does it mean to be¶ haunted by these bodies? Bodies themselves narrate a story of what happened.¶ When they die, they need to be explained,75 rather than simply being buried, both¶ literally and figuratively. It is these explanations that I attempt to ferret out from¶ the mass graves and bleached bones in the desert and rubble.
What we need to do now more than ever is to clear this space for the possibility of new forms of knowledge production that can change future politics. The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater that best embraces the specter in the debate round and in ethics- this is key to continue the haunting outside of the classroom.
Chen 10 (Kuan-Hsing, professor in the Graduate Institute for Social Research and Cultural Studies @ Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization, pp. 211 - 212) This I have called “Asia as method,” and yet it is impossible to definitely state what this might mean. Takeuchi Yoshimi, "Asia As Method" The critical analysis of nationalist thought is also necessarily an intervention in a political discourse of our own time. Reflecting on the intellectual struggles of nationalist writers of a bygone era, we are made aware of the way in which we relate our own theory and practice; judging their assessment of political possibilities, we begin to ponder the possibilities open to us today. Thus, analysis itself becomes politics; interpretation acquires the undertones of a polemic. In such circumstances, to pretend to speak in the “objective” voice of history is to dissimulate. By marking our own text with the signs of battle, we hope to go a little further towards a more open and self-aware discourse. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World Knowledge production is one of the major sites in which imperialism operates and exercises its power. The analyses in the preceding chapters suggest that the underdevelopment of deimperialization movements is a significant contributing factor in local, regional, and global conflicts throughout the contemporary world. This underdevelopment, I submit, has to do with the current conditions of knowledge production, which have serious structural limitations. To breakthrough the impasse, critical intellectual work on deimperialization first and foremost has to transform these problematic conditions, transcend the structural limitations, and uncover alternative possibilities. Leaving Asia for America To confront the long-lasting impact of “leaving Asia for America” ( tuōyǎ rùměi ) since the Second World War in East Asia in general, and Taiwan in particular, this chapter puts forward “Asia as method” as a critical proposition to transform the existing knowledge structure and at the same time to transform ourselves. The potential of Asia as method is this: using the idea of Asia as an imaginary anchoring point, societies in Asia can become each other’s points of reference, so that the understanding of the self may be transformed, and subjectivity rebuilt. On this basis, the diverse historical experiences and rich social practices of Asia maybe mobilized to provide alternative horizons and perspectives. This method of engagement, I believe, has the potential to advance a different understanding of world history. At the same time, the formulation of Asia as method is also an attempt to move forward on the tripartite problematic of decolonization, deimperialization, and de–cold war. To briefly recap the analysis developed over the previous four chapters: the historical processes of imperialization, colonization, and the cold war have become mutually entangled structures, which have shaped and conditioned both intellectual and popular knowledge production. Through the use of Asia as method, a society in Asia may be inspired by how other Asian societies deal with problems similar to its own, and thus overcome unproductive anxieties and develop new paths of engagement. In proposing a means for self-transformation through shifting our points of reference toward Asia and the third world, Asia as method is grounded in the critical discourses of an earlier generation of thinkers, with whom we now imagine new possibilities.
This debate shouldn’t center around detached neutral discussion of the plusses and minuses of prohibiting nuclear power but whether our performative engagement with the trauma of nuclear power offers ways of rearticulating subjectivity
Cho ‘8 (Grace M., Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology @ College of Staten Island, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War, pp. 46-49) While there are methods for fleshing out the ghost, I do not want to fetishize any of them as the correct alternative to standard practices of sociology. When not practiced self-critically, any method can run counter to the goals of my project—to study unconscious thought and dislocated memory, to see what emerges from the holes in history, and to explore the possibility of a wit- ness to trauma that is an assemblage of disparate elements rather than an individual speaking subject. I therefore use multiple methods of dream work and experimental forms of autoethnography to explore the yanggongju’s haunting of the Korean diaspora. But in order to bring alive these methods of remembering trauma, they must not only be written on the page but also expressed through other bearers of unconscious thought such as embodied performance. The field of performance studies, for example, has explored the relationship between trauma and performance, showing that performance, in many cultures, is a way of summoning ghosts.53 It also suggests that the constellations of affect between performers and audience in a live performance embody and transmit trauma.54 If trauma is an experience that is folded into the body but never quite reaches cognition, or thought that is stored but cannot yet emerge because it precedes the technological apparatus required to decode it, performance is one such apparatus that allows that unconscious experience to emerge.55 As Jill Bennett says of the performance artist who treats the subject of trauma, “The artist does not merely describe an inner experience but allows such experience to fold back into the world in a manner that can inform understandings both about the nature of relationships to others and about the political nature of violence and pain.”56 This project combines elements of writing history and memory that are performative in their iterations to allow unconscious experience folded into the body to then fold back into the world, thus creating affective circuits between bodies.¶ As important as it is to use multiple methods, it is just as important to employ “multiple drafts.” Johnston suggests that a contemporary psyche no longer inscribes itself in text through stream of consciousness but rather does so through the reworkings of multiple drafts.57 The methodological byproducts of this process are unexpected juxtapositions, repetitions, discarded thought fragments, and the same story told differently each time. In order to engage the repetition of trauma, the same moments must be revisited, the same phantomized words reiterated. The result of these practices is a performance of traumatic effects—temporal or spatial dislocation, projection, hallucination—in order to unravel the haunting silence that generates ghosts. While such effects are evident throughout the book, they are most notable in the concluding chapter, in which disaggregated pieces of social facts are reassembled, repeated, and laid alongside remnants of an entirely different story. This method of juxtaposition creates unlikely connections and makes gaps more apparent. It exposes the fractures in what was previously a sensible story about the Korean diaspora, and it does so in order to make way for a violently submerged memory to come to the surface.¶ This is a project that must speak in more than one voice. It calls the reader, in Orr’s words, “to turn an other ear toward what might (im)possibly be heard of spiraling effects, of inarticulate experiences of more than one story at a time, . . . the chattering stammering conversation with the dead and about death.”58 The presence of a ghost compels us to listen to these voices and to hear more than one story at a time. Therefore, some of the chapters are somewhat experimental in terms of the voices used, while others are presented in a more “academic” voice. Sometimes the voice is my own, but often my voice is interrupted by the multiplicity of unconscious thoughts that threaten the integrity of a single authoritative voice. Many of the voices in this text are inauthentic. As in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée, there are borrowed voices that are a nagging presence in these pages—those of other authors such as Abraham and Torok, Gordon, and Rose, as well as Cha herself.59 Alongside and in conjunction with these speak other borrowed voices that have not enjoyed the same privileges of authorship, those whose words were never legitimated through print. Some of the voices in this text are seemingly irrational to the point of madness, but if a ghost can take on the guise of a hallucination, what might we venture to gain by listening to what those voices have to say?60¶ I want to tell you a story about the yanggongju, but I also want to resist the tendency toward creating a piece of work whose politics remain at the level of representation about a lost or suppressed history. To tell a story of trauma is not to tell of what was lost but to meditate on the ways in which, as Cheng says, “cultural trauma . . . recurs as a profoundly unlocatable event.”61 Rather than claiming to uncover the truth about what really happened to Korean women during the history of U.S. military involvement or to recover these women’s lost memories, I hope that this work will look for the traces of haunting around us. To give form to the haunted spaces marked by trauma creates openings for trauma’s productive possibilities. Rather than privileging research methods that are organized around the argument, this project shifts the focus of research from content to affect. I am just as concerned about what the presentation of evidence does as what it says. What affects are produced in listeners, and what affects get stored away to be released in the future? As Gordon writes, “Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition.”62 What is produced in this process, I hope, will be new bodies that can offer insight about the present and that “make the irrecoverable the condition of a new political agency,” in the words of Butler.63 This project is a staging of words, of traumas Clough calls “too deeply embodied for an I to speak them.”64 Where flesh and paper meet and unconscious is rendered into text, I share the stage with these ghosts
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Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 2 | Opponent: Lexington KB | Judge: Rodrigo Paramo I affirm. Questions of public policy should be judged through a consequentialist lens. Woller, Gary Woller Professor at Birgham Young University. “Policy Currents.” A Forum on the Role of Environmental Ethics. “An Overview by Gary Woller.” 1997. Moreover, virtuallyall public policies entail some redistribution of economic or political resources, such that one group's gains must come at another group's expense. Consequently, public policies in ademocracy must be justified to the public, and especially to those who pay the costs of those policies. Such justification cannot simply be assumed a priori by invoking some higher-order moral principle. Appeals toa priori moral principles, such as environmental preservation, also often fail to acknowledge thatpublic policies inevitably entail trade-offs among competing values. Thus since policymakers cannot justify inherentvalue conflictsto the public in any philosophical sense, and since public policies inherently imply winners and losers, the policymakers'duty to the public interestare required them to demonstrate that the redistributive effects and value trade-offs implied by their polices are somehow to the overall advantage of society.At the same time, deontologically based ethical systems have severe practical limitations as a basis for public policy. At best, a priori moral principles provide only general guidance to ethical dilemmas in public affairs and do not themselves suggest appropriate public policies, and at worst, they create a regimen of regulatory unreasonableness while failing to adequately address the problem or actually making it worse. For example, a moral obligation to preserve the environment by no means implies the best way, or any way for that matter, to do so, just as there is no a priori reason to believe that any policy that claims to preserve the environment will actually do so. Any number of policies might work, and others, although seemingly consistent with the moral principle, will fail utterly. That deontological principles are an inadequate basis for environmental policy is evident in the rather significant irony that most forms of deontologically based environmental laws and regulations tend to be implemented in a very utilitarian manner by street-level enforcement officials. Moreover, ignoring the relevant costs and benefits of environmental policy and their attendant incentive structures can, as alluded to above, actually work at cross purposes to environmental preservation. (There exists an extensive literature on this aspect of regulatory enforcement and the often perverse outcomes of regulatory policy. See, for example, Ackerman, 1981; Bartrip and Fenn, 1983; Hawkins, 1983, 1984; Hawkins and Thomas, 1984.) Even the most die-hard preservationist/deontologist would, I believe, be troubled by this outcome. The above points are perhaps best expressed by Richard Flathman, The number of values typically involved in public policy decisions, the broad categories which must be employed and above all, the scope and complexity of the consequences to be anticipated militate against reasoning so conclusively that they generates an imperative to institute a specific policy.It is seldom the case that only one policy will meet the criteria of the public interest (1958, p. 12). It therefore follows that in a democracy,policymakers have an ethical duty to establish a plausible link between policy alternatives and the problems they address, and the public must be reasonably assured that a policy will actually do something about an existing problem;this requires themeans-end language andmethodology of utilitarianism ethics. Good intentions, lofty rhetoric, and moral piety are an insufficient though perhaps at times a necessary, basis for public policy in a democracy.
The standard is maximizing wellbeing.
I defend whole res- if you ask me to spec, I’ll spec in CX.
Advantage 1: Sustainability Nuclear power is seen as an infinite resource. The NYA, 11/18/13, University of Rochester, The New York Academy of Science Magazine http://www.nyas.org/Publications/Detail.aspx?cid=d14cf5f2-34ba-43ba-9d7f-40dfa5af8e2c Professor Robert L. McCrory calls it "bringing star power to Earth"—re-creating on our planet with the nuclear reactions that power the Sun, and thereby securing an inexhaustible source of energy is seen as one that emits no greenhouse gases, requires no environmentally destructive mining or drilling, and relies on fuel as abundant as seawater. This is the vision of the University of Rochester's Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE), which is committed to making the dream of producing electricity from nuclear fusion, which makes the Sun shine, a reality.¶ Hydrogen bombs also get their energy from the fusion of atomic nuclei, of course, but for nuclear fusion to generate energy that can be tapped for electricity the reaction must scaled down more than a million times in energy. The LLE therefore investigates inertial confinement fusion, which explores the behavior of matter under conditions of extremely high energy density and temperature. In inertial confinement fusion, ultra-high power lasers emitting hundreds of terawatts of power (1 terawatt equals 1 trillion watts, and is comparable to the power produced by 1,000 electric power plants) irradiate a capsule containing the heavy hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium. The laser energy compresses and heats the hydrogen to conditions near those at the center of the Sun, causing it to undergo fusion. The result is helium fuel and other energetic particles.¶ If the compressed mass is large enough, the highpressure, high-temperature conditions last long enough to produce more energy than is used to power the laser, allowing inertial confinement fusion to be used to produce electric power. The field has made significant strides since it began in the early 1970s and is now within 10 years of demonstrating its scientific feasibility.¶ The LLE is the country's only large-scale facility for inertial confinement fusion at a university rather than a weapons lab. Its showcase facility is the 60-beam OMEGA laser, which can deliver more than 30 billion times the instantaneous power of sunlight that falls on one square meter of the Earth's surface, but concentrates it all on a target less than 1 millimeter across.¶ Inertial confinement fusion research has potential applications in other important areas of science and technology. The most immediate is in nuclear weapons security. By simulating the extreme temperatures and pressure of a thermonuclear burn, inertial confinement fusion can be used to, for instance, predict how nuclear warheads in the nation's stockpile degrade as they age; as a result, much of the LLE's research is funded by the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. Research on inertial confinement fusion at the LLE has also opened up new areas of basic research ranging from laboratory astrophysics (simulating the nuclear reactions inside stars) to the investigation of the behavior of matter under ultra-high dynamic stress.¶ Rochester and its surrounding area has long been a technologically sophisticated region with significant resources in optics, physics, materials science, chemistry, nuclear physics, plasma physics, photonics, and laser technology. When the late Professor Moshe Lubin began the work that would lead to the official founding of the LLE in 1970, he started with lasers abandoned by the Eastman Kodak Company, another Rochester-based institution. The University of Rochester, too, has long had strong programs in optics, photonics, and physics.¶ The importance of the LLE in advancing inertial confinement fusion for energy production as well as national security and basic research is reflected in the breadth of its support. The lab, directed by McCrory since 1983, receives funding from the National Nuclear Security Administration and the New York State Energy Research Development Authority.¶ The next decade promises a number of historic milestones. The LLE is on track to demonstrate inertial confinement fusion ignition and burn, showing the way toward long-term applications of this approach to energy production. The OMEGA laser, by producing ultra-high-density states of matter, promises to solve many outstanding puzzles in materials science, fundamental atomic physics, fundamental nuclear science, and plasma physics.
Current rates of resource consumption are unsustainable- we need to change our praxis or risk extinction. Smith 1, Nuclear Roulette: The Case against a Nuclear Renaissance. Gar SmithEditor Emeritus of Earth Island Journal. No.5 in the International Forum on Globalization on False Solutions to the global climate crisis. June 2011. Even if all of the world’s current energy output could be produced by renewables, this level of energy consumption would still inflict terrible harm on Earth’s damaged ecosystems. In order to survive, we need to relearn how to use less. It is critical that we adopt a Conservation Imperative. Faced with the inevitable disappearance of the stockpiles of cheap energy we have used to move and transform matter, we need to identify society’s fundamental needs and invest our limited energy resources in those key areas.A Post-Oil/Post Coal/Post-Nuclear world can no longer sustain the one-time extravagances of luxury goods, designed-to-be-disposable products, and brain-numbing entertainment devices. The long-distance transport of raw materials, food and manufactured goods will need to decline in favor of local production geared to match local resources and needs.Warfare—the most capital-, resource- and pollution-intensive human activity—must also be diminished. Neither the costly inventory of nuclear arms nor the Pentagon’s imperial network of 700-plus foreign bases is sustainable.There will doubtless still be wars but, in the Post-oil World, they will be either be waged with solar-powered tanks or fought on horseback. Modern economies insist on powering ahead like competing steamboats in an upstream race.We have become addicted to over-consumption on a planet that was not designed for limitless exploitation.As the late environmental leader David Brower noted:“In the years since the Industrial Revolution, we humans have been partying pretty hard.We’ve ransacked most of the Earth for resources….We are living off the natural capital of the planet—the principal, and not the interest.The soil, the seas, the forests, the rivers, and the protective atmospheric cover—all are being depleted. It was a grand binge, but the hangover is now upon us, and it will soon be throbbing.” 224 On the eve of India’s independence, Mahatma Gandhi was asked whether his new nation could expect to attain Britain’s level of industrial development. Noting that “it took Britain half the resources of this planet to achieve its prosperity,” Gandhi famously estimated that raising the rest of the world to British levels of consumption would require “two more planets.”The United Nations Development Program recently reconsidered Gandhi’s equation as it applies towards “a world edging towards the brink of dangerous climate change.” Working from the assumed “sustainable” ceiling of climate-warming gases (14.5 Gt CO2 per year), UNEP confirmed that “if emissions were frozen at the current level of 29 Gt CO2, we would need two planets.” Unfortunately, UNEP noted, some countries are producing more CO2 than others. Fifteen percent of the world’s richest residents are using 90 percent of the planet’s sustainable budget of shared resources.According to UNEP’s calculations, just sustaining the current lifestyle of Canada and the U.S. would require the resources of 16 planets—eight planets each. 225 In this final chapter, we have bundled some of these ideas into four broad categories:Technological Efficiencies;Alternative-Renewable Energy systems; Public Policy Options; and most importantly,The Conservation Imperative—Powering Down. A combination of these efforts, enthusiastically embraced, will have a good chance of saving the world by embracing new, sustainable lifestyles that eschew the bizarre notion that happiness can only come from never-ending consumption and accumulation.A new level of appreciation for “sufficiency” and “equitability” will be the ultimate answer.
Err aff on this issue- the idea that we can infinitely sustain ourselves is the most likely scenario for extinction. Empirics prove. Kahn, Richard Kahn. Core Faculty in Education at Antioch University, Los Angeles.“Paulo Freire and Eco-Justice: Updating Pedagogy of the Oppressed for the Age of Ecological Calamity.” 2007. When Freire's work is engaged by the reality of the current ecological crisis, it provides immediate historical insight as to why the people of the Third World, along with other species of the Earth, have been consistently denied the rights and privileges accorded those living amidst the advanced capitalist nations -- there is a logic of domination at work. As Freire theorizes, it has always been the mindset of the oppressors to see themselves as “human,” while their that they prey upon are always less than such; like animals, they are barred from the prospects of history and the possibilities inherent in liberatory conduct. Therefore, it is of little surprise that people in the Third World and species everywhere currently bear the great burdens of “sustainable development,” uttered by the global oppressors as a cure-all for all those already suffering from the previous legacy of development and imposed transformation of their life worlds. According to Freire's own thinking, we who stand with the global oppressed should then be especially dubious, if not in outright objection, of such top-down policy initiatives as proposed by global states and federations -- policies that are formed by those who live in great opulence and ease but which are always directed at those surrounded by despair. Duly informed by the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, we might suggest that in contradistinction to the many terrors now foisted by states and state-minded organizations upon the world, we need not globalization-from-above, but globalization-from-below.The idea of mixing a thorough-going critique of power with a sort of Gramscian-inspired, counter-hegemonic alliance politics is certainly not new within the Freirean legacy. I think it is fair to point to movements as diverse as Critical Pedagogy, the Poststructural--Marxism promoted by Laclau and Mouffe, recent forms of Revolutionary Multiculturalism and to Borderland Feminism as promoting a sort of Freireanism fit for today's anti-globalization set. Yet, as bell hooks herself testifies, this updating of Freire's work was often achieved only with great anguish. Only after concerted effort were feminist, post-colonial, and multicultural criticisms of Pedagogy of the Oppressed allowed to stand and be heard within the Freirean corpus.Now, as we stand smack dab in the middle of a planetary eco-crisis, a catastrophe in which global powers will destroy the peoples and cultures of the Third World along with the species and habitats of their regions, I would like to ask: Is Freire's work in a position to mediate and speak with both those who stand beside the global poor and destitute and those whose deepest commitment is to the entirety of the natural kingdom? Can the Freirean corpus itself find agreement with the multi-faceted movement for eco-justice? II. The Present Moment as Such: Planetary Environmental Crisis, Mass Oppression and the Dizzy Heights of Global Capitalism In his book, The Enemy of Nature, Joel Kovel begins by documenting the terrible legacy of human resource degradation (and its consequence for humanity) that spans the thirty-odd years that have now elapsed since the first Earth Day and the release of the Club of Rome's benchmark economic treatise The Limits to Growth. Echoing the findings of eminent environmental and ecological groups and personages such as The Union of Concerned Scientists, Edward O. Wilson, and Peter Raven, the picture that emerges from Kovel's work is that of an institutionalized, transnational, phase-changing neo-liberalism this is loosed as a cancer upon the Earth, a form of “endless growth” political economy that is literally over-producing and consuming the planet to death in the attempt to stave offits own demise. Wholly without precedent, human population has nearly doubled during this time period, increasing by 2.5 billion people. Similarly, markets have continued to worship the gods of speed and quantity and refused to conserve themselves. The use and extraction of “fossil fuel” resources like oil, coal, and natural gas – the non-renewable energy stockpiles -- followed and exceeded the trends set by the population curve despite many years of warnings about the consequences inherent in their over-use and extraction, and this has led to a corresponding increase in the carbon emissions known to be responsible for global warming. Likewise, tree consumption for paper products doubled over the last thirty years, resulting in about half of the planet's forests disappearing, while in the oceans, global fishing also doubled. Further, since the end of the 1960's, half of the planet's wetlands have either been filled or drained for development, and nearly half of the Earth's soils have been agriculturally degraded.All these trends are increasing and most are accelerating.Even during what amounts to a current economic downturn, markets and development continue to flow and evolve, the globalization of technocapital fueling yet another vast reconstruction and hegemonic reintegration of the myriad planetary political, economic, and socio-cultural forces into a futuristic “network society.”Over the last thirty years then, humanity has exploded like a shock wave across the face of the Earth, one which has led to an exponential increase of transnational marketplaces and startling achievements in science and technology, but which has also had devastating effects upon the planetary eco-system. Perhaps most telling has been the parallel tendency over this time period towards mass extinction for the great diversity of species deemed non-human, including vast numbers of mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. Comparing the numbers involved in this catastrophe with the handful of other great extinctions existing within the prehistoric record has led the esteemed paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey to coin this age of technocapitalism is the time of “the Sixth Extinction,” a great vanishing of creatures in the last thirty years such as we have not seen in the previous sixty-five million. But, lest we make the mistake of thinking that our present globalization crisis unfolds along the simple lines of human flourishing and resource wasting, it should be noted that even as world gross economic product has nearly tripled since 1970, these gains have been pocketed by a relatively few advanced capitalist nations at the expense of the poor.Recently, the United Nations Development Programme issued itsHuman Development Report 1999 which found that the top twenty percent of the people living in advanced capitalist nations have eighty-six percent of the world gross domestic product, control eighty-two percent of the world export markets, initiate sixty-eight percent of all foreign direct investment, and possess seventy-four percent of the communication wires. Meanwhile, the bottom twenty percent of the people hailing from the poorest nations represent only about one percent of each category respectively.The divide between rich and poor has been gravely exacerbated, with the gap between the two nearly doubling itself from an outrageous factor of 44:1 in 1973 to about 72:1 as of the year 2000. Much of this is directly related to a series of loans begun by the World Bank and the World Trade Organization in the 1990's, which ultimately increased Third World debt by a factor of eight compared with pre-globalization figures. So, as approximately 1.2 billion people live on less than $1 per day and nearly 3 billion live on less than $2 per day, the dizzy heights of global technocapitalism have been unfortunate indeed for nearly half of the human population.Globalization has been especially torturous upon poor women and children, who are denied basic human rights en masse and who, in the attempt to combat their situations of mass starvation and homelessness, enter by the millions each year into the relations of slave-labor and the horrors of the global sex trade. Even more tragically, millions of additional poor (many of whom are women and children) have been violently pressed into the circumstance of outright slavery! Thus, when this is properly related to the conditions fostered upon the Third World by the explosion of transnational capitalist development over the last few decades, we can agree with the critical feminist Rhonda Hammer that these very same cultural, economic and political practices by the hegemonic powers constitute a form of global “family terrorism” meant to oppress those most in need of help. New advances in capitalist lifestyle and practice are then directly responsible for grave exacerbations of widespread poverty and environmental destruction; and in many ways, the exploitation of the environment and of the poor by the rich has come to be integrated so as to be a part of one process -- the globalization of technocapitalsm.Interestingly, it was only very recently, in Johannesburg, South Africa, at the U.N.'s World Summit for Sustainable Development, that the plight of the poor and of species everywhere was again expressed as being a result of the sort of “unsustainable development” that has been the planetary norm over the last thirty years. However, sadly, due to pressure by the Bush administration and by other world powers,the conservation of the environment was essentially shelved as a policy agenda and the prescription for poor nations was, ironically, even more transnational capitalist development, market expansion, and resource extraction.Kofi Annan ended the summit by proclaiming, “This is not the end. It's the beginning.”But, in fact, the W.S.S.D. was but the latest in a 30-year lineage of world summits stretching back across the recent history of globalization, to the first of its kind in Stockholm. As we can see then, Annan's promise of change is more appropriately interpreted as a curse. The present standard of living enjoyed by those across the planet is estimated to utilize somewhere between two to four times the amount of sustainable resources provided by the planet. As population continues to rise toward 9 billion people and living standards increase in commensurate measure,it is calculated that to have a sustainable planet by the year 2070 would entail technical advances capable of enabling 60 times as much production and consumption as presently afforded, while only generating one-half to one-third the amount of present resource and environmental cost.Yet, according to the U.N.'s own UNEP GEO-3 report, released just prior to the summit,a vision of continued growth of this kind is consonant only with extinction; either great changes are made in global lifestyle now or an irrevocable crisis will descend upon the planet by 2032.
Only affirming solves- causes paradigm shift that orients us towards a more sustainable lifestyle. We need to do away with the promise of limitless energy. Smith 2, Nuclear Roulette: The Case against a Nuclear Renaissance. Gar SmithEditor Emeritus of Earth Island Journal. No.5 in the International Forum on Globalization on False Solutions to the global climate crisis. June 2011. We need decentralized solutions and ground-up, community-based alternatives. Instead of bailing out speculators, we should be investing to create small-scale, decentralized, sustainable and democratic communities supported by millions of small, local, organic farms. We will need to respond to massive changes and had better be flexible and agile. In the Brave New Post-Oil World, old ideas about energy will disappear.We will need to understand the economic advantages of owning a mule rather than a pick-up. Someone who knows how to make and repair a boot could become more valued than someone who knows how to boot up a computer. Many capital-intensive, extractive centralized industries will collapse, leaving us to care for our polluted air, damaged land, chemically poisoned croplands, and the broken oceanic food chain. Turning away from the false promises of nuclear power is not only good in itself, it will help us focus on the real necessities for a better future. We will have to redesign our technologies to be smarter and more efficient and our cities to be compact, convenient and congenial.We will need to learn to live within our means—doing without extravagance, just as our thrifty forebears did—living better with less, more in tune with each other and our shared planet. If we can escape the easy temptations of the consumerist mentality, we will be able to address the inequality that threatens the fundamental stability of our nation and our world.The old Combustion Economy promoted massive inequities in the distribution wealth and power.What the world needs now is a sustainable Compassion Economy that will usher in a new era of stewardship and sharing
Advantage 2 is Environment
Scenario 1 is Meltdowns Meltdowns are inevitable – other models are flawed Max - Planck- Gesselschaft 12 –The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science is a formally independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German research institute (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Major Reactor, 5-22-2012, "Severe nuclear reactor accidents likely every 10 to 20 years, European study suggests," ScienceDaily, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120522134942.htm) Fukushima are more likely to happen than previously assumed. Based on the operating hours of all civil nuclear reactors and the number of nuclear meltdowns that have occurred, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz have calculated that such events may occur once every 10 to 20 years (based on the current number of reactors) -- some 200 times more often than estimated in the past. The researchers also determined that, in the event of such a major accident, half of the radioactive caesium-137 would be spread over an area of more than 1,000 kilometres away from the nuclear reactor. Their results show that Western Europe is likely to be contaminated about once in 50 years by more than 40 kilobecquerel of caesium-137 per square meter. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, an area is defined as being contaminated with radiation from this amount onwards. In view of their findings, the researchers call for an in-depth analysis and reassessment of the risks associated with nuclear power plants. The reactor accident in Fukushima has fuelled the discussion about nuclear energy and triggered Germany's exit from their nuclear power program. It appears that the global risk of such a catastrophe is higher than previously thought, a result of a study carried out by a research team led by Jos Lelieveld, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz: "After Fukushima, the prospect of such an incident occurring again came into question, and whether we can actually calculate the radioactive fallout using our atmospheric models." According to the results of the study, a nuclear meltdown in one of the reactors in operation worldwide is likely to occur once in 10 to 20 years. Currently, there are 440 nuclear reactors in operation, and 60 more are planned. To determine the likelihood of a nuclear meltdown, the researchers applied a simple calculation. They divided the operating hours of all civilian nuclear reactors in the world, from the commissioning of the first up to the present, by the number of reactor meltdowns that have actually occurred. The total number of operating hours is 14,500 years, the number of reactor meltdowns comes to four -- one in Chernobyl and three in Fukushima. This translates into one major accident, being defined according to the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES), every 3,625 years. Even if this result is conservatively rounded to one major accident every 5,000 reactor years, the risk is 200 times higher than the estimate for catastrophic, non-contained core meltdowns made by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1990. The Mainz researchers did not distinguish ages and types of reactors, or whether they are located in regions of enhanced risks, for example by earthquakes. After all, nobody had anticipated the reactor catastrophe in Japan.
It’s the single greatest danger to the environment Stapleton 9 - Richard M Stapleton Is the author of books such as Lead Is a Silent Hazard, writes for pollution issues (“Disasters: Nuclear Accidents” http://www.pollutionissues.com/Co-Ea/Disasters-Nuclear-Accidents.html) Of all the environmental disaster events that humans are capable of causing, nuclear disasters have the greatest damage potential. The radiation release associated with a nuclear disaster poses significant acute and chronic risks in the immediate environs and chronic risk over a wide geographic area. Radioactive contamination, which typically becomes airborne, is long-lived, with half-lives guaranteeing contamination for hundreds of years. Concerns over potential nuclear disasters center on nuclear reactors, typically those used to generate electric power. Other concerns involve the transport of nuclear waste and the temporary storage of spent radioactive fuel at nuclear power plants. The fear that terrorists would target a radiation source or create a "dirty bomb" capable of dispersing radiation over a populated area was added to these concerns following the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. Radioactive emissions of particular concern include strontium-90 and cesium-137, both having thirty-year-plus half-lives, and iodine-131, having a short half-life of eight days but known to cause thyroid cancer. In addition to being highly radioactive, cesium-137 is mistaken for potassium by living organisms. This means that it is passed on up the food chain and bioaccumulated by that process. Strontium-90 mimics the properties of calcium and is deposited in bones where it may either cause cancer or damage bone marrow cells.
Biod loss causes extinction---newest ev Torres 16 – (Apr 11, Phil, is the founding director of the X-Risks Institute, a contributor for the Future of Life Institute, an affiliate scholar at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and the author of The End: What Science and Religion Tell Us About the Apocalypse. His writing focuses on apocalyptic terrorism, emerging technologies, and existential risks. “Biodiversity loss: An existential risk comparable to climate change” http://thebulletin.org/biodiversity-loss-existential-risk-comparable-climate-change9329) According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the two greatest existential threats to human civilization stem from climate change and nuclear weapons. Both pose clear and present dangers to the perpetuation of our species, and the increasingly dire climate situation and nuclear arsenal modernizations in the United States and Russia were the most significant reasons why the Bulletin decided to keep the Doomsday Clock set at three minutes before midnight earlier this year. But there is another existential threat that the Bulletin overlooked in its Doomsday Clock announcement: biodiversity loss. This phenomenon is often identified as one of the many consequences of climate change, and this is of course correct. But biodiversity loss is also a contributing factor behind climate change. For example, deforestation in the Amazon rainforest and elsewhere reduces the amount of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere by plants, a natural process that mitigates the effects of climate change. So the causal relation between climate change and biodiversity loss is bidirectional. Furthermore, there are myriad phenomena that are driving biodiversity loss in addition to climate change. Other causes include ecosystem fragmentation, invasive species, pollution, oxygen depletion caused by fertilizers running off into ponds and streams, overfishing, human overpopulation, and overconsumption. All of these phenomena have a direct impact on the health of the biosphere, and all would conceivably persist even if the problem of climate change were somehow immediately solved. Such considerations warrant decoupling biodiversity loss from climate change, because the former has been consistently subsumed by the latter as a mere effect. Biodiversity loss is a distinct environmental crisis with its own unique syndrome of causes, consequences, and solutions—such as restoring habitats, creating protected areas (“biodiversity parks”), and practicing sustainable agriculture. The sixth extinction. The repercussions of biodiversity loss are potentially as severe as those anticipated from climate change, or even a nuclear conflict. For example, according to a 2015 study published in Science Advances, the best available evidence reveals “an exceptionally rapid loss of biodiversity over the last few centuries, indicating that a sixth mass extinction is already under way.” This conclusion holds, even on the most optimistic assumptions about the background rate of species losses and the current rate of vertebrate extinctions. The group classified as “vertebrates” includes mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, and all other creatures with a backbone. The article argues that, using its conservative figures, the average loss of vertebrate species was 100 times higher in the past century relative to the background rate of extinction. (Other scientists have suggested that the current extinction rate could be as much as 10,000 times higher than normal.) As the authors write, “The evidence is incontrovertible that recent extinction rates are unprecedented in human history and highly unusual in Earth’s history.” Perhaps the term “Big Six” should enter the popular lexicon—to add the current extinction to the previous “Big Five,” the last of which wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. But the concept of biodiversity encompasses more than just the total number of species on the planet. It also refers to the size of different populations of species. With respect to this phenomenon, multiple studies have confirmed that wild populations around the world are dwindling and disappearing at an alarming rate. For example, the 2010 Global Biodiversity Outlook report found that the population of wild vertebrates living in the tropics dropped by 59 percent between 1970 and 2006. The report also found that the population of farmland birds in Europe has dropped by 50 percent since 1980; bird populations in the grasslands of North America declined by almost 40 percent between 1968 and 2003; and the population of birds in North American arid lands has fallen by almost 30 percent since the 1960s. Similarly, 42 percent of all amphibian species (a type of vertebrate that is sometimes called an “ecological indicator”) are undergoing population declines, and 23 percent of all plant species “are estimated to be threatened with extinction.” Other studies have found that some 20 percent of all reptile species, 48 percent of the world’s primates, and 50 percent of freshwater turtles are threatened. Underwater, about 10 percent of all coral reefs are now dead, and another 60 percent are in danger of dying. Consistent with these data, the 2014 Living Planet Report shows that the global population of wild vertebrates dropped by 52 percent in only four decades—from 1970 to 2010. While biologists often avoid projecting historical trends into the future because of the complexity of ecological systems, it’s tempting to extrapolate this figure to, say, the year 2050, which is four decades from 2010. As it happens, a 2006 study published in Science does precisely this: It projects past trends of marine biodiversity loss into the 21st century, concluding that, unless significant changes are made to patterns of human activity, there will be virtually no more wild-caught seafood by 2048. Catastrophic consequences for civilization. The consequences of this rapid pruning of the evolutionary tree of life extend beyond the obvious. There could be surprising effects of biodiversity loss that scientists are unable to fully anticipate in advance. For example, prior research has shown that localized ecosystems can undergo abrupt and irreversible shifts when they reach a tipping point. According to a 2012 paper published in Nature, there are reasons for thinking that we may be approaching a tipping point of this sort in the global ecosystem, beyond which the consequences could be catastrophic for civilization. As the authors write, a planetary-scale transition could precipitate “substantial losses of ecosystem services required to sustain the human population.” An ecosystem service is any ecological process that benefits humanity, such as food production and crop pollination. If the global ecosystem were to cross a tipping point and substantial ecosystem services were lost, the results could be “widespread social unrest, economic instability, and loss of human life.” According to Missouri Botanical Garden ecologist Adam Smith, one of the paper’s co-authors, this could occur in a matter of decades—far more quickly than most of the expected consequences of climate change, yet equally destructive. Biodiversity loss is a “threat multiplier” that, by pushing societies to the brink of collapse, will exacerbate existing conflicts and introduce entirely new struggles between state and non-state actors. Indeed, it could even fuel the rise of terrorism. (After all, climate change has been linked to the emergence of ISIS in Syria, and multiple high-ranking US officials, such as former US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and CIA director John Brennan, have affirmed that climate change and terrorism are connected.) The reality is that we are entering the sixth mass extinction in the 3.8-billion-year history of life on Earth, and the impact of this event could be felt by civilization “in as little as three human lifetimes,” as the aforementioned 2012 Nature paper notes. Furthermore, the widespread decline of biological populations could plausibly initiate a dramatic transformation of the global ecosystem on an even faster timescale: perhaps a single human lifetime. The unavoidable conclusion is that biodiversity loss constitutes an existential threat in its own right. As such, it ought to be considered alongside climate change and nuclear weapons as one of the most significant contemporary risks to human prosperity and survival.
Independently, inevitable solar flares cause nuclear holocausts, extinction---only total ban solves Adams 11 – (Sept 13, Mike, Editor of NaturalNews.com, “Solar flare could unleash nuclear holocaust across planet Earth, forcing hundreds of nuclear power plants into total meltdowns”, http://www.naturalnews.com/033564_solar_flares_nuclear_power_plants.html) (NaturalNews) Forget about the 2012 Mayan calendar, comet Elenin or the Rapture. The real threat to human civilization is far more mundane, and it's right in front of our noses. If Fukushima has taught us anything, it's that just one runaway meltdown of fissionable nuclear material can have wide-ranging and potentially devastating consequences for life on Earth. To date, Fukushima has already released 168 times the total radiation released from the Hiroshima nuclear bomb detonated in 1945, and the Fukushima catastrophe is now undeniably the worst nuclear disaster in the history of human civilization. But what if human civilization faced a far greater threat than a single tsunami destroying a nuclear power facility? What if a global tidal wave could destroy the power generating capacities of all the world's power plants, all at once? Such a scenario is not merely possible, but factually inevitable. And the global tidal wave threatening all the nuclear power plants of the world isn't made of water but solar emissions. The sun, you see, is acting up again. NASA recently warned that solar activity is surging, with a peak expected to happen in 2013 that could generate enormous radiation levels that sweep across planet Earth. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has even issued an urgent warning about solar flares due to strike in 2012 and 2013. IBtimes wrote, "With solar activity expected to peak around 2013, the Sun is entering a particularly active time and big flares like the recent one will likely be common during the next few years. ...A major flare in the mid-19th century blocked the nascent telegraph system, and some scientists believe that another such event is now overdue." (http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/194166/20110...) The story goes on to explain: "Several federal government studies suggest that this extreme solar activity and emissions may result in complete blackouts for years in some areas of the nation. Moreover, there may also be disruption of power supply for years, or even decades, as geomagnetic currents attracted by the storm could debilitate the transformers." Why does all this matter? To understand that, you have to understand how nuclear power plants function. Or, put another way, how is nuclear material prevented from "going nuclear" every single day across our planet? Every nuclear power plant operates in a near-meltdown state All nuclear power plants are operated in a near-meltdown status. They operate at very high heat, relying on nuclear fission to boil water that produces steam to drive the turbines that generate electricity. Critically, the nuclear fuel is prevented from melting down through the steady circulation of coolants which are pushed through the cooling system using very high powered electric pumps. If you stop the electric pumps, the coolant stops flowing and the fuel rods go critical (and then melt down). This is what happened in Fukushima, where the melted fuel rods dropped through the concrete floor of the containment vessels, unleashing enormous quantities of ionizing radiation into the surrounding environment. The full extent of the Fukushima contamination is not even known yet, as the facility is still emitting radiation. It's crucial to understand that nuclear coolant pumps are usually driven by power from the electrical grid. They are not normally driven by power generated locally from the nuclear power plant itself. Instead, they're connected to the grid. In other words, even though nuclear power plants are generating megawatts of electricity for the grid, they are also dependant on the grid to run their own coolant pumps. If the grid goes down, the coolant pumps go down, too, which is why they are quickly switched to emergency backup power -- either generators or batteries. As we learned with Fukushima, the on-site batteries can only drive the coolant pumps for around eight hours. After that, the nuclear facility is dependent on diesel generators (or sometimes propane) to run the pumps that circulate the coolant which prevents the whole site from going Chernobyl. And yet, critically, this depends on something rather obvious: The delivery of diesel fuel to the site. If diesel cannot be delivered, the generators can't be fired up and the coolant can't be circulated. When you grasp the importance of this supply line dependency, you will instantly understand why a single solar flare could unleash a nuclear holocaust across the planet. When the generators fail and the coolant pumps stop pumping, nuclear fuel rods begin to melt through their containment rods, unleashing ungodly amounts of life-destroying radiation directly into the atmosphere. This is precisely why Japanese engineers worked so hard to reconnect the local power grid to the Fukushima facility after the tidal wave -- they needed to bring power back to the generators to run the pumps that circulate the coolant. This effort failed, of course, which is why Fukushima became such a nuclear disaster and released countless becquerels of radiation into the environment (with no end in sight). And yet, despite the destruction we've already seen with Fukushima, U.S. nuclear power plants are nowhere near being prepared to handle sustained power grid failures. As IBtimes reports: "Last month, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said U.S. plants affected by a blackout should be able to cope without electricity for at least eight hours and should have procedures to keep the reactor and spent-fuel pool cool for 72 hours. Nuclear plants depend on standby batteries and backup diesel generators. Most standby power systems would continue to function after a severe solar storm, but supplying the standby power systems with adequate fuel, when the main power grids are offline for years, could become a very critical problem. If the spent fuel rod pools at the country's 104 nuclear power plants lose their connection to the power grid, the current regulations aren't sufficient to guarantee those pools won't boil over -- exposing the hot, zirconium-clad rods and sparking fires that would release deadly radiation." (http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/194166/20110...) Now, what does all this have to do with solar flares? How the end of modern civilization will most likely occur As any sufficiently informed scientist will readily admit, solar flares have the potential to blow out the transformers throughout the national power grid. That's because solar flares induce geomagnetic currents (powerful electromagnetic impulses) which overload the transformers and cause them to explode. You've probably witnessed this yourself during a lightning storm when lightning unleashes a powerful electromagnetic pulse that causes a local transformer to explode. Solar flares do the same thing on a much larger scale. A global scale, in fact. The upshot of this situation is that suddenly and without warning, the power grid infrastructure across nearly the entire planet could be destroyed. As a bonus, nearly all satellites will be fried, too, leaving GPS inoperable and causing millions of clueless drivers to become forever lost in their own neighborhoods because they never paid attention to the streets and always relied on a GPS voice to tell them, "In fifty feet, turn right." Communications satellites will be obliterated, too. This, of course, will halt nearly all news propaganda distribution across the planet, causing tens of thousands of people to instantly die out of the sheer fear of suddenly having to think for themselves. As another bonus, nearly all mobile phone service will be disrupted, too, meaning all the teenage text junkies of the world will, for the first time in their lives, be forced to lay down their iPhones and interact with real people in the real world. But the real kicker in all this is that the power grid will be destroyed nearly everywhere. What happens when there's no electricity? Imagine a world without electricity. Even for just a week. Imagine New York City with no electricity, or Los Angeles, or Sao Paulo. Within 72 hours, most cities around the world will devolve into total chaos, complete with looting, violent crime, and runaway fires. But that's not even the bad news. Even if all the major cities of the world burned to the ground for some other reason, humanity could still recover because it has the farmlands: the soils, the seeds, and the potential to recover, right? And yet the real crisis here stems from the realization that once there is no power grid, all the nuclear power plants of the world suddenly go into "emergency mode" and are forced to rely on their on-site emergency power backups to circulate coolants and prevent nuclear meltdowns from occurring. And yet, as we've already established, these facilities typically have only a few hours of battery power available, followed by perhaps a few days worth of diesel fuel to run their generators (or propane, in some cases). Did I also mention that half the people who work at nuclear power facilities have no idea what they're doing in the first place? Most of the veterans who really know the facilities inside and out have been forced into retirement due to reaching their lifetime limits of on-the-job radiation exposure, so most of the workers at nuclear facilities right now are newbies who really have no clue what they're doing. There are 440 nuclear power plants operating across 30 countries around the world today. There are an additional 250 so-called "research reactors" in existence, making a total of roughly 700 nuclear reactors to be dealt with (http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf01.html). Now imagine the scenario: You've got a massive solar flare that knocks out the world power grid and destroys the majority of the power grid transformers, thrusting the world into darkness. Cities collapse into chaos and rioting, martial law is quickly declared (but it hardly matters), and every nation in the world is on full emergency. But that doesn't solve the really big problem, which is that you've got 700 nuclear reactors that can't feed power into the grid (because all the transformers are blown up) and yet simultaneously have to be fed a steady stream of emergency fuels to run the generators the keep the coolant pumps functioning. How long does the coolant need to circulate in these facilities to cool the nuclear fuel? Months. This is also the lesson of Fukushima: You can't cool nuclear fuel in mere hours or days. It takes months to bring these nuclear facilities to a state of cold shutdown. And that means in order to avoid a multitude of Fukushima-style meltdowns from occurring around the world, you need to truck diesel fuel, generator parts and nuclear plant workers to every nuclear facility on the planet, ON TIME, every time, without fail, for months on end. Now remember, this must be done in the middle of the total chaos breakdown of modern civilization, where there is no power, where law enforcement and emergency services are totally overrun, where people are starving because food deliveries have been disrupted, and when looting and violent crime runs rampant in the streets of every major city in the world. Somehow, despite all this, you have to run these diesel fuel caravans to the nuclear power plants and keep the pumps running. Except there's a problem in all this, even if you assume you can somehow work a logistical miracle and actually deliver the diesel fuel to the backup generators on time (which you probably can't). The problem is this: Where do you get diesel fuel? Why refineries will be shut down, too From petroleum refineries. Most people don't realize it, but petroleum refineries run on electricity. Without the power grid, the refineries don't produce a drop of diesel. With no diesel, there are no generators keeping the coolant running in the nuclear power facilities. But wait, you say: Maybe we could just acquire diesel from all the gas stations in the world. Pump it out of the ground, load it into trucks and use that to power the generators, right? Except there are other problems here: How do you pump all that fuel without electricity? How do you acquire all the tires and spare parts needed to keep trucks running if there's no electricity to keep the supply businesses running? How do you maintain a truck delivery infrastructure when the electrical infrastructure is totally wiped out? Some countries might be able to pull it off with some degree of success. With military escorts and the total government control over all fuel supplies, a few nations will be able to keep a few nuclear power facilities from melting down. But here's the real issue: There are 700 nuclear power facilities in the world, remember? Let's suppose that in the aftermath of a massive solar flare, the nations of the world are somehow able to control half of those facilities and nurse them into cold shutdown status. That still leaves roughly 350 nuclear facilities at risk. Now let's suppose half of those are somehow luckily offline and not even functioning when the solar flare hits, so they need no special attention. This is a very optimistic assumption, but that still leaves 175 nuclear power plants where all attempts fail. Let's be outrageously optimistic and suppose that a third of those somehow don't go into a total meltdown by some miracle of God, or some bizarre twist in the laws of physics. So we're still left with 115 nuclear power plants that "go Chernobyl." Fukushima was one power plant. Imagine the devastation of 100+ nuclear power plants, all going into meltdown all at once across the planet. It's not the loss of electricity that's the real problem; it's the global tidal wave of invisible radiation that blankets the planet, permeates the topsoil, irradiates everything that breathes and delivers the final crushing blow to human civilization as we know it today. Because if you have 100 simultaneous global nuclear meltdowns, the tidal wave of radiation will make farming nearly impossible for years. That means no food production for several years in a row. And that, in turn, means a near-total collapse of the human population on our planet. How many people can survive an entire year with no food from the farms? Not one in a hundred people. Even beyond that, how many people can essentially live underground and be safe enough from the radiation that they can have viable children and repopulate the planet? It's a very, very small fraction of the total population. Solar flares far more likely to hit nuclear power plants than tidal waves or earthquakes What's the chance of all this actually happening? A report by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory said that "...over the standard 40-year license term of nuclear power plants, solar flare activity enables a 33 percent chance of long-term power loss, a risk that significantly outweighs that of major earthquakes and tsunamis." (http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/194166/20110...) The world's reliance on nuclear power, you see, has doomed us to destroy our own civilization. Of course, this is all preventable if we would only dismantle and shut down ALL nuclear power plants on the planet. But what are the chances of that happening? Zero, of course. There are too many commercial and political interests invested in nuclear power. So the power plants will stay, and we will therefore be vulnerable to a solar flare which could strike us at any time and unleash a global nuclear holocaust. Planet Earth has been struck by solar flares before, of course, but all the big hits in recorded human history took place long before the age of modern electronics, so the impacts were minimal. Today, society cannot function without electronics. Nor can nuclear facility coolant pumps. Once you realize that, you begin to understand the true danger in which humanity has placed itself by relying on nuclear power. By relying on nuclear power, we are risking everything. And we're doing it blindly, with no real acknowledgement of the dangers of running 700+ nuclear facilities in a constant state of "near meltdown" while foolishly relying on the steady flow of electricity to keep the fuel rods cool. If Fukushima, all by itself, could unleash a tidal wave of deadly radiation all by itself, imagine a world where hundreds of nuclear facilities go into a total meltdown simultaneously. A repeat of the 1859 solar storm -- called the Carrington Event -- would "devastate the modern world," admits a National Geographic article: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011... What can you do about any of this? Build yourself an underground bunker and prepare to live in it for an extended period of time. (Just a few feet of soil protects you from most radiation.) The good news is that if you survive it all and one day return to the surface to plant your non-hybrid seeds and begin rebuilding human society, real estate will be really, really cheap. Especially in the radiation zones. Take this seriously! Read more from NASA http://www.space.com/12580-sun-unleashes-maj...http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science... From NASA: "Just before dawn the next day, skies all over planet Earth erupted in red, green, and purple auroras so brilliant that newspapers could be read as easily as in daylight. Indeed, stunning auroras pulsated even at near tropical latitudes over Cuba, the Bahamas, Jamaica, El Salvador, and Hawaii. Even more disconcerting, telegraph systems worldwide went haywire. Spark discharges shocked telegraph operators and set the telegraph paper on fire. Even when telegraphers disconnected the batteries powering the lines, aurora-induced electric currents in the wires still allowed messages to be transmitted..." "...as electronic technologies have become more sophisticated and more embedded into everyday life, they have also become more vulnerable to solar activity. On Earth, power lines and long-distance telephone cables might be affected by auroral currents, as happened in 1989. Radar, cell phone communications, and GPS receivers could be disrupted by solar radio noise. Experts who have studied the question say there is little to be done to protect satellites from a Carrington-class flare. In fact, a recent paper estimates potential damage to the 900-plus satellites currently in orbit could cost between $30 billion and $70 billion."
Scenario 2 is Water Plants cause environmental damage, water wars Wareham and Green 7 – (Oct 28, Dr Sue Wareham became involved in MAPW over 20 years ago out of a "horror at the destructive capacity of a single nuclear weapon." Sue believes that her work through MAPW is fundamental to her commitment to the protection of human life and the improvement of human well-being. Dr Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner for Friends of the Earth and author of the report No Solution To Climate Change (pdf file 1.98MB) launched in September 2005. His PhD thesis dealt with the history of the Lucas Heights nuclear plant and the debate over the replacement of its nuclear research reactor. He is a member of the EnergyScience Coalition. Read his essay Environmentalists Do Not Support Nuclear Power: Critique of James Lovelock and Patrick Moore. “Nuclear power and water scarcity” http://www.sciencealert.com/nuclear-power-and-water-scarcity) The connections between water scarcity, power generation and the federal government's promotion of nuclear power are worth reflecting on in National Water Week, held from October 21-27. Some problems associated with nuclear power are much discussed – such as its connection to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Less well known is the fact that nuclear power is the most water-hungry of all energy sources, with a single reactor consuming 35-65 million litres of water each day. Water scarcity is already a serious problem for Australia's power-generation industry, largely because of our heavy reliance on water-guzzling coal-fired plants. Current problems in Australia's power industry resulting from water shortages include: expensive long-distance water haulage to some power plants as local supplies dwindle; reduced electrical generating capacity and output at some coal and hydro plants; higher and more volatile electricity prices; increased risks of blackouts; and intensified competition for water between power plants, agriculture, industries, and environmental flows. Introducing nuclear power would exacerbate those problems. A December 2006 report by the Commonwealth Department of Parliamentary Services notes that the water requirements for a nuclear power station are 20-83 per cent higher than for other power stations. Moreover, those calculations do not include water consumption by uranium mines. The Roxby Downs mine in South Australia uses 35 million litres of water each day, with plans to increase this to 150 million litres each day. Mine operator BHP Billiton does not pay one cent for this water despite recording a record $17 billion profit in 2006-07. Water outflows from nuclear power plants can damage the local environment. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency states: "When nuclear power plants remove water from a lake or river for steam production and cooling, fish and other aquatic life can be affected. Water pollutants, such as heavy metals and salts, build up in the water used in the nuclear power plant systems. These water pollutants, as well as the higher temperature of the water discharged from the power plant, can negatively affect water quality and aquatic life." A report by the U.S. Nuclear Information and Resource Service details the destruction of delicate marine ecosystems and large numbers of animals, including endangered species, by nuclear power plants. Most of the damage is done by water inflow pipes, while expulsion of warm water causes further damage. Another documented problem is 'cold stunning' - fish acclimatise to warm water but die when the reactor is taken off-line and warm water is no longer expelled. In New Jersey, local fishermen estimated that 4,000 fish died from cold stunning when a reactor was shut down. Nuclear reactors in numerous European countries have been periodically taken off-line or operated at reduced output in recent years because of water shortages driven by climate change, drought and heat waves. Nuclear utilities have also sought and secured exemptions from operating conditions in order to discharge overheated water. The water consumption of renewable energy sources and energy efficiency and conservation measures is negligible compared to nuclear or coal. Operating a 2,400 Watt fan heater for one hour consumes 0.01 litres of water if wind is the energy source, 0.26 litres if solar is the energy source, 4.5 litres if coal is the energy source, or 5.5 litres if nuclear power is the energy source. Tim Flannery, the 2007 Australian of the Year, notes that hastening the uptake of renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, and geothermal 'hot rocks' will help ease the water crisis as well as reducing greenhouse gas emissions - a win-win outcome. Globally, there is another compelling reason to ensure that decisions on water allocation - including its use in energy production - are made wisely and equitably. Limited access to water is already contributing to armed conflicts ('water wars') in a number of places around the globe. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon recently noted that shortages of food and water in sub-Saharan Africa were a precursor to the current tragic violence in Darfur. The problem goes "far beyond Darfur", he warned, as many other places are now suffering water shortages.
Water wars cause global wars Engelke and Sticklor 15 – (Sept 15, Peter Engelke is a Resident Senior Fellow with the Strategic Foresight Initiative at the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC. Russell Sticklor is a Non-Resident Research Fellow with the Stimson Environmental Security Program in Washington, DC. “Water Wars: The Next Great Driver of Global Conflict?” http://nationalinterest.org/feature/water-wars-the-next-great-driver-global-conflict-13842?page=show) We live in an age of great anxiety about threats to global peace and stability. Among these are worries that intense water-related stresses, now showing up in regions around the world, may become all-too-common sources of conflict. Just as often, however, concerns about water wars are dismissed as much ado about nothing. An influential school of thought has long contended future international conflicts will not be fought over this resource. Water, it says, is of such elemental importance to human existence that even long-time adversaries will be forced to accommodate one another’s needs in a water-scarce future. As water is too expensive to transport over long distances, moreover, it is very difficult to steal or plunder. And history gives some comfort to this forecast: as few wars have been fought specifically over water, it is highly unlikely humanity will start engaging in water conflicts now. Or so the thinking goes. In the case of water, this logic — of the past as predictor of the future — is compelling and comforting. But it also is dangerously myopic, for it fails to consider the possibility that the future may look nothing at all like the past. From nearly any standpoint, the world we live in is a fundamentally different place compared with the past. Over just the last century, for example, the global population has rocketed upward from roughly two billion to well past seven billion. While population growth is hardly the only driver of social, economic, and ecological change at global and regional scale, it has been among the most important. Nor is this process at an end. Current demographic projections forecast a global population of at least nine billion by 2050 — and possibly more. Water in the Anthropocene: Population growth provides a fitting illustration of the rapid pace of change in the modern world. No consequence is more important than what has been done to nature. Humans have so drastically altered the Earth that scientists now question whether we remain in the Holocene, the 12,000-year-old geological epoch during which all of recorded human history has occurred. Instead, increasingly they speak of the Earth as having entered a new epoch, the Anthropocene. The basic idea behind the Anthropocene is that human activity has so thoroughly disrupted the Earth’s core processes (for instance, its nitrogen cycle or sediment flows) that the planet no longer can be said to function according to the familiar rhythms of the Holocene. Human interference in the Earth’s carbon cycle, for example, has changed the planet’s climate and in the process altered rainfall patterns, accelerated glacial melting, increased air and sea temperatures, and much else. Gone is the Holocene’s stable climate; here is the Anthropocene’s unstable one. While there is some debate amongst scientists and others about whether the Anthropocene will lead to a better or worse future, nearly everyone involved in the discussion agrees that the Earth of the future will not resemble its past. From here forward, we face an unfamiliar planet that will throw our assumptions about nearly everything out the window. No resource stands to be more affected by the arrival of the Anthropocene than fresh water. Finite and increasingly scarce in many parts of the world, fresh water remains the most vital single input for everything from food production, energy generation, and manufacturing to human health, social development, and economic modernization. Unlike oil, water has no substitute, making access to it nothing less than a matter of existential importance to every living creature on Earth. Yet despite its monumental role in local and international affairs, water ironically remains completely undervalued, pumped and consumed virtually free of charge across much of the world. We essentially pump water as we breathe oxygen; it is a learned reflex, central to our ability to survive and thrive as a species. Nicknames like “blue gold” and “oil of the 21st century” attest to the value of fresh water and its importance to everyday affairs throughout the world. While every country’s water equation is different, at a global scale the basic problem is that demand for water is soaring while water supplies are being squeezed. On the demand side, the challenge results from an inexorable combination of global economic and population growth combined with water-use inefficiencies. On the supply side, the problem results not just from exhaustion of the world’s stock of fresh water capital, as is happening to groundwater reservoirs nearly everywhere. Fresh water supply is also becoming less predictable as climate change sets in—shifting rainfall and snowfall patterns and increasing evaporation rates are giving us more frequent droughts and floods. The upshot is that the arrival of the Anthropocene foreshadows a world where received wisdom may no longer be a reliable guide to the future. Water insecurity from drought, excessive groundwater extraction, and changed seasonal precipitation patterns is affecting — or soon will affect — regions as diverse as the Middle East, South Asia, the Caribbean, northern China, sub-Saharan Africa, the western United States, and many more. Water Geopolitics: Much as oil shaped the global geopolitics of the 20th century, water has the power to reorder international relations in the current century. The world’s emerging water geopolitics are complicated, as fresh water resources are distributed unevenly across the globe. There are great water powers, blessed with enormous renewable reserves (Brazil, Russia, the United States, Canada, and China round out the top five). But even within these huge countries, water availability is not uniform, with southern Brazil, the western United States, northern China, and other sub-regions facing intense water stress. Far more numerous than the water powers are the water have-nots, a growing list of countries suffering through a perfect storm of rapid population growth, resource depletion, poor governance, economic stagnation, and unsettling climate change impacts, all within the context of chronic aridity. The most water-fragile among them are concentrated in a strategically significant belt stretching from North Africa across the Middle East and Horn of Africa into Central, South, and East Asia. It is in these naturally arid or semi-arid countries where water scarcity has the greatest potential to inflict serious harm. Water stress is best understood as a precursor to conflict. While the environmental security community generally agrees that water disputes rarely leads to interstate violence, the same cannot be said of intrastate conflict. Here, at the subnational level, water disputes and instability can trigger violent conflict, particularly in situations of existing social, political, or economic fragility. Water stress acts as an accelerant, increasing the likelihood of conflict. Moreover, water scarcity-fueled instability can have dangerous security implications for wider geographic regions. Take Syria as an example. Between 2006 and 2010, the country was hit hard by drought, which wiped out rural livelihoods for many and caused significant internal displacement across the country. Internal displacement in turn helped stir up a pot that boiled over into all-out civil war in Syria, eventually spreading to Iraq. Over the last two years, ISIS has viewed water access and control as a primary strategic objective of their campaign, and has commandeered hydroelectric dams, irrigation canals, reservoirs, pipelines, and other water infrastructure to cement territorial gains. Water has played an important role in Yemen’s ongoing collapse. Decades of mismanagement have left the country — one of the world’s most water-scarce nations — with dilapidated water infrastructure, severely depleted groundwater reserves, and high rates of water-use inefficiency. Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, may become the first capital in the modern world to functionally run out of water, possibly as soon as 2025. In Pakistan, meanwhile, runaway population growth and shifting rainfall patterns threaten its water outlook. With a massive population set to nearly double in the next 35 years, Pakistan’s demand on its very limited water resources will intensify in a way that is almost unimaginable. Already, the country is one of the most water scarce on earth. In a nod to water’s importance in shaping the region, many Pakistani militant groups long hostile to India have supplanted protests over Indian control of Kashmir with more specific protests over access to Kashmir’s most valuable resource — water. Other countries join Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Pakistan on the list of nations facing a similar combination of water stress and social and political insecurity. They include conflict-prone countries of geopolitical significance, including Iran, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya, Nigeria, and Somalia. Even more worrisome, global heavyweights such as China, India, and even the United States face uncomfortable futures given mismatches between forecasted demand for water and squeezed sources of supply. While there is no reason to believe that the latter states will suffer from the same forms of insecurity as those countries in the arc of crisis, neither will they be exempted from the blunt realities of a water-stressed world.
