To modify or delete round reports, edit the associated round.
Cites
Entry
Date
0- Broken Interps
Tournament: all | Round: Finals | Opponent: all | Judge: all Interpretation: Debaters may not read new affirmatives without disclosing them on the NDCA wiki at least 30 minutes prior to the round.
If you have any questions about disclosure, feel free to email or message me. I will probably respond quicker if you use Facebook. I disclose all broken positions, but may also read a position from any of my teammate's wikis.
5/7/17
1- Brackets Theory
Tournament: Blake | Round: 6 | Opponent: Valley | Judge: Eric Weine Interpretation – debaters may not bracket cards, or insert any of their own words into a piece of evidence written by another author in brackets.
Misappropriation 2. Evidence Ethics
12/21/16
1- Cap ROB
Tournament: Emory | Round: 3 | Opponent: Kinkaid JY | Judge: Nadia Hussein ROB The Counter-Role of the ballot is to endorse the best political strategy for resisting capitalism in the university–the judge has a unique obligation to act as a critical educator and shift focus of the debate towards resolving capitalism McClaren 5 Peter, Professor at the Graduate School of Education at UCLA, Teaching against global capitalism and the new imperialism: a critical pedagogy, pg. 6-11, 2005) As U.S. imperialism sinks its claws deeper into the rich oil fields of the Middle East, foreign policy pundits in the White House brandish the bragging rights of belonging to the one and only uncontested imperial power of the twenty-first century. In the wake of the recent invasion, occupation, and brutish colonization of Iraq, not to mention Afghanistan and Haiti, there has been an unforgiving yet understandable reluctance on the part of some educators in graduate schools of education and teacher education programs to engage in political and ideological debates over the current social, political, and economic crisis of capitalism (which Marxists claim are dangerously moving us closer to a fatal collision course with capitalism's own internal contradictions). Fewer still have seen fit to inquire into and oppose the baleful erosion of human rights that have been pro- vided by the Constitution. They have justified their inaction in the name of fight- ing a permanent war on terrorism. Under the false pretense of research "objectivity" and "neutrality" many educators are reluctant to take a public stance, let alone rally against the blood-soaked ambitions of the American empire. Protected by the ivory towers of academia, educators routinely resort to a discourse of objectivity and neutrality as a tactic to avoid facing the political and ideological nature of their work (hooks 2004). In some cases, the discourse of neutrality and objectivity allows educators to distance themselves from the larger set of social and political contradictions and antagonisms that are generated by capitalist social relations of production. It also enables them to reduce the risks of having their fellow colleagues criticize them for lacking collegiality. Of course, for tenured professors who sport $120 Tommy Bahama's T-shirls and are waiting for their retirement benefits to kick in, there is little to worry about. But for a number of untenured Marxist educators, who have opened up a new front in university classrooms by teaching against global capitalism and the new imperialism, it has become increasingly dangerous to problematize let alone unmask the relationship between imperialism and education. Within the academy in general, there exists too little genuine discussion or debate over the globalization of poverty, the exploitation of labor in Third World countries, or the Wal-Martization of the American workforce in the domestic frontiers. Given that most universities are now under corporate board-style management, this comes as little surprise. That a significant amount of scholarship churned out of graduate schools of education across the United States continues to operate from within the parameters drawn by capitalist social relations of production is simply restating a truism that holds for most of the academy. But what disturbs us is that this situation equally holds true for much of today's radical and progressive scholarship, which has largely failed to offer a lucid and incisive criticism of capitalism. This is because naming let alone questioning the social, political, cultural, and economic arrangements under capitalism constitutes a form of political intervention and activism that for many educators is simply too risky. Instead, many engage in a form of "soft-radicalism" that scantly scratches the surface of the mechanisms of the dominant ideology. Here, protests reverberate like distant eructations from the bar stools of the local pub. Other colleagues may hide their class and race privileges in an obscure political and ideological dis- course and language that leaves little room for actually addressing the material needs of those in our society who permanently live on the margins and the periphery. Often times, educators divorce political and ideological questions from pedagogical questions and reduce pedagogy to a congerie of prescribed methods and techniques that sacrifice theory and reflection at the altar of the high priests and prophets of practice. Here we are referring to those self- proclaimed practitioners who advocate concrete applications of teaching and learning over theory and self-reflection. We do not deny the importance of practice. In fact, we believe that theory must serve practice, and vice versa, for questions raised in practice must be answered by theory, which underscores the dialectical relationship between theory and practice. However, the theoretical and the practical dimensions of pedagogy can never be reduced to each another. This is because they exist in dialectical tension. In the absence of a theoretical understanding of the world, or a conceptual framework where we can reflect upon our experiences, or a discourse that enables us to examine our positionalities, or an opportunity to explore and rethink the ways in which we interact and relate to the world, practical tools and applications of pedagogy work only to reproduce and maintain capitalist social relations of production. In many instances, teacher education programs have failed to engage students in dialogues about class exploitation and oppression. Oftentimes, class power is sanitized and its powerful effect on the life chances of working-class students is denuded or made invisible. As Paul Lauter (1998) has cogently expressed: Class... remains that unaddressed member of that now-famous trio "race, gender, class." Over the last two decades, there has been far more widespread acknowledgment of and open discussion of race and gender in the classroom, while class has generally remained the silenced subject. In fact, in classrooms, people have seemed afraid to talk about class. They often don't know how to acknowledge economic difference and economic privilege—with their entourage of conflicting social and cultural forms. Regrettably, many progressive teacher education programs too often divorce the causes of cultural, racial, and gender oppression from class oppression. As a result, the struggle for social justice oftentimes is reduced to a truncated and dogmatically fatalist strategy of attrition that fails, in the main, to challenge and expose the mechanisms responsible for reproducing capitalist hegemony. In fact, such programs serve as a recipe for inaction. Educators in our view need to shoulder the courage to question and to problematize the intensification of class antagonisms, the reproduction of the sexual division of labor, and the stubborn persistence of institutional racism that nourishes the ever-decaying roots of capitalism in its latest metabolic stage, namely, the new imperialism. As educators, we need to take the moral and ethical responsibility to question why the United States, as the wealthiest nation on the planet, continues to have the highest child poverty rate among Western industrialized countries. We need to question why 34.6 million Americans are living in poverty. We need to question why 43.6 million Amer- icans are lacking any access to health insurance. And why is the combined in- come of the three wealthiest individuals on the planet equal to the combined national income of the poorest forty-nine countries? A historical comparison by Mathew Fox may shed some light on the issues. Fox (2004) notes that "in the 1960s, the overall income of the richest 20 percent of the world's population was thirty times that of the poorest 20 percent. Today, it is 224 times larger! In the 1960s, the richest 20 percent held 70 percent of the world's revenues; in 1999 it was 85 percent"(42). Those of us who teach in graduate schools of education, and whose work is informed and guided by the principles of critical pedagogy, feel a sense of urgency in drawing attention to the growing class inequalities. Take for example, access to higher education, which now more than ever is beyond the reach of working-class high school graduates. In a recent issue of BusinessWeek, Jessi Hempel (2004) notes that in a study of the country's top 146 colleges and universities, only 3 percent of the student body came from families in the bottom quarter of wage earners. A more disturbing trend is the growing number of entering freshman who are from families earning $100,000 or more. Hemple writes that in the nation's top forty-two state universities, the number of entering fresh- man in this category jumped from 32 percent to 40 percent in less than five years. unions. Finally, critical pedagogy needs to be a creative process by integrating elements of popular culture (i.e., drama, music, oral history, narratives) as educational tools that can successfully raise the level of political conscious- ness of students and teachers. In our view, critical pedagogy must be animated by a passionate and critical-minded optimism. In the chapters that follow, we attempt to expand on this approach to pedagogy as a means of challenging current social relations of production and incarnations of imperialism worldwide. That outweighs—capitalism is the root cause of gendered and racialized oppression and makes mass violence and extermination inevitable Peter Mclaren 4, Education and Urban Schooling Division prof, UCLA—and Valerie Scatamburlo-D'Annibale; University of Windsor, Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 36, No. 2, 2004, www.freireproject.org/articles/node2065/RCGS/class_dismissed-val-peter.10.pdf For example, E. San Juan (2003) argues that race relations and race conflict are necessarily structured by the larger totality of the political economy of a given society, as well as by modifications in the structure of the world economy. He further notes that the capitalist mode of production has articulated ‘race’ with class in a peculiar way. He too is worth a substantial quotation: While the stagnation of rural life imposed a racial or castelike rigidity to the peasantry, the rapid accumulation of wealth through the ever more intensifying exploitation of labor by capital could not so easily ‘racialize’ the wage-workers of a particular nation, given the alienability of labor power—unless certain physical or cultural characteristics can be utilized to divide the workers or render one group an outcast or pariah removed from the domain of ‘free labor.’ In the capitalist development of U.S. society, African, Mexican, and Asian bodies—more precisely, their labor power and its reproductive efficacy—were colonized and racialized; hence the idea of ‘internal colonialism’ retains explanatory validity. ‘Race’ is thus constructed out of raw materials furnished by class relations, the history of class conflicts, and the vicissitudes of colonial/capitalist expansion and the building of imperial hegemony. It is dialectically accented and operationalized not just to differentiate the price of wage labor within and outside the territory of the metropolitan power, but also to reproduce relations of domination–subordination invested with an aura of naturality and fatality. The refunctioning of physical or cultural traits as ideological and political signifiers of class identity reifies social relations. Such ‘racial’ markers enter the field of the alienated laborprocess, concealing the artificial nature of meanings and norms, and essentializing or naturalizing historical traditions and values which are contingent on mutable circumstances. For San Juan, racism and nationalism are modalities in which class struggles articulate themselves at strategic points in history. He argues that racism arose with the creation and expansion of the capitalist world economy. He maintains, rightly in our view, that racial or ethnic group solidarity is given ‘meaning and value in terms of their place within the social organization of production and reproduction of the ideological-political order; ideologies of racism as collective social evaluation of solidarities arise to reinforce structural constraints which preserve the exploited and oppressed position of these “racial” solidarities’. It is remarkable, in our opinion, that so much of contemporary social theory has largely abandoned the problems of labor, capitalist exploitation, and class analysis at a time when capitalism is becoming more universal, more ruthless and more deadly. The metaphor of a contemporary ‘tower of Babel’ seems appropriate here—academics striking radical poses in the seminar rooms while remaining oblivious to the possibility that their seemingly radical discursive maneuvers do nothing to further the struggles ‘against oppression and exploitation which continue to be real, material, and not merely “discursive” problems of the contemporary world’ (Dirlik, 1997, p. 176). Harvey (1998, pp. 29–31) indicts the new academic entrepreneurs, the ‘masters of theory-in-and-for-itself’ whose ‘discourse radicalism’ has deftly side-stepped ‘the enduring conundrums of class struggle’ and who have, against a ‘sobering background of cheapened discourse and opportunistic politics,’ been ‘stripped of their self-advertised radicalism.’ For years, they ‘contested socialism,’ ridiculed Marxists, and promoted ‘their own alternative theories of liberatory politics’ but now they have largely been ‘reduced to the role of supplicants in the most degraded form of pluralist politics imaginable.’ As they pursue the politics of difference, the ‘class war rages unabated’ and they seem ‘either unwilling or unable to focus on the unprecedented economic carnage occurring around the globe.’ Harvey’s searing criticism suggests that post-Marxists have been busy fiddling while Rome burns and his comments echo those made by Marx (1978, p. 149) in his critique of the Young Hegelians who were, ‘in spite of their allegedly “worldshattering” statements, the staunchest conservatives.’ Marx lamented that the Young Hegelians were simply fighting ‘phrases’ and that they failed to acknowledge that in offering only counter-phrases, they were in no way ‘combating the real existing world’ but merely combating the phrases of the world. Taking a cue from Marx and substituting ‘phrases’ with ‘discourses’ or ‘resignifications’ we would contend that the practitioners of difference politics who operate within exaggerated culturalist frameworks that privilege the realm of representation as the primary arena of political struggle question some discourses of power while legitimating others. Moreover, because they lack a class perspective, their gestures of radicalism are belied by their own class positions.10 As Ahmad (1997a, p. 104) notes: One may speak of any number of disorientations and even oppressions, but one cultivates all kinds of politeness and indirection about the structure of capitalist class relations in which those oppressions are embedded. To speak of any of that directly and simply is to be ‘vulgar.’ In this climate of Aesopian languages it is absolutely essential to reiterate that most things are a matter of class. That kind of statement is … surprising only in a culture like that of the North American university … But it is precisely in that kind of culture that people need to hear such obvious truths. Ahmad’s provocative observations imply that substantive analyses of the carnage wrought by ‘globalized’ class exploitation have, for the most part, been marginalized by the kind of radicalism that has been instituted among the academic Left in North America. He further suggests that while various post-Marxists have invited us to join their euphoric celebrations honoring the decentering of capitalism, the abandonment of class politics, and the decline of metanarratives (particularly those of Marxism and socialism), they have failed to see that the most ‘meta of all metanarratives of the past three centuries, the creeping annexation of the globe for the dominance of capital over laboring humanity has met, during those same decades, with stunning success’ (Ahmad, 1997b, p. 364). As such, Ahmad invites us to ask anew, the proverbial question: What, then, must be done? To this question we offer no simple theoretical, pedagogical or political prescriptions. Yet we would argue that if social change is the aim, progressive educators and theorists must cease displacing class analysis with the politics of difference. Conclusion … we will take our stand against the evils of capitalism, imperialism, and racism with a solidarity derived from a proletarian internationalism born of socialist idealism. —National Office of the Black Panther Party, February 1970 For well over two decades we have witnessed the jubilant liberal and conservative pronouncements of the demise of socialism. Concomitantly, history’s presumed failure to defang existing capitalist relations has been read by many self-identified ‘radicals’ as an advertisement for capitalism’s inevitability. As a result, the chorus refrain ‘There Is No Alternative’, sung by liberals and conservatives, has been buttressed by the symphony of post-Marxist voices recommending that we give socialism a decent burial and move on. Within this context, to speak of the promise of Marx and socialism may appear anachronistic, even naïve, especially since the post-al intellectual vanguard has presumably demonstrated the folly of doing so. Yet we stubbornly believe that the chants of T.I.N.A. must be combated for they offer as a fait accompli, something which progressive Leftists should refuse to accept—namely the triumph of capitalism and its political bedfellow neo-liberalism, which have worked together to naturalize suffering, undermine collective struggle, and obliterate hope. We concur with Amin (1998), who claims that such chants must be defied and revealed as absurd and criminal, and who puts the challenge we face in no uncertain terms: humanity may let itself be led by capitalism’s logic to a fate of collective suicide or it may pave the way for an alternative humanist project of global socialism. The grosteque conditions that inspired Marx to pen his original critique of capitalism are present and flourishing. The inequalities of wealth and the gross imbalances of power that exist today are leading to abuses that exceed those encountered in Marx’s day (Greider, 1998, p. 39). Global capitalism has paved the way for the obscene concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands and created a world increasingly divided between those who enjoy opulent affluence and those who languish in dehumanizing conditions and economic misery. In every corner of the globe, we are witnessing social disintegration as revealed by a rise in abject poverty and inequality. At the current historical juncture, the combined assets of the 225 richest people is roughly equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 percent of the world’s population, while the combined assets of the three richest people exceed the combined GDP of the 48 poorest nations (CCPA, 2002, p. 3). Approximately 2.8 billion people—almost half of the world’s population—struggle in desperation to live on less than two dollars a day (McQuaig, 2001, p. 27). As many as 250 million children are wage slaves and there are over a billion workers who are either un- or under-employed. These are the concrete realities of our time—realities that require a vigorous class analysis, an unrelenting critique of capitalism and an oppositional politics capable of confronting what Ahmad (1998, p. 2) refers to as ‘capitalist universality.’ They are realities that require something more than that which is offered by the prophets of ‘difference’ and post-Marxists who would have us relegate socialism to the scrapheap of history and mummify Marxism along with Lenin’s corpse. Never before has a Marxian analysis of capitalism and class rule been so desperately needed. That is not to say that everything Marx said or anticipated has come true, for that is clearly not the case. Many critiques of Marx focus on his strategy for moving toward socialism, and with ample justification; nonetheless Marx did provide us with fundamental insights into class society that have held true to this day. Marx’s enduring relevance lies in his indictment of capitalism which continues to wreak havoc in the lives of most. While capitalism’s cheerleaders have attempted to hide its sordid underbelly, Marx’s description of capitalism as the sorcerer’s dark power is even more apt in light of contemporary historical and economic conditions. Rather than jettisoning Marx, decentering the role of capitalism, and discrediting class analysis, radical educators must continue to engage Marx’s oeuvre and extrapolate from it that which is useful pedagogically, theoretically, and, most importantly, politically in light of the challenges that confront us.
3/6/17
1- Framework
Tournament: Harvard | Round: 5 | Opponent: Bronx JJ | Judge: Heaven Montague The role of the ballot is to assess the desirability of a topical, post-fiat policy option about banning speech codes on college campuses
They violate
Vote neg—
Procedural fairness—Analytic Fairness is a voter and outweighs—when non-topical debates kill competitive equity, they undermine respect for debate participants Galloway 7 Ryan Galloway 7, Samford Comm prof, Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28, 2007
Debate as a dialogue sets an argumentative table, where all parties receive a relatively fair opportunity to voice their position. Anything that fails to allow participants to have their position articulated denies one side of the argumentative table a fair hearing. The affirmative side is set by the topic and fairness requirements. While affirmative teams have recently resisted affirming the topic, in fact, the topic selection process is rigorous, taking the relative ground of each topic as its central point of departure.¶ Setting the affirmative reciprocally sets the negative. The negative crafts approaches to the topic consistent with affirmative demands. The negative crafts disadvantages, counter-plans, and critical arguments premised on the arguments that the topic allows for the affirmative team. According to fairness norms, each side sits at a relatively balanced argumentative table.¶ When one side takes more than its share, competitive equity suffers. However, it also undermines the respect due to the other involved in the dialogue. When one side excludes the other, it fundamentally denies the personhood of the other participant (Ehninger, 1970, p. 110). A pedagogy of debate as dialogue takes this respect as a fundamental component. A desire to be fair is a fundamental condition of a dialogue that takes the form of a demand for equality of voice. Far from being a banal request for links to a disadvantage, fairness is a demand for respect, a demand to be heard, a demand that a voice backed by literally months upon months of preparation, research, and critical thinking not be silenced.¶ Affirmative cases that suspend basic fairness norms operate to exclude particular negative strategies. Unprepared, one side comes to the argumentative table unable to meaningfully participate in a dialogue. They are unable to “understand what ‘went on…’” and are left to the whims of time and power (Farrell, 1985, p. 114).
Analytic
2. jurisdiction – Analytic
3. Switch-side debate.
Analytic Switch side debate is key to an ethical society built on tolerance and pluralism O’Donnell et al 9 Timothy O’Donnell (University of Mary Washington), Neil Butt (Wayne State University), Stefan Bauschard (Lakeland School District, New York), Joseph Bellon (Georgia State University), Warren Decker (George Mason University), John Katsulas (Boston College), William Keith (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), James Lyle (Clarion University), Danielle Verney O’Gorman (US Naval Academy), and Joseph Packer (University of Pittsburgh). “A Rationale for Intercollegiate Debate in the Twenty-first Century.” Navigating Opportunity: Policy Debate in the 21st Century, ed. Allan Louden. Wake Forest National Debate Conference, 2009, pg. 44. IDebate Press.
There is a far stronger case to be made that participation in switch-side debating teachers students to form a sound ethical foundation. For example, Star Muir argues that “firm moral commitments to a value system” are “founded in reflexive assessments of multiple perspectives” (1993, 291). By forcing students to defend both sides of an argument, switch-side debating cultivates a “healthy ethic of tolerance and pluralism” and leads students to appreciate the validity of opposing belief systems, while “instilling responsible and critical skepticism toward dominant systems” (Harrigan 2008, 37). This process of debate and self-reflection over time produces a more ethical belief system because it is grounded in critical thought. Nurturing debate about alternative viewpoints and trying on others’ ideas through simulated and situational argument is the essence of a free society and the basis for an ethical society.
Our kind of pluralism and democracy doesn’t exclude identity or alternate style – it’s style-neutral. Any other conception of argumentation crowds out the potential for mutual dialogue which reifies disableism Amanda Anderson 6, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English at Brown University, Spring 2006, “Reply to My Critic(s),” Criticism, Vol. 48, No. 2, p. 281-290 MY RECENT BOOK, The Way We Argue Now, has in a sense two theses. In the first place, the book makes the case for the importance of debate and argument to any vital democratic or pluralistic intellectual culture. This is in many ways an unexceptional position, but the premise of the book is that the claims of reasoned argument are often trumped, within the current intellectual terrain, by appeals to cultural identity and what I gather more broadly under the rubric of ethos, which includes cultural identity but also forms of ethical piety and charismatic authority. In promoting argument as a universal practice keyed to a human capacity for communicative reason, my book is a critique of relativism and identity politics, or the notion that forms of cultural authenticity or group identity have a certain unquestioned legitimacy, one that cannot or should not be subjected to the challenges of reason or principle, precisely because reason and what is often called "false universalism" are, according to this pattern of thinking, always involved in forms of exclusion, power, or domination. My book insists, by contrast, that argument is a form of respect, that the ideals of democracy, whether conceived from a nationalist or an internationalist perspective, rely fundamentally upon procedures of argumentation and debate in order to legitimate themselves and to keep their central institutions vital. And the idea that one should be protected from debate, that argument is somehow injurious to persons if it does not honor their desire to have their basic beliefs and claims and solidarities accepted without challenge, is strenuously opposed. As is the notion that any attempt to ask people to agree upon processes of reason-giving argument is somehow necessarily to impose a coercive norm, one that will discourage the free expression and performance of identities, feelings, or solidarities. Disagreement is, by the terms of my book, a form of respect, not a form of disrespect. And by disagreement, I don't mean simply to say that we should expect disagreement rather than agreement, which is a frequently voiced-if misconceived-criticism of Habermas. Of course we should expect disagreement. My point is that we should focus on the moment of dissatisfaction in the face of disagreement-the internal dynamic in argument that imagines argument might be the beginning of a process of persuasion and exchange that could end in agreement (or partial agreement). For those who advocate reconciling ourselves to disagreements rather than arguing them out, by contrast, there is a complacent-and in some versions, even celebratory-attitude toward fixed disagreement. Refusing these options, I make the case for dissatisfied disagreement in the final chapter of the book and argue that people should be willing to justify their positions in dialogue with one another, especially if they hope to live together in a post-traditional pluralist society.
4. Limits—specific topics are key to reasonable expectations for 1ncs. Open subjects create incentives for avoidance and monopolization of moral high ground—that denies a role for the neg and turns accessibility. Abandoning topical debate creates an impossible prep burden that materially affects our lives outside of round Harris 13 Scott Harris (Director of Debate at U Kansas, 2006 National Debate Coach of the Year, Vice President of the American Forensic Association, 2nd speaker at the NDT in 1981). “This ballot.” 5 April 2013. CEDA Forums. http://www.cedadebate.org/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=4762.0;attach=1655
I understand that there has been some criticism of Northwestern’s strategy in this debate round. This criticism is premised on the idea that they ran framework instead of engaging Emporia’s argument about home and the Wiz. I think this criticism is unfair. Northwestern’s framework argument did engage Emporia’s argument. Emporia said that you should vote for the team that performatively and methodologically made debate a home. Northwestern’s argument directly clashed with that contention. My problem in this debate was with aspects of the execution of the argument rather than with the strategy itself. It has always made me angry in debates when people have treated topicality as if it were a less important argument than other arguments in debate. Topicality is a real argument. It is a researched strategy. It is an argument that challenges many affirmatives. The fact that other arguments could be run in a debate or are run in a debate does not make topicality somehow a less important argument. In reality, for many of you that go on to law school you will spend much of your life running topicality arguments because you will find that words in the law matter. The rest of us will experience the ways that word choices matter in contracts, in leases, in writing laws and in many aspects of our lives. Kansas ran an affirmative a few years ago about how the location of a comma in a law led a couple of districts to misinterpret the law into allowing individuals to be incarcerated in jail for two days without having any formal charges filed against them. For those individuals the location of the comma in the law had major consequences. Debates about words are not insignificant. Debates about what kinds of arguments we should or should not be making in debates are not insignificant either. The limits debate is an argument that has real pragmatic consequences. I found myself earlier this year judging Harvard’s eco-pedagogy aff and thought to myself—I could stay up tonight and put a strategy together on eco-pedagogy, but then I thought to myself—why should I have to? Yes, I could put together a strategy against any random argument somebody makes employing an energy metaphor but the reality is there are only so many nights to stay up all night researching. I would like to actually spend time playing catch with my children occasionally or maybe even read a book or go to a movie or spend some time with my wife. A world where there are an infinite number of affirmatives is a world where the demand to have a specific strategy and not run framework is a world that says this community doesn’t care whether its participants have a life or do well in school or spend time with their families. I know there is a new call abounding for interpreting this NDT as a mandate for broader more diverse topics. The reality is that will create more work to prepare for the teams that choose to debate the topic but will have little to no effect on the teams that refuse to debate the topic. Broader topics that do not require positive government action or are bidirectional will not make teams that won’t debate the topic choose to debate the topic. I think that is a con job. I am not opposed to broader topics necessarily. I tend to like the way high school topics are written more than the way college topics are written. I just think people who take the meaning of the outcome of this NDT as proof that we need to make it so people get to talk about anything they want to talk about without having to debate against Topicality or framework arguments are interested in constructing a world that might make debate an unending nightmare and not a very good home in which to live. Limits, to me, are a real impact because I feel their impact in my everyday existence. Limits turn solvency. Research shows that research overload leads to superficial education, meaning we won’t learn about the aff or anything else. Chokshi 10 Niraj Chokshi is a former staff editor at TheAtlantic.com, where he wrote about technology. He is currently freelancing How Do We Stop the Internet From Making Us Stupid? JUN 8 2010 http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/06/how-do-we-stop-the-internet-from-making-us-stupid/57796/ BK When it comes to focus, turning on the spotlight may not matter as much as our ability to dim the ambient light. Nicholas Carr argued on Saturday in The Wall Street Journal that the Internet is making us dumber and on Monday The New York Times had a front-page feature on the mental price we pay for our multi-tasked lifestyles. If we are indeed losing our ability to think deeply, the key to fighting back may lie in a subtlety: focus may be more about our ability to filter out distractions than our ability to home in on the issue at hand. Carr posed his idea that technology is making us stupid in a 2008 Atlantic cover story and his forthcoming book "The Shallows" is a longer rumination on the theory. According to professors and research cited in The Times piece "the idea that information overload causes distraction was supported by more and more research." And those distractions, according to research Carr cites, are forcing us to change the way we think. Deep thought is losing ground to superficiality. So, if our multitasking lifestyle causes distraction, and distraction leads to superficial thinking, how do we fight back? Carr offers some advice:
Topical version—Analytic As long as ableism is separated from public policy analysis, there’s no chance of solvency Watson 93: Watson, The Pew State Policy Initiatives Senior Officer, 93 (Sara D., Winter 1993, Policy Studies Journal, “Introduction: Disability Policy as an Emerging Field of Mainstream Public Policy Research and Pedagogy,” vol. 21(4), Chadwyk Periodicals Archive Online, p. 722, bs) Because of this separation between people knowledgeable about disability issues and those knowledgeable about public policy theory, the field of public policy has missed the incredibly rich and varied lessons that decisions in disability policy can teach. And the field of disability policy has missed the benefit of experiences learned in other programs. The quandaries faced by people designing disability programs or mobilizing the disability constituency are not unique. For example, the voucher concept so controversial in education is also being considered for the publicly-funded rehabilitation system. While the underlying rationale is the same—the public system does not meet everyone's needs and there is curiosity about whether a private, market-driven system would produce better results—other circumstances put a different slant on the debate. As another example, the debate over whether immigrant children should be taught only in English is in some ways similar to the debate over whether deaf children should be taught sign language, oral speech, or some combination of the two. In both situations, a key question is whether the minority population should be forced to learn the language of the majority, or whether the majority should be expected to accommodate the needs of the minority. Other examples explored in this two-part symposium include the following: Jean Campbell (in the second part) explores the unintended consequences of public policy. In this case, her subject is people with mental illnesses under the ADA, but the lessons could apply to a variety of situations. Jean Flatley McGuire (in the second pan) explores an issue familiar to many involved in social movement politics: holding together a diverse coalition in order to pass controversial legislation. In an article that challenges conventional wisdom on media and public policy, Joseph Shapiro (in the second part) talks about the disability movement's disdain for media coverage as a tool for achieving their goals. Interestingly, this strategy bears some similarity to the new media strategy demonstrated in the 1992 presidential election. Issues of resource allocation and consumer control all have permeated past programs, particularly in the welfare system. Margaret Nosek and Carol How land's paper in this part illustrates this question for the personal assistance services program. All the issues relevant to other minority populations in the United States are relevant for people with disabilities; for example, the rise and progress of the civil rights movement. Recognizing the problems faced by older civil rights movements and applicable public programs can help the disability movement avoid them. My paper in this pan explores the similarities between the women's movement and the disability movement and examines how they illustrate the new policymaking philosophy of the Clinton administration. As Frank Bowe points out in this pan, telecommunications policy for people with disabilities illustrates the constant question in public policy of user fees—should a party using a service bear the extra cost, or should it be distributed among a larger group? The next step in the evolution of disability policy must be a conscious cross-fertilization among disability scholars and public policy experts; to that end, we include wonderfully specific papers by Gerben DeJong and Daniel M Fox (both in the second part) on building this capacity. This cursory description illustrates the vast potential of this field to inform other public policy debates, and vice-versa. It is our hope that the papers in this symposium will be used not only in research and curriculum on disability policy, but also in research and pedagogy that explore the larger issues in the public policy discipline.
Focus on institutional change is empirically successful for persons with disabilities DSQ 3 writes The history of the efforts of the disability rights movement on behalf of legislation which would facilitate the attainment of its twin goals of the inclusion and empowerment of persons with disabilities can be said to begin in the 1950s. Specifically, it can be traced (Varela 1983: 35) to the "paralyzed veterans . . . fighting for more parking spaces, and for more accessible commodes . . ." and to the fight by people with disabilities "for local and state accessibility laws throughout the 1950s." The first significant federal legislation advancing the goals of the movement came in 1965 with the creation of the National Commission on Architectural Barriers to the Rehabilitation of the Handicapped. The Commission was to "study the problems involved in making all federal buildings accessible to disabled citizens" (Varela 1983: 36). However, the import of the work of the Commission on such problems is not limited to problems of access. As Varela (1983: 36) observes, "the work of the Commission, and, more importantly, of disabled activists . . . changed attitudes toward disability . . . ." The change was from "an emphasis on services (that is, on doing something about 'those people')" to "an emphasis on civil rights (that is, the notion that once certain obstacles were removed, disabled people would be able to do a lot more for themselves than society had imagined)" (Varela 1983: 36). In short, efforts to include those with disabilities became efforts to empower them as well. Moreover, the notion that environmental obstacles and not just the impairment of individuals were worthy of attention rendered it plausible to seek the enactment of laws and regulations that would do so. In other words, "environmental variables, unlike individual characteristics can be rectified through legislative and administrative action" (DeJong 1983: 25). In 1968, the Architectural Barriers Act was passed. It stipulated that any facility built with or merely receiving federal funds had to be accessible to all. However, enforcement was minimal (Varela 1983: 36). Fortunately, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, in a provision welcomed by the disability right movement, established the Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board (AandTBCB) to investigate and enforce compliance with established standards. Unfortunately, it "never received the funding it needed to enforce the law or even to investigate all . . . violations . . . reported by disabled consumers" (Varela 1983: 37). Nevertheless, the fight for accessibility did advance the cause of the disability rights movement. It helped make it clear that barriers included "social, political and intellectual obstacles, as well as physical ones" (Varela 1983: 37). Moreover, the 1973 Rehabilitation Act contained provisions in addition to the establishment of the AandTBCB which were important to the movement (Varela 1983: 40-41). It required the establishment, by state rehabilitation agencies, of selection methods that would ensure that people with severe impairments were not excluded from the agency's programs. In effect, then, the Act made it clear that no impairment, no matter how severe, was to be allowed as a consequences of a state agency's denial of services to become a disability. In addition, the 1973 act included provisions for client rights and for civil rights. Specifically, Section 504 prohibited discrimination against persons with so-called disabilities by any federally supported program. Thus, Section 504 was important to persons with so- called disabilities "who were looking for jobs . . . who wanted to use the same clinic as everyone else, who wanted the same choice of apartments, and who wanted to get into the polling places on election day" (Varela 1983: 42), who wanted simply to be an autonomous, contributing member of society. The next step in the history of legislation to empower and include people with impairments was the passage of Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA, originally called the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, P. L. 94-142). IDEA set "forth a comprehensive scheme" to ensure "two basic substantive rights of eligible children with disabilities . . . ." These were: "(1) the right to a free appropriate public education, and (2) the right to that education in the least restrictive environment" (National Council on Disability 2000: 28). The law applied in every state that receives federal funds under IDEA and to all public agencies authorized to provide special education and related services in a state that receives such funds. The Act was amended and reauthorized in 1997 (NCD 2000 30-31). In 1978, the Rehabilitation, Comprehensive Services and Developmental Disabilities Amendments (P. L. 95-602) of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act were passed. The amendments evinced Congress' endorsement of the autonomy premise of the social model described above. That is, the Amendments acknowledged that persons with disabilities should be involved in forming the policies and practices which affect their lives. Specifically, it mandated that a grant for an independent living center "provide assurances that handicapped individuals be substantially involved in the policy direction and management of such center, and will be employed by such center" (P. L.. 95-602 as quoted by Varela 1983: 46). Many, if not most, however, view the enactment of the Americans with Disability Act (ADA) in 1990 as the crowning achievement of the disability rights movement. That act (P. L. 101-336) extended provisions of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the 1978 amendments well beyond the earlier application to federally supported programs and the state rehabilitation agencies and of the IDEA to special education. Indeed, it "codified into law important principles that would henceforth govern the relationship between American society and its citizens with disabilities . . . and altered public discourse about disability and about the role of people with disabilities in American society" (National Council on Disability 1997b: 4-5). It did so, first, by, in effect, making the marginalization, the exclusion of people with impairments from the mainstream of society in the United States, illegitimate. Specifically, it declared that "people with disabilities are an integral part of society and, as such, should not be segregated, isolated, or subjected to the effects of discrimination" (National Council on Disability 1997b: 4). Furthermore, it sought to enable "people with disabilities to take charge of their lives . . . by fostering employment opportunities, facilitating access to public transportation and public accommodation, and ensuring the use of our nation's communication system" (National Council on Disability 1997b: 4). Moreover, the principles of the ADA can serve as a basis to test and challenge public policies and practices not consistent with those principles and even to demand they be changed. The ADA, then, "upholds the principle that each individual has the potential, and deserves, the right to participate in, and contribute to, society" (National Council on Disability 1997b: 5).
2/20/17
1- K- Cap Ableism
Tournament: Harvard | Round: 5 | Opponent: Bronx JJ | Judge: Heaven Montague The aff’s focus on survival strategies reflects the Achilles heel of identity politics—its individualistic focus precludes collective action to change larger structures—only a method grounded in class struggle can achieve change, both for the working class and persons with disabilities Batalo 13 Klas Batalo. “What Wears us Down: Dual Consciousness and Disability At Work.” Libcom.org. June 20th, 2013. https://libcom.org/library/what-wears-us-down-dual-consciousness-disability-work
Without minimizing the importance of this work, we would like to offer up a few critiques. One is that identity politics tends to rely very heavily on individual identity. Because disability is a somewhat flexible identity, this has at times contributed to arguments such as “we are all disabled” or “we all will be disabled someday” as reasons to be involved in these struggles. Our concern in this regard is that opening up a massive spectrum of disability may serve to obscure the realities faced by people most severely affected by disableism, possibly reinforcing the structures that we seek to undermine. Another political argument is the one we put forward in this article: that able bodied working class people also have a stake in this, not because we may be disabled or we may become disabled someday, but because disability is a fundamental part of class structure. Another critique is that the direction that comes from identity politics is the focus on accessibility at activist events. While this is an important thing to do and the exclusion of disabled people from activist events is a real and serious issue, it is a limited project. While our own events and meetings may be a sensible starting point, a great deal of this type of activism tends to stop here, caught up in perfecting accessibility practice. In order to effect real change, we must not neglect our internal practices - but we also must not let them become a barrier to action in mass struggles. Lastly, identity politics frames the fight against disability in terms of individual transformations, rather than collective change. Identity politics teaches us that with workshops and trainings we can become more self-aware of our privilege and become better allies. This is really a form of liberalism – the notion that we can change the world one individual at a time. It doesn’t take into account that able-bodied privilege and disableism are social processes and must be struggled against as a collective process on all of our actions and ideas. It is not enough to change the individual’s ideology; we need to participate in projects that seek to undermine the material basis (wage-labour, housing, etc.) that produce able-bodied privilege and disableism. Class struggle anarchists, as a tradition, have done little with disability politics, either internally or in mass work. This is in part due to our conceptions of class and class struggle, which too often focus entirely on workers and the workplace, and don’t take proper account of the community and of reproductive labour. Even within workplace organizing, our focus tends to be similar to that of mainstream unions - wages and benefits, and often throwing our support behind strikes initiated by unions. Tackling issues like dual consciousness and disability requires a different approach, one that gets to the heart of how we conceive of ourselves as working people. We need to develop strategies on the job, using anarchist principles such as direct action and mutual aid, to address issues that could never be written into even the best collective agreement. It is our hope that this piece expresses a class struggle approach to oppression that is not an either-or choice between class and identity. Class and social oppressions such as disableism are linked, and can - and must, in order to be effective - be holistically addressed. While we critique identity politics for being too inwardly focused, we must also not ignore prefigurative politics in our own organizations. Rather, we should challenge ourselves to apply principles such as mutual aid and collective responsibility to tackle disableism in our organizations and in our mass work.
Rejecting capitalism should be the starting point for challenging disableism—it’s a sequencing question—no perms because the alt has to happen first Saczkowski 11 Thomas, Graduate Progam in Critical Disability Studies, York U, Aug, "NARRATIVES OF VIOLENCE: THE RELATIONSHIP OF MASCULINITY AND ABLEISM," www.academia.edu/1062128/Narratives_of_Violence_The_Relationship_of_Masculinity_and_Ableism
In analyzing the relationship between patriarchal masculinity and politicaleconomy, Mohanty (2003) argues that we need to rethink how these two influence eachother so as to secure and maximize patriarchy. If we focus on these relations then we will further understand the dynamics of systemic violence and state oppression as aninterlocking web of social oppressions, and we can better resist these forces. I focus on the relationship between capitalism, class relations and disableism in order to further understand the intersection of these oppressive ideologies and structures. First, I will present some of the Marxist-feminist literature on the relationship between masculinityand capitalism. I will not be focusing on the relationship between masculinity and class,although this has a significant impact on the dominant hybrid bloc of masculinity indifferent spaces. I will argue that capitalism is organized to necessarily reject people with disabilities based on productivity and capital accumulation, which reifies the ideology of ableism and has consequences on how people with disabilities are viewed in terms of class. I am defining class as being constituted by the relations of production and ownership of property that has implications on how people are treated and perceivedwithin a specific society (Bannerji et al., 2001) To give a specific example, the working class is constituted as a class by the fact that, unlike the bourgeoisie, it does not control a great deal of property or wealth (Engels, 2007). To explain how ableism and other formsof social oppressions are created and perpetuated by capitalism, it is necessary to think about the essence of capitalist relations. By initially describing these roots we can then see how social structures are organized and how the economic and social structures of capitalism perpetuate hegemonic ideologies that permeate interpersonal relations(Mohanty, 2003).
The alternative is a socialist pedagogy which engages in oppositional politics toward capitalist universality—your ballot has to center around class politics---capitalism is the root cause of oppression and makes mass violence and extermination inevitable Peter Mclaren 4, Education and Urban Schooling Division prof, UCLA—and Valerie Scatamburlo-D'Annibale; University of Windsor, Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 36, No. 2, 2004, www.freireproject.org/articles/node2065/RCGS/class_dismissed-val-peter.10.pdf For example, E. San Juan (2003) argues that race relations and race conflict are necessarily structured by the larger totality of the political economy of a given society, as well as by modifications in the structure of the world economy. He further notes that the capitalist mode of production has articulated ‘race’ with class in a peculiar way. He too is worth a substantial quotation: While the stagnation of rural life imposed a racial or castelike rigidity to the peasantry, the rapid accumulation of wealth through the ever more intensifying exploitation of labor by capital could not so easily ‘racialize’ the wage-workers of a particular nation, given the alienability of labor power—unless certain physical or cultural characteristics can be utilized to divide the workers or render one group an outcast or pariah removed from the domain of ‘free labor.’ In the capitalist development of U.S. society, African, Mexican, and Asian bodies—more precisely, their labor power and its reproductive efficacy—were colonized and racialized; hence the idea of ‘internal colonialism’ retains explanatory validity. ‘Race’ is thus constructed out of raw materials furnished by class relations, the history of class conflicts, and the vicissitudes of colonial/capitalist expansion and the building of imperial hegemony. It is dialectically accented and operationalized not just to differentiate the price of wage labor within and outside the territory of the metropolitan power, but also to reproduce relations of domination–subordination invested with an aura of naturality and fatality. The refunctioning of physical or cultural traits as ideological and political signifiers of class identity reifies social relations. Such ‘racial’ markers enter the field of the alienated laborprocess, concealing the artificial nature of meanings and norms, and essentializing or naturalizing historical traditions and values which are contingent on mutable circumstances. For San Juan, racism and nationalism are modalities in which class struggles articulate themselves at strategic points in history. He argues that racism arose with the creation and expansion of the capitalist world economy. He maintains, rightly in our view, that racial or ethnic group solidarity is given ‘meaning and value in terms of their place within the social organization of production and reproduction of the ideological-political order; ideologies of racism as collective social evaluation of solidarities arise to reinforce structural constraints which preserve the exploited and oppressed position of these “racial” solidarities’. It is remarkable, in our opinion, that so much of contemporary social theory has largely abandoned the problems of labor, capitalist exploitation, and class analysis at a time when capitalism is becoming more universal, more ruthless and more deadly. The metaphor of a contemporary ‘tower of Babel’ seems appropriate here—academics striking radical poses in the seminar rooms while remaining oblivious to the possibility that their seemingly radical discursive maneuvers do nothing to further the struggles ‘against oppression and exploitation which continue to be real, material, and not merely “discursive” problems of the contemporary world’ (Dirlik, 1997, p. 176). Harvey (1998, pp. 29–31) indicts the new academic entrepreneurs, the ‘masters of theory-in-and-for-itself’ whose ‘discourse radicalism’ has deftly side-stepped ‘the enduring conundrums of class struggle’ and who have, against a ‘sobering background of cheapened discourse and opportunistic politics,’ been ‘stripped of their self-advertised radicalism.’ For years, they ‘contested socialism,’ ridiculed Marxists, and promoted ‘their own alternative theories of liberatory politics’ but now they have largely been ‘reduced to the role of supplicants in the most degraded form of pluralist politics imaginable.’ As they pursue the politics of difference, the ‘class war rages unabated’ and they seem ‘either unwilling or unable to focus on the unprecedented economic carnage occurring around the globe.’ Harvey’s searing criticism suggests that post-Marxists have been busy fiddling while Rome burns and his comments echo those made by Marx (1978, p. 149) in his critique of the Young Hegelians who were, ‘in spite of their allegedly “worldshattering” statements, the staunchest conservatives.’ Marx lamented that the Young Hegelians were simply fighting ‘phrases’ and that they failed to acknowledge that in offering only counter-phrases, they were in no way ‘combating the real existing world’ but merely combating the phrases of the world. Taking a cue from Marx and substituting ‘phrases’ with ‘discourses’ or ‘resignifications’ we would contend that the practitioners of difference politics who operate within exaggerated culturalist frameworks that privilege the realm of representation as the primary arena of political struggle question some discourses of power while legitimating others. Moreover, because they lack a class perspective, their gestures of radicalism are belied by their own class positions.10 As Ahmad (1997a, p. 104) notes: One may speak of any number of disorientations and even oppressions, but one cultivates all kinds of politeness and indirection about the structure of capitalist class relations in which those oppressions are embedded. To speak of any of that directly and simply is to be ‘vulgar.’ In this climate of Aesopian languages it is absolutely essential to reiterate that most things are a matter of class. That kind of statement is … surprising only in a culture like that of the North American university … But it is precisely in that kind of culture that people need to hear such obvious truths. Ahmad’s provocative observations imply that substantive analyses of the carnage wrought by ‘globalized’ class exploitation have, for the most part, been marginalized by the kind of radicalism that has been instituted among the academic Left in North America. He further suggests that while various post-Marxists have invited us to join their euphoric celebrations honoring the decentering of capitalism, the abandonment of class politics, and the decline of metanarratives (particularly those of Marxism and socialism), they have failed to see that the most ‘meta of all metanarratives of the past three centuries, the creeping annexation of the globe for the dominance of capital over laboring humanity has met, during those same decades, with stunning success’ (Ahmad, 1997b, p. 364). As such, Ahmad invites us to ask anew, the proverbial question: What, then, must be done? To this question we offer no simple theoretical, pedagogical or political prescriptions. Yet we would argue that if social change is the aim, progressive educators and theorists must cease displacing class analysis with the politics of difference. Conclusion … we will take our stand against the evils of capitalism, imperialism, and racism with a solidarity derived from a proletarian internationalism born of socialist idealism. —National Office of the Black Panther Party, February 1970 For well over two decades we have witnessed the jubilant liberal and conservative pronouncements of the demise of socialism. Concomitantly, history’s presumed failure to defang existing capitalist relations has been read by many self-identified ‘radicals’ as an advertisement for capitalism’s inevitability. As a result, the chorus refrain ‘There Is No Alternative’, sung by liberals and conservatives, has been buttressed by the symphony of post-Marxist voices recommending that we give socialism a decent burial and move on. Within this context, to speak of the promise of Marx and socialism may appear anachronistic, even naïve, especially since the post-al intellectual vanguard has presumably demonstrated the folly of doing so. Yet we stubbornly believe that the chants of T.I.N.A. must be combated for they offer as a fait accompli, something which progressive Leftists should refuse to accept—namely the triumph of capitalism and its political bedfellow neo-liberalism, which have worked together to naturalize suffering, undermine collective struggle, and obliterate hope. We concur with Amin (1998), who claims that such chants must be defied and revealed as absurd and criminal, and who puts the challenge we face in no uncertain terms: humanity may let itself be led by capitalism’s logic to a fate of collective suicide or it may pave the way for an alternative humanist project of global socialism. The grosteque conditions that inspired Marx to pen his original critique of capitalism are present and flourishing. The inequalities of wealth and the gross imbalances of power that exist today are leading to abuses that exceed those encountered in Marx’s day (Greider, 1998, p. 39). Global capitalism has paved the way for the obscene concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands and created a world increasingly divided between those who enjoy opulent affluence and those who languish in dehumanizing conditions and economic misery. In every corner of the globe, we are witnessing social disintegration as revealed by a rise in abject poverty and inequality. At the current historical juncture, the combined assets of the 225 richest people is roughly equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 percent of the world’s population, while the combined assets of the three richest people exceed the combined GDP of the 48 poorest nations (CCPA, 2002, p. 3). Approximately 2.8 billion people—almost half of the world’s population—struggle in desperation to live on less than two dollars a day (McQuaig, 2001, p. 27). As many as 250 million children are wage slaves and there are over a billion workers who are either un- or under-employed. These are the concrete realities of our time—realities that require a vigorous class analysis, an unrelenting critique of capitalism and an oppositional politics capable of confronting what Ahmad (1998, p. 2) refers to as ‘capitalist universality.’ They are realities that require something more than that which is offered by the prophets of ‘difference’ and post-Marxists who would have us relegate socialism to the scrapheap of history and mummify Marxism along with Lenin’s corpse. Never before has a Marxian analysis of capitalism and class rule been so desperately needed. That is not to say that everything Marx said or anticipated has come true, for that is clearly not the case. Many critiques of Marx focus on his strategy for moving toward socialism, and with ample justification; nonetheless Marx did provide us with fundamental insights into class society that have held true to this day. Marx’s enduring relevance lies in his indictment of capitalism which continues to wreak havoc in the lives of most. While capitalism’s cheerleaders have attempted to hide its sordid underbelly, Marx’s description of capitalism as the sorcerer’s dark power is even more apt in light of contemporary historical and economic conditions. Rather than jettisoning Marx, decentering the role of capitalism, and discrediting class analysis, radical educators must continue to engage Marx’s oeuvre and extrapolate from it that which is useful pedagogically, theoretically, and, most importantly, politically in light of the challenges that confront us.
2/20/17
1- K- Colorblind Discourse
Tournament: Blake | Round: 3 | Opponent: idk | Judge: Heaven Montague My opponent’s usage of the term “colorblindness” appropriates and reintrenches ableism Obasogie 13 Obasogie, Osagie. “Blinded by Sight”. Stanford Law Books. http://www.sistahvegan.com/2015/12/08/why-a-colorblind-vegan-utopian-world-is-ableist/. 12/11/13 LBE In effect, colorblindness as a metaphor turns blind people into racial mascots in much the same way that some sports teams demean Native American by misappropriating their imagery and social experience. A distorted, misunderstood, and objectified understanding of group abilities and social dynamics is celebrated as a rally cry at the very same time that it dehumanizes the group by denying full acknowledgment of their complex lives. Colorblindness has turned blind people against their will into a series of cartoonish representations of racial utopia that fundamentally warps their human experiences. Ableist violence is real and is intertwined with racism – you can’t solve one while furthering the other. Autistichoya 16 Autistichoya. “Ableism is not ‘bad words.’ it’s violence”. http://www.autistichoya.com/2016/07/ableism-is-not-bad-words-its-violence.html. 7/25/16 LBE We bear it, heavy, wherever we go. Ableism is the violence in the clinic, in the waiting room, in the social welfare lines, in the classroom, in the recess yard, in the bedroom, in the prisons, in the streets. Ableism is the violence (and threat of violence) we live with each day. Ableism is the constant apologetics for family members and caregivers who murder their disabled relatives -- they must have had it so hard, it must have been such a burden, you musn't judge unless you've walked in their shoes. (In the last few decades, more than 400 disabled people were murdered by relatives or caregivers, and those are only the stories we know about.) Ableism is the fact that a police officer who shot an unarmed Black man with his hands up decided it made more sense to claim he was actually aiming for the Brown autistic man holding a toy truck beside the Black man. Ableism is the fact that the left wants to talk about jails and prisons as the largest mental health care providers in the country, decry the crisis of incarceration of psych disabled people, and then suggest unironically that we build new facilities, new asylums, new institutions, new inpatient beds so that at least we can get "treatment." … Ableism is the fact that when violence does happen to disabled people, it's framed as inherently more tragic and pitiable because we are supposed to be these innocent fucking angels, like babies (no matter how old we are), and it's particularly low to attack us (but apparently not to attack non-disabled transgender people or non-disabled Black people or non-disabled Muslims or non-disabled women -- all of that is totally okay and justifiable and besides, it must have been the victim's fault in some way) Ableism is the fact that anywhere from around 40 to 70 of U.S. prisoners are also disabled, and that the forces of white supremacy, racism, and capitalism that keep poor Black and Brown people in prisons are necessarily intertwined with ableist presuppositions about intelligence and emotional capacity. (And that all incarcerated people -- disabled or not -- as well as many free disabled people can be paid, completely legally, only a few cents per hour for menial labor, and that this is called opportunity and teaching work ethic.) … Ableism is the fact that on average, autistic people die 30 years younger than non-autistic people, with suicide as the second leading cause of death. As one friend put it, that's an act of murder by society, because it is so bad that too many of us decide that it is no longer worth trying to live in a world literally designed to destroy us from the moment we are first born. They hate us, and we already know it. They aim for us. They mean to kill. They mean to harm. They know what they are doing, and we know it too. There can be no innocence, not for us. Ableism is not some arbitrary list of "bad words," as much as language is a tool of oppression. Ableism is violence, and it kills.
Discourse first--that's key to inclusivity within debate Vincent 13 Chris Vincent (debate coach, did college policy @ Louisville). “Re-Conceptualizing our Performances: Accountability in Lincoln Douglas Debate.” vBriefly. October 2013. http://vbriefly.com/2013/10/26/201310re-conceptualizing-our-performances-accountability-in-lincoln-douglas-debate/ As a community we must re-conceptualize this distinction the performance by the body and of the body by re-evaluating the role of the speech and the speech act. It is no longer enough for judges to vote off of the flow anymore. Students of color are being held to a higher threshold to better articulate why racism is bad, which is the problem in a space that we deem to be educational. It is here where I shift my focus to a solution. Debaters must be held accountable for the words they say in the round. We should no longer evaluate the speech. Instead we must begin to evaluate the speech act itself. Debaters must be held accountable for more than winning the debate. They must be held accountable for the implications of that speech. As educators and adjudicators in the debate space we also have an ethical obligation to foster an atmosphere of education. It is not enough for judges to offer predispositions suggesting that they do not endorse racist, sexist, homophobic discourse, or justify why they do not hold that belief, and still offer a rational reason why they voted for it. Judges have become complacent in voting on the discourse, if the other debater does not provide a clear enough role of the ballot framing, or does not articulate well enough why the racist discourse should be rejected. Judges must be willing to foster a learning atmosphere by holding debaters accountable for what they say in the round. They must be willing to vote against a debater if they endorse racist discourse. They must be willing to disrupt the process of the flow for the purpose of embracing that teachable moment. The speech must be connected to the speech act. We must view the entire debate as a performance of the body, instead of the argument solely on the flow. Likewise, judges must be held accountable for what they vote for in the debate space. If a judge is comfortable enough to vote for discourse that is racist, sexist, or homophobic, they must also be prepared to defend their actions. We as a community do not live in a vacuum and do not live isolated from the larger society. That means that judges must defend their actions to the debaters, their coaches, and to the other judges in the room if it is a panel. Students of color should not have the burden of articulating why racist discourse must be rejected, but should have the assurance that the educator with the ballot will protect them in those moments. Until we re-conceptualize the speech and the speech act, and until judges are comfortable enough to vote down debaters for a performance that perpetuates violence in the debate space, debaters and coaches alike will remain complacent in their privilege. As educators we must begin to shift the paradigm and be comfortable doing this. As a community we should stop looking at ourselves as isolated in a vacuum and recognize that the discourse and knowledge we produce in debate has real implications for how we think when we leave this space. Our performances must be viewed as of the body instead of just by it. As long as we continue to operate in a world where our performances are merely by bodies, we will continue to foster a climate of hostility and violence towards students of color, and in turn destroy the transformative potential this community could have.
Tournament: TOC | Round: 6 | Opponent: Byram Hills JB | Judge: Tom Evnen The affirmative’s description of denials of the will as equivalent to slavery trivializes the real traumas of slavery Wade, 11 (Lisa Wade, professor of sociology atandnbsp;Occidental Collegeandnbsp;and the co-author of Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions., ) Trivializing the Slave Trade » Sociological Images, No Publication 6-8-2011 Just as “I’m not a racist, but…” is a sure sign that someone is about to say something racist, an essay that begins “I don’t want to trivialize the inhumane horrors that African slaves endured on slave ships destined for the Americas. But…” is certain to do just that. Indeed, Steven Heller at Imprint began his post this way, going on to suggest that the design of modern airplanes “resembles” that of slave ships. As evidence, he recalls his own discomfort in coach and compares drawings of slave ships and blueprints of airplanes. Heller prefaced his observations with a disclaimer because he knew comparing modern air travel to the slave trade was sketchy. And it is, indeed, sketchy. The descendants of slaves live life with the knowledge that their ancestors were stolen, shackled, beaten, and denied their very humanity; at least they survived the trip across the Atlantic. Nope, not like air travel one bit. So, yes, it’s lovely to be clever, but it’s also lovely to be thoughtful and sensitive. In this case, Heller’s desire to be the former won out over the latter. Or perhaps he never really thought that anyone would seriously be upset by the comparison. It’s obviously tongue-in-cheek right? I mean, slavery has been over for, like, ever. Or maybe he forgot that descendants of slaves read the freakin’ internet just like everyone else. Who knows. In any case, it’s a great example of the trivializing of the histories and traumas of a marginalized population. Hold them responsible for their representations. Educational institutions have LONG omitted and trivialized Black history, which isn’t just “the past” but a historical fact that shapes the world today – Vote negative to mount a challenge to the curriculum of anti-Black oppression that the affirmative actively participates in. Legal-Miller 12 (Althea Legal-Miller, Teaching Fellow in African American Civil Rights at UCL Institute of the Americas) Students Told to Create a Business Plan for Enslaving Africans, Clutch Magazine 2012 As a historian, it is an honor to have the responsibility of storytelling. Indeed, our history is a collection of stories and a powerful instrument that expresses who we are, what we came from, how we struggle, and how we are strong. So the abuse of this precious privilege always cuts deep. The education system has long omitted, neglected, distorted and skewed our history through the lens of white privilege and racism. Yet, I was stunned by the level of apathy that was exposed this week when a girls’ school in London, England was forced to issue an apology over the use of offensive material during a high school history lesson on “The Slave Trade”. Students aged 13 and 14 were given imaginary tools including manacles, whips, thumb screws, iron brands, muskets and barracoons, and asked to devise a Dragon’s Den-style (a reality TV show known as Shark Tank in the US) business proposal for the capture and enslavement of African people. Lesson materials included direction on how to carry out a “slave raid” and manipulate “African Chiefs” through bribes and lacing them with alcohol. Perhaps the most debased suggestions were that the “best” aspect of being a slave trader was having “an affair with a beautiful African girl,” and that adult male “mixed race” offspring could be sent to Africa to “run the slave business” while his white father sailed to America. Teaching the history of enslavement via a business plan model serves to erase violence, oppression and numerous traumatic events such as the systematic rape of black girls and women. The teacher/s involved in this particular lesson plan saw nothing inappropriate or offensive about their methods. Yet, it would be hard to imagine that these same individuals would sanction a history class on the Holocaust that required students to figure out how to exterminate Jewish people. But black genocide is somehow different, less painful, less abhorrent, and thus vulnerable to trivialization. In 1986, Susan Rice (presently the subject of unjust Republican opposition to her potential nomination for the position of Secretary of State) argued that: The greatest evil in omitting or misrepresenting Black history, literature, and culture in elementary or secondary education is the unmistakable message it sends to the black child. The message is ‘your history, your culture, your language and your literature are insignificant. And so are you.’ The implicit message of this particular history lesson was not lost on one 13 year old black girl, who in a state of distress complained to her mother about the humiliation she felt during the class. The mother soon after met with two teachers who refused to acknowledge the harm caused to her daughter, and instead sought to justify the innovative approach of the class. They, and later a third teacher, argued that the class emphasized how the slave trade was largely “divorced from moral and social issues”, and that it had been taught for three years without objection. Perhaps if the narrow objectives of this so-called history lesson were a little broader, then these teachers would have understood that the history of black resistance runs deep in our veins. In the face of the school’s dismissal, the student’s mother contacted Pan African Human Rights Organization Ligali, who filed a formal complaint with the school, and subsequent press release. In a speedy reversal – which the glare of publicity so often precipitates – the principal publicly apologized on behalf of her staff for being “patronizing” and for the “trivialization” of slavery. The lesson materials were immediately withdrawn with a reassurance that “appropriate steps” had been taken in relation to “possible disciplinary action” against the teacher who devised the class. If disciplinary action is taken, then I hope it is understood that to scapegoat a single teacher is wholly inadequate, as this case exposes far deeper issues of white privilege and institutional racism within education. It is unclear why this particular class went unchallenged for three years, but such incidents remind us that it is not only a personal but a political imperative that we ask our kids “What did you learn in school today?” It is through our history that we recall, lay claim to, and understand both the past and present. And we cannot afford to abdicate our responsibility to monitor, intervene and challenge the educational system.
Their obfuscation and the use of spikes is antithetical to the ethic of intellectual integrity,
TORSON 13
~"Debate and the Virtue of Intellectual Integrity by Adam Torson" March 25th, 2013. By Victory Briefs. http://vbriefly.com/2013/03/25/20133debate-and-the-virtue-of-intellectual-integrity-by-adam-torson/~~NB Against Purposeful Obfuscation Too often in debate, strategy devolves into sophistry. Debaters utilize a series of tactics designed only to muddy the water, to obscure a fair evaluation of the merits of their arguments by either judges or opponents. This includes the distortion of evidence, e.g. by reading cards out of context so as to make it seem that authors using terms differently actually intend the same meaning. It includes evasive or overly ambiguous explanations of arguments, designed to allow debaters to shift their positions in the rebuttals. It includes impossibly dense and blippy analytical frameworks with contingent standards, layers of unreasonable spikes, theory bait, and other tricks hidden throughout. These tactics are inconsistent with an ethic of intellectual integrity. The rules that we set up to make the debate game intellectually rigorous are exploited to separate us altogether from a meaningful contest of ideas; the tail wags the dog. A student deploying these tactics hopes to win not because he marshals the most compelling argument, but because his opponent makes a superficial error or his judge is too embarrassed to admit that he didn’t properly follow the argument. We hope that the practice of dialectic contestation will help us to challenge or confirm our beliefs on important personal and political questions. Strategies of purposeful obfuscation, on the other hand, turn arguments into mere instruments of power – ways of manipulating the circumstances to contrive a favorable outcome. These strategies are disingenuous approaches to thinking through the topic because they are fundamentally unrelated to the residual quality of the arguments. That bad arguments could reliably beat good ones should strike us as a very strange outcome in any debate event worthy of the name.
Intellectual integrity is the biggest impact- it’s the point of debate. TORSON 13 ~"Debate and the Virtue of Intellectual Integrity by Adam Torson" March 25th, 2013. By Victory Briefs. http://vbriefly.com/2013/03/25/20133debate-and-the-virtue-of-intellectual-integrity-by-adam-torson/~~NB Intellectual integrity denotes a commitment to the honest pursuit of truth through openness to evidence, ideas, and the criticisms of others. It prohibits the subordination of truth to expediency or personal gain, and requires us to be on guard against self-deception and short-sightedness. It requires a balance between the courage of honest conviction and the humility to recognize that our conclusions must always be uncertain and provisional.¶ Practiced with intellectual integrity, debate can be a powerful vehicle for personal growth. It encourages the self-reflection that helps students to cultivate a mature inner-life. Conscience is little more than an honest internal dialogue – the ability to critically reflect on one’s own thoughts and actions. Openness to opposing beliefs requires appreciating what the world looks like from someone else’s point of view, which in turn fosters humility, perspective, and tolerance. I think that many of us credit debate as a formative experience precisely because it taught us the virtue of intellectual integrity.¶ Intellectual integrity is also indispensable in cultivating a sense of civic virtue. Our public life is plagued by sophistry and mindless line-toeing. Politics is treated like a spectator sport, and we engage only if we are enthralled by the spectacle. Intellectual integrity is a bulwark against citizenship devolving in this way. One with intellectual integrity is willing to be persuaded by reasoned argument rather than held hostage by ideology or tribalism. It requires suspicion of convention and to be more than a mere political dilettante or pseudo-intellectual. Above all, intellectual integrity bars credulous acquiescence to demagogues and mediocre apologists. By careful examination of the challenges we must face together, debate can foster a mature sense of connection to our many communities. We must recognize the burden of stewardship that comes with the opportunity to work with gifted young people.¶ If what I’ve said rings true, then the debate communitfroy is obliged to embrace intellectual integrity as one of its core values. We aspire to be a community of thinkers and learners, and this goal is conveyed not simply by what we teach in the classroom but by the practices we deploy. I encourage the examination of those practices through the lens of intellectual integrity.
Reject the 1AC’s to embrace argumentative responsibility- you know what you did wrong and know you better own up to it.
TORSON 13
~"Debate and the Virtue of Intellectual Integrity by Adam Torson" March 25th, 2013. By Victory Briefs. http://vbriefly.com/2013/03/25/20133debate-and-the-virtue-of-intellectual-integrity-by-adam-torson/~~NB** What We Can Do About It¶ Students¶ I encourage debaters to embrace the responsibility that comes with argumentative agency. Ultimately the person who chooses the arguments you run is you. More than that, you are the authors of the culture. Coaches and judges do what they can to provide incentives to debate in certain ways, but it is ultimately a commitment in the minds of debaters to deploy intellectually sound strategies that creates the norm.¶ The willingness to win at any cost is a bankrupt approach to debate. While it’s great to take pride in your accomplishments, the luster of debate trophies will eventually fade. Choose to make one of your lasting contributions to the community the choice to debate with intellectual integrity. You will value the habits of mind you develop for the rest of your life.
The only ethical demand is one that calls for the end of the world itself—the affirmative represents a conflict within the paradigm of America but refuses to challenge the foundational antagonism that produces the violence that undergirds the that same paradigm
Wilderson, ’10 ~2010, Frank B. Wilderson is an Associate Professor of African-American Studies at UC Irvine and has a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, "Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,"~ Leaving aside for the moment their state of mind, it would seem that the structure, that is to say the rebar, or better still the grammar of their demands—and, by extension, the grammar of their suffering—was indeed an ethical grammar. Perhaps their grammars are the only ethical grammars available to modern politics and modernity writ large, for they draw our attention not to the way in which space and time are used and abused by enfranchised and violently powerful interests, but to the violence that underwrites the modern world’s capacity to think, act, and exist spatially and temporally. The violence that robbed her of her body and him of his land provided the stage upon which other violent and consensual dramas could be enacted. Thus, they would have to be crazy, crazy enough to call not merely the actions of the world to account but to call the world itself to account, and to account for them no less! The woman at Columbia was not demanding to be a participant in an unethical network of distribution: she was not demanding a place within capital, a piece of the pie (the demand for her sofa notwithstanding). Rather, she was articulating a triangulation between, on the one hand, the loss of her body, the very dereliction of her corporeal integrity, what Hortense Spillers charts as the transition from being a being to becoming a "being for the captor" (206), the drama of value (the stage upon which surplus value is extracted from labor power through commodity production and sale); and on the other, the corporeal integrity that, once ripped from her body, fortified and extended the corporeal integrity of everyone else on the street. She gave birth to the commodity and to the Human, yet she had neither subjectivity nor a sofa to show for it. In her eyes, the world—and not its myriad discriminatory practices, but the world itself—was unethical. And yet, the world passes by her without the slightest inclination to stop and disabuse her of her claim. Instead, it calls her "crazy." And to what does the world attribute the Native American man’s insanity? "He’s crazy if he thinks he’s getting any money out of us"? Surely, that doesn’t make him crazy. Rather it is simply an indication that he does not have a big enough gun. What are we to make of a world that responds to the most lucid enunciation of ethics with violence? What are the foundational questions of the ethico-political? Why are these questions so scandalous that they are rarely posed politically, intellectually, and cinematically—unless they are posed obliquely and unconsciously, as if by accident? Return Turtle Island to the "Savage." Repair the demolished subjectivity of the Slave. Two simple sentences, thirteen simple words, and the structure of U.S. (and perhaps global) antagonisms would be dismantled. An "ethical modernity" would no longer sound like an oxymoron. From there we could busy ourselves with important conflicts that have been promoted to the level of antagonisms: class struggle, gender conflict, immigrants rights. When pared down to thirteen words and two sentences, one cannot but wonder why questions that go to the heart of the ethico-political, questions of political ontology, are so unspeakable in intellectual meditations, political broadsides, and even socially and politically engaged feature films. Clearly they can be spoken, even a child could speak those lines, so they would pose no problem for a scholar, an activist, or a filmmaker. And yet, what is also clear—if the filmographies of socially and politically engaged directors, the archive of progressive scholars, and the plethora of Left-wing broadsides are anything to go by—is that what can so easily be spoken is now (five hundred years and two hundred fifty million Settlers/Masters on) so ubiquitously unspoken that these two simple sentences, these thirteen words not only render their speaker "crazy" but become themselves impossible to imagine. Soon it will be forty years since radical politics, Left-leaning scholarship, and socially engaged feature films began to speak the unspeakable. In the 1960s and early 1970s the questions asked by radical politics and scholarship were not "Should the U.S. be overthrown?" or even "Would it be overthrown?" but rather when and how—and, for some, what—would come in its wake. Those steadfast in their conviction that there remained a discernable quantum of ethics in the U.S. writ large (and here I am speaking of everyone from Martin Luther King, Jr., prior to his 1968 shift, to the Tom Hayden wing of SDS, to the Julian Bond and Marion Barry faction of SNCC, to Bobbie Kennedy Democrats) were accountable, in their rhetorical machinations, to the paradigmatic zeitgeist of the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and the Weather Underground. Radicals and progressives could deride, reject, or chastise armed struggle mercilessly and cavalierly with respect to tactics and the possibility of "success," but they could not dismiss revolution-as-ethic because they could not make a convincing case—by way of a paradigmatic analysis—that the U.S. was an ethical formation and still hope to maintain credibility as radicals and progressives. Even Bobby Kennedy (a U.S. attorney general and presidential candidate) mused that the law and its enforcers had no ethical standing in the presence of Blacks. One could (and many did) acknowledge America’s strength and power. This seldom, however, rose to the level of an ethical assessment, but rather remained an assessment of the so-called "balance of forces." The political discourse of Blacks, and to a lesser extent Indians, circulated too widely to credibly wed the U.S. and ethics. The raw force of COINTELPRO put an end to this trajectory toward a possible hegemony of ethical accountability. Consequently, the power of Blackness and Redness to pose the question—and the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all—retreated as did White radicals and progressives who "retired" from struggle. The question’s echo lies buried in the graves of young Black Panthers, AIM Warriors, and Black Liberation Army soldiers, or in prison cells where so many of them have been rotting (some in solitary confinement) for ten, twenty, thirty years, and at the gates of the academy where the "crazies" shout at passers-by. Gone are not only the young and vibrant voices that affected a seismic shift on the political landscape, but also the intellectual protocols of inquiry, and with them a spate of feature films that became authorized, if not by an unabashed revolutionary polemic, then certainly by a revolutionary zeitgeist. Is it still possible for a dream of unfettered ethics, a dream of the Settlement and the Slave estate’s destruction, to manifest itself at the ethical core of cinematic discourse, when this dream is no longer a constituent element of political discourse in the streets nor of intellectual discourse in the academy? The answer is "no" in the sense that, as history has shown, what cannot be articulated as political discourse in the streets is doubly foreclosed upon in screenplays and in scholarly prose; but "yes" in the sense that in even the most taciturn historical moments such as ours, the grammar of Black and Red suffering breaks in on this foreclosure, albeit like the somatic compliance of hysterical symptoms—it registers in both cinema and scholarship as symptoms of awareness of the structural antagonisms. Between 1967 and 1980, we could think cinematically and intellectually of Blackness and Redness as having the coherence of full-blown discourses. But from 1980 to the present, Blackness and Redness manifests only in the rebar of cinematic and intellectual (political) discourse, that is, as unspoken grammars. This grammar can be discerned in the cinematic strategies (lighting, camera angles, image composition, and acoustic strategies/design), even when the script labors for the spectator to imagine social turmoil through the rubric of conflict (that is, a rubric of problems that can be posed and conceptually solved) as opposed to the rubric of antagonism (an irreconcilable struggle between entities, or positionalities, the resolution of which is not dialectical but entails the obliteration of one of the positions). In other words, even when films narrate a story in which Blacks or Indians are beleaguered with problems that the script insists are conceptually coherent (usually having to do with poverty or the absence of "family values"), the non-narrative, or cinematic, strategies of the film often disrupt this coherence by posing the irreconcilable questions of Red and Black political ontology—or non-ontology. The grammar of antagonism breaks in on the mendacity of conflict. Semiotics and linguistics teach us that when we speak, our grammar goes unspoken. Our grammar is assumed. It is the structure through which the labor of speech is possible. Likewise, the grammar of political ethics—the grammar of assumptions regarding the ontology of suffering—which underwrite Film Theory and political discourse (in this book, discourse elaborated in direct relation to radical action), and which underwrite cinematic speech (in this book, Red, White, and Black films from the mid-1960s to the present) is also unspoken. This notwithstanding, film theory, political discourse, and cinema assume an ontological grammar, a structure of suffering. And the structure of suffering which film theory, political discourse, and cinema assume crowds out other structures of suffering, regardless of the sentiment of the film or the spirit of unity mobilized by the political discourse in question. To put a finer point on it, structures of ontological suffering stand in antagonistic, rather then conflictual, relation to one another (despite the fact that antagonists themselves may not be aware of the ontological positionality from which they speak). Though this is perhaps the most controversial and out-of-step claim of this book, it is, nonetheless, the foundation of the close reading of feature films and political theory that follows.
Black positionality renders their notions of counterhegemony and resistance incoherent—blackness is the site of absolute dereliction and blackness can only be the total disconfiguration of civil society
Wilderson 7 ~Frank B., "The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s Silent Scandal" in Warfare in the American Homeland ed. Joy James, p. 31-2~ Slavery is the great leveler of the black subjects positionality. The black American subject does not generate historical categories of entitlement, sovereignty, and immigration for the record. We are "off the map" with respect to the cartography that charts civil society's semiotics; we have a past but not a heritage. To the data-generating demands of the Historical Axis, we present a virtual blank, much like that which the Khoisan presented to the Anthropological Axis. This places us in a structurally impossible position, one that is outside the articulations of hegemony. However, it also places hegemony in a structurally impossible position because—and this is key—our presence works back on the grammar of hegemony and threatens it with incoherence. If every subject— even-the most massacred among them, Indians—is required to have analogs within the nations structuring narrative, and the experience of one subject on whom the nations order of wealth was built is without analog, then that subjects presence destabilizes all other analogs. Fanon writes, "Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder."12 If we take him at his word, then we must accept that no other body functions in the Imaginary, the Symbolic, or the Real so completely as a repository of complete disorder as the black body. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Real, for in its magnetizing of bullets the black body functions as the map of gratuitous violence, through which civil society is possible— namely, those bodies for which violence is, or can be, contingent. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Symbolic, for blackness in America generates no categories for the chromosome of history and no data for the categories of immigration or sovereignty. It is an experience without analog—a past without a heritage. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Imaginary, for "whoever says 'rape' says Black" (Fanon), whoever says "prison" says black (Sexton), and whoever says "aids" says black—the "Negro is a phobogenic object."13 Indeed, it means all those things: a phobogenic object, a past without a heritage, the map of gratuitous violence, and a program of complete disorder. Whereas this realization is, and should be, cause for alarm, it should not be cause for lament or, worse, disavowal—not at least, for a true revolutionary or for a truly revolutionary movement such as prison abolition. If a social movement is to be neither social-democratic nor Marxist in terms of structure of political desire, then it should grasp the invitation to assume the positionality of subjects of social death. If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must admit that the "Negro" has been inviting whites, as well as civil society's junior partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They have been, and remain today—even in the most antiracist movements, such as the prison abolition movement—invested elsewhere. This is not to say that all oppositional political desire today is pro-white, but it is usually antiblack, meaning that it will not dance with death. Black liberation, as a prospect, makes radicalism more dangerous to the United States. This is not because it raises the specter of an alternative polity (such as socialism or community control of existing resources), but because its condition of possibility and gesture of resistance function as a negative dialectic: a politics of refusal and a refusal to affirm, a "program of complete disorder." One must embrace its disorder, its incoherence, and allow oneself to be elaborated by it if, indeed, ones politics are to be underwritten by a desire to take down this country. If this is not the desire that underwrites ones politics, then through what strategy of legitimation is the word "prison" being linked to the word "abolition"? What are this movements lines of political accountability? There is nothing foreign, frightening, or even unpracticed about the embrace of disorder and incoherence. The desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by disorder and incoherence is not anathema in and of itself. No one, for example, has ever been known to say, "Gee-whiz, if only my orgasms would end a little sooner, or maybe not come at all." Yet few so-called radicals desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by the disorder and incoherence of blackness—and the state of political movements in the United States today is marked by this very Negrophobogenisis: "Gee-whiz, if only black rage could be more coherent, or maybe not come at all." Perhaps there is something more terrifying about the foy of black than there is in the joy of sex (unless one is talking sex with a Negro). Perhaps coalitions today prefer to remain in-orgasmic in the face of civil society—with hegemony as a handy prophylactic, just in case. If through this stasis or paralysis they try to do the work of prison abolition, the work will fail, for it is always work from a position of coherence (i.e., the worker) on behalf of a position of incoherence of the black subject, or prison slave. In this way, social formations on the left remain blind to the contradictions of coalitions between workers and slaves. They remain coalitions operating within the logic of civil society and function less as revolutionary promises than as crowding y out scenarios of black antagonisms, simply feeding our frustration. Whereas the positionality of the worker (whether a factory worker demanding a monetary wage, an immigrant, or a white woman demanding a social wage) gestures toward the reconfiguration of civil society, the positionality of the black subject (whether a prison slave or a prison slave-in-waiting) gestures toward the disconfiguration of civil society. From the coherence of civil society, the black subject beckons with the incoherence of civil war, a war that reclaims blackness not as a positive value but as a politically enabling site, to quote Fanon, of "absolute dereliction." It is a "scandal" that rends civil society asunder. Civil war, then, becomes the unthought, but never forgotten, understudy of hegemony. It is a black specter waiting in the wings, an endless antagonism that cannot be satisfied (via reform or reparation) but that must, nonetheless, be pursued to the death.
The alternative and role of the ballot is to reorient ourselves towards the end of the world. Freedom is an illusion created by the shackles of civil society, and abandoning the pursuit for equality is the only way to break down the way that whiteness maintains itself.
Farley 5: Farley 5 ~Boston College (Anthony, "Perfecting Slavery", http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1028andcontext=lsfp)~~====** VII. BURN What is to be done? Two hundred years ago, when the slaves in Haiti rose up, they, of necessity, burned everything: They burned San Domingo flat so that at the end of the war it was a charred desert. Why do you burn everything? asked a French officer of a prisoner. We have a right to burn what we cultivate because a man has a right to dispose of his own labour, was the reply of this unknown anarchist. 48 The slaves burned everything because everything was against them. Everything was against the slaves, the entire order that it was their lot to follow, the entire order in which they were positioned as worse than senseless things, every plantation, everything. 49 "Leave nothing white behind you," said Toussaint to those dedicated to the end of white-overblack. 50 "God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time." 51 The slaves burned everything, yes, but, unfortunately, they only burned everything in Haiti. 52 Theirs was the greatest and most successful revolution in the history of the world but the failure of their fire to cross the waters was the great tragedy of the nineteenth century. 53 At the dawn of the twentieth century, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, "The colorline belts the world." 54 Du Bois said that the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the colorline. 55 The problem, now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century is the problem of the colorline. The colorline continues to belt the world. Indeed, the slave power that is the United States now threatens an entire world with the death that it has become and so the slaves of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, those with nothing but their chains to lose, must, if they would be free, if they would escape slavery, win the entire world. VIII. TRAINING We begin as children. We are called and we become our response to the call. Slaves are not called. What becomes of them? What becomes of the broken-hearted? The slaves are divided souls, they are brokenhearted, the slaves are split asunder by what they are called upon to become. The slaves are called upon to become objects but objecthood is not a calling. The slave, then, during its loneliest loneliness, is divided from itself. This is schizophrenia. The slaves are not called, or, rather, the slaves are called to not be. The slaves are called unfree but this the living can never be and so the slaves burst apart and die. The slaves begin as death, not as children, and death is not a beginning but an end. There is no progress and no exit from the undiscovered country of the slave, or so it seems. We are trained to think through a progress narrative, a grand narrative, the grandest narrative, that takes us up from slavery. There is no up from slavery. The progress from slavery to the end of history is the progress from white-over-black to white-over-black to white-overblack. The progress of slavery runs in the opposite direction of the pastpresent-future timeline. The slave only becomes the perfect slave at the end of the timeline, only under conditions of total juridical freedom. It is only under conditions of freedom, of bourgeois legality, that the slave can perfect itself as a slave by freely choosing to bow down before its master. The slave perfects itself as a slave by offering a prayer for equal rights. The system of marks is a plantation. The system of property is a plantation. The system of law is a plantation. These plantations, all part of the same system, hierarchy, produce white-overblack, white-over-black only, and that continually. The slave perfects itself as a slave through its prayers for equal rights. The plantation system will not commit suicide and the slave, as stated above, has knowing non-knowledge of this fact. The slave finds its way back from the undiscovered country only by burning down every plantation. When the slave prays for equal rights it makes the free choice to be dead, and it makes the free choice to not be. Education is the call. We are called to be and then we become something. We become that which we make of ourselves. We follow the call, we pursue a calling. Freedom is the only calling—it alone contains all possible directions, all of the choices that may later blossom into the fullness of our lives. We can only be free. Slavery is death. How do slaves die? Slaves are not born, they are made. The slave must be trained to be that which the living cannot be. The only thing that the living are not free to be is dead. The slave must be trained to follow the call that is not a call. The slave must be trained to pursue the calling that is not a calling. The slave must be trained to objecthood. The slave must become death. Slavery is white-over-black. White-over-black is death. White-over-black, death, then, is what the slave must become to pursue its calling that is not a calling.
12/21/16
1- NC- Oppresion
Tournament: TOC | Round: 2 | Opponent: Valley CT | Judge: Phoebe Kuo NC Adopting the perspective of the oppressed is the only way to account for dominant ideologies that skew our thought processes. Mills 5: Charles W. Mills (John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy) ““Ideal Theory” as Ideology” Hypatia vol. 20, no. 3 (Summer 2005) RW Now what distinguishes ideal theory is not merely the use of ideals, since obviously nonideal theory can and will use ideals also (certainly it will appeal to the moral ideals, if it may be more dubious about the value of invoking idealized human capacities). What distinguishes ideal theory is the reliance on idealization to the exclusion, or at least marginalization, of the actual. As O’Neill emphasizes, this is not a necessary corollary of the operation of abstraction itself, since one can have abstractions of the ideal-as-descriptive-model type that abstract without idealizing. But ideal theory either tacitly represents the actual as a simple deviation from the ideal, not worth theorizing in its own right, or claims that starting from the ideal is at least the best way of realizing it. Ideal theory as an approach will then utilize as its basic apparatus some or all of the following concepts and assumptions (there is necessarily a certain overlap in the list, since they all intersect with one another): • An idealized social ontology. Moral theory deals with the normative, but it cannot avoid some characterization of the human beings who make up the society, and whose interactions with one another are its subject. So some overt or tacit social ontology has to be presupposed. An idealized social ontology of the modern type (as against, say, a Platonic or Aristotelian type) will typically assume the abstract and undifferentiated equal atomic individuals of classical liberalism. Thus it will abstract away from relations of structural domination, exploitation, coercion, and oppression, which in reality, of course, will profoundly shape the ontology of those same individuals, locating them in superior and inferior positions in social hierarchies of various kinds. • Idealized capacities. The human agents as visualized in the theory will also often have completely unrealistic capacities attributed to them—unrealistic even for the privileged minority, let alone those subordinated in different ways, who would not have had an equal opportunity for their natural capacities to develop, and who would in fact typically be disabled in crucial respects. • Silence on oppression. Almost by de nition, it follows from the focus of ideal theory that little or nothing will be said on actual historic oppression and its legacy in the present, or current ongoing oppression, though these may be gestured at in a vague or promissory way (as something to be dealt with later). Correspondingly, the ways in which systematic oppression is likely to shape the Charles W. Mills 169 basic social institutions (as well as the humans in those institutions) will not be part of the theory’s concern, and this will manifest itself in the absence of ideal-as-descriptive-model concepts that would provide the necessary macro- and micro-mapping of that oppression, and that are requisite for understanding its reproductive dynamic. • Ideal social institutions. Fundamental social institutions such as the family, the economic structure, the legal system, will therefore be conceptualized in ideal-as-idealized-model terms, with little or no sense of how their actual workings may systematically disadvantage women, the poor, and racial minorities. • An idealized cognitive sphere. Separate from, and in addition to, the idealization of human capacities, what could be termed an idealized cognitive sphere will also be presupposed. In other words, as a corollary of the general ignoring of oppression, the consequences of oppression for the social cognition of these agents, both the advantaged and the disadvantaged, will typically not be recognized, let alone theorized. A general social transparency will be presumed, with cognitive obstacles minimized as limited to biases of self-interest or the intrinsic difficulties of understanding the world, and little or no attention paid to the distinctive role of hegemonic ideologies and group-speci c experience in distorting our perceptions and conceptions of the social order. Thus, the standard is minimizing structural violence, defined as promoting the material conditions necessary for inclusion
Debate is a space for real world change, but we have to consider tangible policy action above all else—ideal theory abstracts away from material consequences and legitimizes oppression Curry 14: Dr. Tommy J. Curry 14, “The Cost of a Thing: A Kingian Reformulation of a Living Wage Argument in the 21st Century”, Victory Briefs, 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.
This outweighs—learning philosophy makes us immoral. Posner 98: The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory, Richard A. Posner Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit; University of Chicago Law School., Harvard Law Review, Vol. 111, No. 7 (May, 1998), pp. 1637-1717 The better read you are in philosophy or literature, and the more imaginative and analytically supple you are, the easier you will find it to reweave your tapestry of moral beliefs so that your principles allow you to do what your id tells you to do. My point is not that it's costless to change one's moral stripes, but only that the cost is less for a highly educated person. Ignorance is the ally of morality, as the medieval Roman Catholic Church recognized when it instructed priests not to ask parishioners in the confessional about specific sexually deviant practices, lest they give them ideas. Moral education equips the student to argue against moral preceptors. So even if instruction in moral reasoning improves people's moral beliefs (which I greatly doubt), the effect may be completely offset by the reduction in the likelihood that people would conform their behavior to moral precepts. To be confident that moral instruction would not have this effect, you would have to agree with Socrates that people are naturally good and do bad things only out of ignorance.
Intent is a code word for privilege and ignorance – consequences outweigh Utt 13 (Jamie Utt, July 30, 2013, “Intent vs. Impact: Why Your Intentions Don’t Really Matter”, http://everydayfeminism.com/2013/07/intentions-dont-really-matter/YS 8.8.16) From Paula Deen to Alec Baldwin to your annoying, bigoted uncle or friend, we hear it over and over again: “I never meant any harm…” “It was never my intent…” “I am not a racist…” “I am not a homophobe…” “I’m not a sexist…” I cannot tell you how often I’ve seen people attempt to deflect criticism about their oppressive language or actions by making the conversation about their intent. At what point does the “intent” conversation stop mattering so that we can step back and look at impact? After all, in the end, what does the intent of our action really matter if our actions have the impact of furthering the marginalization or oppression of those around us? In some ways, this is a simple lesson of relationships. If I say something that hurts my partner, it doesn’t much matter whether I intended the statement to mean something else – because my partner is hurting. I need to listen to how my language hurt my partner. I need to apologize. And then I need to reflect and empathize to the best of my ability so I don’t do it again. But when we’re dealing with the ways in which our identities intersect with those around us – and, in turn, the ways our privileges and our experiences of marginalization and oppression intersect – this lesson becomes something much larger and more profound. This becomes a lesson of justice. What we need to realize is that when it comes to people’s lives and identities, the impact of our actions can be profound and wide-reaching. And that’s far more important than the question of our intent. We need to ask ourselves what might be or might have been the impact of our actions or words. And we need to step back and listen when we are being told that the impact of our actions is out of step with our intents or our perceptions of self. Identity Privilege and Intent For people of identity privilege, this is where listening becomes vitally important, for our privilege can often shield us from understanding the impact of our actions. After all, as a person of privilege, I can never fully understand the ways in which oppressive acts or language impact those around me. What I surely can do is listen with every intent to understand, and I can work to change my behavior. Because what we need to understand is that making the conversation about intent is inherently a privileged action. The reason? It ensures that you and your identity (and intent) stay at the center of any conversation and action while the impact of your action or words on those around you is marginalized. So if someone ever tells you to “check your privilege,” what they may very well mean is: “Stop centering your experience and identity in the conversation by making this about the intent of your actions instead of their impact.” That is: Not everything is about you. Oppression is created by social systems so only a focus on material conditions can solve. Johnson no date: Allan Johnson (PhD in sociology, he joined the sociology department at Wesleyan University) http:www.cabrillo.edu/lroberts/AlanJohnsonWhatCanWeDO001.pdf. RW Privilege is a feature of social systems, not individuals. People have or don't have privilege depending on the system they're in and the social categories other people put them in. To say, then, that I have race privilege says less about me personally than it does about how the society we all live in and how it is organized to assign privilege on the basis of a socially defined set of racial categories that change historically and often overlap. The challenge facing me as an individual has more to do with how I participate in society as a recipient of race privilege and how those choices oppose or support the system itself. In dealing with the problem of privilege, we have to get used to being surrounded by paradox. Very often those who have privilege don't know it, for example, which is a key aspect of privilege. Also paradoxical is the fact that privilege doesn't necessarily lead to a "good life," which can prompt people in privileged groups to deny resentfully that they even have it. But privilege doesn't equate with being happy. It involves having what others don't have and the struggle to hang on to it at their expense, neither of which is a recipe for joy,personal fulfillment, or spiritual contentment.... To be an effective part of the solution, we have to realize that privilege and oppression are not a thing of the past. It's happening right now. It isn't just a collection of wounds inflicted long ago that now need to be healed. The wounding goes on as I write these words and as you read them, and unless people work to change the system that promotes it, personal healing by itself cannot be the answer. Healing wounds is no more a solution to the oppression that causes the wounding than military hospitals are a solution to war. Healing is a necessary process, but it isn't enough.... Since privilege is rooted primarily in systems—such as families, schools, and workplaces—change isn't simply a matter of changing people. People, of course, will have to change in order for systems to change, but the most important point is that changing people isn't enough. The solution also has to include entire systems, such as capitalism, whose paths of least resistance that shape how we feel, think, and behave as individuals, how we see ourselves and one another. s
4/29/17
1- New Affs Bad
Tournament: TOC | Round: 6 | Opponent: Byram Hills JB | Judge: Tom Evnen Interpretation: Debaters may not read new affirmatives without disclosing them on the NDCA wiki at least 30 minutes prior to the round.
Testing Strat Skew
5/3/17
1- PIC- Apocalyptic Rhetoric
Tournament: Emory | Round: 5 | Opponent: Harvard Westlake CE | Judge: Akash Gogate I endorse the entirety of the 1AC without their use of apocalyptic rhetoric.
Apocalyptic rhetoric fuels psychic numbing which makes it impossible for us to discern threats which are truly real Chernus 14 Ira Chernus, a TomDispatch regular, is professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and author of the online "MythicAmerica: Essays." He blogs at MythicAmerica.us; “Apocalypses Everywhere Is There Any Hope in an Era Filled with Gloom and Doom?”; February 25, 2014; http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175811/tomgram3A_ira_chernus2C_what_ever_happened_to_plain_old_apocalypse/
Yes, the A-word is now everywhere, and most of the time it no longer means "the end of everything," but "the end of anything." Living a life so saturated with apocalypses undoubtedly takes a toll, though it’s a subject we seldom talk about. So let's lift the lid off the A-word, take a peek inside, and examine how it affects our everyday lives. Since it’s not exactly a pretty sight, it’s easy enough to forget that the idea of the apocalypse has been a container for hope as well as fear. Maybe even now we’ll find some hope inside if we look hard enough. A Brief History of Apocalypse Apocalyptic stories have been around at least since biblical times, if not earlier. They show up in many religions, always with the same basic plot: the end is at hand; the cosmic struggle between good and evil (or God and the Devil, as the New Testament has it) is about to culminate in catastrophic chaos, mass extermination, and the end of the world as we know it. That, however, is only Act I, wherein we wipe out the past and leave a blank cosmic slate in preparation for Act II: a new, infinitely better, perhaps even perfect world that will arise from the ashes of our present one. It’s often forgotten that religious apocalypses, for all their scenes of destruction, are ultimately stories of hope; and indeed, they have brought it to millions who had to believe in a better world a-comin', because they could see nothing hopeful in this world of pain and sorrow. That traditional religious kind of apocalypse has also been part and parcel of American political life since, in Common Sense, Tom Paine urged the colonies to revolt by promising, "We have it in our power to begin the world over again." When World War II -- itself now sometimes called an apocalypse -- ushered in the nuclear age, it brought a radical transformation to the idea. Just as novelist Kurt Vonnegut lamented that the threat of nuclear war had robbed us of "plain old death" (each of us dying individually, mourned by those who survived us), the theologically educated lamented the fate of religion's plain old apocalypse. After this country’s "victory weapon" obliterated two Japanese cities in August 1945, most Americans sighed with relief that World War II was finally over. Few, however, believed that a permanently better world would arise from the radioactive ashes of that war. In the 1950s, even as the good times rolled economically, America's nuclear fear created something historically new and ominous -- a thoroughly secular image of the apocalypse. That's the one you'll get first if you type "define apocalypse" into Google's search engine: "the complete final destruction of the world." In other words, one big "whoosh" and then... nothing. Total annihilation. The End. Apocalypse as utter extinction was a new idea. Surprisingly soon, though, most Americans were (to adapt the famous phrase of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick) learning how to stop worrying and get used to the threat of "the big whoosh." With the end of the Cold War, concern over a world-ending global nuclear exchange essentially evaporated, even if the nuclear arsenals of that era were left ominously in place. Meanwhile, another kind of apocalypse was gradually arising: environmental destruction so complete that it, too, would spell the end of all life. This would prove to be brand new in a different way. It is, as Todd Gitlin has so aptly termed it, history’s first "slow-motion apocalypse." Climate change, as it came to be called, had been creeping up on us "in fits and starts," largely unnoticed, for two centuries. Since it was so different from what Gitlin calls "suddenly surging Genesis-style flood" or the familiar "attack out of the blue," it presented a baffling challenge. After all, the word apocalypse had been around for a couple of thousand years or more without ever being associated in any meaningful way with the word gradual. The eminent historian of religions Mircea Eliade once speculated that people could grasp nuclear apocalypse because it resembled Act I in humanity’s huge stock of apocalypse myths, where the end comes in a blinding instant -- even if Act II wasn’t going to follow. This mythic heritage, he suggested, remains lodged in everyone's unconscious, and so feels familiar. But in a half-century of studying the world's myths, past and present, he had never found a single one that depicted the end of the world coming slowly. This means we have no unconscious imaginings to pair it with, nor any cultural tropes or traditions that would help us in our struggle to grasp it. That makes it so much harder for most of us even to imagine an environmentally caused end to life. The very category of "apocalypse" doesn't seem to apply. Without those apocalyptic images and fears to motivate us, a sense of the urgent action needed to avert such a slowly emerging global catastrophe lessens. All of that (plus of course the power of the interests arrayed against regulating the fossil fuel industry) might be reason enough to explain the widespread passivity that puts the environmental peril so far down on the American political agenda. But as Dr. Seuss would have said, that is not all! Oh no, that is not all. Apocalypses Everywhere When you do that Google search on apocalypse, you'll also get the most fashionable current meaning of the word: "Any event involving destruction on an awesome scale; for example 'a stock market apocalypse.'" Welcome to the age of apocalypses everywhere. With so many constantly crying apocalyptic wolf or selling apocalyptic thrills, it's much harder now to distinguish between genuine threats of extinction and the cheap imitations. The urgency, indeed the very meaning, of apocalypse continues to be watered down in such a way that the word stands in danger of becoming virtually meaningless. As a result, we find ourselves living in an era that constantly reflects premonitions of doom, yet teaches us to look away from the genuine threats of world-ending catastrophe. Oh, America still worries about the Bomb -- but only when it's in the hands of some "bad" nation. Once that meant Iraq (even if that country, under Saddam Hussein, never had a bomb and in 2003, when the Bush administration invaded, didn’t even have a bomb program). Now, it means Iran -- another country without a bomb or any known plan to build one, but with the apocalyptic stare focused on it as if it already had an arsenal of such weapons -- and North Korea. These days, in fact, it's easy enough to pin the label "apocalyptic peril" on just about any country one loathes, even while ignoring friends, allies, and oneself. We're used to new apocalyptic threats emerging at a moment's notice, with little (or no) scrutiny of whether the A-word really applies. What's more, the Cold War era fixed a simple equation in American public discourse: bad nation + nuclear weapon = our total destruction. So it's easy to buy the platitude that Iran must never get a nuclear weapon or it's curtains. That leaves little pressure on top policymakers and pundits to explain exactly how a few nuclear weapons held by Iran could actually harm Americans. Meanwhile, there's little attention paid to the world's largest nuclear arsenal, right here in the U.S. Indeed, America's nukes are quite literally impossible to see, hidden as they are underground, under the seas, and under the wraps of "top secret" restrictions. Who’s going to worry about what can’t be seen when so many dangers termed "apocalyptic" seem to be in plain sight? Environmental perils are among them: melting glaciers and open-water Arctic seas, smog-blinded Chinese cities, increasingly powerful storms, and prolonged droughts. Yet most of the time such perils seem far away and like someone else's troubles. Even when dangers in nature come close, they generally don't fit the images in our apocalyptic imagination. Not surprisingly, then, voices proclaiming the inconvenient truth of a slowly emerging apocalypse get lost in the cacophony of apocalypses everywhere. Just one more set of boys crying wolf and so remarkably easy to deny or stir up doubt about. Death in Life Why does American culture use the A-word so promiscuously? Perhaps we've been living so long under a cloud of doom that every danger now readily takes on the same lethal hue. Psychiatrist Robert Lifton predicted such a state years ago when he suggested that the nuclear age had put us all in the grips of what he called "psychic numbing" or "death in life." We can no longer assume that we'll die Vonnegut’s plain old death and be remembered as part of an endless chain of life. Lifton's research showed that the link between death and life had become, as he put it, a "broken connection." As a result, he speculated, our minds stop trying to find the vitalizing images necessary for any healthy life. Every effort to form new mental images only conjures up more fear that the chain of life itself is coming to a dead end. Ultimately, we are left with nothing but "apathy, withdrawal, depression, despair." If that's the deepest psychic lens through which we see the world, however unconsciously, it's easy to understand why anything and everything can look like more evidence that The End is at hand. No wonder we have a generation of American youth and young adults who take a world filled with apocalyptic images for granted. Think of it as, in some grim way, a testament to human resiliency. They are learning how to live with the only reality they've ever known (and with all the irony we’re capable of, others are learning how to sell them cultural products based on that reality). Naturally, they assume it's the only reality possible. It's no surprise that "The Walking Dead," a zombie apocalypse series, is their favorite TV show, since it reveals (and revels in?) what one TV critic called the "secret life of the post-apocalyptic American teenager." Perhaps the only thing that should genuinely surprise us is how many of those young people still manage to break through psychic numbing in search of some way to make a difference in the world. Yet even in the political process for change, apocalypses are everywhere. Regardless of the issue, the message is typically some version of "Stop this catastrophe now or we're doomed!" (An example: Stop the Keystone XL pipeline or it’s “game over”!) A better future is often implied between the lines, but seldom gets much attention because it’s ever harder to imagine such a future, no less believe in it. No matter how righteous the cause, however, such a single-minded focus on danger and doom subtly reinforces the message of our era of apocalypses everywhere: abandon all hope, ye who live here and now.
Apocalyptic representations of climate change, particularly in the Small evidence, portray ecological destruction as a distant future event—that masks the suffering of the present and rationalizes ridiculous techno-fixes which will further destroy the Earth Crist 7 Eileen Crist, Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies in the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies at Virginia Tech “Beyond the Climate Crisis: A Critique of Climate Change Discourse” Telos 141 Winter 2007
Climate Change as Apocalypse and the Rise of Geoengineering Proposals The knowledge that biodiversity is in deep trouble has been available for at least three decades, but this momentous event has never inspired the urgency that climate change has triggered in a handful of years. This seems to be a blatant manifestation of anthropocentrism (the idée fixe that human interests, including short-term and non-vital ones, always come before all others), for climate change is perceived as threatening people directly— as the summer 2003 European heat wave, Hurricane Katrina, and other extreme weather exemplifies. The loss of life’s diversity and abundance, on the other hand, is not widely regarded as harboring a survival risk for human beings. After all, countless species, subspecies, ecosystems, populations of wild animals and plants, ancient forests, wetlands, and so on, have been eclipsed or diminished, and yet, to cite an anti-environmentalist cliché, “the sky did not fall.” But the dominant framing of climate change—its identification as the most urgent problem that we face—all but bluntly declares that the sky is falling. The apocalyptic potential of global warming in the not-so-distant future manifests between the lines of climate-change writings far more vividly than mere subtext. The difference between such climate-change characterizations (quoted earlier) as “collapse of civilization” or “planetary emergency,” on the one hand, and the idea of apocalypse, on the other, is almost purely semantic. Climate-change works do not employ the word apocalypse, but they often imply or outright describe something that uncannily resembles what religious imagery has pictured. Ross Gelbspan, for example, in a description fairly typical of what climate change foreshadows, writes of “the world becoming a storm-battered, insect-infested breeding ground of infectious diseases,” one “of temperature extremes, of extensive drought and desperate heat.”48 The Revenge of Gaia may be the most openly apocalyptic work on global warming in print. Lovelock assesses all variables affecting climate as being in positive feedback, which indicates, in his words, that “any addition of heat from any source will be amplified.”49 Among positive feedbacks, he lists loss of albedo from the melting of polar ice, decline of carbon-dioxide-absorbing and cloud-producing plankton, and the release of land-locked and (possibly) sea-bottom methane—all consequences of increasing temperatures, which, in turn, will act to reinforce and accelerate “global heating.” Any one of these feedbacks might raise concern, but considered together an alarming picture emerges for Lovelock. He predicts runaway heating: “The evidence coming in from the watchers of the world,” he claims, “brings news of an imminent shift in our climate towards one that can easily be described as Hell: so hot, so deadly that only a handful of the teeming billions now alive will survive.”50 This forecast proceeds from the apprehension of overstepping Earth-system thresholds and unleashing consequences both deadly and uncontrollable: in the climate-change literature, exceeding such thresholds is referred to as “dangerous anthropogenic interference.” While the specific forecast of a Hell in which billions perish is at the extreme end of climate-change predictions, the general intimation of a looming calamity for large numbers of people, and for civilization itself, is widespread in the literature. Overt or oblique, apocalyptic intimations abound in climate-change discourse. The concept of apocalypse is not just a household idea, but it is so in the air today (with fundamentalisms of all stripes and their ideas in full swing) that explicit reference to an impending apocalypse is redundant for the audience of climate-change writings. Dire warnings about the consequences of the continued use of fossil fuels, coupled with images of rising seas, soaring heat waves, raging wildfires, rampant disease, and acidified oceans, suffice to vividly evoke an end-ofthe-world vision circulated for two millennia by Judeo-Christian culture. Apocalyptic thinking manifests in a three-fold narrative structure pertaining to the timing, nature, and consequences of expected events if greenhouse-gas emissions continue unabated: one, an Earth-shattering calamity is forecast (or insinuated) to arrive at a future, albeit unspecified, time; two, it is nebulously portrayed as a single monumental catastrophe (adumbrated, perhaps, by a string of interconnected lesser catastrophes) that will affect everyone and everything; and three, it is suggested that human survival and the viability of civilization are at stake, with unprecedented levels of death, suffering, and social breakdown anticipated. Whether or not apocalyptic admonitions are tracking an immanent reality, and the world is actually headed for the hellish heat and anomie that Lovelock fears, climate change as apocalypse can be censured for playing straight into the hands of the religious fundamentalisms that are menacing the world. Indeed, the apocalyptic narratives of climate-change literature align closely with prophetic claims strewn throughout the Old and New Testaments.51 A perverse and noteworthy consequence of the alignment between climate-change and biblical imagery is that many fundamentalists (politicians, decision-makers, or citizens) may well remain undeterred and unmoved by climate-change warnings, which only resonate with their visions of death-by-fire, on the one hand, and rapture, on the other. As Derrick Jensen observes about this disturbing element at play today, “to many fundamentalists, the killing of the planet is not something to be avoided but encouraged, hastening as it does the victory of God over all things earthly.”52 Apocalyptic warnings dovetail into the day-of-reckoning fantasies of those who seem to care little about the biosphere’s destiny; and while their fantasies may not be widely held beliefs, they possess a sort of de facto credibility by virtue of their sheer cultural ubiquity.53 Narrative affinity with biblical stories is the least problematic aspect of representing the climate crisis as near-future apocalypse. The most pernicious dimension of this representation is that of occluding the reality we are (and have been) immersed in here and now—namely, the simplification-cum-homogenization of life on Earth. Climate change is not causing, but is hastening, the running down of the planet, and the technological grail that might ultimately solve the climate crisis will, more likely than not, simply allow the business-as-usual unraveling of the biosphere to proceed. Besides coddling humanity’s proclivity for self-centered concern, apocalyptic thinking directs attention toward some future Hollywood-style cataclysm, while dimming awareness of the present and real suffering of nonhumans, disempowered and impoverished people, and consumers beleaguered by clutter and malaise. Life’s ongoing devastation, and humanity’s pathological imbalance with wild nature and schisms within itself, are the predicaments that we are called to face—not the preemption of some imagined crash in some imagined future. Given the dominant framing of climate change, it is hardly surprising that schemes for what is called “geoengineering” (and, in even more Orwellian speak, “radiation management”) are increasingly aired as reasonable solutions to the climate crisis; it will be equally unsurprising if they are soon promoted as inevitable. A recent article in Nature claims that given “the need for drastic approaches to stave off the effects of rising planetary temperatures. . . curiosity about geoengineering looks likely to grow.”54 Six months earlier, an article in Wired gushed over the prospects, assuring us that “luckily, a growing number of scientists are thinking more aggressively, developing incredibly ambitious technical fixes to cool the planet.”55 In the wake of apocalyptic fears, geoengineering is easily packaged as an idea whose time has come; physicist Paul Crutzen’s recent attentions have imbued it with even more credibility. Crutzen received the Nobel Prize for his work on ozone depletion, and is now cautiously promoting “active scientific research” into the possibility of shooting SO2 into the stratosphere, which, by converting into sulfate particles, would mask global warming by an effect known as global dimming; Crutzen calls it “stratospheric albedo enhancement.”56 In essence, this strategy calls for countering one form of pollution with another.
Speculative extinction risks rationalize oppressive state institutions—that leads to a net increase in existential risk—challenging their epistemic frame is a prior question—Bostrom ironically goes neg on this question Bostrom 13 Nick Bostrom (faculty of philosophy, University of Oxford). “Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority.” Global Policy, Vol. 4, Issue 1. 2013. http://www.existential-risk.org/concept.pdf
Moral motivations, too, may fail to measure up to the magnitude of what is at stake. The scope insensitivity of our moral sentiments is likely to be especially pronounced when very large numbers are involved: Substantially larger numbers, such as 500 million deaths, and especially qualitatively different scenarios such as the extinction of the entire human species, seem to trigger a different mode of thinking—enter into a ‘separate magisterium’. People who would never dream of hurting a child hear of an existential risk, and say, ‘Well, maybe the human species doesn’t really deserve to survive’. (Yudkowsky, 2008, p. 114) Existential risk requires a proactive approach. The reactive approach—to observe what happens, limit damages, and then implement improved mechanisms to reduce the probability of a repeat occurrence—does not work when there is no opportunity to learn from failure. Instead, we must anticipate emerging dangers, mobilise support for action against hypothetical future harm, and get our precautions sufficiently right the first time. That is a tall order. Few institutions are capable of operating consistently at such a level of effective rationality, and attempts to imitate such proactive behaviour within less perfect institutions can easily backfire. Speculative riskmongering could be exploited to rationalise self-serving aggressive action, expansion of costly and potentially oppressive security bureaucracies, or restrictions of civil liberties that keep societies free and sane. The result of false approximations to the rational ideal could easily be a net increase in existential risk.32 Multidisciplinary and epistemological challenges, academic distractions and diversions, cognitive biases, freerider problems, moral lethargy and scope-insensitivity, institutional incompetence, and the political exploitation of unquantifiable threats are thus some of the barriers to effective mitigation. To these we can add the difficulty of achieving required levels of global cooperation. While some existential risks can be tackled unilaterally—any state with a space industry could build a global defense against asteroid impacts—other risks require a joint venture between many states. Management of the global climate may require buy-in by an overwhelming majority of industrialised and industrialising nations. Avoidance of arms races and relinquishment of dangerous directions of technological research may require that all States join the effort, since a single defector could annul any bene- fits of collaboration. Some future dangers might even require that each State monitor and regulate every significant group or individual within its territory.33
1/30/17
JANFEB- CP- Campaign Expenditure
Tournament: Blake | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Dulles AW | Judge: Eric Weine, Heaven Montague, Trevor Martinez CP CP Text—Public colleges and universities in the US ought not restrict any constitutionally protected forms of speech except in the case of student government elections. Public colleges and universities should preserve expenditure limits on student government campaigns—that fosters creativity in education and solves socio-economic disparities Powers 9: David M. Powers. College Student Affairs Journal; 2009; 28, 1; ProQuest Central pg. 124. The Constitutional Implications of Expenditure Limits in Student Government Elections. RW The university presented on main justification for the spending limit it imposed. The school contended that the main intent of the limits is to prevent student government from being diverted by interests other than ones educational" (Ftin4 2007, p. 835). The court accepted the school's contention, and asserted its own analysis: Imposing limits on candidate spending requires student candidates to focus on desirable qualities such as the art of persuasion, public speaking, and answering questions face-to-face with one's potential constituents. Students are forced to campaign personally, wearing our their shoe-leather rather than messing out parent's—or an activist organization's pocketbook (Diet, 2007, p. 835). In addition, the University President asserted further justification for the Limits: Unlimited spending in student government elections also would change the nature of the election process as a learning experience. The spending limits mean that students have to figure out no-con or low-cost ways of campaigning. They have to plan ahead to figure out their strategy, rather than just dumping a lot of money 1into advertising materials at the last minute. They have to make decisions about allocating their resources effectively. Without spending limits, the well-off students would nor have to face these constraints or make these kinds of decisions in the course of running for student government. 2007, P. 835). In regards to the tint interest, that the restriction equalizes socio-economic differences between students, the court rejected it under reasoning put forth in Bxelelry. The court wrote that the Beeklry decision "stands for the proposition that the desire to equalize the financial resources available to candidates does not justify the campaign finance limitation" (Welker, 2001, p. 1065). Secondly, the court rejected the interest that the restriction encouraged student's academic pursuits, because they found that the spending resvimion was not "narrowly tailored to that interest" (Welker, 2001, p. 1065-1066). Further, the court found that the expenditure limit was nor related in "any substantial sense" to its contended purpose of encouraging academic success, because managing a creative campaign (another of the school's alleged interests) takes just as much of the student's time as seeking financial contributions (Welker, 2001, p. 1066). The court also found that the interest of prohibiting undue corporate influence not narrowly tailored, became corporations could always endorse a specific canas didate, which could have the same influence as a financial contribution (Welker, 2001,p. 1066). Finally the noun rejected the university's contention that the restriction would foster creativity among students. The court found that the limitation was not narrowly tailored, and purported that it did not see the link connecting the cap on expenditures and fostering student candidate creativity in the election: For example, the court defined viewpoint neutrality as "the requirement that government not favor one speaker's message over anther's regarding the same topic" (Fiat, 2007, p. 833). Flaw contended that the expenditure limitation and did not constitute viewpoint discrimination because it applied equally to all candidates for student government (HA 2007, p. 833). The court rejected the plaintiff's argument that the restriction was viewpoint discrimination on account that the limitation allowed "non.candidate students" to speak without any restrictions (Fint, 2007, p. 834). This would have been a stronger argument if the court would have adopted the Alabm Shulent dissent approach, and found the entire campus to be the forum, rather than the individual election. However, the argument was not valid since the university did not allow "non-candidate students" to speak in the forum (the election) (Fkni, 2007, p. 834). In making his argument, the plaintiff was assuming that if the court did undertake no forum analysis, they would consider the entire campus the forum, rather than merely the election. Unlimited financial expenditure is a constitutionally protected form of speech on campuses—that replaces democratic values with neoliberalism PC 16: “Overturning the “Money as speech” Doctrine. 2016. ” Democracy is for the people—a Public Citizen project. http://www.democracyisforpeople.org/page.cfm?id=19. About Authors-- http://www.citizen.org/about/. RW Even before its disastrous 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the U.S. Supreme Court had already developed a flawed reading of the First Amendment that struck down reforms designed to prevent corruption and to ensure that the voices of the powerful did not drown out “We the People” in the halls of our democratic institutions. Although the extraordinary threat of unlimited corporate money in elections is a new expansion of the doctrine that “money is speech”, decisions of the Court since the Watergate era have enabled the richest one percent of society to buy outsized influence in our government. For over a hundred years, democratic representatives have listened to public outcry to stop the super-wealthy and big businesses from buying our elections. Reform efforts in the first half of the 20th Century prohibited corporate and union contributions to candidates.i In the wake of the Watergate scandal and allegations of illegal contributions in the 1972 election, Congress passed sweeping campaign finance reforms in the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA). FECA enacted comprehensive limits on campaign fundraising and spending, expanded disclosure requirements, established public financing for Presidential elections, and created the Federal Elections Commission to enforce the law. However, FECA was challenged in the 1976 Supreme Court case Buckley v. Valeo. In the Buckley decision, the Court upheld contribution limits, disclosure requirements, and presidential public financing. However, the Court struck down limits on “independent” expenditures and established the controversial idea that spending money for political campaigns purposes is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment. This idea became known colloquially as “money equals speech.” The Court reached this conclusion by treating “the distribution of the humblest handbill or leaflet” the same as expensive, professional advertising in a nation “dependent on television, radio, and other mass media,” and by refusing to acknowledge the corrupting power of unlimited money being used to support and attack candidates.ii This paved the way for huge increases in political spending by groups that only need to avoid a technical definition of “coordination” with candidate campaigns. Subsequent Court rulings weakened or did away with other restrictions on campaign spending. Citizens United marked the culmination of this trend, taking an errant reading of the Constitution and a broken campaign-finance system to an extreme with the conclusion: that corporations should have a First Amendment right to spend limitless amounts to influence election outcomes. Buckley and the cases that follow it, including Citizens United, rest on a number of flawed assumptions about money and politics.iii In particular, the Buckley Court assumed: That each dollar spent directly leads to some increased “quantity of speech,” and therefore placing any limits on campaign spending is the same as placing limits on political speech as a whole. That politicians are less indebted to or corrupted by people who “independently” spend huge amounts of money to elect them than to those who contribute money directly to their campaign. That government has no compelling interest in fostering equal participation in the campaign process or stopping the corrosion of democratic ideals that results when election costs spiral out of control and only the super-wealthy have influence. Spending money in election-related contexts helps people express themselves and can lead to political speech. But money itself is not the equivalent of political speech.I A system that allows corporations and the wealthiest among us to drown out the voices of others, and ensures unequal access to and leverage over elected officials, undermines the First Amendment’s core purpose – to foster and protect a flourishing marketplace of democratic ideas.
Policies should seek to support democracy within academia—corruption and capitalism are uniquely harmful to the purposes of educational institutions—spills up to cause large scale structural violence Giroux 15: (Henry A high-school social studies teacher in Barrington, Rhode Island, for six years,2 Giroux has held positions at Boston University, Miami University, and Penn State University. In 2005, Giroux began serving as the Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.34 He has published more than 50 books and more than 300 academic articles, and is published widely throughout education and cultural studies literature.5 "The curse of totalitarianism and the challenge of critical pedagogy" http://philosophersforchange.org/2015/10/13/the-curse-of-totalitarianism-and-the-challenge-of-critical-pedagogy/) The forces of free-market fundamentalism are on the march ushering in a terrifying horizon of what Hannah Arendt once called “dark times.” Across the globe, the tension between democratic values and market fundamentalism has reached a breaking point. 1 The social contract is under assault, neo-Nazism is on the rise, right wing populism is propelling extremist political candidates and social movements into the forefront of political life, anti-immigrant sentiment is now wrapped in the poisonous logic of nationalism and exceptionalism, racism has become a mark of celebrated audacity, and a politics of disposability comes dangerously close to its endgame of extermination for those considered excess. Under such circumstances, it becomes frightfully clear that the conditions for totalitarianism and state violence are still with us smothering critical thought, social responsibility, the ethical imagination, and politics itself. As Bill Dixon observes: The totalitarian form is still with us because the all too protean origins of totalitarianism are still with us: loneliness as the normal register of social life, the frenzied lawfulness of ideological certitude, mass poverty and mass homelessness, the routine use of terror as a political instrument, and the ever growing speeds and scales of media, economics, and warfare. 2 In the United States, the extreme right in both political parties no longer needs the comfort of a counterfeit ideology in which appeals are made to the common good, human decency, and democratic values. On the contrary, power is now concentrated in the hands of relatively few people and corporations while power is global and free from the limited politics of the democratic state. In fact, the state for all intent and purposes has become the corporate state. Dominant power is now all too visible and the policies, practices, and wrecking ball it has imposed on society appear to be largely unchecked. Any compromising notion of ideology has been replaced by a discourse of command and certainty backed up by the militarization of local police forces, the surveillance state, and all of the resources brought to bear by a culture of fear and a punishing state aligned with the permanent war on terror. Informed judgment has given way to a corporate controlled media apparatus that celebrates the banality of balance and the spectacle of violence, all the while reinforcing the politics and value systems of the financial elite.3 Following Arendt, a dark cloud of political and ethical ignorance has descended on the United States creating both a crisis of memory and agency. Thoughtlessness has become something that now occupies a privileged, if not celebrated, place in the political landscape and the mainstream cultural apparatuses. A new kind of infantilism and culture of ignorance now shapes daily life as agency devolves into a kind of anti-intellectual cretinism evident in the babble of banality produced by Fox News, celebrity culture, schools modeled after prisons, and politicians who support creationism, argue against climate change, and denounce almost any form of reason. Education is no longer viewed as a public good but a private right, just as critical thinking is devalued as a fundamental necessity for creating an engaged and socially responsible citizenship. Politics has become an extension of war, just as systemic economic uncertainty and state sponsored violence increasingly find legitimation in the discourses of privatization and demonization which promote anxiety, moral panics, fear and undermine any sense of communal responsibility for the well-being of others. Too many people today learn quickly that their fate is solely a matter of individual responsibility, irrespective of wider structural forces. This is a much promoted hyper-competitive ideology whose message is that surviving in a society demands reducing social relations to forms of social combat. People today are expected to inhabit a set of relations in which the only obligation is to live for one’s own self-interest and to reduce the responsibilities of citizenship to the demands of a consumer culture. Yet, there is more at work here than a flight from social responsibility, if not politics itself. Also lost is the importance of those social bonds, modes of collective reasoning, public spheres and cultural apparatuses crucial to the formation of a sustainable democratic society. With the return of the Gilded Age and its dream worlds of consumption, privatization, and deregulation, both democratic values and social protections at risk. At the same time, the civic and formative cultures that make such values and protections central to democratic life are in danger of being eliminated altogether. As market mentalities and moralities tighten their grip on all aspects of society, democratic institutions and public spheres are being downsized, if not altogether disappearing. As these institutions vanish—from public schools to health care centers– there is also a serious erosion of the discourses of community, justice, equality, public values, and the common good. One consequence is a society stripped of its inspiring and energizing public spheres and the “thick mesh of mutual obligations and social responsibilities to be found in” any viable democracy.5 This grim reality marks a failure in the power of the civic imagination, political will, and open democracy. 6 It is also part of a politics that strips the social of any democratic ideals and undermines any understanding of higher education as a public good and pedagogy as an empowering practice, a practice which acts directly upon the conditions which bear down on our lives in order to change them when necessary. At a time when the public good is under attack and there seems to be a growing apathy toward the social contract, or any other civic minded investment in public values and the larger common good, education has to be seen as more than a credential or a pathway to a job. It has to be viewed as crucial to understanding and overcoming the current crisis of agency, politics, and historical memory faced by many young people today. One of the challenges facing the current generation of educators and students is the need to reclaim the role that education has historically played in developing critical literacies and civic capacities. There is a need to use education to mobilize students to be critically engaged agents, attentive to addressing important social issues and being alert to the responsibility of deepening and expanding the meaning and practices of a vibrant democracy. At the heart of such a challenge is the question of what education should accomplish in a democracy? What work do educators have to do to create the economic, political, and ethical conditions necessary to endow young people with the capacities to think, question, doubt, imagine the unimaginable, and defend education as essential for inspiring and energizing the citizens necessary for the existence of a robust democracy? In a world in which there is an increasing abandonment of egalitarian and democratic impulses, what will it take to educate young people to challenge authority and in the words of James Baldwin “rob history of its tyrannical power, and illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.”7 What role might education and critical pedagogy have in a society in which the social has been individualized, emotional life collapses into the therapeutic, and education is relegated to either a private affair or a kind of algorithmic mode of regulation in which everything is reduced to a desired measureable economic outcome. Feedback loops now replace politics and the concept of progress is defined through a narrow culture of metrics, measurement, and efficiency.8 In a culture drowning in a new love affair with empiricism and data, that which is not measurable withers. Lost here are the registers of compassion, care for the other, the radical imagination, a democratic vision, and a passion for justice. In its place emerges what Goya in one of his engravings termed “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monster.” Goya’s title is richly suggestive particularly about the role of education and pedagogy in compelling students, to be able to recognize, as my colleague David Clark points out, “that an inattentiveness to the never-ending task of critique breeds horrors: the failures of conscience, the wars against thought, and the flirtations with irrationality that lie at the heart of the triumph of every-day aggression, the withering of political life, and the withdrawal into private obsessions.”9 Given the multiple crises that haunt the current historical conjuncture, educators need a new language for addressing the changing contexts and issues facing a world in which there is an unprecedented convergence of resources–financial, cultural, political, economic, scientific, military, and technological–that are increasingly used to concentrate powerful and diverse forms of control and domination. Such a language needs to be political without being dogmatic and needs to recognize that pedagogy is always political because it is connected to the struggle over agency. In this instance, making the pedagogical more political means being vigilant about those very “moments in which identities are being produced and groups are being constituted, or objects are being created.”10 At the same time it means educators need to be attentive to those practices in which critical modes of agency and particular identities are being denied. For example, the Tuscon Unified School District board not only eliminated the famed Mexican American Studies Program, but also banned a number of Chicano and Native American books it deemed dangerous. The ban included Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest,” and “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by the famed Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. This act of censorship provides a particularly disturbing case of the war that is being waged in the United States against not only young people marginalized by race and class but also against the very spaces and pedagogical practices that make critical thinking possible. Such actions suggest the need for faculty to develop forms of critical pedagogy that not only inspire and energize. They should also be able to challenge a growing number of anti-democratic practices and policies while also resurrecting a radical democratic project that provides the basis for imagining a life beyond a social order immersed in inequality, degradation to the environment, and the elevation of war and militarization to national ideals. Under such circumstances, education becomes more than an obsession with accountability schemes, an audit culture, market values, and an unreflective immersion in the crude empiricism of a data-obsessed market-driven society. It becomes part of a formative culture in which thoughtlessness prevails providing the foundation for what the curse of totalitarianism. At a time of increased repression, it is all the more crucial for educators to reject the notion that higher education is simply a site for training students for the workforce and that the culture of higher education is synonymous with the culture of business. At issue here is the need for educators to should recognize the power of education in creating the formative cultures necessary to both challenge the various threats being mobilized against the ideas of justice and democracy while also fighting for those public spheres, ideals, values, and policies that offer alternative modes of identity, thinking, social relations, and politics. In both conservative and progressive discourses pedagogy is often treated simply as a set of strategies and skills to use in order to teach prespecified subject matter. In this context, pedagogy becomes synonymous with teaching as a technique or the practice of a craft-like skill. Any viable notion of critical pedagogy must grasp the limitations of this definition and its endless slavish imitations even when they are claimed as part of a radical discourse or project. In opposition to the instrumental reduction of pedagogy to a method—which has no language for relating the self to public life, social responsibility or the demands of citizenship–critical pedagogy illuminates the relationships among knowledge, authority, and power.11 Central to any viable notion of what makes pedagogy critical is, in part, the recognition that pedagogy is always a deliberate attempt on the part of educators to influence how and what knowledge and subjectivities are produced within particular sets of social relations. This approach to critical pedagogy does not reduce educational practice to the mastery of methodologies, it stresses, instead, the importance of understanding what actually happens in classrooms and other educational settings by raising questions regarding: what the relationship is between learning and social change, what knowledge is of most worth, what does it mean to know something, and in what direction should one desire? Pedagogy is always about power, because it cannot be separated from how subjectivies are formed, desires mobilized, how some experiences are legitimated and other are not or how some knowledge is considered acceptable while other forms are excluded from the curriculum. Pedagogy is a moral and political practice because it offers particular versions and visions of civic life, community, the future, and how we might construct representations of ourselves, others, and our physical and social environment. But it does more; it also “represents a version of our own dreams for ourselves, our children, and our communities. But such dreams are never neutral; they are always someone’s dreams and to the degree that they are implicated in organizing the future for others they always have a moral and political dimension.”12 It is in this respect that any discussion of pedagogy must begin with a discussion of educational practice as a particular way in which a sense of identity, place, worth, and above all value is informed by practices which organize knowledge and meaning.13 Central to my argument is the assumption that politics is not only about the exercise of economic and political power, but also, as Cornelius Castoriadis points out, “has to do with political judgements and value choices,”14 indicating that questions of civic education and critical pedagogy (learning how to become a skilled citizen) are central to the struggle over political agency and democracy. In this instance, critical pedagogy emphasizes critical reflection, bridging the gap between learning and everyday life, understanding the connection between power and difficult knowledge, and extending democratic rights and identities by using the resources of history and theory. However, among many educators and social theorists, there is a widespread refusal to recognize that education does not only take place in schools, but also through of what can be called the educative nature of the culture. That is, there are a range of cultural institutions extending from the mainstream media to new digital screen cultures that engage in what I have called forms of public pedagogy, which are central to the tasks of either expanding and enabling political and civic agency or shutting them down. At stake here is the crucial recognition that pedagogy is central to politics itself because it is about changing the way people see things, recognizing that politics is educative and as the late Pierre Bourdieu reminded us “the most important forms of domination are not only economic but also intellectual and pedagogical, and lie on the side of belief and persuasion.” Just as I would argue that pedagogy has to be made meaningful in order to be made critical and transformative, I think it is fair to argue that there is no politics without a pedagogy of identification; that is, people have to invest something of themselves in how they are addressed or recognize that any mode of education, argument, idea, or pedagogy has to speak to their condition and provide a moment of recognition. Lacking this understanding, pedagogy all too easily becomes a form of symbolic and intellectual violence, one that assaults rather than educates. One can see this in forms of high stakes testing and empirically driven teaching approaches which dull the critical impulse and produce what might be called dead zones of the imagination. We also see such violence in schools whose chief function is repression. Such schools often employ modes of instruction that are punitive and mean-spirited and are largely driven by regimes of memorization and conformity. Pedagogies of repression are largely disciplinary and have little regard for analysing contexts, history, making knowledge meaningful, or expanding upon what it means for students to be critically engaged agents. Expanding critical pedagogy as a mode of public pedagogy suggests being attentive to and addressing modes of knowledge and social practices in a variety of sites that not only encourage critical thinking, thoughtfulness, and meaningful dialogue but also offer opportunities to mobilize instances of moral outrage, social responsibility, and collective action. Such mobilisation opposes glaring material inequities and the growing cynical belief that today’s culture of investment and finance makes it impossible to address many of the major social problems facing the USA, Canada, Latin America, and the larger world. Most importantly, such work points to the link between civic education, critical pedagogy, and modes of oppositional political agency that are pivotal to creating a politics that promotes democratic values, relations, autonomy and social change. Hints of such a politics were evident in the various approaches developed by the Quebec student protesters, the now dormant Occupy Movement, the student movements in Chile, and the pedagogical strategies being developed by the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. Borrowing a line from Rachel Donadio, these young protestors are raising important questions about “what happens to democracy when banks become more powerful than political institutions?”15
3/6/17
JANFEB- CP- Campaign Expenditure v2
Tournament: Emory | Round: 3 | Opponent: Kinkaid JY | Judge: Nadia Hussein 1NC- CP CP Text—Public colleges and universities in the US ought not restrict any constitutionally protected forms of speech except in the case of student government elections. Public colleges and universities should preserve expenditure limits on student government campaigns Wright and Danetz 8: Demos attorneys Brenda Wright and Lisa J. Danetz joined David Aronofsky, University of Montana Legal Counsel, in defending the University's campaign spending limits in the Supreme Court. January 7, 2008. SUPREME COURT ALLOWS SPENDING LIMITS FOR STUDENT GOVERNMENT ELECTIONS AT UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA, REJECTING FIRST AMENDMENT CHALLENGE. Demos. http://www.demos.org/press-release/supreme-court-allows-spending-limits-student-government-elections-university-montana-r. RW The Supreme Court today turned back a constitutional challenge to spending limits for student government campaigns at the University of Montana, denying review of a June 2007 ruling by the Ninth Circuit that upheld the limits. The Supreme Court's action is a victory for the Associated Students of the University of Montana ("ASUM") and the University, which argued that the limits on campaign spending serve to assure all students, regardless of their financial circumstances, an equal opportunity to win election to student government. Brenda Wright, Legal Director of Demos, a non-profit organization that assisted in defending the University's spending limits, called the ruling '"a victory for fair elections and educational opportunity," stating "the First Amendment was never designed to make made student government participation a function of a student's wealth." The case was brought in 2004 by former UM student Aaron Flint, who exceeded the $100 spending cap in his effort to win a seat on the ASUM Senate and was disqualified from taking his seat as a result of the violation. A nationally prominent opponent of campaign finance regulation, James Bopp, Jr., represented Flint and argued that the First Amendment guaranteed Flint the right to spend unlimited sums in his quest for a student government seat. The Ninth Circuit, however, found there is ample justification for ASUM's campaign limits, observing: "Imposing limits on candidate spending requires student candidates to focus on desirable qualities such as the art of persuasion, public speaking, and answering questions face-to-face with one's potential constituents. Students are forced to campaign personally, wearing out their shoe-leather rather than wearing out a parent's--or an activist organization's--pocketbook." The Supreme Court's ruling today means that the Ninth Circuit's decision will stand as the leading appellate precedent on the constitutionality of rules designed to foster fair access to student government participation. The Ninth Circuit includes Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington
It’s competitive—we do the aff minus unlimited campaign expenditures by placing restrictions on the amount of money that can be spent in student elections—perms are severance which make the aff a moving target and make being neg impossible Unlimited financial expenditure towards elections is a constitutionally protected form of speech on campuses—that replaces democratic values with market capitalism PC 16: “Overturning the “Money as speech” Doctrine. 2016. ” Democracy is for the people—a Public Citizen project. http://www.democracyisforpeople.org/page.cfm?id=19. About Authors-- http://www.citizen.org/about/. RW Even before its disastrous 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the U.S. Supreme Court had already developed a flawed reading of the First Amendment that struck down reforms designed to prevent corruption and to ensure that the voices of the powerful did not drown out “We the People” in the halls of our democratic institutions. Although the extraordinary threat of unlimited corporate money in elections is a new expansion of the doctrine that “money is speech”, decisions of the Court since the Watergate era have enabled the richest one percent of society to buy outsized influence in our government. For over a hundred years, democratic representatives have listened to public outcry to stop the super-wealthy and big businesses from buying our elections. Reform efforts in the first half of the 20th Century prohibited corporate and union contributions to candidates.i In the wake of the Watergate scandal and allegations of illegal contributions in the 1972 election, Congress passed sweeping campaign finance reforms in the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA). FECA enacted comprehensive limits on campaign fundraising and spending, expanded disclossure requirements, established public financing for Presidential elections, and created the Federal Elections Commission to enforce the law. However, FECA was challenged in the 1976 Supreme Court case Buckley v. Valeo. In the Buckley decision, the Court upheld contribution limits, disclosure requirements, and presidential public financing. However, the Court struck down limits on “independent” expenditures and established the controversial idea that spending money for political campaigns purposes is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment. This idea became known colloquially as “money equals speech.” The Court reached this conclusion by treating “the distribution of the humblest handbill or leaflet” the same as expensive, professional advertising in a nation “dependent on television, radio, and other mass media,” and by refusing to acknowledge the corrupting power of unlimited money being used to support and attack candidates.ii This paved the way for huge increases in political spending by groups that only need to avoid a technical definition of “coordination” with candidate campaigns. Subsequent Court rulings weakened or did away with other restrictions on campaign spending. Citizens United marked the culmination of this trend, taking an errant reading of the Constitution and a broken campaign-finance system to an extreme with the conclusion: that corporations should have a First Amendment right to spend limitless amounts to influence election outcomes. Buckley and the cases that follow it, including Citizens United, rest on a number of flawed assumptions about money and politics.iii In particular, the Buckley Court assumed: That each dollar spent directly leads to some increased “quantity of speech,” and therefore placing any limits on campaign spending is the same as placing limits on political speech as a whole. That politicians are less indebted to or corrupted by people who “independently” spend huge amounts of money to elect them than to those who contribute money directly to their campaign. That government has no compelling interest in fostering equal participation in the campaign process or stopping the corrosion of democratic ideals that results when election costs spiral out of control and only the super-wealthy have influence. Spending money in election-related contexts helps people express themselves and can lead to political speech. But money itself is not the equivalent of political speech.I A system that allows corporations and the wealthiest among us to drown out the voices of others, and ensures unequal access to and leverage over elected officials, undermines the First Amendment’s core purpose – to foster and protect a flourishing marketplace of democratic ideas.
The CP also solves 100 of the case—the only type of constitutional speech we restrict is financial expenditures, which means people still have the ability to physically speak and say whatever they want—regardless, we’ll isolate three independent net benefits to expenditure limits:
The “money as speech doctrine” reinforces the capitalist illusion of freedom—that makes speech meaningless and kills value to life—the CP solves
Smith 14: R.C. Smith April 24, 2014 “POWER, CAPITAL and THE RISE OF THE MASS SURVEILLANCE STATE: ON THE ABSENCE OF DEMOCRACY, ETHICS, DISENCHANTMENT and CRITICAL THEORY” Heathwood Institute and Press http://www.heathwoodpress.com/power-capital-the-rise-of-the-mass-surveillance-state-on-the-absence-of-democracy-ethics-disenchantment-critical-theory/ JJN from file One pressing issue, moreover, is that majority of the popular movements that have emerged in response to the Snowden leaks appear to be reformist in character. As a result, the discourse isn’t so much about fundamental system change; rather it becomes crafted into making mass surveillance less repulsive and more socially acceptable, even marketable. (Consider, for instance, the latest reforms proposed by President Barack Obama). For Adorno, this reformist inclination can be explained in part through an analysis of the logic of the system of capital. We read in Adorno how under modernity – i.e., capitalism – human beings are treated as commodities and the political-economy, which is principled on concentrations of power (i.e., ‘contradictory recognition’5), goes over the head of the individual, particularly as ‘coercive society’ aims to ‘shape people’ on behalf of the economic, social and political status quo.6 The system of capital, along with the instrumental use of Enlightenment ideals to promote a rational, efficient system7 have laid a foundation for society wherein the political-economy influences individuals and manufactures consent.8 Accordingly, people are seen as “substitutable entities valued merely for their instrumental uses or ability to command market resources,” and even where “commodification is resisted, the overriding pull of society is toward the status quo and those forms that are valued by society”. 9 As Kate Schick writes: The mind thus shapes itself into socially acceptable, marketable forms and freedom becomes an illusion, made all the more dangerous and difficult to resist because of the appearance of freedom. This is not the fault of Enlightenment ideals as such, but the instrumental use of these ideals in the promotion of a rational, efficient system: ‘The network of the whole is drawn ever tighter, modelled after the act of exchange’ (Adorno 1981: 21).10 Present in the logic of the system of capital itself is not an ‘emancipatory reason’ that aims toward universal guiding principles of an actually egalitarian democracy – i.e., Equality, Egalitarianism, Justice, Rights, etc. Rather, in modern capitalism, with its instrumental reason and positivist logic, such concepts lose their meaning. The social narrative no longer accommodates these fundamental principles or judges them to be delusions, because all concepts must be strictly functional in order to be considered “reasonable”.12 In turn, the ideals of a ‘good’ society, for example ideals toward an actual egalitarian democracy, become dependent on the “interests” of the dominant and governing system, which produces and reproduces the epistemic context of its own validity.13
The CP corrects socio-economic disparities between students Powers 9: David M. Powers. College Student Affairs Journal; 2009; 28, 1; ProQuest Central pg. 124. The Constitutional Implications of Expenditure Limits in Student Government Elections. RW The university presented on main justification for the spending limit it imposed. The school contended that the main intent of the limits is to prevent student government from being diverted by interests other than ones educational" (Ftin4 2007, p. 835). The court accepted the school's contention, and asserted its own analysis: Imposing limits on candidate spending requires student candidates to focus on desirable qualities such as the art of persuasion, public speaking, and answering questions face-to-face with one's potential constituents. Students are forced to campaign personally, wearing our their shoe-leather rather than messing out parent's—or an activist organization's pocketbook (Diet, 2007, p. 835). In addition, the University President asserted further justification for the Limits: Unlimited spending in student government elections also would change the nature of the election process as a learning experience. The spending limits mean that students have to figure out no-con or low-cost ways of campaigning. They have to plan ahead to figure out their strategy, rather than just dumping a lot of money 1into advertising materials at the last minute. They have to make decisions about allocating their resources effectively. Without spending limits, the well-off students would nor have to face these constraints or make these kinds of decisions in the course of running for student government. 2007, P. 835). In regards to the tint interest, that the restriction equalizes socio-economic differences between students, the court rejected it under reasoning put forth in Bxelelry. The court wrote that the Beeklry decision "stands for the proposition that the desire to equalize the financial resources available to candidates does not justify the campaign finance limitation" (Welker, 2001, p. 1065). Secondly, the court rejected the interest that the restriction encouraged student's academic pursuits, because they found that the spending resvimion was not "narrowly tailored to that interest" (Welker, 2001, p. 1065-1066). Further, the court found that the expenditure limit was nor related in "any substantial sense" to its contended purpose of encouraging academic success, because managing a creative campaign (another of the school's alleged interests) takes just as much of the student's time as seeking financial contributions (Welker, 2001, p. 1066). The court also found that the interest of prohibiting undue corporate influence not narrowly tailored, became corporations could always endorse a specific canas didate, which could have the same influence as a financial contribution (Welker, 2001,p. 1066). Finally the noun rejected the university's contention that the restriction would foster creativity among students. The court found that the limitation was not narrowly tailored, and purported that it did not see the link connecting the cap on expenditures and fostering student candidate creativity in the election: For example, the court defined viewpoint neutrality as "the requirement that government not favor one speaker's message over anther's regarding the same topic" (Fiat, 2007, p. 833). Flaw contended that the expenditure limitation and did not constitute viewpoint discrimination because it applied equally to all candidates for student government (HA 2007, p. 833). The court rejected the plaintiff's argument that the restriction was viewpoint discrimination on account that the limitation allowed "non.candidate students" to speak without any restrictions (Fint, 2007, p. 834). This would have been a stronger argument if the court would have adopted the Alabm Shulent dissent approach, and found the entire campus to be the forum, rather than the individual election. However, the argument was not valid since the university did not allow "non-candidate students" to speak in the forum (the election) (Fkni, 2007, p. 834). In making his argument, the plaintiff was assuming that if the court did undertake no forum analysis, they That independently outweighs—Capitalism’s grip on the academy causes massive structural violence—democratic practices fostered during student elections are key Giroux 15: (Henry A high-school social studies teacher in Barrington, Rhode Island, for six years,2 Giroux has held positions at Boston University, Miami University, and Penn State University. In 2005, Giroux began serving as the Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.34 He has published more than 50 books and more than 300 academic articles, and is published widely throughout education and cultural studies literature.5 "The curse of totalitarianism and the challenge of critical pedagogy" http://philosophersforchange.org/2015/10/13/the-curse-of-totalitarianism-and-the-challenge-of-critical-pedagogy/) The forces of free-market fundamentalism are on the march ushering in a terrifying horizon of what Hannah Arendt once called “dark times.” Across the globe, the tension between democratic values and market fundamentalism has reached a breaking point. 1 The social contract is under assault, neo-Nazism is on the rise, right wing populism is propelling extremist political candidates and social movements into the forefront of political life, anti-immigrant sentiment is now wrapped in the poisonous logic of nationalism and exceptionalism, racism has become a mark of celebrated audacity, and a politics of disposability comes dangerously close to its endgame of extermination for those considered excess. Under such circumstances, it becomes frightfully clear that the conditions for totalitarianism and state violence are still with us smothering critical thought, social responsibility, the ethical imagination, and politics itself. As Bill Dixon observes: The totalitarian form is still with us because the all too protean origins of totalitarianism are still with us: loneliness as the normal register of social life, the frenzied lawfulness of ideological certitude, mass poverty and mass homelessness, the routine use of terror as a political instrument, and the ever growing speeds and scales of media, economics, and warfare. 2 In the United States, the extreme right in both political parties no longer needs the comfort of a counterfeit ideology in which appeals are made to the common good, human decency, and democratic values. On the contrary, power is now concentrated in the hands of relatively few people and corporations while power is global and free from the limited politics of the democratic state. In fact, the state for all intent and purposes has become the corporate state. Dominant power is now all too visible and the policies, practices, and wrecking ball it has imposed on society appear to be largely unchecked. Any compromising notion of ideology has been replaced by a discourse of command and certainty backed up by the militarization of local police forces, the surveillance state, and all of the resources brought to bear by a culture of fear and a punishing state aligned with the permanent war on terror. Informed judgment has given way to a corporate controlled media apparatus that celebrates the banality of balance and the spectacle of violence, all the while reinforcing the politics and value systems of the financial elite.3 Following Arendt, a dark cloud of political and ethical ignorance has descended on the United States creating both a crisis of memory and agency. Thoughtlessness has become something that now occupies a privileged, if not celebrated, place in the political landscape and the mainstream cultural apparatuses. A new kind of infantilism and culture of ignorance now shapes daily life as agency devolves into a kind of anti-intellectual cretinism evident in the babble of banality produced by Fox News, celebrity culture, schools modeled after prisons, and politicians who support creationism, argue against climate change, and denounce almost any form of reason. Education is no longer viewed as a public good but a private right, just as critical thinking is devalued as a fundamental necessity for creating an engaged and socially responsible citizenship. Politics has become an extension of war, just as systemic economic uncertainty and state sponsored violence increasingly find legitimation in the discourses of privatization and demonization which promote anxiety, moral panics, fear and undermine any sense of communal responsibility for the well-being of others. Too many people today learn quickly that their fate is solely a matter of individual responsibility, irrespective of wider structural forces. This is a much promoted hyper-competitive ideology whose message is that surviving in a society demands reducing social relations to forms of social combat. People today are expected to inhabit a set of relations in which the only obligation is to live for one’s own self-interest and to reduce the responsibilities of citizenship to the demands of a consumer culture. Yet, there is more at work here than a flight from social responsibility, if not politics itself. Also lost is the importance of those social bonds, modes of collective reasoning, public spheres and cultural apparatuses crucial to the formation of a sustainable democratic society. With the return of the Gilded Age and its dream worlds of consumption, privatization, and deregulation, both democratic values and social protections at risk. At the same time, the civic and formative cultures that make such values and protections central to democratic life are in danger of being eliminated altogether. As market mentalities and moralities tighten their grip on all aspects of society, democratic institutions and public spheres are being downsized, if not altogether disappearing. As these institutions vanish—from public schools to health care centers– there is also a serious erosion of the discourses of community, justice, equality, public values, and the common good. One consequence is a society stripped of its inspiring and energizing public spheres and the “thick mesh of mutual obligations and social responsibilities to be found in” any viable democracy.5 This grim reality marks a failure in the power of the civic imagination, political will, and open democracy. 6 It is also part of a politics that strips the social of any democratic ideals and undermines any understanding of higher education as a public good and pedagogy as an empowering practice, a practice which acts directly upon the conditions which bear down on our lives in order to change them when necessary. At a time when the public good is under attack and there seems to be a growing apathy toward the social contract, or any other civic minded investment in public values and the larger common good, education has to be seen as more than a credential or a pathway to a job. It has to be viewed as crucial to understanding and overcoming the current crisis of agency, politics, and historical memory faced by many young people today. One of the challenges facing the current generation of educators and students is the need to reclaim the role that education has historically played in developing critical literacies and civic capacities. There is a need to use education to mobilize students to be critically engaged agents, attentive to addressing important social issues and being alert to the responsibility of deepening and expanding the meaning and practices of a vibrant democracy. At the heart of such a challenge is the question of what education should accomplish in a democracy? What work do educators have to do to create the economic, political, and ethical conditions necessary to endow young people with the capacities to think, question, doubt, imagine the unimaginable, and defend education as essential for inspiring and energizing the citizens necessary for the existence of a robust democracy? In a world in which there is an increasing abandonment of egalitarian and democratic impulses, what will it take to educate young people to challenge authority and in the words of James Baldwin “rob history of its tyrannical power, and illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.”7 What role might education and critical pedagogy have in a society in which the social has been individualized, emotional life collapses into the therapeutic, and education is relegated to either a private affair or a kind of algorithmic mode of regulation in which everything is reduced to a desired measureable economic outcome. Feedback loops now replace politics and the concept of progress is defined through a narrow culture of metrics, measurement, and efficiency.8 In a culture drowning in a new love affair with empiricism and data, that which is not measurable withers. Lost here are the registers of compassion, care for the other, the radical imagination, a democratic vision, and a passion for justice. In its place emerges what Goya in one of his engravings termed “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monster.” Goya’s title is richly suggestive particularly about the role of education and pedagogy in compelling students, to be able to recognize, as my colleague David Clark points out, “that an inattentiveness to the never-ending task of critique breeds horrors: the failures of conscience, the wars against thought, and the flirtations with irrationality that lie at the heart of the triumph of every-day aggression, the withering of political life, and the withdrawal into private obsessions.”9 Given the multiple crises that haunt the current historical conjuncture, educators need a new language for addressing the changing contexts and issues facing a world in which there is an unprecedented convergence of resources–financial, cultural, political, economic, scientific, military, and technological–that are increasingly used to concentrate powerful and diverse forms of control and domination. Such a language needs to be political without being dogmatic and needs to recognize that pedagogy is always political because it is connected to the struggle over agency. In this instance, making the pedagogical more political means being vigilant about those very “moments in which identities are being produced and groups are being constituted, or objects are being created.”10 At the same time it means educators need to be attentive to those practices in which critical modes of agency and particular identities are being denied. For example, the Tuscon Unified School District board not only eliminated the famed Mexican American Studies Program, but also banned a number of Chicano and Native American books it deemed dangerous. The ban included Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest,” and “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by the famed Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. This act of censorship provides a particularly disturbing case of the war that is being waged in the United States against not only young people marginalized by race and class but also against the very spaces and pedagogical practices that make critical thinking possible. Such actions suggest the need for faculty to develop forms of critical pedagogy that not only inspire and energize. They should also be able to challenge a growing number of anti-democratic practices and policies while also resurrecting a radical democratic project that provides the basis for imagining a life beyond a social order immersed in inequality, degradation to the environment, and the elevation of war and militarization to national ideals. Under such circumstances, education becomes more than an obsession with accountability schemes, an audit culture, market values, and an unreflective immersion in the crude empiricism of a data-obsessed market-driven society. It becomes part of a formative culture in which thoughtlessness prevails providing the foundation for what the curse of totalitarianism. At a time of increased repression, it is all the more crucial for educators to reject the notion that higher education is simply a site for training students for the workforce and that the culture of higher education is synonymous with the culture of business. At issue here is the need for educators to should recognize the power of education in creating the formative cultures necessary to both challenge the various threats being mobilized against the ideas of justice and democracy while also fighting for those public spheres, ideals, values, and policies that offer alternative modes of identity, thinking, social relations, and politics. In both conservative and progressive discourses pedagogy is often treated simply as a set of strategies and skills to use in order to teach prespecified subject matter. In this context, pedagogy becomes synonymous with teaching as a technique or the practice of a craft-like skill. Any viable notion of critical pedagogy must grasp the limitations of this definition and its endless slavish imitations even when they are claimed as part of a radical discourse or project. In opposition to the instrumental reduction of pedagogy to a method—which has no language for relating the self to public life, social responsibility or the demands of citizenship–critical pedagogy illuminates the relationships among knowledge, authority, and power.11 Central to any viable notion of what makes pedagogy critical is, in part, the recognition that pedagogy is always a deliberate attempt on the part of educators to influence how and what knowledge and subjectivities are produced within particular sets of social relations. This approach to critical pedagogy does not reduce educational practice to the mastery of methodologies, it stresses, instead, the importance of understanding what actually happens in classrooms and other educational settings by raising questions regarding: what the relationship is between learning and social change, what knowledge is of most worth, what does it mean to know something, and in what direction should one desire? Pedagogy is always about power, because it cannot be separated from how subjectivies are formed, desires mobilized, how some experiences are legitimated and other are not or how some knowledge is considered acceptable while other forms are excluded from the curriculum. Pedagogy is a moral and political practice because it offers particular versions and visions of civic life, community, the future, and how we might construct representations of ourselves, others, and our physical and social environment. But it does more; it also “represents a version of our own dreams for ourselves, our children, and our communities. But such dreams are never neutral; they are always someone’s dreams and to the degree that they are implicated in organizing the future for others they always have a moral and political dimension.”12 It is in this respect that any discussion of pedagogy must begin with a discussion of educational practice as a particular way in which a sense of identity, place, worth, and above all value is informed by practices which organize knowledge and meaning.13 Central to my argument is the assumption that politics is not only about the exercise of economic and political power, but also, as Cornelius Castoriadis points out, “has to do with political judgements and value choices,”14 indicating that questions of civic education and critical pedagogy (learning how to become a skilled citizen) are central to the struggle over political agency and democracy. Activism through protest is immediately shut down by college administrators—working through student government is key to reshape policies and affect real change on campus Singh 13: Sejal Singh, 2013. Know your IX: Empowering students to stop sexual violence. Tips from the ground: how to be a student government ally. http://knowyourix.org/activism/tips-from-the-ground-how-to-be-a-student-government-ally/. RW
One of the biggest obstacles anti-sexual violence organizers have faced is a society that constantly tries to silence the voices of survivors. Survivors who talk about being sexually assaulted often face backlash and victim-blaming from other students, and schools sometimes try to intimidate survivors and activists who speak out. All of this means that there’s a culture of silence around sexual assault and survivors’ voices are rarely at the center of the conversation. As a student leaders, your job is to amplify those voices, not to drown them out. If a reporter calls you to ask about sexual assault or your policy, put them in touch with survivors and activists (but always check to make sure they’re okay with that first!). If administrators are holding an important meeting to discuss your sexual assault policy and procedures, make sure that student survivors and activists will be there. Ultimately, your the goal should be to make sure that leaders people who publicly identify as survivors are always centrally involved in the conversation. This can be tricky, since many survivors don’t want to speak publicly about their experiences (and you might be a survivor of sexual assault yourself). When in doubt, make sure to check in with survivors about whether they’d want to participate in a given meeting or article. Don’t sensationalize anyone’s story and, if at all possible, always let survivors speak for themselves. It goes without saying that sexual violence is an incredibly personal issue, so make sure you’re not inadvertently co-opting someone’s trauma and always let survivors tell their stories on their own terms. Never pressure anyone to tell their story publicly if they’re uncomfortable with it. Definitely never tell anyone else’s story unless they’ve given you the go ahead! Of course, you might be a survivor yourself. If you are, that can definitely give you a lot of valuable insight into ways your school’s climate, procedures, and resources may be failing survivors. But it’s still important to listen to other survivors who may have different experiences, ideas, and insights. Other survivors may have faced different challenges because they have a different relationship with the school, because they’re LGBTQ, because they’re differently abled, or for a whole host of other reasons. Remember that sexual assault affects many, many different kinds of people: there should never be just one face of the movement at your school. Bureaucracy is a major barrier to effective student activism — students will be directed from office to office, given meaningless meetings, or spend lots of time sitting down with officials who never pass their conversations on to the people actually in charge. If you’re in Student Government, you probably have a lot of experience navigating byzantine University systems and can help direct activists to the people who will actually make decisions. You also probably know who’s receptive to student ideas, who’ll be up front with activists, and who won’t make any firm commitments. You have lots of specialized knowledge and can be a great resource! Student Government members may have access to Deans, Trustees, or University Presidents, but it can be very hard for other students to meet with them or even get their emails read. Your their job is not to speak for survivors but to help foster a meaningful dialogue between survivors and key decision-makers. Use your access to make sure administrators listen to all the concerns and goals laid out by survivors. Push decision-makers to hold public forums about sexual assault, to read policy proposals, and most importantly, to meet directly with activists and survivors. Set up open meetings with administrators about consent education, resources, or policy reform that anyone can come to, or put activists in touch with administrators and request that they meet. Since you’re elected to represent students, you may be invited to meetings about reforming sexual misconduct policies, expanding resources, or improving accountability. Remember that no one can understand sexual assault if they haven’t experienced it, and that those people need to be at the table. Many schools will try to keep survivors or activists out of key conversations. That might just be an oversight, or they may be intentionally trying to shut survivors out of the conversation — either way, it’s not okay! If you’re invited to a meeting about sexual assault on your campus, make sure to ask what other students will be there. See if any of those students publicly identify as survivors and check with student activist groups to see if any of their members have been invited. If survivors haven’t been invited to those meetings, insist that they be included. Help make survivors voices heard!
That turns and outweighs the case—Absent a political candidate to rally behind, student protest reinforces neoliberal ideologies by fracturing systemic, campus-wide problems into individualized social narratives—that makes change impossible and causes their impacts Tannock 14 Mayssoun Sukarieh and Stuart Tannock ( Senior Lecturer @ IOE - Education, Practice and Society, UCL Institute of Education), "Education, Protest, and the Continuing Extension of Youth," in Youth Rising?: The Politics of Youth in the Global Economy (Critical Youth Studies), 2014 AZ Some commentators have argued that the limitations in the demands and vision of recent student protesters reflect a deficit particular to the current generation of youth: a lack of historical memory and ideology, and an overly individualised way of looking at the world (e.g.. Aitehison and Gilbert. 2012; Mason. 2012). “For all their faults," writes Paul Mason (2011), "the children of 1968 started out with something you don't find much of in the current generation of student protesters -a coherent vision of the kind of society they would like to create." But this critique risks removing “youth" from the social, cultural, political and economic structures in which it has been constructed and situated in contemporary capitalist society and economy. As Gavin Brown (2013. p. “9) points out. it is not just the current generation of student protesters who have tended to frame their demands within a "particular form of neoliberal social hope based around promoting individualized social mobility." but several decades of state social and educational policy as well (see also Ram». 2009). Indeed, as we argue above, the very extension of youth as a social category in contemporary society is based on the spread of this neoliberal politics of education and aspiration for social mobility across global capitalist society and economy. The problem of limitation of vision, then, is less a generational issue than a structural one. Ironically, despite the apparent disruptiveness and oppositional nature of the post-global financial crisis student protest movements, these movements, rather than being a radical rejection of the contemporary model of education in society, are better understood as both its ultimate realization and demonstration of its inherent contradictions. As Nicholas Somma (2ol2. p. 296) puts it, in the context of Chile, the recent student movements can be seen as the “unintended byproduct" of neoliberal society, as “the expansion of tertiary education…which tool: place under an educational market system during the last three decades, created both the critical mass of organized students and the frustrations and inequalities that fueled mobilization" (see also Salinas 8c Fraser. 2012). Similarly. Gavin Brown (2M3. p. 4l9) argues that the student protests in the United Kingdom in 2oW both reveal and are the result of “the success of…policy interventions around raising young people's aspirations and the limits of the politics of aspiration" (italics in original). Writing at the end of the 1960s: about the student movements of that era, Ralph Turner 0969. p. 44") once argued that “youth are unlikely to go so far as to dismantle the ‘credential society, since the movement leadership will be largely recruited from those who are earning credentials that entitle them to favoured positions in bureaucracies. "At the same time, Turner also suggested that “the passive, mutinized, hierarchical, and continuous nature of the passage through schooling and bureaucratic employment will assuredly be a continuing target in the developing student movements." the developing student movements." due to the inequalities. injustices, insecurities and alienation that this passage repeatedly generates (p. 40). Despite the radical differences between the student movements of Turner's era and the current period-in the 196os. Concerns about tuition fees, student debt, graduate unemployment, and underemployment played almost no role in generating student protest-Turner's observed contradiction retains its relevance today. For the majority of the recent student protest movements are not challenging or questioning the basic vision of the education for social mobility model—that, after all, underlies the very expansion of education, extension of youth and construction of student identity in the contemporary period in the first place- but the structural obstacles they perceive to be threatening their ability to realize this vision for themselves. As Giorgio Jackson, one of the student protest leaders in Chile, explains the eruption of protest there: The promise of youth and expansion in higher education came without the regulatory framework that is necessary to prevent this huge pp between the expectations of students and their families that were created by expending millions in advertising and a much less promising reality (quoted in Salinas 8 From; 2012. p. J7). The problem with this focus of protest is that, so long as student demands are stuck within the frame of access to education for individual mobility, growing numbers of young people around the world are likely to be stuck for ever lengthening periods of time in a prolonged state of precariousness, uncertainty, risk and-to use the term of youth studies researchers in the global South-waithood.
3/6/17
JANFEB- CP- Hate Speech
Tournament: Harvard | Round: 4 | Opponent: Asheville IG | Judge: Jharick Shields CP CP Text—Public Colleges and universities in the US should remove all restrictions on constitutionally protected free speech except in hate speech, including hate speech not protected by the First Amendment. McElwee 13: Sean McElwee. “The Case for Censoring Hate Speech.” July 12, 2013. Alternet. http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/case-censoring-hate-speech. HW The negative impacts of hate speech do not lie in the responses of third-party observers, as hate speech aims at two goals. First, it is an attempt to tell bigots that they are not alone. Frank Collins —the neo-Nazi prosecuted in National Socialist Party of America v Skokie (1977) — said, “We want to reach the good people, get the fierce anti-Semites who have to live among the Jews to come out of the woodwork and stand up for themselves." The second purpose of hate speech is to intimidate the targeted minority, leading them to question whether their dignity and social status is secure. In many cases, such intimidation is successful. Consider the number of rapes that go unreported. Could this trend possibly be impacted by Reddit threads like /r/rapingwomen or /r/mensrights? Could it be due to the harassment women face when they even suggest the possibility they were raped? The rape culture that permeates Facebook, Twitter and the public dialogue must be held at least partially responsible for our larger rape culture. Reddit, for instance, has become a veritable potpourri of hate speech; consider Reddit threads like /r/nazi, /r/killawoman, /r/misogny, /r/killingwomen. My argument is not that these should be taken down because they are offensive, but rather because they amount to the degradation of a class that has been historically oppressed. Imagine a Reddit thread for /r/lynchingblacks or /r/assassinatingthepresident. We would not argue that we should sit back and wait for this kind of speech be “outspoken” by positive speech, but that it should be entirely banned. American free speech jurisprudence relies upon the assumption that speech is merely the extension of a thought, and not an action. If we consider it an action, then saying that we should combat hate speech with more positive speech is an absurd proposition; the speech has already done the harm, and no amount of support will defray the victim’s impression that they are not truly secure in this society. We don’t simply tell the victim of a robbery, “Hey, it’s okay, there are lots of other people who aren’t going to rob you.” Similarly, it isn’t incredibly useful to tell someone who has just had their race/gender/sexuality defamed, “There are a lot of other nice people out there.” Those who claim to “defend free speech” when they defend the right to post hate speech online, are in truth backwards. Free speech isn’t an absolute right; no right is weighed in a vacuum. The court has imposed numerous restrictions on speech. Fighting words, libel and child pornography are all banned. Other countries merely go one step further by banning speech intended to intimidate vulnerable groups. The truth is that such speech does not democratize speech, it monopolizes speech. Women, LGBTQ individuals and racial or religious minorities feel intimidated and are left out of the public sphere. On Reddit, for example, women have left or changed their usernames to be more male-sounding lest they face harassment and intimidation for speaking on Reddit about even the most gender-neutral topics. Those who try to remove this hate speech have been criticized from left and right. At Slate, Jillian York writes, “While the campaigners on this issue are to be commended for raising awareness of such awful speech on Facebook’s platform, their proposed solution is ultimately futile and sets a dangerous precedent for special interest groups looking to bring their pet issue to the attention of Facebook’s censors.” It hardly seems right to qualify a group fighting hate speech as an “interest group” trying to bring their “pet issue” to the attention of Facebook censors. The “special interest” groups she fears might apply for protection must meet Facebook's strict community standards, which state: While we encourage you to challenge ideas, institutions, events, and practices, we do not permit individuals or groups to attack others based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability or medical condition. If anything, the groups to which York refers are nudging Facebook towards actually enforcing its own rules. People who argue against such rules generally portray their opponents as standing on a slippery precipice, tugging at the question “what next?” We can answer that question: Canada, England, France, Germany, The Netherlands, South Africa, Australia and India all ban hate speech. Yet, none of these countries have slipped into totalitarianism. In many ways, such countries are more free when you weigh the negative liberty to express harmful thoughts against the positive liberty that is suppressed when you allow for the intimidation of minorities. As Arthur Schopenhauer said, “the freedom of the press should be governed by a very strict prohibition of all and every anonymity.” However, with the Internet the public dialogue has moved online, where hate speech is easy and anonymous. Jeffrey Rosen argues that norms of civility should be open to discussion, but, in today's reality, this issue has already been decided; impugning someone because of their race, gender or orientation is not acceptable in a civil society. Banning hate speech is not a mechanism to further this debate because the debate is over. As Jeremy Waldron argues, hate speech laws prevent bigots from, “trying to create the impression that the equal position of members of vulnerable minorities in a rights-respecting society is less secure than implied by the society’s actuala foundational commitments.” Some people argue that the purpose of laws that ban hate speech is merely to avoid offending prudes. No country, however, has mandated that anything be excised from the public square merely because it provokes offense, but rather because it attacks the dignity of a group—a practice the U.S. Supreme Court called in Beauharnais v. Illinois (1952) “group libel.” Such a standard could easily be applied to Twitter, Reddit and other social media websites. While Facebook’s policy as written should be a model, it’s enforcement has been shoddy. Chaim Potok argues that if a company claims to have a policy, it should rigorously and fairly enforce it. If this is the standard, the Internet will surely remain controversial, but it can also be free of hate and allow everyone to participate. A true marketplace of ideas must co-exist with a multi-racial, multi-gender, multi-sexually-oriented society, and it can.
Donations to colleges growing at rapid rate – survey of 983 colleges proves Lederman 16 Doug Lederman (editor, co-founder of Inside Higher Ed), "In Giving to Colleges, the One Percenters Gain," Inside Higher Ed, 1/27/2016 The Council for Aid to Education's study is one of a handful of annual reports (along with today's on endowments, last week's on state support for higher education, and some others) that provide a baseline sense of the state of higher education finances. The survey drew fund-raising information from 983 institutions, and it extrapolates from those results to estimate total giving for 3,900 colleges and universities. The 7.6 percent rise revealed for 2015 by the council's survey, which followed a 10.8 percent gain from 2013 to 2014, was driven largely by giving from individuals (alumni and not), which increased sharply. Donations from foundations and corporations, meanwhile, were either modest or flat, as seen in the table below. Continuing a trend of recent years, the amount of money donated by alumni rose sharply, by 10.2 percent, to $10.85 billion, but the proportion of alumni who contributed fell to 8.4 percent, from 8.6 percent. (It was 11.7 percent in 2007.) Ann E. Kaplan, who directs the survey, attributed the decline mostly to the fact that digital and other technologies are helping colleges track down more alumni. "Participation will only increase if the number of donors rises more than the number of located alumni," Kaplan said in a news release. "This is unlikely in a technological age in which individuals may have multiple means of contact that make them easy to locate. Finding an address is much simpler than cultivating a relationship that leads to a contribution." Giving by nonalumni individuals (donors, parents, etc.) rose by more than any other category, 23.1 percent. Donations for current operations (as opposed to capital purposes) rose by 13.1 percent in fiscal 2015, while funds for endowments, facilities and other purposes were flat. The study attributes the latter result to the fact that there was a huge -- 23.3 percent -- rise the previous year (fiscal 2014) in gifts to restricted endowments, which is the largest category of capital purposes. That kind of donation tends to track the stock market, which was stronger in 2014 than in 2015. Administrators need the ability to regulate speech to maintain donations Press and Student Nation ‘16 ALEX PRESS is a PhD student in sociology based in Boston. STUDENTNATION First-person accounts from student activists, organizers and journalists reporting on youth-oriented movements for social justice, economic equality and tolerance. “Silence on Campus: Contingent Work and Free Speech.” The Nation. February 17, 2016. https://www.thenation.com/article/silence-on-campus-contingent-work-and-free-speech/ Corporatization creates a dilemma for higher education: College, unlike most businesses, serves a social function—the production and transfer of knowledge—the achievement of which requires an environment of intellectual freedom that can conflict with profit margins, as some actors central to the model, such as donors, may take issue with controversial speech. In the past, tenure resolved some of this tension—once professors gain tenure, they’re walled off from these pressures, at least theoretically. With the erosion of tenure and a slack academic job market, free speech disappears as professors become increasingly disposable. As Steven Vallas, a sociologist at Northeastern University who researches the changing nature of work, argues, a professor’s right to speak freely presumes a foundation of job stability. “If you have an expansion of the adjunct, precarious professoriate, than you really are eroding the proportion of people who can speak their mind.” In contrast to claims that censorious students are the central threat to the ability of college to serve as a marketplace of ideas, the silencing of speech that comes with a sense of one’s disposability appears much more powerful. Conceding the difficulty of capturing the preemptive stifling of debate that comes with disposable worker status, we can take the severity of repercussions visited upon those who don’t censor themselves as indicative of the problem. Take the case of Steven Salaita, an indigenous studies scholar whose offer of a position at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign was rescinded after he tweeted critically about Israel’s 2014 attack on Gaza. A violation of academic freedom that resulted in a rare formal censure from the AAUP, for Salaita, administrative censorship is no secret. “For the uninitiated, the levels of vitriol and retribution that attend criticism of Israel can be stunning,” he writes, referencing a report authored by the Center for Constitutional Rights and Palestine Legal that details hundreds of reported acts of suppression of pro-Palestine advocacy in under two years. Salaita sued the University of Illinois for violating his rights. While he settled out of court for $875,000, discovery findings from his lawsuit reveal the likelihood of donor influence on the decision to fire him, with the chancellor communicating with donors about Salaita’s tweets and his possible dismissal. As Salaita’s case demonstrates, the extent of donor pressure goes a long way to explain why administrations might choose to silence speech, explains William Robinson, a professor at the University of California–Santa Barbara. In 2009, Robinson caught the attention of outside organizations that then pressured UCSB administrators to charge him with violating the university’s academic code of conduct, according to Robinson’s account of the incident, as well as details published by his supporters. Explaining the role financial needs play in decisions to censor faculty in public higher education, Robinson argues, “As public funding is cut, the administration becomes more reliant on private donors. These donors then use that leverage, threatening to withdraw donations if an administration doesn’t act.” The problem is worsening as public funds for higher education are drying up across the country, according to a recent report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. As this money dwindles, administrations turn to wealthy donors, creating the conditions under which prestigious donors can sway administrator’s decisions on how to respond to controversial faculty, if those faculty can get hired in the first place. Endowment funds are key to US competitiveness – ensures college quality Leigh 14 Steven R. Leigh (dean of CU-Boulder’s College of Arts and Sciences), "Endowments and the future of higher education," UColorado Boulder, March 2014 These broad trends point directly to the need for CU-Boulder’s College of Arts and Sciences to increase endowment funding across the college. Endowments drive improvements in the quality of an institution and reflect alums, donors and supporters who recognize the importance of research universities in the 21st century. Endowed professorships are the first and most important component of increasing our academic quality. Named chairs recognize significant faculty achievements and help the university support faculty salary and research. CU-Boulder professors are among the most productive in the nation and are heavily recruited by competitors, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Cornell, Berkeley, Illinois, UC Irvine and many others. Often, these competitors offer our faculty endowed professorships, conferring prestige and research support. CU must provide its faculty with comparable support to be competitive. A second major area for endowments is student scholarships and, for graduate students, fellowships. A stable source of income that helps pay tuition is the most direct and effective way to offset the costs of education. Endowed scholarships are also effective recruiting tools for admitting the nation’s best to CU. Our dynamic programs, departments and majors are attracting more and more applicants, including the best in the nation. Like faculty support, endowed scholarships and fellowships confer prestige and, most importantly, allow students to focus entirely on academics without balancing jobs and worrying about future loan repayments. Finally, endowment funding for programs greatly enriches the institution, providing capabilities that are difficult to attain when tuition revenue provides the majority of funding. Institutions funded mainly by tuition must make sure that expenditures directly benefit students, which sometimes limits options for innovation and risk-taking. Programmatic funding enables faculty and students to take risks in their research and creative work. For example, in my own field, this might involve traveling to an unexplored region to prospect for human fossils or archaeological sites. Support for high-risk projects allows our faculty and students to develop new areas of knowledge, benefitting society by broadening the capacity of the institution to innovate. The future of higher education, including CU’s future, depends to a large degree on how successfully we can build major endowments. Ultimately, U.S. competitiveness and leadership in the global knowledge economy depends on this as well. For alums, donors and supporters, endowments indelibly affirm the importance of higher education and enduringly preserve its viability and vitality. Innovation solves great power war Taylor 4 – Professor of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Mark, “The Politics of Technological Change: International Relations versus Domestic Institutions,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 4/1/2004, http://www.scribd.com/doc/46554792/Taylor) I. Introduction Technological innovation is of central importance to the study of international relations (IR), affecting almost every aspect of the sub-field. First and foremost, a nation’s technological capability has a significant effect on its economic growth, industrial might, and military prowess; therefore relative national technological capabilities necessarily influence the balance of power between states, and hence have a role in calculations of war and alliance formation. Second, technology and innovative capacity also determine a nation’s trade profile, affecting which products it will import and export, as well as where multinational corporations will base their production facilities. Third, insofar as innovation-driven economic growth both attracts investment and produces surplus capital, a nation’s technological ability will also affect international financial flows and who has power over them. Thus, in broad theoretical terms, technological change is important to the study of IR because of its overall implications for both the relative and absolute power of states. And if theory alone does not convince, then history also tells us that nations on the technological ascent generally experience a corresponding and dramatic change in their global stature and influence, such as Britain during the first industrial revolution, the United States and Germany during the second industrial revolution, and Japan during the twentieth century. Conversely, great powers which fail to maintain their place at the technological frontier generally drift and fade from influence on international scene. This is not to suggest that technological innovation alone determines international politics, but rather that shifts in both relative and absolute technological capability have a major impact on international relations, and therefore need to be better understood by IR scholars. Indeed, the importance of technological innovation to international relations is seldom disputed by IR theorists. Technology is rarely the sole or overriding causal variable in any given IR theory, but a broad overview of the major theoretical debates reveals the ubiquity of technological causality. For example, from Waltz to Posen, almost all Realists have a place for technology in their explanations of international politics. At the very least, they describe it as an essential part of the distribution of material capabilities across nations, or an indirect source of military doctrine. And for some, like Gilpin quoted above, technology is the very cornerstone of great power domination, and its transfer the main vehicle by which war and change occur in world politics. Jervis tells us that the balance of offensive and defensive military technology affects the incentives for war. Walt agrees, arguing that technological change can alter a state’s aggregate power, and thereby affect both alliance formation and the international balance of threats. Liberals are less directly concerned with technological change, but they must admit that by raising or lowering the costs of using force, technological progress affects the rational attractiveness of international cooperation and regimes. Technology also lowers information and transactions costs and thus increases the applicability of international institutions, a cornerstone of Liberal IR theory. And in fostering flows of trade, finance, and information, technological change can lead to Keohane’s interdependence or Thomas Friedman et al’s globalization. Meanwhile, over at the “third debate”, Constructivists cover the causal spectrum on the issue, from Katzenstein’s “cultural norms” which shape security concerns and thereby affect technological innovation; to Wendt’s “stripped down technological determinism” in which technology inevitably drives nations to form a world state. However most Constructivists seem to favor Wendt, arguing that new technology changes people’s identities within society, and sometimes even creates new cross-national constituencies, thereby affecting international politics. Of course, Marxists tend to see technology as determining all social relations and the entire course of history, though they describe mankind’s major fault lines as running between economic classes rather than nation-states. Finally, Buzan and Little remind us that without advances in the technologies of transportation, communication, production, and war, international systems would not exist in the first place.
2/19/17
JANFEB- DA- Revenge Porn
Tournament: Harvard | Round: 1 | Opponent: Dulles DH | Judge: Chris Castillo DA
Uniqueness-Bipartisan revenge porn legislation on college campuses is coming now
Abdul-Alim 16: Jamaal Abdul-Alim 16Reporter, “Colleges may get Help Fighting Revenge porn,” Diverseeducation.com, 3 October 2016. RW A proposed law that would punish people who publish “revenge porn” online will likely be put forth in the next Congress, but it remains to be seen how effective the measure — if passed — would be in combating the practice on America’s college campuses. “We are totally aware of the huge problem on campus of sexual assault and this sort of conduct on campuses as well,” said Josh Connolly, chief of staff for U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), who introduced the bill — known as the “Intimate Privacy Protection Act,” or IPPA — earlier this year and plans to do so again next session. U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier While sexual assaults on campus are often handled by Title IX coordinators, Connolly said he didn’t foresee that happening if the revenge porn bill becomes law. He said the “default” should be to have attorneys general or district attorneys handle the cases. “Regarding any sort of jurisdictional ambiguity, we don’t really foresee that,” Connolly said. “I think it is solidly within a DA or an AG’s jurisdiction of whether or not to take a case or not, and we would encourage them to do so.” Connolly made his remarks Friday during a panel discussion on Capitol Hill titled “Outlawing Revenge Porn: How Congress Can Protect Privacy and Reduce Online Harassment.” The discussion comes at a time when sex video scandals — sometimes with costly and tragic results — are making more and more headlines. People of all ages have become ensnared in the practice in which perpetrators post images or videos of their victims nude or engaged in sex acts. The victims range from celebrities such as Hulk Hogan, who earlier this year won a $140 million lawsuit against Gawker for publishing a portion of a sex tape of the pro wrestler, to otherwise anonymous young people such as Tovonna Holton, 15, who committed suicide this year after friends video recorded her in the shower and posted it on social media app Snapchat. Similar things have happened at colleges and universities in recent years. For example, Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old Rutgers University freshman, leapt to his death after a roommate used a webcam to live broadcast Clementi on social media having sex in his dorm with another man. The roommate, Dharun Ravi, served 20 days in jail on various charges and was ordered to pay $10,000 to a program to help victims of hate crimes. However, his conviction was overturned last month due to a change in state law. Last year, Penn State banned Kappa Delta Rho fraternity for three years after it surfaced that members of the fraternity had been using an invitation-only Facebook page to post photos of nude women who were passed out. Aff means public colleges and universities can’t restrict revenge porn Goldberg 16 Erica Goldberg JD, Cardozo, Columbia Law Review Volume 116, No. 3 April 2016 "FREE SPEECH CONSEQUENTIALISM”. RW The regulation of revenge porn presents thorny First Amendment issues, even though the speech is considered both highly injurious and of low value. Some argue that revenge porn can be regulated as obscenity, but, like much pornography, sexually explicit speech that does not rise to the level of obscenity is still protected speech. Criminal statutes and torts based on the invasion of privacy and emotional distress caused by revenge porn compromise the freedom to distribute protected speech lawfully obtained. Indeed, the Supreme Court has recognized a right for the media to publish even unlawfully obtained content, so long as the publisher was not involved in the illegal so long as the publisher was not involved in the illegal conduct that produced the content. And in United States v. Stevens, the Supreme Court held that individuals cannot be held criminally liable for distributing speech depicting illegal acts, so long as the individuals did not perpetrate the underlying act.304 Revenge porn, as defined here, is both legally obtained and depicts a legal act. In the ultimate articulation of free speech consequentialism, Mary Anne Franks argues for criminalization of revenge porn because “some expressions of free speech are just considered so socially harmful and don’t contribute any benefits to society.”305 Yet this does not separate revenge porn from any number of categories of protected speech that may cause others emotional distress and are considered by some to pos- sess little value; this is nothing more than a call for judges to make whole- sale and retail judgments about the value and harms that flow from particular forms of speech. If revenge porn can be regulated, legislators should not target the victim’s emotional distress or the invasion of pri- vacy, as these focal points threaten to undermine strong free speech pro- tections exceptional to America’s free speech regime. That means the aff massively increases revenge porn—chances are extraordinarily high given the amount of sexting on campus Reid 14 Samantha Reid, reporter at USA Today, "Study says 70 of students have sexted, so how do they feel about revenge porn?" USA Today, May 15, 2014, http://college.usatoday.com/2014/05/15/study-says-70-of-students-have-sexted-so-how-do-they-feel-about-revenge-porn/~~ HSLASC
“Sexting” has been occurring on college campuses for years, but lawmakers are now beginning to take notice –– revenge porn, or the non-consensual distribution of nude or semi-nude photos, is an issue currently being addressed in state legislatures around the country. These new laws, the most recent of which just passed in Arizona – where felony charges are applied to revenge porn perpetrators — aim to criminalize this type of media sharing to varying degrees of penalty. College students are a key demographic affected by these laws –– according to a study published by the Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality, nearly 70 of college students admit to having sent or received sexually suggestive text messages. Apps like Snapchat, makes it easier than ever for students to share nude or partially nude images. While students are willing to admit to sexting in anonymous studies, very few are willing to speak on the topic openly for fear of embarrassment or hurting potential career prospects –– the same results as when photos are leaked. RELATED “Revenge porn is not talked about openly,” says Nickie Hackenbrack, a senior at University of Tennessee. “Because of the anonymity of the Internet and students’ trust of those around us we have the impression that it could never happen to us.” Several schools have held events this past semester to attempt to bolster student awareness. Dowling College in Oakdale, N.Y., Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colo. and Beloit College in Beloit, Wis. all held events that focused on revenge porn. Hackenbrack is part of “Sexual Empowerment and Awareness at Tennessee,” better known on campus as SEAT. The group puts on “Sex Week” at UT, and the organizers hope to focus on revenge porn at this year’s event. “We hope the event brings to light the pervasiveness of technology, even when it comes to sexuality,” Hackenbrack says. “To address this issue head on, we hope need to put together a panel from legal and ethical perspectives to talk about the current state of revenge porn legislation.” Events like “Sex Week” strive to open up a greater dialogue about intimacy and respect among college students. Sending nude photos is a pervasive practice, but conversation about it is often taboo. “For college students this is part of contemporary sexual expression and relationships,” says Danielle Citron, a law professor at University of Maryland who specializes in cybercrime. “We want to encourage private sexual expression… but there’s got to be a sense of confidentiality.” Julie Bogen, a senior at Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., agrees that sexual expression is hindered without laws in place to protect individual privacy. “The existence of revenge porn creates a twisted paranoia surrounding experimentation and trusting your partner,” Bogen says. “Who would trust anyone or try anything new… when if the relationship ends poorly, their private moments could end up as public domain?” RELATED Without laws that pertain specifically to this type of crime, victims are left with few options for recourse when that privacy is violated–– civil suits are one route, but for the young people that this issue most commonly affects that too can be problematic. Revenge porn is the epitome of violent patriarchy and dehumanizing violence Dermody 14 Meagan Dermody, Managing Editor at CT, "Jennifer Lawrence, privacy and the patriarchy," The independent student press at Virginia Commonwealth University, September 7, 2014, http://www.commonwealthtimes.org/2014/09/07/jennifer-lawrence-privacy-and-the-patriarchy/~~ HSLASC The leak falls somewhere between degradation and physical violence; though the violation those involved have experienced was not physical in nature, losing control over sexual images can mean losing control of a piece of your personhood. Woman becomes passive body, cut to discrete and consumable pieces without consent — the photo no longer represents a person sharing an intimate part of a complex and valuable self, but an object to be fantasized about, criticized, and consumed. It doesn’t stop there. Users of the website 4chan attempted to manipulate female users into sharing nude photographs of themselves — in solidarity, they claimed. By painting it as a movement for solidarity, they belied (however ineffectively) their true intentions. The attempt to access sexually explicit images of other women is in fact a manifestation of the will to objectify, an act of patriarchal punishment with a beguiling false attitude. It follows that the leak of these photographs and the demand for more represent a greater initiative to consume the female body as passive sex object — a large-scale manifestation of patriarchal violence, meant to reify women on a grand scale and degrade their consent by stripping them of their control over their image and intimate selves.
2/19/17
JANFEB- K- Alt Right Discourse
Tournament: Emory | Round: 3 | Opponent: Kinkaid JY | Judge: Nadia Hussein K Calling the movement the “alt right” legitimizes the movement and concedes it’s authority which is an independent case turn O’Connor 16: Brendan O’Connor, November 21st, 2016. “Stop Calling Them “the alt-right””. Jezebel News. http://jezebel.com/stop-calling-them-the-alt-right-1789231922. RW This weekend, members of the so-called “alt-right” movement gathered in Washington, D.C., to celebrate Donald Trump’s electoral victory and their ascendance as the “intellectual vanguard” of the Trumpist movement. Media coverage of the event has largely focused on their appearance and struggled to find the vocabulary to accurately describe, at least in short hand, who these people are and what they believe. Richard Spencer, president of the white nationalist National Policy Institute and coiner of the term “alt-right,” is described in a recent Mother Jones profileas “an articulate and well-dressed former football player with prom-king good looks and a ‘fashy’ (as in fascism) haircut.” His aim, the piece describes, is to “make racism cool again.” Attendees at this weekend’s NPI-hosted conference, the Los Angeles Times reported, “more resembled Washington lobbyists than the robed Ku Klux Klansmen or skinhead toughs that often represent white supremacists, though they share many familiar views.” The alt-right movement, according to POLITICO, “has been associated with racism and anti-Semitism.” This last is something of an understatement: The “alt-right” movement, which has gleefully embraced Hillary Clinton’s ill-advised “deplorables” epithet, is a reactionary coalition of white supremacists, neo-monarchists, radical misogynists, and outright fascists. Senior White House advisor Steve Bannon has described his website, Breitbart News, as a “platform for the alt-right.” It is an Internet ideology of resentment that has wound its way from the world of pick-up artistry to Gamergate to, now, the White House. (Jezebel has used the term “alt-right” to refer to this loose conglomerate, among other monikers. Going forward, however, we resolve to be as specific as possible in naming their beliefs.) It can be difficult and confusing to know how to talk about a phenomenon like this, especially because the movement’s explicit intent is to operate outside—for now, at least—of the political vocabulary and system of values most people in the United States have, in the past 50 years, consciously or unconsciously come to accept. “Donald Trump has a lot to do,” alt-right blogger Vox Day wrote on his website immediately following the election. “It is the Alt-Right’s job to move the Overton Window and give him conceptual room to work.” (The ‘Overton Window’ is a theory that there is a range of acceptable ideas in the public’s political imagination, and that anything outside of that is impossible for most people to even begin to articulate.) For Day and his ilk, moving the Overton Window, as the New Yorker’s Andrew Marantz notes, has meant overwhelming the Internet with misinformation, inscrutable memes, neologisms, and pseudo-scientific racial theories. Any attempt to engage with these ideas and their adherents is crazy-making: They are cunning and devious sophists. Given the movement’s composition, however, one might reasonably feel reluctant to turn its labeling over to its adherents. “This is how you sneak these ideas into the mainstream,” the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Heidi Beirich told the Los Angeles Times after this weekend’s conference. “The guys in the suits are the ones we have to worry about.” A taxonomy of right-wing extremism is necessary and important (the Left’s propensity to descend into semantic navel-gazing notwithstanding). But to allow the “alt-right” to dictate the terms of the conversation is to cede ground that we simply cannot afford to surrender. n part, the term “alt-right” rankles because it is so non-specific, the “alt” gesturing more obviously to “alt rock,” than, say, white supremacy. But is calling them white supremacists any more fruitful? Perhaps not, to the extent that it does not account for their misogyny as well as their racism. There is, too, a subtle distinction to be made between ‘white supremacy’ and ‘white nationalism.’ From the New York Times: Members of the movement have described to me their support for white separatism, as well—basically, a reinstatement of the doctrine that the races should be “separate but equal.” This idea, articulated in the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy vs. Ferguson, was overturned by the Court in 1954, with Brown vs. the Board of Education. Meanwhile, to call the movement a neo-Nazi one—cathartic, certainly—is only correct to the extent that some of its members (and maybe even a substantial number) consciously ascribe to that specific iteration of white supremacy. Still, it’s not unfounded: Attendees at this weekend’s conference, the New York Times reports, met the conclusion of Richard Spencer’s address with Nazi salutes and shouts of “Heil the people! Heil victory!” They’re not alone, either: In Sweden, the neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement held the largest rally in its history (some 600 people) last weekend to herald Trump’s victory. Thousands of anti-fascists held a counter-demonstration, throwing snowballs and fireworks at the Nazis, TheLocal.se reported. (Right-wing extremists the world over—including ISIS!—are very concerned with the negative impact of “political correctness.” And, as The Ringer’s K. Austin Collins pointed out on Twitter, dubbing a broadly reactionary movement as Nazism almost exoticizes the phenomenon, implying that the ideology is somehow foreign. This implication elides the appeal of both white supremacy generally and Nazism specifically in the United States.) So. If we are to deny this movement its chosen moniker—and thereby dent, hopefully, its claim to legitimacy and respectability—what should we call them instead? Perhaps they deserve mockery and nothing more, although any short-hand descriptor at all risks failing to adequately yoke the individuals to the consequences of their stated beliefs and values. (See: “Drumpf.”) In any case, Marantz is correct: This movement is not monolithic—but ideology does not require orthodoxy or strict, universal adherence to its tenets. It doesrequire a broad alignment of interests and a willingness to work together. Ultimately this leads to a distinction without a difference—who cares what the man whose boot is on your neck actually believes?—but to the extent that we must know our enemy before we can fight him it seems worthwhile to acknowledge that not all of our enemies are precisely the same, even if we must treat them all as antagonists. The alternative is to tell it as it is: just call them white supremacists, racists, and white nationalists, and remove any significance to the movement Blades 16: Lincoln Blades, August 26th, 2016. Rolling Stone. “Call the Alt-Right Movement for what it is: Racist as hell.” http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/call-the-alt-right-movement-what-it-is-racist-as-hell-w436363. RW
To live in modern-day America is to live in a country undeniably affected by racism – mysteriously, without any racists. For instance, even after calling Mexicans rapists, retweeting memes from white-supremacist message boards and saying Muslims should be banned from entering the country, Donald Trump says he's not racist. Former KKK leader David Duke – an authority on this subject, if there ever was one – agrees. Many of the Republican nominee's other fellow party members have also enforced the idea that he's not racist, even if they must contradict themselves in doing so: We live in a society in which damn near nothing can pass the bar for racism. At the same time the Republican Party has ushered in an era of socially regressive leaders like Ted Cruz, John Kasich and Carly Fiorina, we're increasingly finding ourselves stuck in debates over whether statements or people are "really" racist. At her Reno, Nevada, rally Thursday, Hillary Clinton aimed to put an end to that pointless train of thought by attaching Trump to a movement that's clearly and unrepentantly racist. Before Clinton took the Reno stage to calmly and thoughtfully dissect the so-called "Alt-Right" movement, it's fair to say much of America had never heard of it. Though the Alt-Right sounds like an innocuous keyboard shortcut, the movement is actually a collection of ultra-conservatives who lurk in dark corners of the Internet, like 4Chan and Reddit threads, where they often anonymously spew their hatred. But what may be most important to understand about this clique is that they are so far removed from the already troubling "establishment" conservatives that they consider themselves an alternative to those who find coded racism, misogyny and xenophobia to be too weak and passive. Their war isn't simply on Democrats, or on multiculturalism, or on women – it's on other Republicans, especially those unwilling to embrace their prejudicial megaphones. They repeatedly refer to members of their own party as "cucks" – short for cuckold – because they believe establishment Republicans gain pleasure in sitting back and watching their country "get fucked." This past spring, as Trump was racking up wins in primary states around the country, Breitbart published an extensive explanation of who makes up the Alt-Right. The article was co-written by Milo Yiannopoulos – the same Milo who, in a review of the new Ghostbustersmovie, launched an all-out misogynoir attack on actor Leslie Jones that resulted in her being so viciously harassed by Milo and his 750,000 followers that Twitter banned him from the service for life. (A month later, Jones' personal website was hacked and nude photos of her were stolen.) Recently, Trump made his ties to the Alt-Right movement much more explicit by hiring Steve Bannon, the former executive chairman of Breitbart – a longtime safe space for white-supremacist ideology – as campaign CEO. The Alt-Right movement's rise to prominence, by way of the Republican nominee's campaign, is why the movement matters, and why we can't afford to frame its members as anything less than a band of racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, white-nationalist xenophobes who spew dangerous bullshit while hiding behind their keyboards. The Alt-Right crowd is an ensemble of bigots who want us to understand their affinity for intolerance. Case in point: The Alt-Right group American Renaissance responded to Hillary Clinton's speech by writing, "There is a very broad overlap between the races, but they differ in average levels of intelligence and in other traits." Now that the Trump campaign has put these people center stage in our national politics, the worst thing we can do is dither on about whether they – and he – pass the "officially" racist test. The Alt-right crowd believes in and endorses a racist ideology, and they have a presidential nominee who does the same. Calling these people anything less than vile racists would be morally reprehensible and intellectually fraudulent. This is a voting issue—debaters should be held responsible for in-round discourse—anything else legitimizes antiblackness Vincent 13: Christopher J. Vincent, October 26th, 2013. http://www.vbriefly.com/2013/10/26/201310re-conceptualizing-our-performances-accountability-in-lincoln-douglas-debate/. RW It is becoming increasingly more apparent in Lincoln Douglas debate that students of color are being held to a higher threshold of proving why racism is bad, than white students are in being forced to justify their actions and in round discourse. The abstractness of philosophical texts being used in LD and the willingness of judges and coaches alike to endorse that abstractness has fostered a climate in which students are allowed to be divorced from the discourse they are producing. Debate should first and foremost be viewed as a performance. Every action taken, every word said, and every speech given reflects a performance of the body. This drowns out the perspectives of students of color that are historically excluded from the conversation. Normativity becomes a privilege that historically students of color do not get to access because of the way we discuss things. These same philosophical texts have served as a cornerstone in Lincoln Douglas and in turn have been used to justify exclusion. That is why it is easy for a white student to make claims that we do not know whether racism is bad, or even question whether oppression is bad, since after all it is just another argument on the flow. They never have to deal with the practical implications of their discourse. These become manifestations of privilege in the debate space because for many students of color, who have to go back to their communities, they still have to deal with the daily acts of racism and violence inflicted upon their homes, communities, and cultures. To question or even make a starting point question for the debate to be about justifying why racism is bad ignores the reality of the bodies present in the room. Our justification of western philosophy has allowed us to remain disconnected from reality. Philosophy, as Mills argues, justifies particular way of knowing under free and rational thought, through a universal way of knowing, believing, and discussing. We have embedded white ways of knowing as normative without ever challenging how it replicates oppressive structures. The question then becomes how does our discourse justify what we believe? For many debaters it is the gaming aspect of debate that allows us to assume that our speech can be disconnected from the speech act. The speech can be defined as the arguments that are placed on the flow, and is evaluated in the context of what is the most logical and rational argument to win the round. The critical distinction is the speech act, which is the performance of that discourse. It’s not what you say, but what you justify. Understanding the speech act requires critically assessing the ramifications of the debaters discourse. Debate is in and of itself a performance. To claim that it is not is to be divorced from the reality of what we do. We must evaluate what a debaters performance does and justifies. For white debaters it is easy to view the discourse as detached from the body. For those with privilege in debate, they are never forced to have their performance attached to them but instead their arguments are viewed as words on paper. They are taught to separate themselves from any ideologies and beliefs, and feel that there is no consequence to what they say. It becomes the way in which they justify what is deemed as “rational” and “logical” thought. The argument sounds like it will be competitive so it is read but it is deemed as just an argument. Judges evaluate this as just a speech. This becomes what I deem as a performance by the body, rather than a performance of the body. Performances by the body allow debaters to not be held accountable to the words they say. Again for debaters of color, their performance is always attached to their body which is why it is important that the performance be viewed in relation to the speech act. If a judge is comfortable enough to vote for discourse that is racist, sexist, or homophobic, they must also be prepared to defend their actions. We as a community do not live in a vacuum and do not live isolated from the larger society. That means that judges must defend their actions to the debaters, their coaches, and to the other judges in the room if it is a panel. Students of color should not have the burden of articulating why racist discourse must be rejected, but should have the assurance that the educator with the ballot will protect them in those moments. Until we re-conceptualize the speech and the speech act, and until judges are comfortable enough to vote down debaters for a performance that perpetuates violence in the debate space, debaters and coaches alike will remain complacent in their privilege. As educators we must begin to shift the paradigm and be comfortable doing this. As a community we should stop looking at ourselves as isolated in a vacuum and recognize that the discourse and knowledge we produce in debate has real implications for how we think when we leave this space. Our performances must be viewed as of the body instead of just by it. As long as we continue to operate in a world where our performances are merely by bodies, we will continue to foster a climate of hostility and violence towards students of color, and in turn destroy the transformative potential this community could have.
3/6/17
JANFEB- K- Biopower
Tournament: Blake | Round: 2 | Opponent: Peninsula JL | Judge: Dean Doneen The 1AC’s "free speech" narrative naturalizes state apparatuses of control—that makes biopower and fascism inevitable—also independently turns case
Anarchist Library 15: The Anarchist Library. Collection of various political writers. All authors are on dthe website. "Not just free speech, but freedom itself." A Critique of Civil Liberties. July 7, 2015. Published originally in the ninth issue ofRolling Thunder magazine; republished in the zine The Divorce of Thought from Deed: Social Conflict, White Supremacy, and Free Speech at UNC-Chapel Hill by the North Carolina Piece Corps. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/not-just-free-speech-but-freedom-itself. RW If defending free speech has come to mean sponsoring wealthy right-wing politicians and enabling fascist recruiting, perhaps it is time for anarchists to reassess this principle. The discourse of free speech in democracy presumes that no significant imbalances of power exist, and that the primary mechanism of change is rational discussion. In fact, a capitalist elite controls most resources, and power crystallizes upward along multiple axes of oppression. Against this configuration, it takes a lot more than speech alone to open the possibility of social change. There can be no truly free speech except among equal—among parties who are not just equal before the law, but who have comparable access to resources and equal say in the world they share. Can an employee really be said to be as free to express herself as her boss, if the latter can take away her livelihood? Are two people equally free to express their views when one owns a news network and the other cannot even afford to photocopy fliers? "Despite the radical roots of organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union that advocate for state protection of free expression, this form of civil liberties empties the defense of free speech of any radical content, implying that only the state can properly guarantee our ability to express ourselves freely and thus reinforcing the power of the state above the right to free speech itself." Across the years, anarchists have defended freedom of speech. This is important in principle: in an anarchist vision of society, neither the state or any other entity should be able to determine what we can and cannot say. It’s also important in practice: as a revolutionary minority frequently targeted for repression, we’ve consistently had our speeches, newspapers, websites, and marches attacked.~But~ Extreme right and fascist organizations have jumped onto the free speech bandwagon as well. In the US, Anti-Racist Action and similar groups have been largely effective in disrupting their events and organizing efforts. Consequently, fascists now increasingly rely on the state to protect them, claiming that racist, anti-immigrant, and anti-gay organizing constitutes a form of legally protected speech—and within the framework of the ACLU, it does. Fascist groups that are prevented from publishing their material in most other industrialized democracies by laws restricting hate speech frequently publish it in the United States, where no such laws exist, and distribute it worldwide from here. So in practice, state protection of the right to free expression aids fascist organizing.
Their view of rights is too abstract—speech is never truly free in a world controlled by the flow of capital; the affirmative’s focus on individual liberties simply re-entrenches dominant power structures
Anarchist Library 15: The Anarchist Library. Collection of various political writers. All authors are on the website. "Not just free speech, but freedom itself." A Critique of Civil Liberties. July 7, 2015. Published originally in the ninth issue ofRolling Thunder magazine; republished in the zine The Divorce of Thought from Deed: Social Conflict, White Supremacy, and Free Speech at UNC-Chapel Hill by the North Carolina Piece Corps. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/not-just-free-speech-but-freedom-itself. RW
In the US, where donations to political candidates legally constitute speech, the more money you have, the more "free speech" you can exercise. As the slogan goes, freedom isn’t free—and nowhere is that clearer than with speech. Contrary to the propaganda of democracy, ideas alone have no intrinsic force. Our capacity to act on our beliefs, not just to express them, determines how much power we have. In this sense, the "marketplace of ideas" metaphor is strikingly apt: you need capital to participate, and the more you have, the greater your ability to enact the ideas you buy into. Just as the success of a few entrepreneurs and superstars is held up as proof that the free market rewards hard work and ingenuity, the myth of the marketplace of ideas suggests that the capitalist system persists because everyone—billionaire and bellboy alike—agrees it is the best idea.
That trades off with revolutionary politics—the state justifies a right to "say anything, so long as you don’t do anything"
Anarchist Library 15: The Anarchist Library. Collection of various political writers. All authors are on the website. "Not just free speech, but freedom itself." A Critique of Civil Liberties. July 7, 2015. Published originally in the ninth issue ofRolling Thunder magazine; republished in the zine The Divorce of Thought from Deed: Social Conflict, White Supremacy, and Free Speech at UNC-Chapel Hill by the North Carolina Piece Corps. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/not-just-free-speech-but-freedom-itself. RW
But what if, despite the skewed playing field, someone manages to say something that threatens to destabilize the power structure? If history is any indication, it swiftly turns out that freedom of expression is not such a sacrosanct right after all. In practice, we are permitted free speech only insofar as expressing our views changes nothing. The premise that speech alone cannot be harmful implies that speech is precisely that which is ineffectual: therefore anything effectual is not included among one’s rights. During World War I, the Espionage Act criminalized any attempt to "cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, ~or~ refusal of duty" or to obstruct recruiting for the armed forces. President Woodrow Wilson urged the bill’s passage because he believed antiwar activity could undermine the US war effort. Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman were arrested under this law for printing anarchist literature that opposed the war. Likewise, the Anarchist Exclusion Act and the subsequent Immigration Act were used to deport or deny entry to any immigrant "who disbelieves in or who is opposed to all organized government." Berkman, Goldman, and hundreds of other anarchists were deported under these acts. There are countless other examples showing that when speech can threaten the foundation of state power, even the most democratic government doesn’t hesitate to suppress it. Thus, when the state presents itself as the defender of free speech, we can be sure that this is because our rulers believe that allowing criticism will strengthen their position more than suppressing it could. Liberal philosopher and ACLU member Thomas Emerson saw that freedom of speech "can act as a kind of ‘safety valve’ to let off steam when people might otherwise be bent on revolution." Therein lies the true purpose of the right to free speech in the US.
That’s also terminal defense to the aff—allowing free speech means people will never actually resist structures of neoliberalism
Their use of the state is also biopolitical—biopower is functionally colonialist and perpetuates capitalist exploitation as well
Brennan 14 Philip Khaled Brennan (researcher on human rights and biopower from the UK). "PREVENT: An Exercise in Biopower—Section One." The Cat House. April 6th, 2014. http://cathouse.hivetimes.org.uk/2014/04/06/prevent-an-exercise-in-biopower-section-one/ The Nature of the Modern Nation-State All modern nation states operate in the biopower mode, without exception. Whether they are former colonial states or states created through colonial conquest, the biopolitical is at the heart of how all modern states operate. This is directly attributable to the colonial era, as it was through this period of world conquest by western powers that biopower as a tool of governance was refined and perfected in the colonies before being brought back and used at home as a kind of colonisation of the lower orders of the home population. This is the classic Foucauldian Boomerang Effect: "It should never be forgotten that while colonization, with its techniques and its political and juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself."1 Despite biopower’s use in the colonial context, its first instance was in the regulation of life at the start of the Industrial Revolution. The state had to reduce mortality in the subaltern population in order that they would better service the needs of capital. The fields of public hygiene, medicine, social engineering, and so forth, were enacted upon populations in the West to reduce mortality and morbidity, and to make them more effective as workers and wealth generators. The longer life expectancies of workers, and their reduction in diseases and injuries which either debilitated or killed them outright, increase the amount of capital they could generate for the state and the capitalist class. This is the primary reason why child labour was gradually phased out in the 19th century: the mortality and morbidity rats of child labourers threatened the continual supply of adult labour. This meant that biopower, twinned with the state operating under raison d’etat, insinuated itself within all levels of disciplinary institutions and power, and over the course of two hundred years led to the creation of the self-policing state. Where the discipline of the individual ends and the discipline of the population begins is hard to define, but it suffices to note that man-as-species as opposed to man-as-individual became a major theme in disciplinary power from around the beginning of the 18th century and beyond.
The alternative and Role of the Ballot is to reject the instantiation of biopower within educational spaces—that’s a prerequisite to literally everything else—biopower skews our ability to make normative decisions and each rejection is key Wittman 6: John Wittman, Spring 2006. Composition Forum. Biopower and Pedagogy: Local Spaces and Institutional Technologieshttp://compositionforum.com/issue/15/wittmanbiopower.php. RW Biopower, as defined by Francois Ewald, is "the industrial and controlled production and reproduction of the living" (8). It is the word Foucault uses to characterize changes in the practice and regulation of life beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This was largely a result of industrialization, which forced a change in sovereign power—absolute power retreated and regulatory and disciplinary powers substituted for it. Instead of simply having an absolute and normal right over life and death, in the classical age life transformed alongside several elements and mechanisms of power "working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize" the social body (History 136). According to Foucault this shift happened in two separate but consistent forms: "anatomo-politics" and "a politics of the population." The first treated the body as a functioning mechanism—"its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces," the second treated the body as a ‘species’, "imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes" (History 139). The first form was concerned with the manipulation and management, or disciplining, of humans bodies. The key of "disciplinary power was to produce a human being who could be treated as a ‘docile body’" (Dreyfus 34-35). While these technological changes and their significance went largely unnoticed as they evolved, in the nineteenth century they come together to produce a new kind of political technology—what Foucault refers to as "the great technology of power in the nineteenth century" (History 140). Governance of life and its relation to power were institutionally legitimated in new ways incorporating institutions such as family, medicine, psychiatry, education, etc. They create what Foucault calls the "welfare state." Ewald clarifies, "The welfare state accomplishes the dream of bio-power—.~it~ is a state whose primary aim is no longer to protect the freedom of each individual—but rather to assume responsibility for the very manner in which the individual manages his life" (8). In a discussion of education, in The Subject and Power Foucault argues that the disposal of its space, the meticulous regulations that govern its internal life, the different activities that are organized there . . . constitute a block of capacity-communication-power. Activity to ensure learning and the acquisition of aptitudes to types of behavior works via a whole ensemble of regulated communications—and by means of a whole series of power processes. (338) One critical component to the success of biopolitics is that different and sometimes competing institutions, whether they be ideological or material, operate together as a system of coercion rather than force. This is not so much a means of mind control as it is a systematic reorganization of governing technologies. These technologies do not impose regulatory principles as much as governing institutions (re)constitute new social relations that (re)create how to live. Unless this process of biopower is interrupted, people can become so entrenched in institutional logics that those logics and the institutions that support them become invisible. In other words, the threat of biopower is the increasing retreat of analytical thought to cliché forms of thinking. Disrupting the technology of biopolitics is a difficult task, but not an impossible one. Foucault suggests in acting within institutional boundaries "it is quite possible . . . to get to know how it works and to work within it . . . and . . . to carry out in that specific area work that may properly be called intellectual" ("On Power" 107). This includes learning how one is imbedded in a system to gain some perspective on how to act just beyond it. To struggle within real, material everyday circumstances is what Foucault calls the task of the "specific" intellectual, which he opposes to the "universal" intellectual. The specific intellectual must be able to suspend "as far as possible the system of values to which one refers when testing and assessing" (107). The task of the specific individual is to respond to local contingent sites of struggle in the context of the global. It is not to critique specific notions of right and wrong but to uncover how we are produced institutionally. This defrosting of institutional thought gets at the heart of Foucault. I am using the term transformative pedagogy to broadly refer to recent movements in scholarship that generated largely from the early work of Paulo Freire which argue that education is a context of social, democratic action. These would include the school of critical pedagogy of well known scholars such as Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, and Michael Apple and others but also the theoretical influence of Feminism and Critical Race Theory for instance.
12/16/16
JANFEB- K- Governmentality
Tournament: TOC | Round: 3 | Opponent: Cedar Park MG | Judge: Mark Gorthey Governmentality K Though Butler is largely based on Foucault’s theory of power, the central problem with the affirmative is that it overlooks Foucault’s lesson about governmentality—the subtle techniques by which subjects are molded in order to become governable The aff is under the mistaken assumption that removing overt restrictions on speech will liberate bodies—that overlooks how neoliberal governmentality controls the subject through their freedom—university students will speak freely, but only as individual consumers and entrepreneurs Brown 3 Wendy Brown (Professor of Political Science at UC Berkley. Professor Brown received her Ph.D in Political Philosophy from Princeton University in 1983. Prior to coming to Berkeley in 1999, she taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz and at Williams College. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She lectures around the world and has held a number of distinguished visiting fellowships and lectureships. Most recently, she has been a member of the Birkbeck Critical Theory Summer School faculty (2012), a Senior Invited Fellow of the Center for Humanities at Cornell University (2013) and a visiting professor at Columbia University (2014)). “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy.” Theory and Event 7:1. 2003. http://lchc.ucsd.edu/cogn_150/Readings/brown.pdf 3) The extension of economic rationality to formerly non-economic domains and institutions extends to individual conduct, or more precisely, prescribes citizen-subject conduct in a neo-liberal order. Whereas classical liberalism articulated a distinction, and at times even a tension, among the criteria for individual moral, associational, and economic actions (hence the striking differences in tone, subject matter and even prescription between Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and his Theory of Moral Sentiments), neo-liberalism normatively constructs and interpellates individuals as entrepreneurial actors in every sphere of life. It figures individuals as rational, calculating creatures whose moral autonomy is measured by their capacity for "self-care" -- the ability to provide for their own needs and service their own ambitions. In making the individual fully responsible for her/himself, neo-liberalism equates moral responsibility with rational action; it relieves the discrepancy between economic and moral behavior by configuring morality entirely as a matter of rational deliberation about costs, benefits, and consequences. In so doing, it also carries responsibility for the self to new heights: the rationally calculating individual bears full responsibility for the consequences of his or her action no matter how severe the constraints on this action, e.g., lack of skills, education, and childcare in a period of high unemployment and limited welfare benefits. Correspondingly, a "mismanaged life" becomes a new mode of depoliticizing social and economic powers and at the same time reduces political citizenship to an unprecedented degree of passivity and political complacency. The model neo-liberal citizen is one who strategizes for her/ himself among various social, political and economic options, not one who strives with others to alter or organize these options. A fully realized neo-liberal citizenry would be the opposite of public-minded, indeed it would barely exist as a public. The body politic ceases to be a body but is, rather, a group of individual entrepreneurs and consumers . . . which is, of course, exactly the way voters are addressed in most American campaign discourse.8Other evidence for progress in the development of such a citizenry is not far from hand: consider the market rationality permeating universities today, from admissions and recruiting to the relentless consumer mentality of students in relationship to university brand names, courses, and services, from faculty raiding and pay scales to promotion criteria.9 Or consider the way in which consequential moral lapses (of a sexual or criminal nature) by politicians, business executives, or church and university administrators are so often apologized for as "mistakes in judgement," implying that it was the calculation that was wrong, not the act, actor, or rationale. The state is not without a project in the making of the neo-liberal subject. The state attempts to construct prudent subjects through policies that organize such prudence: this is the basis of a range of welfare reforms such as workfare and single-parent penalties, changes in the criminal code such as the "three strikes law," and educational voucher schemes. Because neo-liberalism casts rational action as a norm rather than an ontology, social policy is the means by which the state produces subjects whose compass is set by their rational assessment of the costs and benefits of certain acts, whether teen pregnancy, tax cheating, or retirement planning. The neo-liberal citizen is calculating rather than rule-abiding, a Benthamite rather than a Hobbesian. The state is one of many sites framing the calculations leading to social behaviors that keep costs low and productivity high. This mode of governmentality (techniques of governing that exceed express state action and orchestrate the subject's conduct toward themselves him or herself) convenes a "free" subject who rationally deliberates about alternative courses of action, makes choices, and bears responsibility for the consequences of these choices. In this way, Lemke argues, "the state leads and controls subjects without being responsible for them;" as individual 'entrepreneurs' in every aspect of life, subjects become wholly responsible for their well-being and citizenship is reduced to success in this entrepreneurship (201). Neo-liberal subjects are controlled through their freedom -- not simply, as thinkers from the Frankfurt School through Foucault have argued, because freedom within an order of domination can be an instrument of that domination -- but because of neo-liberalism's moralization of the consequences of this freedom. This also means that the withdrawal of the state from certain domains and the privatization of certain state functions does not amount to a dismantling of government but, rather, constitutes a technique of governing, indeed the signature technique of neo-liberal governance in which rational economic action suffused throughout society replaces express state rule or provision. Neo-liberalism shifts "the regulatory competence of the state onto 'responsible,' 'rational' individuals with the aim of encouraging individuals to give their lives a specific entrepreneurial form" (Lemke 202). Neoliberal rationality engulfs all moral and democratic values through a cold economic calculus, destroying value to life—this undermines political freedoms, which turns the case Brown 3 Wendy Brown (Professor of Political Science at UC Berkley. Professor Brown received her Ph.D in Political Philosophy from Princeton University in 1983. Prior to coming to Berkeley in 1999, she taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz and at Williams College. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She lectures around the world and has held a number of distinguished visiting fellowships and lectureships. Most recently, she has been a member of the Birkbeck Critical Theory Summer School faculty (2012), a Senior Invited Fellow of the Center for Humanities at Cornell University (2013) and a visiting professor at Columbia University (2014)). “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy.” Theory and Event 7:1. 2003. http://lchc.ucsd.edu/cogn_150/Readings/brown.pdf However, invaluable as Marx's theory of capital and Weber's theory of rationalization are in theorizing aspects of neo-liberalism, neither brings into view the historical-institutional rupture it signifies, the form of governmentality it replaces and the form it inaugurates, and hence, the modalities of resistance it outmodes and those that must be developed if it is to be effectively challenged. Neo-liberalism is not an inevitable historical development of capital and instrumental rationality; it is not the unfolding of laws of capital or of instrumental rationality suggested by a Marxist or Weberian analysis but represents instead a new and contingent organization and operation of both. Moreover, neither analysis articulates the shift neo-liberalism heralds from relatively differentiated moral, economic, and political rationalities and venues in liberal democratic orders to their discursive and practical integration. Neo-liberal governmentality undermines the relative autonomy of certain institutions from one another and from the market -- law, elections, the police, the public sphere -- an independence that formerly sustained an interval and a tension between a capitalist political economy and a liberal democratic political system. The implications of this transformation are significant. If Marcuse worried about the loss of a dialectical opposition within capitalism when it "delivers the goods," that is, when, by mid-twentieth century, a relatively complacent middle class had taken the place of the hard-laboring impoverished masses Marx depicted as the negating contradiction to the concentrated wealth of capital, neo-liberalism entails the erosion of oppositional political, moral, or subjective claims located outside capitalist rationality but inside liberal democratic society, that is, the erosion of institutions, venues, and values organized by non-market rationalities in democracies. When democratic principles of governance, civil codes, and even religious morality are submitted to economic calculation, when no value or good stands outside of this calculus, sources of opposition to, and mere modulation of, capitalist rationality disappear. This reminds us that however much a Left analysis has identified a liberal political order with legitimating, cloaking, and mystifying the stratifications of society achieved by capitalism and achieved as well by racial, sexual, and gender superordinations, it is also the case that liberal democratic principles of governance -- liberalism as a political doctrine -- have functioned as something of an antagonism to these stratifications. As Marx himself argued in "On the Jewish Question," formal political principles of equality and freedom (with their attendant promises of individual autonomy and dignity) figure an alternative vision of humanity and alternative social and moral referents to those of the capitalist order within which they are asserted. This is the Janus-face or at least Janus-potential of liberal democracy vis a vis a capitalist economy: while liberal democracy encodes, reflects, and legitimates capitalist social relations, it simultaneously resists, counters, and tempers them. Put simply, what liberal democracy has provided over the last two centuries is a modest ethical gap between economy and polity. Even as liberal democracy converges with many capitalist values (property rights, individualism, Hobbesian assumptions underneath all contract, etc.) the formal distinction it establishes between moral and political principles on the one hand and the economic order on the other has also served as insulation against the ghastliness of life exhaustively ordered by the market and measured by market values. It is this gap that a neo-liberal political rationality closes as it submits every aspect of political and social life to economic calculation: asking not, for example, what does liberal constitutionalism stand for, what moral or political values does it protect and preserve, but rather what efficacy or profitability does constitutionalism promote . . . .or interdict? Liberal democracy cannot be submitted to neo-liberal political governmentality and survive. There is nothing in liberal democracy's basic institutions or values -- from free elections, representative democracy, and individual liberties equally distributed, to modest power-sharing or even more substantive political participation -- that inherently meets the test of serving economic competitiveness or inherently withstands a cost-benefit analysis. And it is liberal democracy that is going under in the present moment, even as the flag of American "democracy" is being planted everywhere it finds or creates soft ground. (The fact that "democracy" is the rubric under which so much anti-democratic imperial and domestic policy is enacted suggests that we are in an inter-regnum, or more precisely, that neo-liberalism borrows extensively from the old regime to legitimate itself even as it also develops and disseminates new codes of legitimacy. More about this below.)
The alternative is to endorse an oppositional consciousness to neoliberal rationality—this counter-rationality is a starting point for a just future Brown 3 Wendy Brown (Professor of Political Science at UC Berkley. Professor Brown received her Ph.D in Political Philosophy from Princeton University in 1983. Prior to coming to Berkeley in 1999, she taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz and at Williams College. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She lectures around the world and has held a number of distinguished visiting fellowships and lectureships. Most recently, she has been a member of the Birkbeck Critical Theory Summer School faculty (2012), a Senior Invited Fellow of the Center for Humanities at Cornell University (2013) and a visiting professor at Columbia University (2014)). “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy.” Theory and Event 7:1. 2003. http://lchc.ucsd.edu/cogn_150/Readings/brown.pdf A half-century ago, Herbert Marcuse argued that capitalism had eliminated a revolutionary subject (the proletariat) representing the negation of capitalism; consequently, he insisted, the Left had to derive and cultivate anti-capitalist principles, possibilities, and agency from capitalism's constitutive outside. That is, the Left needed to tap the desires -- not for wealth or goods but for beauty, love, mental and physical well-being, meaningful work, and peace -- manifestly unmet within a capitalist order and to appeal to those desires as the basis for rejecting and replacing the order. No longer could economic contradictions of capitalism inherently fuel opposition to it; rather opposition had to be founded in an alternative table of values. Today, the problem Marcuse diagnosed has expanded from capitalism to liberal democracy itself: oppositional consciousness cannot be generated from liberal democracy's false promises and hypocrisies. The space between liberal democratic ideals and lived realities has ceased to be exploitable because liberal democracy itself is no longer the most salient discourse of political legitimacy and the good life. Put the other way around, the politically exploitable hollowness in formal promises of freedom and equality has largely vanished to the extent that both freedom and equality have been redefined by neo-liberalism. Similarly, revealed linkages between political and economic actors -- not merely bought politicians but arrangements of mutual profiteering between corporate America and its political elite -- do not incite outrage at malfeasance, corruption, or injustice but appear instead as a potentially rational set of linkages between state and economy. Thus, from the "scandal" of Enron to the "scandal" of Vice President Cheney delivering Iraq to Halliburton to clean up and rebuild, there is no scandal. Rather, there is only market rationality, a rationality that can encompass even a modest amount of criminality but also treats close state-corporate ties as a potentially positive value -- maximizing the aims of each -- rather than as a conflict of interest.18 Similarly, even as the Bush Administration fails to come up with WMDs in Iraq and fails to be able to install order let alone democracy there, this is irrelevant to the neo-liberal criteria for success in that military episode. Indeed, even the scandal of Bush's installation as president by a politicized Supreme Court was more or less ingested by the American people as business as usual, an ingestion that represents a shift from the expectation that the Supreme Court is independent of political influence to one that tacitly accepts its inclusion in the governmentality of neo-liberalism. Even John Poindexter, a key figure in the Iran-Contra affair and director of the proposed "Terrorism Information Awareness" program that would have put all Americans under surveillance, continued to have power and legitimacy at the Pentagon until the flap over the scheme to run a futures market on political violence in the Middle East. All three projects are models of neo-liberalism's indifference to democracy; only the last forced Poindexter into retirement. These examples suggest that not only liberal democratic principles but democratic morality has been largely eviscerated -- in neo-liberal terms, each of these "scandals" is framed as a matter of miscalculation or political maneuvering rather than by right and wrong, truth or falsehood, institutional propriety or impropriety. Consequently, the Left cannot count upon revealed deception, hypocrisies, interlocking directorates, featherbedding, or corruption to stir opposition to the existing regime. It cannot count on the expectation that moral principle undergirds political action or even on consistency as a value by which to judge state practices or aims. Much of the American public appeared indifferent to the fact that both the Afghan and Iraqi regimes targeted by Bush had previously been supported or even built by earlier U.S. foreign policy. It appeared indifferent as well to the fact that the "liberation" of Afghan women was touted as one of the great immediate achievements of the overthrow of the Taliban while overthrow of the Baath regime has set into motion an immediately more oppressive regime of gender in Iraq. The inconsistency does not matter much because political reasons and reasoning that exceed or precede neo-liberal criteria has ceased to matter much. This is serious political nihilism which no mere defense of free speech and privacy, let alone securing gay marriage rights or an increase in the minimum wage will reverse. What remains for the Left, then, is to challenge emerging neo-liberal governmentality in EuroAtlantic states with an alternative vision of the good, one that rejects homo oeconomicus as the norm of the human and rejects this norm's correlative formations of economy, society, state and (non)morality. In its barest form, this would be a vision in which justice would not center upon maximizing individual wealth or rights but on developing and enhancing the capacity of citizens to share power and hence, collaboratively govern themselves. In such an order, rights and elections would be the background rather than token of democracy, or better, rights would function to safeguard the individual against radical democratic enthusiasms but would not themselves signal the presence nor constitute the central principle of democracy. Instead a left vision of justice would focus on practices and institutions of shared popular power; a modestly egalitarian distribution of wealth and access to institutions; an incessant reckoning with all forms of power -- social, economic, political, and even psychic; a long view of the fragility and finitude of non-human nature; and the importance of both meaningful activity and hospitable dwellings to human flourishing. However differently others might place the accent marks, none of these values can be derived from neo-liberal rationality nor meet neo-liberal criteria for the good. The development and promulgation of such a counter rationality -- a different figuration of human beings, citizenship, economic life, and the political -- is critical both to the long labor of fashioning a more just future and to the immediate task of challenging the deadly policies of the imperial U.S. state.
I can now state my first thesis about good and evil: good and bad are always attributive, not predicative, adjectives. this is fairly clear about bad because bad is something like an alienans adjective; we cannot safely predicate of a bad A what we predicate of an A, any more than we can predicate of a forged banknote or a putative father what we predicate of a banknote or a father. We actually call forged money bad; and we cannot infer e.g. that because food supports life bad food supports life. For good the point is not so clear at first sight, since good is not alienans—whatever holds true of an A as such holds true of a good A. But consider the contrast in such a pair of phrases as red car and good car. I could ascertain that a distant object is a red car because I can see it is red and a keensighted but colour-blind friend can see it is a car; there is no such possibility of ascertaining that a thing is a good car by pooling independent information that it is good and that it is a car. This sort of example shows that good like bad is essentially an attributive adjective. Even when good and bad stands by itself as a predicate, and is thus grammatically predicative, some substantive has to be understood; there is no such thing as being just good or bad, there is only being a good or bad so-and-so. (If I say that something is a good or bad thing, either thing is a mere proxy for a more descriptive noun to be supplied from the context; or else I am trying to use good or bad predicatively, and its being grammatically attributive is a mere disguise. The latter attempt is, on my thesis, illegitimate.) Thus, the standard is constitutivism.
Restrictions are constitutive of speech—speech isn’t inherently valuable but relies on an ulterior purpose—when speech comes into conflict with a university’s purposes, restrictions are justified
I want to say that all affirmations of freedom of expression are like Milton’s, dependent for their force on an exception that literally carves out the space in which expression can then emerge. I do not mean that expression (saying something) is a realm whose integrity is sometimes compromised by certain restrictions but that restriction, in the form of an underlying articulation of the world that necessarily (if silently) negates alternatively possible articulations, is constitutive of expression. Without restriction, without an inbuilt sense of what it would be meaningless to say or wrong to say, there could be no assertion and no reason for asserting it. The exception to unregulated expression is not a negative restriction but a positive hollowing out of value—we are for this, which means we are against that—in relation to which meaningful assertion can then occur. It is in reference to that value—constituted as all values are by an act of exclusion—that some forms of speech will be heard as (quite literally) intolerable. Speech, in short, is never a value in and of itself but is always produced within the precincts of some assumed conception of the good to which it must yield in the vent of conflict. When the pinch comes (and sooner or later it will always come) and the institution (be it church, state, or university) is confronted by behavior subversive of its core rationale, it will respond by declaring "of course we mean not tolerated ———, that we extirpate," not because an exception to a general freedom has suddenly and contradictorily been announced, but because the freedom has never been general and has always been understood against the background of an ordinary exclusion that gives it meaning.
Free speech is not an ultimate good—universities and colleges must restrict it in some circumstances to achieve their purposes
But if this is the case, a First Amendment purist might reply, why not drop the charade along with the malleable distinctions that make it possible, and declare up front that total freedom of speech is our primary value and trumps anything else, no matter what? The answer is that freedom of expression would only be a primary value if it didn’t matter what was said, didn’t matter in the sense that no one gave a damn but just liked to hear talk. There are contexts like that, a Hyde Park corner or a call-in talk show where people get to sound off for the sheer fun of it. These, however, are special contexts, artificially bounded spaces designed to assure that talking is not taken seriously. In ordinary contexts, talk is produced with the goal of trying to move the world in one direction rather than another. In these contexts—the contexts of everyday life—you go to the trouble of asserting that X is Y only because you suspect that some people are wrongly asserting that X is Z or that X doesn’t exist. You assert, in short, because you give a damn, not about assertion—as if it were a value in and of itself—but about what your assertion is about. It may seem paradoxical, but free expression could only be a primary value if what you are valuing is the right to make noise; but if you are engaged in some purposive activity in the course of which speech happens to be produced, sooner or later you will come to a point when you decide that some forms of speech do not further but endanger that purpose. Take the case of universities and colleges. Could it be the purpose of such places to encourage free expression? If the answer were "yes," it would be hard to say why there would be any need for classes, or examinations, or departments, or disciplines, or libraries, since freedom of expression requires nothing but a soapbox or an open telephone line. The very fact of the university’s machinery—of the events, rituals, and procedures that fill its calendar—argues for some other, more substantive purpose. In relation to that purpose (which will be realized differently in different kinds of institutions), the flourishing of free expression will in almost all circumstances be an obvious good; but in some circumstances, freedom of expression may pose a threat to that purpose, and at that point it may be necessary to discipline or regulate speech, lest, to paraphrase Milton, the institution sacrifice itself to one of its accidental features.
12/16/16
JANFEB- NC- Kant
Tournament: TOC | Round: 6 | Opponent: Byram Hills JB | Judge: Tom Evnen There must be a right to set ends, otherwise ethics is incoherent since it assumes subjects deliberate between multiple possible courses of action. However, to prevent this right from becoming contingent, we must have a conception of property
Buck 87 (Wayne, Yale, "Kant's Justification of Private Property." In New Essays on Kant. Ed. den Ouden, 227-244.). RW Because human beings have the right to pursue their ends (i.e. they have the right to external freedom) they have a right to act in those ways necessary for achieving any ends at all. When we act to attain some end, in many cases our action involves manipulating or transforming some material object. When I eat an apple, I use the object for sustenance. When I paint, I use a brush and oils to transform a piece of canvas. Manipulation of objects is thus one of the means necessary to achieving ends in general. Hence the right to use external things is a necessary condition of the right to external freedom. As Kant puts it, if reason were to forbid the use of physical objects, external freedom would come into contradiction with itself, or "freedom would be robbing itself of the use of its Willkur" (MEJ, 52 354). Simply put, external freedom would in effect be forbidden by reason and morallyß impossible. Kant argues that this principle entails that every rational being who exists in space with others has the innate right to private property— that is, that it entails the Juridical Postulate. Let us first consider Kant's argument for the Universal Principle ofjustice, and then his derivation of the Postulate. Human beings, according to Kant, are both negatively and posi- tively free. They are free from determination by the phenomenal realm. But they are also free to limit their actions to those whose maxims are universalizable.It is just the capacity to act on universalizable maxims—those acceptable to any and every rational being— wherein human dignity and moral worth lies. Therefore, human beings have a right to act on the maxims they adopt for themselves. They have the right to determine their own ends and pursue those ends as they think best. Because human beings exist together in space, (2) So far Kant has established the inherent right to use external objects. But this is not yet to establish the Juridical Postulate, which claims that individuals have the inherent right to own things. Kant makes this second step from the right to use things to owning them by means of an analysis of the concept of "possession." our use insofar The 'subjective' condition of the possibility of actually manipulating a thing is physical possession. I am not able to use an axe unless I have it in hand, and I am not able to build a cabin unless I am standing on the spot where it is to be. These kinds of possession Kant usually calls "empirischer Besitz" and "Inhabung." I will call them "custody." Possession in this sense, then, is the subjective condition of the possibility ot actually using a thing. A thing is externally mine if it is such that any prevention of my use of it would constitute an injury Laesionj to me even if it is not in my possesion (that is, lam not the custodian /Inhaber/ oj the object (MEJ, 55-56357; my emphasis). "Possession," however, cannot just mean custody. Suppose that my right to the use of a thing lasted only as long as no one prevented me from using it as I desired. Thus if someone wrests the thing from my control to use as she pleases, my right to use it would end. But losing the right to an object merely because another grabbed it from me is precisely the situation in which I did not have a right to use it in the first place. Next, property requires the existence of the general will—rights in the state of nature are provisional, and disputes could only be resolved through unilateral coercion. That means the state is legitimate in coercively enforcing rights claims Korsgaard 08: (Christine, "Taking the Law into Our Own Hands: Kant on the Right to Revolution," in The Constitution of Agency: Essays on Practical Reason and Moral Psychology). RW Kant also believes that there is a sense in which we have rights in the state of nature. We have a natural right to our freedom (MPJ 6:237), and, Kant thinks, the Universal Principle of Justice allows us to claim rights in land and, more generally, in external objects, in property. Kant argues that it would be inconsistent with freedom to deny the possibility of property rights, on the grounds that unless we can claim rights to objects, those objects cannot be used (MPJ 6:246).7 This would be a restriction on freedom not based in freedom itself, which we should therefore reject, and this leads us to postulate that objects may be owned. But unlike Locke, Kant argues that in the state of nature these rights are only ‘‘provisional’’ (MPJ 6:256). In this, Kant is partly following Rousseau. In contrast to Locke, Rousseau argues that rights are created by the social contract, and, in a sense, relative to it. My possessions become my property, so far as you and I are concerned, when you and I have given each other certain reciprocal guarantees: I will keep my hands off your possessions if you will keep your hands off mine.8 Rights are not acquired by the metaphysical act of mixing one’s labor with the land, but instead are constructed from the human relations among people who have made such agreements.9 Kant adopts this idea, at least as far as the executive authority mother goat when they were born. However, one of them escaped, and you found it wandering around apparently unowned in the state of nature, took possession of it, fed it and cared for it for many years. Now we have discovered the matter, and each of us thinks she has a right to this particular goat. Since I think I have a right, I also think I may prosecute my right by coercive action. And you think the same. associated with a property right is concerned. I may indeed coercively enforce my rights. But if my doing so is to be consistent with the Universal Principle of Justice, it cannot be an act of unilateral coercion. To claim a right to a piece of property is to make a kind of law; for it is to lay it down that all others must refrain from using the object or land in question without my permission. But to view my claim as a law I must view it as the object of a contract between us, a contract in which we reciprocally commit ourselves to guaranteeing each other’s rights. It is this fact that leads us to enter—or, more precisely, to view ourselves as already having entered—political society. In making this argument, Kant evokes Rousseau’s concept of the general will. He argues that a general will to the coercive enforcement of the rights of all concerned is implicitly involved in every property claim. Now, with respect to an external and contingent possession, a unilateral Will cannot serve as a coercive law for everyone, since that would be a violation of freedom in accordance with universal laws. Therefore, only a Will binding everyone else—that is, a collective, universal (common), and powerful Will—is the kind of Will that can provide the guarantee required. The condition of being subject to general external n(that is, public) legislation that is backed by power is the civil society. Accordingly, a thing can be externally yours or mine that is, can be property only in a civil society. (MPJ 6:256) It is because the idea of the general will to the reciprocal enforcement of rights is implicit in any claim of right that Kant argues that rights in the state of nature are only provisional. They are provisional because this general will has not yet been instituted by setting up a common authority to enforce everyone’s rights. The act that institutes the general will is the social contract. Kant concludes from this argument that when the time comes to enforce your rights coercively, in the state of nature, the only legitimate way to do that is by joining in political society with those with whom you are in dispute. In fact, you enforce your right by first forcing them to join in political society with you so that the dispute can be settled by reciprocal rather than unilateral coercion: If it must be de jure possible to have an external object as one’s own, then the subject must also be allowed to compel everyone else with whom he comes into conflict over the question of whether such an object is his to enter, together with him, a society under a civil constitution. (MPJ 6:256) The actor is the state—public colleges and universities are founded and operated by the state Collegebound no date: "Differences Between Public and Private Universities and Liberal Arts Colleges" http://www.collegebound.net/content/article/differences-between-public-and-private-universities-and-liberal-arts-colleges/18529/. RW
In the US, most public institutions are state universities founded and operated by state governments. Every state has at least one public university. This is partially due to the 1862 Morrill Land-Grant Acts, which gave each eligible state 30,000 acres of federal land to sell to finance public institutions offering study for practical fields in addition to the liberal arts. Many public universities began as teacher training schools and eventually were expanded into comprehensive universities.
Thus, the standard is maintaining a system of equal outer freedom.
Negate: Analytics
5/3/17
JANFEB- T- Any
Tournament: Emory | Round: 5 | Opponent: Harvard Westlake CE | Judge: Akash Gogate “Any” means all—it’s the maximum Merriam-Webster no date Merriam-Webster Dictionary. “Any.” No date. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/any Definition of any 1 : one or some indiscriminately of whatever kind: a : one or another taken at random Ask any man you meet. b : every —used to indicate one selected without restriction Any child would know that. 2 : one, some, or all indiscriminately of whatever quantity: a : one or more —used to indicate an undetermined number or amount Do you have any money? b : all —used to indicate a maximum or whole He needs any help he can get. c : a or some without reference to quantity or extent I'd be grateful for any favor at all. 3 a : unmeasured or unlimited in amount, number, or extent any quantity you desire b : appreciably large or extended could not endure it any length of time
“Any” is not specific Merriam-Webster no date Merriam-Webster Dictionary. “Any.” No date. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/any Definition of any for English Language Learners —used to indicate a person or thing that is not particular or specific
The aff violates because they defend the removal of restrictions on a particular subset of constitutionally protected speech
Self-consciousness requires us to will universal independence
KORSGAARD 96 Christine Korsgaard. "The Sources of Normativity." Lecture 3. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. 1996. Gender modified. http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/'documents/a-to-z/k/korsgaard94.pdf Kant defines a free will as a rational causality that is effective without being determined by any alien cause. Anything outside of the will counts as an alien cause, including the desires and inclinations of the person. The free will must be entirely selfdetermining. Yet, because the will is a causality, it must act according to some law or other. Kant says, "Since the concept of a causality entails that of laws . . . it follows that freedom is by no means lawless . . ." 2 Alternatively, we may say that since the will is practical reason, it cannot be conceived as acting and choosing for no reason. Since reasons are derived from principles, the free will must have a principle. But because the will is free, no law or principle can be imposed on it from outside. Kant concludes that the will must be autonomous: that is, it must have its own law or principle. And here again we arrive at the problem. For where is this law to come from? If it is imposed on the will from outside then the will is not free. So the will must adopt the law for itself. But until the will has a law or principle, there is nothing from which it can derive a reason. So how can it have any reason for adopting one law rather than another ? Well, here is Kant’s answer. The Categorical imperative tells us to act only on a maxim that we could will to be a law. And this, according to Kant, is the law of a free will. To see why, we need only compare the problem faced by the free will with the content of the Categorical imperative. The problem faced by the free will is this: the will must have a law, but because the will is free, it must be its own law. And nothing determines what that law must be. All that it has to be is a law. Now consider the content of the Categorical imperative. The Categorical imperative simply tells us to choose a law. Its only constraint on our choice is that it have the form of a law. And nothing determines what that law must be. All that it has to be is a law. Therefore the categorical imperative is the law of a free will. It does not impose any external constraint on the free will’s activities, but simply arises from the nature of the will. It describes what a free will must do in order to be what it is. It must choose a maxim it can regard as a law.3 Now I’m going to make a distinction that Kant doesn’t make. I am going to call the law of acting only on maxims you can will to be laws "the Categorical imperative." And I am going to distinguish it from what I will call "the moral law." The moral law, in the Kantian system, is the law of what Kant calls the Kingdom of Ends, the republic of all rational beings. The moral law tells us to act only on maxims that all rational beings could agree to act on together in a workable cooperative system. Now the Kantian argument that I have just described establishes that the categorical imperative is the law of a free will. But it does not establish that the moral law is the law of a free will. Any law is universal, but the argument doesn’t settle the question of the domain over which the law of the free will must range. And there are various possibilities here. If the law is the law of acting on the desire of the moment, then the agent will treat each desire as it arises as a reason, and her conduct will be that of a wanton. 4 If the law ranges over the interests of an agent’s whole life, then the agent will be some sort of egoist. It is only if the law ranges over every rational being that the resulting law will be the moral law, the law of the Kingdom of Ends. Because of this, it has sometimes been claimed that the categorical imperative is an empty formalism. And this in turn has been conflated with another claim, that the moral law is an empty formalism. Now that second claim is false.5 But it is true that the argument that shows that we are bound by the categorical imperative does not show that we are bound by the moral law. For that we need another step. The agent must think of herself as a Citizen of the Kingdom of Ends. Those who think that the human mind is internally luminous and transparent to itself think that the term "self - consciousness" is appropriate because what we get in human consciousness is a direct encounter with the self. Those who think that the human mind has a reflective structure use the term too, but for a different rea - son. The reflective structure of the mind~‘s~ is a source of "self-consciousness" because it forces us to have a conception æ that is you, and that chooses which desire to act on. This means that the principle or law by which you determine your actions is one that you regard as being expressive of yourself. To identify with such a principle or law is to be, in St. Paul’s famous phrase, a law to yourself. An agent might think of herself as a Citizen in the Kingdom of Ends. Or she might think of herself as a member of a family or an ethnic group or a nation. She might think of herself as the steward of her own interests, and then she will be an egoist. Or she might think of herself as the slave of her passions, and then she will be a wanton. And how she thinks of herself will determine whether it is the law of the Kingdom of Ends, or the law of some smaller group, or the law of the egoist, or the law of the wanton that is the law that she is to herself. The conception of one’s identity in question here is not a theo - retical one, a view about what as a matter of inescapable scientific fact you are. It is better understood as a description under which you value yourself, a description under which you find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking. So I will call this a conception of your practical identity. Practical identity is a complex matter and for the average person there will be a jumble of such conceptions. You are a human being, a woman or a man, an adherent of a certain religion, a member of an ethnic group, someone’s friend, and so on. And all of these identities give rise to reasons and obligations. Your reasons express your identity, your nature ; your obligations spring from what that iden - tity forbids. Our ordinary ways of talking about obligation reflect this con - nection to identity. A century ago a European could admonish another to civilized behavior by telling him to act like a Christian. It is still true in many quarters that courage is urged on males by the injunction "Be a man!" Duties more obviously connected with social roles are of course enforced in this way. "A psychiatrist doesn’t violate the confidence of her patients." No "ought" is needed here because the normativity is built right into the role. But it isn’t only in the case of social roles that the idea of obliga - tion invokes the conception of practical identity. Consider the astonishing but familiar "I couldn’t live with myself if I did that." Clearly there are two selves here, me and the one I must live with and so must not fail. Or consider the protest against obligation ignored : "Just who do you think you are ?" The connection is also present in the concept of integrity. Etymologically, integrity is oneness, integration is what makes something one. To be a thing, one thing, a unity, an entity; to be anything at all: in the metaphysical sense, that is what it means to have integrity. But we use the term for someone who lives up to his own standards. And that is because we think that living up to them is what makes him one, and so what makes him a person at all. It is the conceptions of ourselves that are most important to us that give~s~ rise to unconditional obligations. For to violate them is to lose your integrity and so your identity, and no longer to be who you are. That is, it is no longer to be able to think of yourself under the description under which you value yourself and find your life worth living and your actions worth undertaking. That is to be for all practical purposes dead or worse than dead. When an action cannot be performed without loss of some fundamental part of one’s identity, and an agent would rather be dead, then the obligation not to do it is unconditional and complete. If reasons arise from reflective endorsement, then obligation arises from re - flective rejection. Analytics Kantian state of reciprocal constraint doesn’t exist in the US – all USFG action is unilateral coercion and must be rejected Mills 15 Charles Mills (the John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern University). "Black Radical Liberalism (by Charles Mills)." PEA Soup, philosophy blog run by professors David Sobel and David Shoemaker. 23 February 2015. http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/2015/02/black-radical-liberalism-and-why-it-isnt-an-oxymoron.html "Black radical liberalism" is my attempt to reconstruct from different and usually counterposed bodies of political thought what I see as the most promising candidate for an emancipatory African American political theory. So I am less concerned with the question of whether any African American political theorists actually self-consciously identified what they were doing under this designation than with the question of whether it stands up to criticism as a plausible way forward. In taxonomies of African American/black political thought, the standard contrast would be: ~Neat visual diagram by Charles Mills removed for card formatting purposes.~ I am arguing for a synthesizing, reconstructed black liberalism which draws upon the most valuable insights of the black nationalist and black Marxist traditions, and incorporates them into a dramatically transformed liberalism. So the taxonomies would now be drawn differently: ~Neat visual diagram by Charles Mills removed for card formatting purposes.~ How does black radical liberalism differ from black mainstream liberalism? By definition they are both "liberal" in endorsing liberalism as a political philosophy, but black radical liberalism seeks to transform liberalism to make it responsive to the alternative realities of the black diasporic experience in modernity, and the correspondingly necessary reordering of liberal normative priorities. Black radical liberalism both recognizes white supremacy as central to the making of the United States and (more sweepingly) the modern world, and (ii) seeks the rethinking of the categories, crucial assumptions, and descriptive and normative frameworks of liberalism in the light of that recognition. Black mainstream liberalism either refuses to recognize white supremacy (for example, by endorsing the "anomaly" view of U.S. racism ~see Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in US History~) or, (ii) even if it does give lip service to its reality, assumes nonetheless that the categories, crucial assumptions, and descriptive and normative frameworks of liberalism can be adopted with little change to the task of getting rid of it. OBJECTIONS: (1) But how can Marxist and liberal insights be reconciled? Aren’t they necessarily opposed? Liberalism comes in different varieties, and black radical liberalism would obviously be a left-wing variety. Liberalism is opposed to state-commandist socialism, but state-commandist socialism has proved itself to be a historical failure, both economically and morally. Liberalism is not in principle opposed to social democracy or market socialism. (2) But how can black nationalist insights be reconciled either with Marxism or liberalism? Black nationalism likewise comes in different varieties. The key insight of the tradition, in my opinion, is the recognition of the reality and centrality of an ontology of race, and how it shapes people and their psychology, which can be accommodated in a modified Marxism and liberalism.
Analytics
12/21/16
NOVDEC- T- For
Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 2 | Opponent: Loyola DW | Judge: Chris Castillo Interpretation— “For” means “suiting the purposes or needs of” (http://www.dictionary.com/browse/for).
Limits Ground
12/21/16
SEPOCT- Armenia Coal DA
Tournament: Valley | Round: 2 | Opponent: Oakwood AM | Judge: Joe Rankin DA-Russian Oil Phase-out in Armenia causes dependence on Russian oils—that causes regional conflict Sahakyan 16: Armine Sahakyan, Human rights activist based in Armenia, Columnist with the Kyiv Post. 04/27/2016 12:36 pm ET. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/armine-sahakyan/armenia-continues-to-gamb'b'9788186.html
Even Armenians who worry about the plant’s safety don’t want to return to the days between 1989 and 1995 when it was shut down after a 1988 earthquake in Gyumri, 48 miles from Metsamor. The quake devastated Armenia’s second-largest city, killing 25,000 and leaving half a million homeless. Although the plant came through the 1988 quake without a hitch, it is located in an active seismic zone — and many Armenian nuclear officials feared a catastrophe if the next temblor involved a direct hit on Metsamor. At the time they recommended closing it, Armenia was able to obtain oil and gas from Russia and Turkmenistan for its thermal power plants. The government decided to increase its purchase of those supplies to produce additional power from thermal plants to cover the loss of electricity from the nuclear plant. The war between ethnic Armenians and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, which had long been Azerbaijani territory, dashed the thermal-plant plans, however. That’s because the oil and gas that Russia and Turkmenistan were sending to Armenia came through Azerbaijan, which refused to transport the fuel once the conflict started. With the nuclear plant shut down and thermal plants unable to be ramped up, Armenians went through the Dark Ages for several years. Power was available only one hour a day, bringing industry to a standstill and making life at home miserable. "You can imagine—it was as cold in the apartment as it was in the street" in winter, journalist Ara Tadevosyan recalled. Although a truce in the war was negotiated in 1994, Armenia was still unable to get oil and gas from Russia and Turkmenistan. Azerbaijan demanded nothing less than the return of Nagorno-Karabakh. Desperate for electricity, Armenia reopened the Metsamor plant — the first time in history that a shuttered nuclear facility had been restarted.
Russian energy expansion causes armed conflict in the Arctic Bugajski 10Janusz, holder of the Lavrentis Lavrentiadis Chair and director of the New European Democracies program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, "Russia’s Pragmatic Reimperialization" CRIA Vol. 4(1)) Russia’s ambitions are to fundamentally alter the existing European security structure, to marginalize or sideline NATO, and to diminish the U.S. role in European security. In all these areas, Russia’s national interests fundamentally diverge from those of the U.S.; or, more precisely, the Russian leadership does not share Western interests or threat perceptions.4 To affirm its national interests, the Medvedev administration has released three major policy documents: the Foreign Policy Concept in July 2008, the Foreign and Security Policy Principles in August 2008, and the National Security Strategy in May 2009.5 The Foreign Policy Concept claims that Russia is a resurgent great power, exerting substantial influence over international affairs and determined to defend the interests of Russian citizens wherever they reside. According to the Foreign and Security Policy Principles, Moscow follows five key principles: the primacy of international law, multipolarity to replace U.S.-dominated unipolarity, the avoidance of Russian isolationism, the protection of Russians wherever they reside, and Russia’s privileged interests in regions adjacent to Russia. Russia’s National Security Strategy, which replaced the previous National Security Concepts, repeats some of the formulations in the other two documents and depicts NATO expansion and its expanded global role as a major threat to Russia’s national interests and to international security. The document asserts that Russia seeks to overcome its domestic problems and emerge as an economic powerhouse. Much attention was also devoted to the potential risk of future energy wars over regions such as the Arctic, where Russia would obviously defend its access to hydrocarbon resources. The document also envisages mounting competition over energy sources escalating into armed conflicts near Russia’s borders. Among the customary list of threats to Russia’s security, the National Security Strategy includes alleged falsifications of Russian history.6 The Kremlin is engaged in an extensive historical revisionist campaign in which it seeks to depict Russia’s Tsarist and Soviet empires as benevolent and civilizing missions pursued in neighboring countries. Systematized state-sponsored historical distortions have profound contemporary repercussions. Interpretations of the past are important for legitimizing the current government, which is committed to demonstrating Russia’s alleged greatness and re-establishing its privileged interests over former satellites.
Arctic war goes global and nuclear Dhanapala 13: member of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and a governing board member of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Jayantha, "The Arctic as a bridge," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, http://thebulletin.org/arctic-bridge)BC** There are in fact many reasons that the international community — and not just the countries with coastlines on the Arctic Ocean — should focus on the Arctic. First, the world is increasingly interdependent, and the hard evidence of climate change proves that the felling of Amazon forests in Brazil and increased carbon dioxide emissions in China have a cumulative global impact, leading to the incipient disappearance of Tuvalu into the Pacific Ocean and the gradual sinking of the Maldives. In a literal sense, English poet John Donne's celebrated line — "No man is an island, entire of itself" — is truer today than ever before. The environment of the Arctic affects the world environment. Beyond its contribution to rising sea levels, the melting of the Arctic ice cap will facilitate the mining of resources, especially oil and gas, and lead to an increase in commercial shipping. The ownership of the resources and the sovereignty of Arctic areas, including the Northwest Passage, are already being contested. The applicability of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea has to be more sharply defined, especially in those areas of the Arctic where claims overlap. And clearly, access to the resources of the Arctic north is of concern to the global south, where the "bottom billion" people of the world live in extreme poverty. Increasingly, science shows that those people are going to be hit hardest by climate change. Some of those people also see the area outside the territory claimed by the littoral states of the Arctic as part of the global commons and, therefore, the shared heritage of humankind. A global regime could thus be established over the Arctic to mitigate the effects of climate change and to provide for the equitable use of its resources outside the territory of the eight circumpolar countries. Third, as someone who has devoted most of his working life to the cause of disarmament, and especially nuclear disarmament, I am deeply concerned that two nuclear weapon states — the United States and the Russian Federation, which together own 95 percent of the nuclear weapons in the world — face one another across the Arctic and have competing claims. These claims — not to mention those that could be made by North Atlantic Treaty Organization member states Canada, Denmark, Iceland, and Norway — may lead to conflict that has the potential to escalate into the use of nuclear weapons. Thus the Arctic is ripe for conversion into a nuclear weapon free zone. I discussed a fourth reason the international community should focus on the Arctic with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (who has in fact visited the Arctic on an icebreaker) when I met him in New York last fall. The Arctic, I told him, is the one region in the world where the environment (and climate change in particular), the threat of nuclear weapons, the human rights of indigenous people, and the need to advance the rule of law converge as international issues. The Arctic, therefore, offers a unique opportunity to make international diplomacy work for the benefit of the entire international community. Security and interdependence. Security today is a concept that is much broader than military security alone. It encompasses international peace and security, human rights, and development. Twenty-first century security is also a cooperative and common security, in which one region's insecurity inevitably and negatively affects the security of other regions of the world. And so Arctic security is inextricably interwoven with global security, giving us all a role as stakeholders in the north.
That risks extinction Kateb 92: George, 1992 The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture, "Thinking About Human Extinction (1): Nuclear Weapons and Individual Rights," p. 111-112
Schell's work attempts to force on us an acknowledgment that sounds far-fetched and even ludicrous, an acknowledgment that the possibility of extinction is carried by any use of nuclear weapons, no matter how limited or how seemingly rational or seemingly morally justified. He himself acknowledges that there is a difference between possibility and certainty. But in a matter that is more than a matter, more than one practical matter in a vast series of practical matters, in the "matter" of extinction, we are obliged to treat a possibility-a genuine possibility-as a certainty. Humanity is not to take any step that contains even the slightest risk of extinction. The doctrine of no-use is based on the possibility of extinction. Schell's perspective transforms the subject. He takes us away from the arid stretches of strategy and asks us to feel continuously, if we can, and feel keenly if only for an instant now and then, how utterly distinct the nuclear world is. Nuclear discourse must vividly register that distinctiveness. It is of no moral account that extinction may be only a slight possibility. No one can say how great the possibility is, but no one has yet credibly denied that by some sequence or other a particular use of nuclear weapons may lead to human and natural extinction. If it is not impossible it must be treated as certain: the loss signified by extinction nullifies all calculations of probability as it nullifies all calculations of costs and benefits. Abstractly put, the connections between any use of nuclear weapons and human and natural extinction are several. Most obviously, a sizable exchange of strategic nuclear weapons can, by a chain of events in nature, lead to the earth's inhabitability, to "nuclear winter," or to Schell's "republic of insects and grass." But the consideration of extinction cannot rest with the possibility of a sizable exchange of strategic weapons. It cannot rest with the imperative that a sizable exchange must not take place. A so-called tactical or "theater" use, or a so-called limited use, is also prohibited absolutely, because of the possibility of immediate escalation into a sizable exchange or because, even if there were not an immediate escalation, the possibility of extinction would reside in the precedent for future use set by any use whatever in a world in which more than one power possesses nuclear weapons. Add other consequences: the contagious effect on nonnuclear powers who may feel compelled by a mixture of fear and vanity to try to acquire their own weapons, thus increasing the possibility of use by increasing the number of nuclear powers; and the unleashed emotions of indignation, retribution, and revenge which, if not acted on immediately in the form of escalation, can be counted on to seek expression later.
9/24/16
SEPTOCT- Armenia CP
Tournament: Valley | Round: 2 | Opponent: Oakwood AM | Judge: Joe Rankin
CP-Russian replacement
CP Text—Armenia ought to work with Russia to replace metsamor with an uprgraded nuclear Russian plant—solves case EC 16 "Armenian Metsamor Nuke Plant Reactor Needs Replacement | Energy Central". Energycentral.com. N. p., 2016. Web. 24 Sept. 2016. It is necessary to do something with Armenia’s Metsamor nuclear power plant in its current state, says Vladimir Yevseyev, political analyst, senior fellow at the International Security Center of the Institute for World Economy and International Relations. "The Metsamor nuclear power plant’s reactor should be replaced with a gigawatt nuclear reactor of new type, which is completely safe," Yevseyev told Trend May 16, adding this would be the best option. "Initially, the Metsamor nuclear power plant consisted of two reactors of 400 megawatts, one of which was taken out of service," the expert said. "Afterwards, Russia offered to construct a new plant, which would generate one gigawatt of electricity." The expert said Armenia doesn’t have a consumer for this electricity and there is a problem to find a buyer. He added that the new type of Russian reactors would be absolutely safe for using in the seismic zone in which Armenia is situated. Armenia has a nuclear power plant, Metsamor, built in 1970. The power plant was closed after a devastating earthquake in Spitak in 1988. But despite the international protests, the power plant's operation was resumed in 1995. Moreover, a second reactor was launched there.
9/26/16
SEPTOCT- CP- Consent Repository
Tournament: Bronx | Round: 3 | Opponent: Acton Boxborough JW | Judge: Jesus Caro
1NC- CP
CP Text: '''''' should develop long-term geological nuclear waste repositories and enter into a consent-based decision-making process with indigenous communities for siting nuclear waste management facilities. Orr 15 Franklin (Under Secretary for Science and Energy) "Finding Long-Term Solutions for Nuclear Waste" December 21 2015 Department of Energy http://www.energy.gov/articles/finding-long-term-solutions-nuclear-waste Today, the Department of Energy is taking a critical step toward the development of a consent-based approach to siting future nuclear waste management facilities as part of a strategy for the long-term storage and disposal of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste. The launch of our consent-based siting initiative represents an important step toward addressing this nuclear waste management challenge, so that we can continue to benefit from nuclear technologies. Today’s step forward follows Secretary Moniz’s announcement in March 2015 that DOE would move forward with the development of a separate repository for defense waste. What is a consent-based siting process, and why is it needed? In short, it is a way to ensure that communities, tribes sand states, as partners, are comfortable with the location of future storage and disposal facilities before they are constructed. We will be developing a detailed plan for this process in the coming year, and we need your help..
Solves case – waste depositories minimize negative effects while giving communities a say. Orr 15 Franklin (Under Secretary for Science and Energy) "Finding Long-Term Solutions for Nuclear Waste" December 21 2015 Department of Energy http://www.energy.gov/articles/finding-long-term-solutions-nuclear-waste Our strategy for managing both spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste is laid out in a strategy document from 2013, which was based on recommendations from President Obama’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future (BRC). The Strategy outlines a need for a pilot interim storage facility, a larger interim storage facility, and long-term geologic repositories. To support each of these elements of an integrated waste management system, the Strategy also emphasizes the importance of a consent-based approach to siting waste storage and disposal facilities throughout the decision making process. The first step for commercial spent fuel begins with developing a pilot interim storage facility that will mainly accept used nuclear fuel from reactors that have already been shut down. The purpose of a pilot facility is to begin the process of accepting spent fuel from utilities, while also developing and perfecting protocols and procedures for transportation and storage of nuclear waste. It is our goal that throughout the process of developing a pilot interim facility that the Department of Energy builds trust with all of the local communities involved. Beyond the pilot-scale facility, the Administration also supports the development of a larger interim storage facility with more capacity and capabilities. Even after a long-term geologic repository is operational, interim storage would provide key benefits for waste management. This could include serving as a packaging facility for waste prior to shipment to a long-term repository. The final piece of the Administration’s Strategy is moving toward one or more long-term geologic repositories for both spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste. According to consensus in the scientific community, geological repositories—which would store nuclear material deep within the earth’s surface in safe, scientifically proven locations—represent the safest and most cost-effective method for permanently disposing of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste. Full implementation of this strategy will take time. Today’s action brings us a step closer to that goal, and the Department of Energy is seeking the help of all Americans to develop a fair and effective approach to consent-based siting. Your input will inform the design of a consent-based siting process, which will serve as a framework for collaborating with interested host communities across the country. We want to hear from you, so please respond to our Invitation for Public Comment, which will be published in the Federal Register in the coming days. You can also attend one of our public meetings taking place across the country throughout 2016. Finally, you can send emails with comments or concerns to the Department of Energy at consentbasedsiting@hq.doe.gov. Please also visit our website at energy.gov/consentbasedsiting to learn more about our activities and find opportunities to participate. Nuclear technology has been a key contributor to America’s energy and security for generations. With the world moving more aggressively toward a low-carbon energy mix to stave off the worst effects of climate change, nuclear power will continue to be a key part of our nation’s strategy to reduce emissions while meeting Americans’ energy needs. The launch of our consent-based siting effort will help ensure that it does so while also protecting our citizens, communities, and the environment — now and in the future.
Geological depositories solve the entire aff Leon et al 1 Cynthia Picot (Nuclear Energy Agency Chief of Cabinet, Head of the Central Secretariat, External Relations and Public Affairs), Hans Riotte (Head of the Radiation Protection and Radioactive Waste Management Division at the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA). Holds a PhD in nuclear physics), and Jorge Lang-Lenton Leon (Director of Communication, ENRESA), "Sustainable solutions for radioactive waste", OECD Observer, 2001, http://www.oecdobserver.org/news/fullstory.php/aid/531/Sustainable'solutions'for'radioactive'waste.html
Nuclear power does not produce polluting combustion gases. So, like renewable energy sources, it could play a key role in helping to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and in tackling global warming, especially as electricity demand rises in the years ahead. Public faith in nuclear energy took a knock from the accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, but as plant safety has improved such risks have greatly diminished. Currently, the perceived problem with nuclear energy from an environmental point of view is how to manage its radioactive waste. Solutions do exist, in particular the technique of burying the waste deep below the ground in engineered facilities, known as geological disposal. The challenge is to convince the public of its safety and reliability. Radioactive waste is an inevitable by-product of the application of ionising radiation, whether it be in nuclear medicine (for diagnosis and treatment), industrial applications (for example, for finding new sources of petroleum or producing plastics), agricultural applications (notably for the conservation of foodstuffs), or of course the production of electricity. The radioactive waste produced by the latter represents less than 1 of the total toxic wastes generated in those countries that use nuclear energy to generate electricity, but at the same time this waste has the highest levels of radioactivity. In most OECD countries, all short-lived, low- and intermediate-level nuclear wastes, whatever their source, are disposed of using surface or under-ground repositories that are safe for people and the environment during the time that these wastes maintain their radioactivity. These wastes, representing some 90 of total radio-active waste, are conditioned and stored in facilities isolated from the environment by specially engineered barriers. Long-lived and high-level waste, on the other hand, is first deposited in temporary storage facilities, under strict safety conditions, for several decades. It is then usually envisaged that the waste will be placed in a final disposal facility. There is no immediate economic, technical or environmental need to speed up the construction of final disposal facilities for radioactive waste. But from a sustainable development perspective – and if we do not want to pass the burden of finding a permanent solution on to future generations – temporary storage is clearly not a satisfactory solution. The long-term solution currently preferred by specialists consists of placing the waste in a deep (500 metres below the surface) and stable geological setting, such as granite, clay, tuff and salt formations that have remained virtually unchanged for millions of years. The aim is to ensure that such wastes will remain undisturbed for the few thousand years needed for their levels of radioactivity to decline to the point where they no longer represent a danger to present or future generations. The concept of deep geological disposal is more than 40 years old, and the technology for building and operating such repositories is now mature enough for deployment. As a general rule, the natural security afforded by the chosen geological formation is enhanced by additional precautionary measures. The wastes are immobilised in an insoluble form, in blocks of glass for example, and then placed inside corrosion-resistant containers; spaces between waste packages are filled with highly pure, impermeable clay; and the repository may be strengthened by means of concrete structures. These successive barriers are mutually reinforcing and together ensure that wastes can be contained over the very long term. The waste can be recovered during the initial phase of the repository, and also during subsequent phases, albeit at increased cost. This provides freedom of choice to future generations to change waste management strategies if they wish. Repositories are designed so that no radioactivity reaches the Earth's surface. Following the precautionary principle, environmental impact assessments spanning 10,000 years analyse worst-case scenarios, including geological and climate changes and inadvertent human intrusion. The assessments maintain that even under those conditions, the impact on the environment and mankind would be less than current regulatory limits, which in turn are lower than natural background radiation. The safety of geological disposal has been demonstrated in nature. Until about two thousand million years ago a natural reactor moderated by natural currents of water operated inter-mittently for millions of years at a uranium ore deposit beneath Gabon in Africa. Throughout that time the material produced during the nuclear fission reaction hardly moved from its original location. The first man-made geological disposal facility for long-lived waste started operation in New Mexico, USA in March 1999 and will provide industrial experience. Another partial solution is to reduce the mass of long-lived, high-level waste using a technique known as partitioning and transmutation (PandT). This involves isolating the transuranic elements and long-lived radionuclides in the waste and aims at transforming most of them by neutron bombardment into other non-radioactive elements or into elements with shorter half-lives. Some countries are investigating this option but it has not yet been fully developed and it is not clear whether it will become available on an industrial scale. This is because in addition to being very costly, PandT makes fuel handling and reprocessing more difficult, with potential implications for safety. Cost is an important issue in radioactive waste management as related to sustainable development. If the nuclear industry did not set aside adequate funds, a large financial burden associated with plant dismantling and radioactive waste disposal would be passed on. In OECD countries, the costs of dismantling nuclear power plants and of managing long-lived wastes are already included in electricity generating costs and billed to end consumers; in other words, they are internalised. Although quite high in absolute terms, these costs represent a small proportion – less than 5 – of the total cost of nuclear power generation. Deep geological disposal allows present generations to progress without leaving burdens for those of the future, but a main weakness is that although the concept is technically sound, it is rarely socially or politically accepted. The issue is not so much about information provision as understanding the mechanisms that govern the social perceptions of risk. There are many factors that affect such perceptions, such as familiarity with the technology, the degree of uncertainty, the level of control, concern for the consequences, the degree of credibility of the institutions, the decision-making process and the ideas and values of the community in which people live
Solves case but better—tribes are demanding waste facilities not removal of waste altogether. UBM 7: United Business Media, 2007. PR Newswire, "Minnesota Indian Tribe Calls on Congress to Solve Nuclear Waste Crisis Before Embracing New Era of Nuclear Power", 2007, http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/minnesota-indian-tribe-calls-on-congress-to-solve-nuclear-waste-crisis-before-embracing-new-era-of-nuclear-power-58984012.html) WASHINGTON, Oct. 31 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — A Minnesota Indian tribe ... million from Minnesotans. WASHINGTON, Oct. 31 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — A Minnesota Indian tribe today urged a Senate panel to deliver on a promise to move the nation's nuclear waste to a safe, secure facility before allowing the United States to revisit nuclear power as a preferred energy source. The Prairie Island Indian Community offered its comments during the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee's hearing on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository project. The tribe is among the closest communities in the country to a temporary nuclear waste site, located just 600 yards from more than 20 large containment units of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel. Prairie Island is just one of thousands of communities in 39 different states located in close proximity to a temporary nuclear waste facility. There are presently 121 temporary nuclear waste storage sites scattered across the United States. "The federal government must fulfill its obligation under the National Nuclear Waste Storage Act and subsequent acts of Congress to solve the waste disposal problem and move the nation's nuclear waste to a safe and secure facility," the tribe stated in its testimony. "Developing a safe, permanent storage facility for spent nuclear fuel is critical to the health and welfare of the millions of Americans who currently live near temporary nuclear waste storage sites." Twenty-five years after Congress passed the National Nuclear Waste Storage Act and mandated the establishment of an underground repository, the future of the nation's nuclear waste disposal program remains in doubt. In 2002, Congress approved Yucca Mountain in Nevada as the site for the nation's first permanent repository for high-level nuclear waste but some Congressional leaders are now calling for the project to be abandoned. Meanwhile, despite the uncertainty surrounding the nation's waste disposal program, new nuclear power plants are being proposed throughout the country. "Lost in the debate over Yucca Mountain are the communities that bear the burden of the federal government's inaction and failure to solve the nation's nuclear waste problem," the tribe commented. "The indefinite storage of high-level nuclear waste at 121 different locations in 39 states poses a serious threat to national security and puts at risk more than 169 million Americans currently living within 75 miles of these temporary storage facilities." Prairie Island told the committee that storage at Yucca Mountain, a remote, militarily-secure site designed to permanently store the nation's high-level nuclear waste is a safer alternative to leaving nuclear waste under varying levels of security at multiple locations, near communities, rivers, and other natural resources. "Until or unless the federal government solves its nuclear waste problem, it is simply irresponsible to allow the construction of new nuclear power plants anywhere in the United States," the tribe stated in its testimony. To date, American ratepayers have contributed more than $28 billion to the national Nuclear Waste Fund to pay for a national storage site. This includes $470 million from Minnesotans. Consent is key—their large scale political approach silences the voices of native communites which makes true liberation impossible Alfred and Corntassel: or Manuel and Posluns, the Fourth World is founded on active relationships with the spiritual and cultural heritage embedded in the words and patterns of thought and behaviour left to us by our ancestors. The legacies of their struggles to be Indigenous form the imperatives of our contemporary struggles to regenerate authentic Indigenous existences. A Fourth World theory asserting Indigenous laws on Indigenous lands highlights the sites of ongoing state–nation conflicts while reaffirming the spiritual and cultural nature of the struggle. This is not simply another taxonomy relating Indigenous realities in a theoretical way to the so-called First, Second and Third Worlds, but a recognition of a spiritual ‘struggle to enter the Fourth World’ and to decode state motivations as they invade under the ‘mantle of liberation and development’.37 The Canadian historian Anthony Hall describes this as a battle against the ‘empire of possessive individualism’ and the ‘militarization of space’: ‘the idea of the Fourth World provides a kind of broad ideological umbrella to cover the changing coalitions of pluralistic resistance aimed at preventing the monocultural transformation of the entire planet . . .’38 While the concepts of peoplehood and the Fourth World undoubtedly provide solid bases for thinking about strategies of resurgence, the question remains: how can these be put into practice? In Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America, the Cherokee sociologist Eva Marie Garroutte discusses the concept of ‘Radical Indigenism’ ~is~ as a process of pursuing scholarship that is grounded in Indigenous community goals and which ‘follows the path laid down in the models of inquiry traditional to their tribal community’.39 This intellectual strategy entails utilizing all of the talents of the people inside and within a community to begin a process of regeneration. The larger process of regeneration, as with the outwardly focused process of decolonization, also begins with the self. It is a self- conscious kind of traditionalism that is the central process in the ‘reconstruction of traditional communities’ based on the original teachings and orienting values of Indigenous peoples.40 Colonialism corrupted the relationship between original peoples and the Settlers, and it eventually led to the corruption of Indigenous cultures and communities too. But our discussion thus far has, we hope, illustrated the fact that decolonization and regeneration are not at root collective and institutional processes. They are shifts in thinking and action that emanate from recommitments and reorientations at the level of the self that, over time and through proper organization, manifest as broad social and political movements to challenge state agendas and authorities. To a large extent, institutional approaches to making meaningful change in the lives of Indigenous people have not led to what we understand as decolonization and regeneration; rather they have further embedded Indigenous people in the colonial institutions they set out to challenge. This paradoxical outcome of struggle is because of the logical inconsistencies at the core of the institutional approaches. Current approaches to confronting the problem of contemporary colonialism ignore the wisdom of the teachings of our ancestors reflected in such concepts as Peoplehood and the Fourth World. They are, in a basic way, building not on a spiritual and cultural foundation provided to us as the heritage of our nations, but on the weakened and severely damaged cultural and spiritual and social results of colonialism. Purported decolonization and watered-down cultural restoration processes that accept the premises and realities of our colonized existences as their starting point are inherently flawed and doomed to fail. They attempt to reconstitute strong nations on the foundations of enervated, dispirited and decultured people. That is the honest and brutal reality; and that is the fundamental illogic of our contemporary struggle.
1/31/17
SEPTOCT- DA- Coal
Tournament: Bronx | Round: 3 | Opponent: Acton Boxborough JW | Judge: Jesus Caro
Holthaus, citing Nordhaus' frequent collaborator Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute, argues that if you ramp down nuclear too quickly, it will lead to an increase in the use of coal or gas. "The net effect of nuclear retirements will generally be increasing emissions." That's also the view of Devin Hartman, electricity policy manager for the R Street Institute, a center-right think tank, and a former energy market analyst at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. He points out that retired nuclear plants in the Northeast and California have been mostly replaced by increased natural gas usage. And in Japan and Germany, where the governments have been shutting down nuclear reactors since the Fukushima meltdown, coal use has spiked. "Shutting down nuclear plants would create a little more demand for energy efficiency and renewables, but the net effect of nuclear retirements will generally be increasing emissions," Hartman says. That's partly because there is excess coal- and gas-burning capacity in the current energy system. While generating an additional megawatt-hour of electricity from existing solar or wind facilities can be cheaper than burning coal, building a whole new set of wind turbines is more expensive than just feeding more gas into your existing gas-fired plant. Holthaus cites a report from centrist think tank Third Way on US nuclear plant retirements; it projects that shuttered plants would lead to more natural gas usage and increased CO2 emissions.
Renewables aren’t an energy source—they require base loading from coal and fossil fuels due to the unpredictable nature of their natural factors—this is 2-4x worse than just nuclear power
IAEA 15 International Atomic Energy Agency "CLIMATE CHANGE AND NUCLEAR POWER 2015" Vienna Austria 2015 Renewable technologies (hydropower, wind, solar) do not face the risk of interruptions in fuel supplies, making them somewhat similar to nuclear power. The difficulty associated with their prospective major expansion in the first half of the twenty-first century forecasted by the IEA ~11~ is not in making reserves of energy sources but in creating storage for the produced energy. The reason is intermittency: in contrast to the dispatchable technologies powered by fuels (nuclear or fossils) with guaranteed energy output allowing long term planning, some renewables depend on unpredictable variations in natural conditions, such as windiness and insolation. Considering the fact that large scale storage of electricity is not yet affordable, this creates a significant challenge for the stable and reliable functioning of the power grid. In order to close the gap between demand and unstable supply, alternative energy sources are needed. Normally, these are thermal power plants (as the output of NPPs cannot change fast enough to balance the variations in wind or solar outputs), paradoxically increasing the importance of fossils fuels. It follows that in order to secure the dependability of electricity supply in systems using significant shares of intermittent renewables, such systems will have to include a substantial share of power plants fuelled by coal or gas. This reduces their environmental benefits significantly below the levels estimated by LCAs of various solar and wind technologies (see Section 2.3). Therefore, at the current level of development of energy storage technologies, power systems relying heavily on intermittent renewables will not only be subject to less stable supply but will also face the energy security threats associated with fossil fuels. Moreover, in terms of operational and environmental benefits, such systems are characterized by the inefficiency of fossil fuel power plant operation due to the unpredictable and abrupt changes in their required output. Though their ability to change output quickly makes them preferential options in comparison with nuclear, it leads to an inevitable trade-off in the form of significant N2O emissions that are hard to control under changing power rate regimes. The magnitude of such environmental penalties is not yet clear but, according to a study of the US National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), reductions in N2O emissions in energy systems with a 20 share of wind or solar PV are only 30–50 of those estimated by ignoring the fossil fuel backup. In the worst case scenarios, emissions of N2O from such systems can actually increase by 2–4 times ~37~. Coal and fossil fuels kill millions—quantifiably worse than nuclear power Shrope 13: Shrope, Mark. April 2, 2013. "Nuclear Power Prevents Deaths Causes." Climate Change: Study estimates that nuclear energy leads to substantially fewer pollution-related deaths and greenhouse gas emissions compared with fossil-fuel sources. http://cen.acs.org/articles/91/web/2013/04/Nuclear-Power-Prevents-Deaths-Causes.html. RW
Using nuclear power in place of fossil-fuel energy sources, such as coal, has prevented some 1.8 million air pollution-related deaths globally and could save millions of more lives in coming decades, concludes a study. The researchers also find that nuclear energy prevents emissions of huge quantities of greenhouse gases. These estimates help make the case that policymakers should continue to rely on and expand nuclear power in place of fossil fuels to mitigate climate change, the authors say (Environ. Sci. Technol., DOI: 10.1021/es3051197). In the wake of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, critics of nuclear power have questioned how heavily the world should rely on the energy source, due to possible risks it poses to the environment and human health. "I was very disturbed by all the negative and in many cases unfounded hysteria regarding nuclear power after the Fukushima accident," says report coauthor Pushker A. Kharecha, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York. Working with Goddard’s James E. Hansen, Kharecha set out to explore the benefits of nuclear power. The pair specifically wanted to look at nuclear power’s advantages over fossil fuels in terms of reducing air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Kharecha was surprised to find no broad studies on preventable deaths that could be attributed to nuclear power’s pollution savings. But he did find data from a 2007 study on the average number of deaths per unit of energy generated with fossil fuels and nuclear power (Lancet, DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(07)61253-7). These estimates include deaths related to all aspects of each energy source from mining the necessary natural resources to power generation. For example, the data took into account chronic bronchitis among coal miners and air pollution-related conditions among the public, including lung cancer. The NASA researchers combined this information with historical energy generation data to estimate how many deaths would have been caused if fossil-fuel burning was used instead of nuclear power generation from 1971 to 2009. They similarly estimated that the use of nuclear power over that time caused 5,000 or so deaths, such as cancer deaths from radiation fallout and worker accidents. Comparing those two estimates, Kharecha and Hansen came up with the 1.8 million figure. They next estimated the total number of deaths that could be prevented through nuclear power over the next four decades using available estimates of future nuclear use. Replacing all forecasted nuclear power use until 2050 with natural gas would cause an additional 420,000 deaths, whereas swapping it with coal, which produces significantly more pollution than gas, would mean about 7 million additional deaths. The study focused strictly on deaths, not long-term health issues that might shorten lives, and the authors did not attempt to estimate potential deaths tied to climate change. Finally the pair compared carbon emissions from nuclear power to fossil fuel sources. They calculated that if coal or natural gas power had replaced nuclear energy from 1971 to 2009, the equivalent of an additional 64 gigatons of carbon would have reached the atmosphere. Looking forward, switching out nuclear for coal or natural gas power would lead to the release of 80 to 240 gigatons of additional carbon by 2050. By comparison, previous climate studies suggest that the total allowable emissions between now and 2050 are about 500 gigatons of carbon. This level of emissions would keep atmospheric CO2 concentrations around 350 ppm, which would avoid detrimental warming. Because large-scale implementation of renewable energy options, such as wind or solar, faces significant challenges, the researchers say their results strongly support the case for nuclear as a critical energy source to help stabilize or reduce greenhouse gas concentrations. Bas van Ruijven, an environmental economist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colo., says the estimates on prevented deaths seem reasonable. But he wonders if the conclusion that nuclear power saves hundreds of times more lives than it claims will convince ardent critics. The nuclear power issue is "so polarized that people who oppose nuclear power will immediately dispute the numbers," Van Ruijven says. Nonetheless, he agrees with the pair’s conclusions on the importance of nuclear power. The coal industry is the epitome of capitalist violence worker exploitation—terrible working conditions magnify chances of toxic inhalations—turns and outweighs case Hopkins 16: The Insanity of Coal Mining. Joe Hopkins. June 4, 2016. World Socialist Party. http://www.wspus.org/2016/06/the-insanity-of-coal-mining/. RW
National Public Radio (NPR) and the Centre for Public Integrity (CPI) teamed up to produce a special investigative report on the increased incidence of black lung disease in coal miners. The results of their combined investigations were released on the NPR’s radio stations on July 9–10, 2012 and broadcast on Public Broadcasting Systems (PBS) television on July 9, 2012. The investigation found that black lung disease in miners had quadrupled since the 1980s and doubled since June–July 2002. This doubling coincides with an increase of 600 hours in the work year of the average miner since 2002. The NPR/CPI investigation focused on mining in West Virginia, Virginia, and Kentucky and found that over 10,000 miners had died of black lung disease and ‘massive fibrosis’ (the most advanced and deadly form of black lung disease) between 1985 and 1994 and that over 2,000 had died from the same causes in West Virginia alone. There is no treatment for black lung disease. Many victims report that at its ‘massive fibrosis’ stage they can either eat or breathe, but not both at the same time. One victim interviewed on NPR and PBS said that he could not even hold his two-year-old grandson for more than a minute or so before oxygen deprivation set in and he had to set the child down. It was too exerting for him. The coal seams in existing mines are thinner now than they were decades ago, and mining companies are extracting coal seams down to one inch thick. These seams are often embedded in quartz rock that has a high silica content. As deadly as coal dust is in itself, the dust produced from extracting these tiny seams is even more deadly. Hiding the dust In 1960 Congress passed a law to protect the health of coal miners by regulating coal dust levels in mines. The Big Coal lobby and the elected politicians of the area (and beyond) had a hand in weakening safety protections in the law that was actually passed. Senator Robert Byrd (known as ‘the coal miner’s friend’) helped weaken the law for economic reasons – to make it cheaper for mining companies to comply and ensure that Big Coal would continue to contribute money to his many, many re-election campaigns. The Senator had a vested interest in protecting coal industry profits. All politicians want corporate profits to be large. The law that finally passed to protect coal miners from the worst abuses of the industry was weak, flawed, and had many loopholes. The law was weak as it put in place the concept of self-policing by the company itself. It was flawed because inspectors were not allowed to enter the mines while production was going on (which was 24 hours a day) without the prior consent of the mining company. One of the loopholes is that when the coal dust samples collected by the industry do not agree with the coal dust samples collected by regulatory inspectors, industry is granted what in golf is called a ‘Mulligan’ — a replay — but one no opponent would ever accept. The company is allowed to collect dust samples from five locations chosen by itself and calculate an average that becomes the definitive coal dust concentration to compare with the figure derived from the samples collected by the government regulatory inspector. For some reason, the concentrations determined by the coal companies and those calculated by the inspectors very often do not agree! The coal companies, of course, come up with lower figures. Mining companies have still been cited with more than 53,000 violations during the last decade. For some strange reason fewer than 1,000 of them resulted in court action! Dust pumps were installed to collect coal dust samples at the coal face, often mounted on the mining machine itself. At a Massey Mine the bosses directed that plastic bags should be put over the intake of the pump to cheat the test. The workers were told that if the concentrations of coal dust were found to be too high the mine would be closed and "they’d be out of work." There is one tiny and tarnished silver lining. The Patriot Coal Company filed for bankruptcy on July 9, 2012. The tarnish is that Patriot miners are now without jobsThe reader may well ask why coal-mining companies would deliberately cheat on safety tests and regulations designed to protect the health (and thus the productivity) of their own workers. Big business is in business to make the greatest profit possible. Workers are expendable and can easily be replaced from the pool of the unemployed. Even during ‘good times’ 3.5 to 5 of the workforce are unemployed. During times of high unemployment (like now) a lost worker is even easier to replace and may even be got at a lower wage rate than the lost worker was being paid. Big business is the product and ultimate consequence of the capitalist system. Capitalism demands that companies grow their profits or lose out and die, to be taken over by more competitive companies. Competition, under the neoliberal ethos in vogue for the past 35–40 years, means upping productivity (through technology and/or getting workers to do more work in a shorter span of time) and cutting costs, the largest cost being the labor bill, i.e., reducing wagesThe capitalist system in its current form confounds many older folks who remember the capitalism-with-a-human-face of the Keynesian phase of capitalist development, when wages were tied to worker productivity. It also confounds younger workers, but for different reasons. Younger folks born in the last forty years have experienced the rise of neo-liberalism as an inevitable progression, an economic necessity, almost a natural law. In the capitalist world of today, the worker class hears big business bosses and corporate CEOs, economic experts, and even the workers’ own union bosses proclaiming that ‘we’re all in it together’ and ‘we’ve got to do more with less.’ The worker class hears nothing of viable alternatives to the rat race that has taken over their lives. They just keep plugging along thinking TINA — There Is No Alternative. The bosses, CEOs, economists, and union bosses, all committed to and doing just fine by the system, say that the status quo is natural, moral, and efficient on its own and that the ‘free market’ system can only function at its highest potential if government stays out of the market. Otherwise it won’t be ‘free’ to fairly distribute its blessings to those who work hard and play by the rulesDue to the $333–500 billions’ worth of externalities generated by the coal industry every year, with damage done by the coal industry amounting to an additional $1–1.5 trillion per year, coal mining would be a thing of the past were the US government, with its monopoly on violence, not in collusion with Big Business — in this case, the coal industry. There is no such thing as a ‘free market’ — and never has been. Government, with its law-making, courts, standing army, and security forces and its self-sustaining monopoly on violence, is necessary to camouflage the tremendous inequality and disequilibrium between the social classes and create the deliberately misleading impression of a society of normal human relations. If all of us, every working class person, were to just say no — and the military and police are working class people too — the means of production would pass into our hands and we could stop the insane production that destroys the world and has been destroying the world for over two hundred years now under the capitalist system.
1/31/17
SEPTOCT- DA- SA Energy
Tournament: Valley | Round: Octas | Opponent: Harrison RP | Judge: Martin Sigalow, Chris Theis, Daniel Shatzkin ERROR
1/31/17
SEPTOCT- DA- Warming
Tournament: Bronx | Round: 6 | Opponent: Harrison CS | Judge: Wesley Hu
DA
Nuclear energy essential to decreasing warming- studies prove
warming real confirmed by IPCC WHO study of nuclear power being clean WNA 16 ~More Than, "World Energy Needs and Nuclear Power," No Publication, http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/world-energy-needs-and-nuclear-power.aspx World Nuclear Association~ KB On a global scale nuclear power currently reduces carbon dioxide emissions by some 2.5 billion tonnes per year (relative to the main alternative of coal-fired generation, about 2 billion tonnes relative to the present fuel mix). Carbon dioxide accounts for half of the human-contributed portion of the global warming effect of the atmosphere. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has comprehensively reviewed global warming and has reached a consensus that the phenomenon is real and does pose a significant environmental threat during the next century if fossil fuel use continues even at present global levels. See also Climate Change – science paper. The 2007 IPCC report on mitigation of climate change says that the most cost-effective option for restricting the temperature rise to under 3°C will require an increase in non-carbon electricity generation from 34 (nuclear plus hydro) then to 48-53 by 2030, along with other measures. With a doubling of overall electricity demand by then, and a carbon emission cost of US$ 50 per tonne of CO2, nuclear's share of electricity generation was projected by IPCC to grow from 16 now to 18 of the increased demand (ie 2650 TWh to some 6000 TWh/yr), representing more than a doubling of the current nuclear output by 2030. The report projected other non-carbon sources apart from hydro contributing some 12-17 of global electricity generation by 2030. This is considerably more than subsequent World Energy Outlook projections for 2030 reported above. Nuclear power has a key role to play in reducing greenhouse gases. Every 22 tonnes of uranium (26 t U3O8) used saves one million tonnes of carbon dioxide relative to coal. Of more immediate relevance is clean air, and the health benefits of low pollution levels. A World Health Organisation (WHO) study published in 2011 showed that some 1.34 million people each year die prematurely due to PM10 particles – those less than 10 microns (μm) – in outdoor air. Outdoor, PM10 particles mostly originate in coal-fired power stations and motor vehicles, and indoors, residential wood and coal burning for space heating is an important contributor, especially in rural areas during colder months. WHO studied publicly-available air quality data from 1081 cities across 91 countries, including capital cities and those with populations of more than 100,000 people. The data used are based on measurements taken from 2003 to 2010, with most being reported for the period 2008-09. The WHO air quality guideline for PM10 is 20 micrograms per cubic metre (μg/m3) as an annual average. However, eleven cities exceeded 200 μg/m3 average, eg UlaanBaatar at 279 μg/m3, whereas most of the 490 cities below the guideline level were in North America. In August 2015 the Global Nexus Initiative (GNI) was set up by the US Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) and the Partnership for Global Security. It aims to explore the links between climate change, nuclear energy and global security challenges through a working group of 17 multidisciplinary policy experts from the non-governmental, academic and private sectors in Denmark, France, Japan, Sweden, the United Arab Emirates and the USA. The group will convene for a series of meetings and workshops, through which it aims to produce policy memoranda identifying the challenges and offering recommendations. These will feed into a cumulative report at the end of the two-year project. GNI points out that climate change, energy security and global security are all issues that cut across national borders, have significant economic and social impacts, and require input from the full spectrum of stakeholders. This means policies must be coordinated at national, regional and global levels.
Nuclear power avoids carbon outputs- better than renewables and coal
hydropower and damming rivers have terribleenv. Conseq. Nuclear power has emp. Avoided a ton of fossil fuel combustion and have stopped a shift Renewables are intermittent, they cant be sustainable, NP key to renewables Emanuel 15:¶ James Hansen, Kerry Emanuel, Ken Caldeira, Tom Wigley. Group of environmentalist writers from the Guardian. The Guardian. December 3, 2015. "Nuclear power paves the only viable path forward on climate change". http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/03/nuclear-power-paves-the-only-viable-path-forward-on-climate-change. RW All four of us have dedicated our scientific careers to understand the processes and impacts of climate change, variously studying ocean systems, tropical cyclones, ice sheets and ecosystems as well as impacts on human societies. We have used both climate models and geological records of past climates to better understand lessons from warmer periods in the Earth’s history and investigate future scenarios. We have become so concerned about humanity’s slow response to this challenge that we have decided we must clearly set out what we see as the only viable path forward. As scientists we do not take advocacy positions lightly, but we believe the magnitude of climate change now presents an unprecedented moral challenge that compels us to speak out. To avoid the worst effects of climate change, including continued sea level rise, the total loss of Arctic sea ice and devastating effects on human societies and natural ecosystems alike, rapid global decarbonisation is needed. The voluntary measures put on the table at Paris by over 100 nations are a welcome step, but unless there are strong measures to reduce emissions beyond 2030, global emissions ~they~ would remain at a high level, practically guaranteeing that young people inherit a climate running out of their control. A new and intensified approach is clearly needed. Everyone agrees that the most urgent component of decarbonisation is a move towards clean energy, and clean electricity in particular. We need affordable, abundant clean energy, but there is no particular reason why we should favour renewable energy over other forms of abundant energy. Indeed, cutting down forests for bioenergy and damming rivers for hydropower – both commonly counted as renewable energy sources – can have terrible environmental consequences. Nuclear power, particularly next-generation nuclear power with a closed fuel cycle (where spent fuel is reprocessed), is uniquely scalable, and environmentally advantageous. Over the past 50 years, nuclear power stations – by offsetting fossil fuel combustion – have avoided the emission of an estimated 60bn tonnes of carbon dioxide. Nuclear energy can power whole civilisations, and produce waste streams that are trivial compared to the waste produced by fossil fuel combustion. There are technical means to dispose of this small amount of waste safely. However, nuclear does pose unique safety and proliferation concerns that must be addressed with strong and binding international standards and safeguards. Most importantly for climate, nuclear produces no CO2 during power generation.To solve the climate problem, policy must be based on facts and not on prejudice. The climate system cares about greenhouse gas emissions – not about whether energy comes from renewable power or abundant nuclear power. Some have argued that it is feasible to meet all of our energy needs with renewables. The 100 renewable scenarios downplay or ignore the intermittency issue by making unrealistic technical assumptions, and can contain high levels of biomass and hydroelectric power at the expense of true sustainability. Large amounts of nuclear power would make it much easier for solar and wind to close the energy gap. The climate issue is too important for us to delude ourselves with wishful thinking. Throwing tools such as nuclear out of the box constrains humanity’s options and makes climate mitigation more likely to fail. We urge an all-of-the-above approach that includes increased investment in renewables combined with an accelerated deployment of new nuclear reactors. For example, a build rate of 61 new reactors per year could entirely replace current fossil fuel electricity generation by 2050. Accounting for increased global electricity demand driven by population growth and development in poorer countries, which would add another 54 reactors per year, this makes a total requirement of 115 reactors per year to 2050 to entirely decarbonise the global electricity system in this illustrative scenario. We know that this is technically achievable because France and Sweden were able to ramp up nuclear power to high levels in just 15-20 years. Nuclear will make the difference between the world missing crucial climate targets or achieving them. We are hopeful in the knowledge that, together with renewables, nuclear can help bridge the ‘emissions gap’ that bedevils the Paris climate negotiations. The future of our planet and our descendants depends on basing decisions on facts, and letting go of long-held biases when it comes to nuclear power
Global warming definitively causes extinction
Sharp and Kennedy 14 – (Associate Professor Robert (Bob) A. Sharp is the UAE National Defense College Associate Dean for Academic Programs and College Quality Assurance Advisor. He previously served as Assistant Professor of Strategic Security Studies at the College of International Security Affairs (CISA) in the U.S. National Defense University (NDU), Washington D.C. and then as Associate Professor at the Near East South Asia (NESA) Center for Strategic Studies, collocated with NDU. Most recently at NESA, he focused on security sector reform in Yemen and Lebanon, and also supported regional security engagement events into Afghanistan, Turkey, Egypt, Palestine and Qatar; Edward Kennedy is a renewable energy and climate change specialist who has worked for the World Bank and the Spanish Electric Utility ENDESA on carbon policy and markets; 8/22/14, "Climate Change and Implications for National Security," International Policy Digest, http://intpolicydigest.org/2014/08/22/climate-change-implications-national-security/)** Our planet is 4.5 billion years old. If that whole time was to be reflected on a single one-year calendar then the dinosaurs died off sometime late in the afternoon of December 27th and modern humans emerged 200,000 years ago, or at around lunchtime on December 28th. Therefore, human life on earth is very recent. Sometime on December 28th humans made the first fires – wood fires – neutral in the carbon balance. Now reflect on those most recent 200,000 years again on a single one-year calendar and you might be surprised to learn that the industrial revolution began only a few hours ago during the middle of the afternoon on December 31st, 250 years ago, coinciding with the discovery of underground carbon fuels. Over the 250 years carbon fuels have enabled tremendous technological advances including a population growth from about 800 million then to 7.5 billion today and the consequent demand to extract even more carbon. This has occurred during a handful of generations, which is hardly noticeable on our imaginary one-year calendar. The release of this carbon – however – is changing our climate at such a rapid rate that it threatens our survival and presence on earth. It defies imagination that so much damage has been done in such a relatively short time. The implications of climate change is the single most significant threat to life on earth and, put simply, we are not doing enough to rectify the damage. This relatively very recent ability to change our climate is an inconvenient truth; the science is sound. We know of the complex set of interrelated national and global security risks that are a result of global warming and the velocity at which climate change is occurring. We worry it may already be too late. Climate change writ large has informed few, interested some, confused many, and polarized politics. It has already led to an increase in natural disasters including but not limited to droughts, storms, floods, fires etc. The year 2012 was among the 10 warmest years on record according to an American Meteorological Society (AMS) report. Research suggests that climate change is already affecting human displacement; reportedly 36 million people were displaced in 2008 alone because of sudden natural disasters. Figures for 2010 and 2011 paint a grimmer picture of people displaced because of rising sea levels, heat and storms. Climate change affects all natural systems. It impacts temperature and consequently it affects water and weather patterns. It contributes to desertification, deforestation and acidification of the oceans. Changes in weather patterns may mean droughts in one area and floods in another. Counter-intuitively, perhaps, sea levels rise but perennial river water supplies are reduced because glaciers are retreating. As glaciers and polar ice caps melt, there is an albedo effect, which is a double whammy of less temperature regulation because of less surface area of ice present. This means that less absorption occurs and also there is less reflection of the sun’s light. A potentially critical wild card could be runaway climate change due to the release of methane from melting tundra. Worldwide permafrost soils contain about 1,700 Giga Tons of carbon, which is about four times more than all the carbon released through human activity thus far. The planet has already adapted itself to dramatic climate change including a wide range of distinct geologic periods and multiple extinctions, and at a pace that it can be managed. It is human intervention that has accelerated the pace dramatically: An increased surface temperature, coupled with more severe weather and changes in water distribution will create uneven threats to our agricultural systems and will foster and support the spread of insect borne diseases like Malaria, Dengue and the West Nile virus. Rising sea levels will increasingly threaten our coastal population and infrastructure centers and with more than 3.5 billion people – half the planet – depending on the ocean for their primary source of food, ocean acidification may dangerously undercut critical natural food systems which would result in reduced rations. Climate change also carries significant inertia. Even if emissions were completely halted today, temperature increases would continue for some time. Thus the impact is not only to the environment, water, coastal homes, agriculture and fisheries as mentioned, but also would lead to conflict and thus impact national security. Resource wars are inevitable as countries respond, adapt and compete for the shrinking set of those available resources. These wars have arguably already started and will continue in the future because climate change will force countries to act for national survival; the so-called Climate Wars. As early as 2003 Greenpeace alluded to a report which it claimed was commissioned by the Pentagon titled: An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for U.S. National Security. It painted a picture of a world in turmoil because global warming had accelerated. The scenario outlined was both abrupt and alarming. The report offered recommendations but backed away from declaring climate change an immediate problem, concluding that it would actually be more incremental and measured; as such it would be an irritant, not a shock for national security systems. In 2006 the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) – Institute of Public Research – convened a board of 11 senior retired generals and admirals to assess National Security and the Threat to Climate Change. Their initial report was published in April 2007 and made no mention of the potential acceleration of climate change. The team found that climate change was a serious threat to national security and that it was: "most likely to happen in regions of the world that are already fertile ground for extremism." The team made recommendations from their analysis of regional impacts which suggested the following. Europe would experience some fracturing because of border migration. Africa would need more stability and humanitarian operations provided by the United States. The Middle East would experience a "loss of food and water security (which) will increase pressure to emigrate across borders." Asia would suffer from "threats to water and the spread of infectious disease. " In 2009 the CIA opened a Center on Climate Change and National Security to coordinate across the intelligence community and to focus policy. In May 2014, CNA again convened a Military Advisory Board but this time to assess National Security and the Accelerating Risk of Climate Change. The report concludes that climate change is no longer a future threat but occurring right now and the authors appeal to the security community, the entire government and the American people to not only build resilience against projected climate change impacts but to form agreements to stabilize climate change and also to integrate climate change across all strategy and planning. The calm of the 2007 report is replaced by a tone of anxiety concerning the future coupled with calls for public discourse and debate because "time and tide wait for no man." The report notes a key distinction between resilience (mitigating the impact of climate change) and agreements (ways to stabilize climate change) and states that: Actions by the United States and the international community have been insufficient to adapt to the challenges associated with projected climate change. Strengthening resilience to climate impacts already locked into the system is critical, but this will reduce long-term risk only if improvements in resilience are accompanied by actionable agreements on ways to stabilize climate change. The 9/11 Report framed the terrorist attacks as less of a failure of intelligence than a failure of imagination. Greenpeace’s 2003 account of the Pentagon’s alleged report describes a coming climate Armageddon which to readers was unimaginable and hence the report was not really taken seriously. It described: A world thrown into turmoil by drought, floods, typhoons. Whole countries rendered uninhabitable. The capital of the Netherlands submerged. The borders of the U.S. and Australia patrolled by armies firing into waves of starving boat people desperate to find a new home. Fishing boats armed with cannon to drive off competitors. Demands for access to water and farmland backed up with nuclear weapons. The CNA and Greenpeace/Pentagon reports are both mirrored by similar analysis by the World Bank which highlighted not only the physical manifestations of climate change, but also the significant human impacts that threaten to unravel decades of economic development, which will ultimately foster conflict. Climate change is the quintessential "Tragedy of the Commons," where the cumulative impact of many individual actions (carbon emission in this case) is not seen as linked to the marginal gains available to each individual action and not seen as cause and effect. It is simultaneously huge, yet amorphous and nearly invisible from day to day. It is occurring very fast in geologic time terms, but in human time it is (was) slow and incremental. Among environmental problems, it is uniquely global. With our planet and culture figuratively and literally honeycombed with a reliance on fossil fuels, we face systemic challenges in changing the reliance across multiple layers of consumption, investment patterns, and political decisions; it will be hard to fix!
1/31/17
SEPTOCT- K- Victimhood
Tournament: Bronx | Round: 2 | Opponent: Walt Whitman CC | Judge: Rahul Gosain
1NC-Butler K
Butler’s idea of the subject ensures an attachment to victimhood that compartmentalizes and reproduces violence Boucher 6: Dr. Geoff Boucher. The politics of performativity. Geoff Boucher is a lecturer in literary studies at Deakin University, Australia. He gained his interdisciplinary PhD from the University of Melbourne. He has written on psychoanalysis, contemporary European philosophy, and social theory. His co-edited collection of critical essays on Slavoj Zizek entitled Traversing the Fantasy has just appeared from Ashgate Publishing. He has published internationally on Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and Jacques Lacan. He is a regular contributor to Arena Magazine and a member of the Independent Social Research Network. 2006. http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia01/parrhesia01'boucher.pdf. RW Some commentators claim that Butler’s "Nietzschean-Foucauldian" conception of agency decisively refutes any individualist interpretation of performativity. Certainly, Butler’s restatement of the structural constraints surrounding the agent, condemn ing the individual to strategies of recuperative or subversive repetition of speech acts, prevent any voluntaristic interpretation of a subject who wilfully "decides," on a day-by-day basis, to adopt this or that subject position. But how compelling is the claim that a Foucauldian treatment of the subject completely blocks methodological individualism? By depriving the subject of its power as genetic origin of structures and instead analysing the process of subjectification as a variable and complex function of power, Foucault appears to eliminate the agency of the individual. For Foucault, ritualised institutional practices take the form of disciplinary norms that literally conform subjects by subjecting them to regimes of bodily signification – drills, routines, conventions – which inscribe the illusory psychic interiority of the soul on the socialised exterior of the body, so that "the soul is the prison of the body." The resistance of the subject is merely a ruse of power, for power depends upon this illusory interiority and its frustrated struggles with authority for its elaboration, extension and penetration into the depth of the individual. The problem is that this arguably resulted in a form of objectivist determinism that prevents the emergence of effective resistance while mechanically reducing the subject to an effect of institutional socialisation. Certainly, Butler questions the ability of this position to think the subversion of power. Foucault’s subsequent work on the "aesthetics of existence," instead of solving this problem, merely inverted it, asserting that although the subject is formed through constraints, nonetheless, the possibility remained open for "practices of liberation" of a voluntarist kind. It might be said, then, that Foucault exposes the constitutive subject – the better to save the political individual. From this perspective, Butler seemingly rehearses Foucault’s trajectory in reverse, shifting from subjective voluntarism to institutional determinism.
Their politics of recognition violently represses difference—the alternative is Lacanian politics of subject-in-outline Leeb 9: Claudia Leeb. 2009. The Politics of Misrecognition: a feminist critique. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/315877. RW For the past decade and a half, social and political thinkers have appropriated the Hegelian trope of a "struggle for recognition" to generate theories that lead to a democratic politics of inclusion.1 The different strands within the "politics of recognition debate" share the conviction that "recognition" is a central human good and the precondition for justice in pluralist societies. However, the French psychoanalytic philosopher Jacques Lacan questions an ethics based on recognition. "Lots of things have been made to fit within the political myth of the ‘struggle for life,’" he argues in Book I, "If it was Darwin who wrought it, that was because he came of a nation of privateers, for whom racism was the basic industry."2 I share Lacan’s suspicion of an ethics based on recognition or its counterpart—misrecognition. Contemporary thinkers, who have wrought this trope for politics have continued to mythologize it, thereby not so much contributing to a politics of inclusion, but instead, perpetuating a politics of exclusions. What parades as a pluralist society where subjects supposedly "equally recognize each other in their diversity" often ends up in the exclusion of different subjects, such as women, sexual and racial minorities, and the poor. Although the influence of the politics of recognition is fading, perhaps because some thinkers have realized its inherent problems, it remains a dominant strand in contemporary political theorizing. Some thinkers, such as Patchen Markell, have pointed to the problematic aspects of a politics based on recognition. The dominance of the "politics of recognition" in contemporary political theorizing, Markell argues, does not so much contribute to establish more just societies; instead, this strand of theorizing "made it more difficult to comprehend and confront unjust social and political relations."3 Although there are some contemporary thinkers who question the validity of the politics of recognition debate, a thorough critique on this strand of thinking remains to be written—its representatives remain perhaps too powerful figures in the field of political theory and philosophy to be challenged. This paper develops such a challenge further. Its aim is two-fold: First, it explains why the language of recognition delivers an inadequate foundation for a political theory that aims at a politics of inclusion. Second, it proposes an alternative political theory, a "politics of a subject-in-outline," as a philosophical foundation for a politics of inclusion.4 It shows that a politics of recognition functions on the level of the Lacanian ego, which excludes everyone who does not neatly fit into the ideal whole it defends. In contrast, a politics of a subject-in-outline emerges in the Lacanian real, the moment beyond recognition, which points at the gaps in the political community. It is through these gaps where those excluded can enter the political community and contest its boundaries. The paper defends its argument in three sections. The first section, "The Ego in the Hegelian Mirror Encounter," explains why a politics of recognition leads to injustice. It reads Lacan alongside Hegel, to show why Hegel himself, who is claimed by contemporary recognition theorists (from Fukuyama to Honneth) as the central source for their vision of a just society based on mutual recognition, was rather suspicious of an ethics based on recognition. This section argues that Hegel’s staging of the processes of "mutual recognition" in the Phenomenologie des Geistes leads to the creation of a politics of the ego, which violently suppresses difference. The second section, "A Politics of a Subject-in-Outline," shows that the aspect in Lacan’s thought where Lacan goes beyond Hegel—the real—provides a philosophical basis for a politics of inclusion. Hegel, although suspicious of an ethics based on recognition, ultimately aimed to establish a just society based on recognition, which renders his project problematic for political theorizing. In contrast, Lacan’s thought is fruitful for such theorizing, because it breaks with the limited language of recognition. Such a break occurs at the point when the real takes center stage in his later works.5 Here the language of recognition and misrecognition disappears and the possibility of an ethics grafted on the real reappears in.
1/31/17
SEPTOCT- Nebel T
Tournament: Valley | Round: 2 | Opponent: Oakwood AM | Judge: Joe Rankin Interpretation: If the affirmative prohibits the production of nuclear power, they must defend the prohibition of the production of nuclear power in all countries, they cannot specify a country or group of countries to take the resolutional action
Grammar 2. Limits 3. Topic lit
9/26/16
SEPTOCT- T- Framework
Tournament: Valley | Round: 4 | Opponent: Lake Highland Prep JW | Judge: Abbey Chapman Interpretation: “Resolved” means the affirmative must defend the implementation of a policy action.
And, Dictionary.com defines prohibit as "to forbid by law".