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Cites
Entry
Date
JAN FEB ABOLISH THE MILITARY CP
Tournament: Golden Desert | Round: 5 | Opponent: Kris Kaya | Judge: Patrick Counterplan text: The United States Federal government should abolish the entire military. That means abolishing all 5 branches of the military. Edmonds ‘04 Edmonds, Brad MS in Industrial Psychology, is a banker in Alabama.. "Four Reasons We Should Abolish the Military." Four Reasons We Should Abolish the Military. N.p., 10 Feb. 2004. Web. 05 Feb. 2017. To address the common claim by neoconservatives that we owe our freedom to the men and women of the US military, I've written recently that we don't owe the military anything of the sort. While many soldiers, airmen, etc. died in combat believing they were defending our freedom, they were misguided in this belief. The "for our freedom" claim is false because our freedoms were won by the founders and written into law by them, hence a military created afterward could have had nothing to do with that; the freedoms then created have only eroded over time, and the military did not prevent this (and could not, not being part of the legislative process); the military has never been necessary to prevent our freedoms being taken by other countries, as historians available all over the web are now making clear; and the military over the last century has only executed the adventurous whims of individual congressmen and presidents, and in so doing has been the muscle behind needlessly making the rest of the world hate us. Aside from looking at the past, there are compelling reasons we should abolish all government military forces now.
Any standing military force aside from the Navy is unconstitutional. The Constitution provides for funding of armies only two years at a time – even the typical four-year commitment for ROTC cadets and new enlistees is thus illegal, as presumably it could not be known four years in advance that there would still be a standing Army or Air Force. Many things the federal government does today are unconstitutional, but this is no reason not to continue to consider the Constitution an authoritative document. 2. The private sector could provide heavy-weapons regional defense better than the government. I neglected to mention in recent articles, but included in my "abolishing government" series, that insurers would most likely take up this task. Insurers have the resources and incentive already, and unlike the government's military, if an insurer caused "collateral damage," the insurer would be held responsible, with no protection from lawsuits. Additionally, an insurer would be required to succeed in protecting its customers, which our military isn't; and do at least as good a job of that for the dollar as the next insurer. By contrast, in today's government military, drill instructors are required to be "sensitive" rather than effective; gays and women share close quarters with men, even in combat, to the detriment of combat effectiveness; materiel is often purchased from the lowest bidder (unless the bidder represents a token minority contractor the Pentagon needs, in which case a toilet seat can cost hundreds of dollars); and in general our government military is a playground for the social-engineering initiatives of leftists in Congress, and is not dedicated primarily to its mission. The private sector, were it allowed to provide regional defense without government interference, would be more efficient, more effective, safer, and would never have incentive to engage in social engineering, nor in murderous foreign-policy adventurism and the consequent creation of bitter enemies around the world. 3. Even if the military were both efficient and constitutional, a standing military is a threat to our liberty, as has been proven in US history. The ultimate test of liberty is secession. Even Lincoln himself agreed before he became president that secession is a natural right. What made a slave a slave was that he could not secede from his owner's governance and go into business for himself. What makes the states and all their citizens slaves to the union today is that we are not allowed to secede and govern ourselves. The US military, in the only action it ever took that directly affected American liberty, prevented it – prevented the secession of several states by killing 300,000 of their citizens, then over several years enforcing draconian martial law over the survivors. 4. As the military is a government outfit, it can never be efficient. Indeed, as Ludwig von Mises showed, the US military, being a purely socialist government monopoly, can never know how much money it should have or spend, can never have a good idea how much its operations should cost. Right now, the US defense budget is over $1,400 for each man, woman, and child in the US. The private sector could provide a deterrent, enough to prevent any threat of foreign invasion, for probably 1/10 of that – which, remember, would still amount to $40 billion. No government agency can ever know what its costs should be; it is a forcible monopoly, and never can face bankruptcy, competition, or loss of customers. For the most part, the military as we have it is unconstitutional, as have been most of its actions since 1812 (in which war most of the work was done by privateers anyway). The private sector would do a far better job for far less money, as the individual Ross Perot proved in practical terms. The only impact the standing military has on our freedom is to take it away. And the military will eternally waste money because it cannot be governed by market forces, cannot ever know what its costs should be, cannot know what value it should return to stakeholders, and will never have an incentive to do a good job efficiently. In short, just as with any government service such as education or welfare services, it can never work well. This military must be abolished. Competitive through net benefits: the DA or turns to the AC Also Solves 100 of the AC advantages by getting rid of the very institution that the AC is criticizing and, thus, best takes back the university from militarism by just getting rid of the military itself.
2/5/17
JAN FEB ANY T
Tournament: Desert | Round: 6 | Opponent: Patrick | Judge: Kris Kaya Interpretation: Any is defined as every Your Dictionary NO DATE (Your Dictionary, online reference, “any,” http://www.yourdictionary.com/any///LADI) every: any child can do it Any is an indefinite pronoun that refers to things generally Language NO DATE (Online English grammar textbook, Unit 42: - Indefinite Pronouns,” http://www.1-language.com/englishcoursenew/unit42_grammar.htm///LADI) Indefinite pronouns replace specific things with general, non-specific concepts. For example: - I want to live abroad in Italy. - I want to live abroad somewhere. This unit covers indefinite pronouns made with some, any, no, and every. Some / any Some and any can be combined with "-thing" to refer to an undefined object. For example: - There's someone outside the door. - There isn't anyone in the office. Some and any can be combined with "-where" to refer to an undefined location. For example: - I'm looking for somewhere to live. - We don't want to live anywhere near here. Some and any can be combined with "-body" or "-one" to refer to an undefined person. There is very little difference in meaning between "-body" and "-one". For example: - If you have a problem, someone/somebody will help you. - Do you know anyone/anybody who can help? These compound nouns follow the same rules as some and any, that is some is used in affirmative statements, and any is used in negative statements and questions. For example: - I need something from the supermarket. - I don't need anything from the supermarket. - Do you need anything from the supermarket?
2/5/17
JAN FEB Abolish Military Academies CP
Tournament: Golden Desert | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Lynbrook | Judge: Panel Text The United States federal government should abolish all military academies including universities like West Point and the Navel Academy. Fleming ’17, a professor at the Naval Academy explains: Fleming, Bruce Ph.D Vanderbilt Comparative Literature, Prof. of Literature at the Naval Academy. "Let’s Abolish West Point: Military Academies Serve No One, Squander Millions of Tax Dollars." Salon. Salon, 5 Jan. 2015. Web. 05 Feb. 2017. In the spirit of hands across the aisle, I’d like to suggest that the first thing the new Republican majority devote itself to is not, say, the repeal of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), but to converting the four hugely expensive and underproductive U.S. service academies (Navy, Army, Air Force and Coast Guard) — taxpayer-funded undergraduate institutions whose products all become officers in the military — to more modest and functional schools for short-term military training programs, as the British have repurposed Sandhurst. Competition Competitive through net benefits. Either the DA or the turns to the Aff the cp is mutually exclusive because military academies can't repeal their speech codes if they don't exist ie. I abolish the actor of the AC Net Benefit Military academies are pointless. They do not meet their own principles of leadership, character, and excellence. Instead, they fail to teach students self-reliance, and they create students that engage in misconduct. Fleming 2. Fleming, Bruce Ph.D Vanderbilt Comparative Literature, Prof. of Literature at the Naval Academy. "Let’s Abolish West Point: Military Academies Serve No One, Squander Millions of Tax Dollars." Salon. Salon, 5 Jan. 2015. Web. 05 Feb. 2017. But they’re fiercely hard to get through, right? Wrong. The students are in the military, so we own them. We mother hen them: we teach not self-reliance but getting by. They get two sets of interim grades every semester, and if they are lagging, they are sent for mandatory tutoring (with me, among other people), are given help by a plethora of support staff and removed from teams if necessary—and if despite all this, they manage to fail a class, we own them in the summer too, so no problem, they repeat class for a higher grade. No wonder we graduate about 80 percent within five years (not counting the prep school). And when they graduate they get among the highest salaries for any college graduates, because it’s guaranteed by the military. If all the graduates of one mediocre state university were guaranteed well paid employment by taxpayers, that college would be ranked high too. The relentless nature of the hype, and its hollowness, prove the pointlessness of these places. “Leaders to serve the Nation,” say the flags on posts at Annapolis. Nobody defines what a leader is, or asks whether somebody like a Silicon Valley innovator might not be serving her nation as much as, if not more than, a desk jockey officer in a fruitless military endeavor in Iraq. Or a first-grade teacher. Or a doctor, or a violinist, or a scientist: we graduate almost none of these. Leaders? Really? Officers, sure, because we have the congressional power to make our graduates officers. That’s a bit circular. And about half leave the military after their obligation of five to seven years as a junior officer, and some are let go before as the military downsizes. At your expense. Do we teach them “character” as we claim we do? Apparently not. In fact about a third of the commanding officers removed in 2012 for malfeasance—record numbers for Navy—were Academy graduates. Read the newspapers for ongoing scandals (sexual assault, cheating) involving current service academy students, all of which the brass (whose prestige depends on all good news all the time) try to squash: these were merely a few bad apples, we hear, indicative of nothing. Keep the tax dollars for the football team flowing. The service academies are trying to be both archaic and up to date. The result is that they’re deeply contradictory. We decided to make them colleges with a bachelor’s degree in the 1960s. We introduced majors including English and History rather than the lockstep engineering curriculum of the 1950s, but discourage them from taking one of the few non-technical majors (including my subject, English) if they show strengths in technical subjects. We even reserve the right to re-assign their major based on the “needs of the Navy.” Everybody gets a B.S. and our curriculum is heavy in engineering, a questionable choice nowadays that wars are changing in nature so quickly, and with the military really in need of creative thinkers. T-shirts in the midshipmen store proudly sport the logo “Not College.” How right they are. They pretend to be colleges, but exercise military control. They forbid students (military subordinates) from contradicting in public the sunny hype of military brass eager for taxpayer dollars and to spit-shine their own careers. They make students go to football games to cheer. Intellectual development? That’s left for the top students, who succeed despite the institutions, not because of them. We’re proud of our Rhodes scholars, but we don’t talk about the taxpayer-supported remedial classes or the lack of enthusiasm of the middle of the pack. Of course you’ll send your child to one if given the chance: college tuition with guaranteed employment, not to mention spiffy uniforms. How can you say no? How the neighbors will envy you! But the hardest charging of the students are the most disappointed (I talk yearly to disillusioned Marine and SEAL selectees), and all count the days until graduation. The service academies are all Potemkin villages, facades with nothing behind them: they don’t teach morals, they don’t make better officers, and they cost you a bundle. Most fundamentally, they combine two incompatible goals: military obedience and the freedom to question offered by knowledge. This is a combustible mixture as students ask why things are as they are and are told sharply that this is the way things are, and are punished if they insist. One day the lid is going to blow. PROVES SOLVENCY UNDER THE ASTORE CARDS THE ROOT CAUSE IS THE UNIVERSITIES NOT THE PEOPLE AND THE SPEECH
2/10/17
JAN FEB Dignity NC
Tournament: Golden Desert | Round: 2 | Opponent: Layton | Judge: Ashan The standard is respecting human dignity. A. Because human dignity is rooted in one’s relationship to society, the state must protect people from policies that humiliate or degrade. Rao ’11 - Neomi Rao Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Center for the Study of the Administrative State; B.A., Yale University; J.D., University of Chicago Law School. ”Three concepts of dignity in constitutional law.” 86 Notre Dame Law Review 183 (2011). MO. Finally, constitutional courts often associate dignity with recognition and respect. (14) This dignity is rooted in a conception of the self as constituted by the broader community--a person's identity and worth depend on his relationship to society. Accordingly, respect for a person's dignity requires recognizing and validating individuals in their particularity. This recognition requires individuals to demonstrate respect and concern for each other. What matters here is not just having a space of non-interference for one's inherent individual dignity or of living life with a particular dignity, but rather the attitude possessed by others and the state. Such dignity requires interpersonal respect, the respect of one's fellow citizens, as can be seen in laws against defamation and hate speech. The idea is that individuals need protection from insults and hateful speech in order to preserve their self-image as well as their standing in the community. Furthermore, this dignity requires the state adopt policies that express the equal worth of all individuals and their life choices, such as requiring gay marriage, not just legally equivalent civil unions, because of the expressive and symbolic importance of marriage. (15) Recognition dignity focuses on the unique and subjective feelings of self-worth possessed by each individual and group. ¶ It is perhaps in this last category where the modern concept of dignity does the most work. Dignity as recognition reflects a new political demand, not for freedom or liberty or a minimum standard of living, but rather for respect, sometimes referred to as third-generation "solidarity rights." Such rights are protected by modern human rights documents and some national constitutions. The demand for recognition, for the dignity of recognition, requires protection against the symbolic, expressive harms of policies that fail to respect the worth of each individual and group. In the first two concepts, dignity often overlaps with familiar political rights and ideals, but the dignity of recognition as a constitutional right is a new value for a new time.
2/4/17
JAN FEB Hate Speech CP
Tournament: Harvard Westlake | Round: 1 | Opponent: Brentwood JD | Judge: Eli Smith Text: Public colleges and universities will implement new hate speech codes following Byrne 90’s recommendations: Byrne, J. Peter. Faculty Director; Georgetown Environmental Law and Policy Institute; Faculty Director, Georgetown State-Federal Climate Resource Center, John Hampton Baumgartner, Jr. Professor of Real Property Law B.A., Northwestern; M.A., J.D., University of Virginia "Racial Insults and Free Speech Within the University." Geo. LJ 79 (1990): 399. MC A central argument of this article has been that the university can be trusted to administer rules prohibiting racial insults because it has the proper moral basis and adequate expertise to do so. It is not surprising, therefore, that I believe that vagueness concerns about such university rules are largely misplaced. This is not to deny that a university should adopt safeguards to protect accused students from the concerns that the courts have highlighted. First, the rules should state explicitly that no one may be disciplined for the good faith statement of any proposition susceptible to reasoned response, no matter how offensive. The possibility that punishment is precluded by this limitation should be addressed at every stage of the disciplinary process. Second, some response between punishment and acquittal should be available when the university concludes that the speaker was subjectively unaware of the offensive character of his speech; these cases seem to present mainly educational concerns. Third, all controversial issues of interpretation of the rules should be entrusted to a panel of faculty and students who are representative of the institution. Rules furthering primarily academic concerns about the quality of speech and the development of students should be given meaning by those most directly concerned with the academic enterprise rather than by administrators who may register more precisely external political pressures on the university. Given these safeguards and a comprehensible definition of an unacceptable insult, such as the one ventured in the introduction to this article,179 a court which accepts the underlying proposition that a university has the constitutional authority to regulate racial insults should not be troubled independently by vagueness.
Competition
Mutual exclusivity: The aff prohibits the restriction of all constitutional speech, hate speech is deemed constitutional in the status quo so you cannot do the aff and the CP without severing out of a part of the AC. 2. Net benefits: the DA
1/14/17
JAN FEB Hate Speech DA
Tournament: Harvard Westlake RR | Round: 5 | Opponent: Rowland Hall KO | Judge: Rebecca Kuang, Byron Arthur Hate speech codes are becoming more prevalent on college campuses. Gould ‘01 Gould, Jon B. professor in the Department of Justice, Law and Society and at the Washington College of Law at American University, where he is also director of the Washington Institute for Public and International Affairs Research "The precedent that wasn't: College hate speech codes and the two faces of legal compliance." Law and Society Review (2001): 345-392. MC But such coverage aside, college hate speech codes are far from dead. As this article demonstrates, hate speech policies not only persist, but they have actually increased in number following a series of court decisions that ostensibly found many to be un- constitutional. This apparent contradiction-between judicial precedent on one hand and collegiate action on the other-may not be surprising to those who study judicial impact, or even to those who understand collegiate policymaking. But such con- certed and widespread noncompliance provides an excellent op- portunity to examine the process by which institutions respond to a change in the legal environment. Much of the literature to date has focused on the overall impact of Supreme Court case law or on the decisions of individuals or government bodies in responding to new cases. Less is known about the process of or- ganizational compliance or about the connection between indi- vidual compliance decisions and aggregate judicial impact.
Speech codes successfully challenge the words we use which are inexplicably linked to our thoughts. Therefore, they are able to target the deep rooted racism that usually goes unaddressed. Yun and Delgado ‘94 Yun, David H. Member of the Colorado bar. J.D., University of Colorado and Richard Delgado Charles Inglis Thomson Professor of Law, University of Colorado. J.D., U.C.- Berkeley. "The Neoconservative Case Against Hate-Speech Regulation—Lively, D'Souza, Gates, Carter, and the Toughlove Crowd." Vanderbilt Law Review 47 (1994). MC A second reason why even neoconservatives ought to pause before throwing their weight against hate-speech rules has to do with the nature of latter-day racism. Most neoconservatives, like many white people, think that acts of out-and-out discrimination are rare today. The racism that remains is subtle, "institutional," or "latter- day."4 It lies in the arena of unarticulated feelings, practices, and patterns of behavior (like promotions policy) on the part of institu- tions as well as individuals. A forthright focus on speech and lan- guage may be one of the few means of addressing and curing this kind of racism. Thought and language are inextricably connected. A speaker who is asked to reconsider his or her use of language may begin to reflect on the way he or she thinks about a subject. Words, external manifestations of thought, supply a window into the uncon- scious. Our choice of word, metaphor, or image gives signs of the attitudes we have about a person or subject. No readier or more effective tool than a focus on language exists to deal with subtle or latter-day racism. Since neoconservatives are among the prime pro- ponents of the notion that this form of racism is the only (or the main) one that remains, they should think carefully before taking a stand in opposition to measures that might make inroads into it. Of course, speech codes would not reach every form of demeaning speech or depiction. But a tool's unsuitability to redress every aspect of a prob- lem is surely no reason for refusing to employ it where it is effective. Especially turns the AC because it proves that the state isn’t the sole causation of hate speech it proves that it lies within a speaker’s own power play Hate speech restrictions on college campuses have been used to punish those that perpetrate hate speech. Wisconsin’s codes proves. Hodulik, Patricia UW JD. "Racist Speech on Campus." Wayne Law Review 37.3 (1991): 1433-1450. GK The most serious concerns about adopting a rule restricting discriminatory harassment or hate speech were those involving legal questions as to whether any sort of restriction on expressive behavior could be accepted in a university setting. The Wisconsin cases, however, provide little evidence to suggest that free expression has been deterred or suppressed as a result of enforcement of the university's antiharassment regulation. In the eighteen months in which it has been in force, a total of thirty-two complaints have been filed alleging violations of the Wisconsin rule.14 Of these, thirteen were dismissed because they were found not to violate the rule;35 two were dismissed following a hearing; and in ten cases, discipline was imposed. 36 The disciplinary sanctions imposed included one written apology, one warning letter, seven disciplinary probations and one suspension. 37 All cases resulting in probation or suspension also involved conduct which violated some other provision of the student conduct codean assault, a threat, or disorderly conduct, for example.38 In no case was discipline imposed in connection with a classroom discussion or expression of opinion.3 9 In most of the cases leading to discipline, the rule violation involved the use of a discriminatory epithet rather than "other expressive behavior." 4 As the controversy over speech rules has continued in the press and other media, they have been cited as evidence of a trend toward thought control, "politically correct" thinking, and other repressive evils. 41 There is, however, little in these cases to suggest that the Wisconsin regulation has had the effect of cutting off debate within the university community, or that a narrow restriction on discriminatory, harassing speech creates a threat to free expression. Rather, the practical experiences with the Wisconsin rule indicate that the risk of a "chilling effect" on speech from a narrowly applicable rule is minimal or nonexistent.
Impact 1: Hate Crimes Racist speech and actions escalate. Permission normalizes racist speech and makes racists more likely to lash out at minorities. Delgado and Yun ’94: Delgado, Richard, Charles Inglis Thomson Professor of Law, University of Colorado. J.D., U.C.- Berkeley and David H. Yun Member of the Colorado bar. J.D., University of Colorado. "Pressure Valves and Bloodied Chickens: An Analysis of Paternalistic Objections to Hate Speech Regulation." California Law Review 82 (1994): 871. MC The pressure valve argument holds that rules prohibiting hate speech are unwise because they increase the danger racism poses to minorities. FN50 Forcing racists to bottle up their dislike of minority group members means that they will be more likely to say or do something hurtful later. Free speech thus functions as a pressure valve, allowing tension to dissipate before it reaches a dangerous level. FN5l Pressure valve proponents argue that if minorities understood this, they would oppose antiracism rules. ¶ The argument is paternalistic; it says we are denying you what you say you want, and we are doing it for your own good. The rules, which you think will help you, will really make matters worse. If you knew this, you would join us in opposing them. ¶ Hate speech may make the speaker feel better, at least temporarily, but it does not make the victim safer. Quite the contrary. the psychological evidence suggests that permitting one person to say or do hateful things to another increases, rather than decreases, the chance that he or she will do so again in the future. FN52 Moreover, others may believe it is permissible to follow suit. FNS3 Human beings are not mechanical objects. Our behavior is more complex than the laws of physics that describe pressure valves, tanks, and the behavior of a gas or liquid in a tube. In particular, we use symbols to construct our social world, a world that contains categories and expectations for "black," "woman," "child," "criminal," 'wartime enemy," and so on. FN54 Once the roles we create for these categories are in place, they govern "879 the way we speak of and act toward members of those categories in the future. FN55 ¶ Even simple barnyard animals act on the basis of categories. Poultry farmers know that a chicken with a single speck of blood will be peeked to death by the others. FN56 With chickens, of course, the categories are neural and innate, functioning at a level more basic than language. But social science experiments demonstrate that the way we categorize others affects our treatment of them. An Iowa teacher's famous "blue eyeslbrown eyes" experiment showed that even a one-day assignment of stigma can change behavior and school performance. FN57 At Stanford University, Phillip Zimbardo assigned students to play the roles of prisoner and prison guard, but was forced to discontinue the experiment when some of the participants began taking their roles too seriously. FN58 And Diane Sculley's interviews with male sexual offenders showed that many did not see themselves as offenders at all. In fact, research suggests that exposure to sexually violent pornography increases men's antagonism toward women and intensifies rapists' belief that their victims really welcomed their attentions. FNS9 At Yale University. Stanley Milgram showed that many members of a university *880 community could be made to violate their conscience if an authority figure invited them to do so and assured them this was the evidence. then, suggests that allowing persons to stigmatize or revile others makes them more aggressive, not less so. Once the speaker forms the category of deserved-victim, his or her behavior may well continue and escalate to bullying and physical violence. Further, the studies appear to demonstrate that stereotypical treatment tends to generalize -- what we do teaches others that they may do likewise. Pressure valves may be safer after letting off steam; human beings are not.
Impact 2: Psychological Violence Racist speech causes immense psychological harm which spills-over into the victims’ personal lives, forces some to disassociate from their identity, and communities who continue to excuse these events as pranks ostracizes them even more. Matsuda ‘89 Matsuda, Mari J. "Public response to racist speech: Considering the victim's story." Michigan Law Review 87.8 (1989): 2320-2381.ZW Racist hate messages are rapidly increasing and are widely distributed in this country using a variety of low and high technologies.82 The negative effects of hate messages are real and immediate for the victims.83 Victims of vicious hate propaganda have experienced physiological symptoms and emotional distress ranging from fear in the gut, rapid pulse rate and difficulty in breathing, nightmares, post-traumatic stress disorder, hypertension, psychosis, and suicide.84 Professor Patricia Williams has called the blow of racist messages "spirit murder" in recognition of the psychic destruction victims experience.85 ¶ Victims are restricted in their personal freedom. In order to avoid receiving hate messages, victims have had to quit jobs, forgo education, leave their homes, avoid certain public places, curtail their own exercise of speech rights, and otherwise modify their behavior and demeanor.86 The recipient of hate messages struggles with inner turmoil. One subconscious response is to reject one's own identity as a victim-group member.87 As writers portraying the African-American experience have noted, the price of disassociating from one's own race is often sanity itself.88 ¶ As much as one may try to resist a piece of hate propaganda, the effect on one's self-esteem and sense of personal security is devastating.89 To be hated, despised, and alone is the ultimate fear of all human beings. However irrational racist speech may be, it hits right at the emotional place where we feel the most pain. The aloneness comes not only from the hate message itself, but also from the government response of tolerance. When hundreds of police officers are called out to protect racist marchers,90 when the courts refuse redress for racial insult, and when racist attacks are officially dismissed as pranks, the victim becomes a stateless person. Target-group members can either identify with a community that promotes racist speech, or they can admit that the community does not include them. Turns and outweighs case. The aff assumes that freedom means the absence of government constraints, but human subjectivity cannot be conceptualized outside of our basic connections to others and the social conditions that enable autonomy. Human identity is dependent on recognition by the other. Honneth ’92 - Axel Honneth University of Frankfurt, “Integrity and Disrespect: Principles of a Conception of Morality Based on the Theory of Recognition,” Political Theory, Vol. 20, No. 2 (May, 1992), pp. 187-201. Sage Publications, inc. http://www.jstor.org/stable/192001 AT According to this theory, human individuation is a process in which the individual can unfold a practical identity to the extent that he is capable of reassuring himself of recognition by a growing circle of partners to communication.2 Subjects capable of language and action are constituted as individuals solely by learning, from the perspective of others who offer approval, to relate to themselves as beings who possess certain positive qualities and abilities. Thus as their consciousness of their individuality grows, they come to depend to an ever increasing extent on the conditions of recognition they are afforded by the life-world of their social environment. That particular human vulner ability signified by the concept of "disrespect" arises from this interlocking of individuation and recognition on which both Hegel and Mead based their inquiries.Since, in his normative image of self-something Mead would call his "Me"-every individual is dependent on the possibility of constant reassurance by the Other; the experience of disrespect poses the risk of an injury that can cause the identity of the entire person to collapse.
1/13/17
JAN FEB Hate Speech Dignity DA
Tournament: Harvard Westlake Round Robin | Round: 1 | Opponent: Harbard Westlake IP | Judge: Castillo, Paramo Link Hate speech codes are becoming more prevalent on college campuses. Gould ‘01 Gould, Jon B. professor in the Department of Justice, Law and Society and at the Washington College of Law at American University, where he is also director of the Washington Institute for Public and International Affairs Research "The precedent that wasn't: College hate speech codes and the two faces of legal compliance." Law and Society Review (2001): 345-392. MC But such coverage aside, college hate speech codes are far from dead. As this article demonstrates, hate speech policies not only persist, but they have actually increased in number following a series of court decisions that ostensibly found many to be un- constitutional. This apparent contradiction-between judicial precedent on one hand and collegiate action on the other-may not be surprising to those who study judicial impact, or even to those who understand collegiate policymaking. But such con- certed and widespread noncompliance provides an excellent op- portunity to examine the process by which institutions respond to a change in the legal environment. Much of the literature to date has focused on the overall impact of Supreme Court case law or on the decisions of individuals or government bodies in responding to new cases. Less is known about the process of or- ganizational compliance or about the connection between indi- vidual compliance decisions and aggregate judicial impact. Impacts A. Racism Hate speech reinforces stereotypes and harms victims physically and emotionally. Weberman ‘10 Weberman, Melissa Associate at Arnold and Porter, Associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom LLP and Affiliates Associates, Law clerk in court of appeals, Emory University School of Law, University of Virginia. "University Hate Speech Policies and the Captive Audience Doctrine." Ohio NUL Rev. 36 (2010): 553. Hate speech harms groups that are the target of the speech. Under the tradition of group libel and the Supreme Court's decision in Beauharnais v. Illinois, speech that is likely to direct contempt or scorn on identifiable groups should be regulated to prevent injury to the status of the members of those groups. A more modern understanding of hate speech derives from the understanding of racism as "the structural subordination of a group based on an idea of racial inferiority."38 Such expression is particularly unacceptable because it locks in the oppression of already marginalized groups; it is "a mechanism of subordination, reinforcing a historical vertical relationship."3 9 Hate speech reinforces stereotypes in the public mind that subsequently guide action.40 Beyond causing harm to the target groups, hate speech causes harms to the individual.41 Racist speech, as one scholar asserted, is a form of "spiritmurder," 42 with injuries to the individual including feelings of fear, humiliation, isolation, vulnerability, resentment, and self-hatred.43 Racist expression is a "dignitary affront,"" particularly powerful because "racial insults . . . conjure up the entire history of racial discrimination in this country."4 5 Bigoted insults may almost amount to physical violence to the target. 6 Specific physiological and emotional harms to the victims include "fear in the gut, rapid pulse rate and difficulty in breathing, nightmares, posttraumatic stress disorder, hypertension, psychosis, and suicide."A7 Exposure to hate speech interferes with the targets' access to and enjoyment of educational opportunities in the university context.48 In addition, hate speech alienates the student from the school.49 When hate speech goes unpunished, the victim of the speech and members of the targeted group may feel disenfranchised from their university.50 Lack of discipline from university officials may be perceived as approval of the racist messages. The cumulative effect of the individual harms and the alienation of the student may result in a hostile environment to the minority groups and a denial of an equal opportunity for education. Thus, hate speech not only leads to stress, but it leads to a detrimental effect on academic opportunity and performance.s3 Implicit in this Article is a belief that university hate speech policies should thus be drafted to ensure equal access to education and prevent interference with the educational process.
Hate speech is harmful because it perpetuates stereotypes of groups from which people cannot withdraw. Hartman ‘93 Hartman, Rhonda G University of Pittsburgh Professor of Law, University of Cambridge, University of Pittsburgh. "Hateful Expression and First Amendment Values: Toward a Theory of Constitutional Constraint on Hate Speech at Colleges and Universities after RAV v. St. Paul." JC and UL 19 (1992): 343. CL
Indeed, several studies confirm the widespread presence of minority, religious, and gender stereotypes and the concomitant stigmatizing effect on individual members of group stereotypes.' 69 These studies emphasize the important role of defamatory stereotypes in maintaining prejudicial attitudes that lead to racial, cultural and social discrimination. 170 Defamation directed at a group may defame no less than if directed at an individual. 1 71 It is precisely because defamation can sweep with a broad brush that it is more difficult to avoid; there are some groups from which an individual cannot disengage. 172 As the Court stated in Beauharnais: A man's job and his educational opportunities and the dignity accorded him may depend as much on the reputation of the racial and religious group to which he willy-nilly belongs, as on his own merits. This being so, we are precluded from saying that speech concededly punishable when immediately directed at individuals cannot be outlawed if directed at groups with whose position and esteem in society the affiliated individual may be inextricably involved.173 Certainly, students cannot withdraw from their race or sex as they can from voluntary groups like political parties or campus social organizations. Consequently, it is far more difficult to avoid the injurious effect of hate speech directed toward minorities or women. Even disputed empirical evidence of harm should not undercut a college's or university's authority to choose which set of conclusions to adopt, so long as some arguable correlation links the expression and harm. The causal link between an injury and a specific publication that helped sustain or create a climate of prejudice in which injuries arise may not be obvious. Indeed, many of the harms that result from defamation may not manifest themselves until sometime after the publication. 174 Although causation may be impossible to chart empirically, reasonable persons perceive the correlation. Moreover, society, as well as a college or university, has an interest in eradicating discrimination and preventing harm to the education of minorities and women. In Healy v. James' 75 the Court expressly acknowledged the university's interest "in an environment free from disruptive interference with the education process.' 176 No one can deny that a disruption of an equal learning environment occurs when, for example, black students hear that they "don't belong in classrooms, they belong hanging from trees," when an Asian student is told, "die, Chink. Hostile Americans want your yellow hide," or when female students are described as "fat housewives."'177 Such demeaning expressions injure self-image, undermine self-confidence, and alienate the victimized student from the college or university . 17 Hate speech hinders learning and participation in and out of class. It also may frustrate a college's or university's efforts to attract minority and female faculty members and students.
Racist speech, set aside from its impacts, creates deontic harm in that it causes psychological injury and we cannot accept it and continue to follow our principle of equality actively. Post ‘90 Post, Robert C. Professor of Law, School of Law (Boalt Hall), University of California at Berkeley. B.A., Harvard College, 1969; J.D., Yale University, 1977; Ph.D., Harvard University "Racist speech, democracy, and the first amendment." Wm. and Mary L. Rev. 32 (1990): 267. MC A recurring theme in the contemporary literature is that racist expression ought to be regulated because it creates what has been termed "deontic" harm.18 The basic point is that there is an "elemental wrongness"' 9 to racist expression, regardless of the presence or absence of particular empirical consequences such as "grievous, severe psychological injury. ' 20 It is argued that toleration for racist expression is inconsistent with respect for "the principle of equality" 2' that is at the heart of the fourteenth amendment. 22 ¶ The thrust of this argument is that a society committed to ideals of social and political equality cannot remain passive: it must issue unequivocal expressions of solidarity with vulnerable minority groups and make positive statements affirming its commitment to those ideals. Laws prohibiting racist speech must be regarded as important components of such expressions and statements.3 ¶ If the basic harm of racist expression lies in its intrinsic and symbolic incompatibility with egalitarian ideals, then the distinct class of communications subject to legal regulation will be defined by reference to those ideals. If the fourteenth amendment is thought to enshrine an antidiscrimination principle, then "any speech (in its widest sense) which supports racial prejudice or discrimination" 24 ought to be subject to regulation. If the relevant ideals are thought to embody substantive racial equality, then the relevant class of communications should be defined as speech containing a "message . ..of racial inferiority."25
Racist speech in itself is a form of spirit murder. Post ‘90 Post, Robert C. Professor of Law, School of Law (Boalt Hall), University of California at Berkeley. B.A., Harvard College, 1969; J.D., Yale University, 1977; Ph.D., Harvard University "Racist speech, democracy, and the first amendment." Wm. and Mary L. Rev. 32 (1990): 267. MC A third prominent theme in the contemporary literature is that racist expression harms individuals. This theme essentially analogizes racist expression to forms of communication that are regulated by the dignitary torts of defamation, invasion of privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The law compensates persons for dignitary and emotional injuries caused by such communication, and it is argued that racist expression ought to be subject to regulation because it causes similar injuries. These injuries include "feelings of humiliation, isolation, and self-hatred,"'3 2 as well as "dignitary affront."33 The injuries are particularly powerful because "racial insults . . . conjure up the entire history of racial discrimination in this country." In Patricia Williams' striking phrase, racist expression is a form of "spirit-murder." 35 B. Dignity Hate speech harms human dignity. Fish describes Waldron’s argument. Fish ’12 - Stanley Fish, “The Harm in Free Speech, “ New York Times. June 4, 2012. Accessed January 9, 2017. (Stanley Waldron is a Prof. of Law, NYU.) AT Jeremy Waldron’s new book, “The Harm in Hate Speech,” might well be called “The Harm in Free Speech”; for Waldron, a professor of law and political theory at New York University and Oxford, argues that the expansive First Amendment we now possess allows the flourishing of harms a well-ordered society ought not permit. ¶ Waldron is especially concerned with the harm done by hate speech to the dignity of those who are its object. He is careful to distinguish “dignity harms” from the hurt feelings one might experience in the face of speech that offends. Offense can be given by almost any speech act — in particular circumstances one might offend by saying “hello” — and Waldron agrees with those who say that regulating offensive speech is a bad and unworkable idea. ¶ But harms to dignity, he contends, involve more than the giving of offense. They involve undermining a public good, which he identifies as the “implicit assurance” extended to every citizen that while his beliefs and allegiance may be criticized and rejected by some of his fellow citizens, he will nevertheless be viewed, even by his polemical opponents, as someone who has an equal right to membership in the society. It is the assurance — not given explicitly at the beginning of each day but built into the community’s mode of self-presentation — that he belongs, that he is the undoubted bearer of a dignity he doesn’t have to struggle for. ¶ Waldron’s thesis is that hate speech assaults that dignity by taking away that assurance. The very point of hate speech, he says, “is to negate the implicit assurance that a society offers to the members of vulnerable groups — that they are accepted … as a matter of course, along with everyone else.” Purveyors of hate “aim to undermine this assurance, call it in question, and taint it with visible expressions of hatred, exclusion and contempt.” ¶ “Visible” is the key word. It is the visibility of leaflets, signs and pamphlets asserting that the group you belong to is un-American, unworthy of respect, and should go back where it came from that does the damage, even if you, as an individual, are not a specific target. “In its published, posted or pasted-up form, hate speech can become a world-defining activity, and those who promulgate it know very well — this is part of their intention — that the visible world they create is a much harder world for the targets of their hatred to live in.” (Appearances count.) ¶ Even though hate speech is characterized by First Amendment absolutists as a private act of expression that should be protected from government controls and sanctions, Waldron insists that “hate speech and defamation are actions performed in public, with a public orientation, aimed at undermining public goods.” That undermining is not accomplished by any particular instance of hate speech. ¶ But just as innumerable individual automobile emissions can pollute the air, so can innumerable expressions of supposedly private hate combine to “produce a large-scale toxic effect” that operates as a “slow-acting poison.” And since what is being poisoned is the well of public life, “it is natural,” says Waldron, “to think that the law should be involved — both in its ability to underpin the provision of public goods and in its ability to express and communicate common commitments.” After all, he reminds us, “Societies do not become well ordered by magic.” ¶ Waldron observes that legal attention to large-scale structural, as opposed to individual, harms is a feature of most other Western societies, which, unlike the United States, have hate speech regulations on their books. He finds it “odd and disturbing that older and cruder models remain dominant in the First Amendment arena.” But as he well knows, it is not so odd within the perspective of current First Amendment rhetoric, which is militantly libertarian, protective of the individual’s right of self-assertion no matter what is being asserted, and indifferent (relatively) to the effects speech freely uttered might have on the fabric of society. ¶ It was not always thus. At one time, both the content and effects of speech were taken into account when the issue of regulation was raised. Is this the kind of speech we want our children to see and hear? Are the effects of certain forms of speech so distressing and potentially dangerous that we should take steps to curtail them? Is this form of speech a contribution to the search for truth? Does it have a redeeming social value? Since New York Times v. Sullivan (1964) these questions, which assess speech in terms of the impact it has in the world, have been replaced by a simpler question — is it speech? — that reflects a commitment to speech as an almost sacrosanct activity. If the answer to that question is “yes,” the presumption is that it should be protected, even though the harms it produces have been documented. ¶ Waldron wants to bring back the focus on those harms and restore the reputation of Beauharnais v. Illinois (1952), in which the Supreme Court upheld a group libel law. The case turned on the conviction of a man who had distributed leaflets warning Chicagoans to be alert to the dangers of mongrelization and rape that will surely materialize, he claimed, if white people do not unite against the Negro. Speaking for the majority, Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote that “a man’s job and his educational opportunities and the dignity accorded him may depend as much on the reputation of the racial group to which he willy-nilly belongs as on his own merit.” ¶ With the phrase “on his own merit,” Frankfurter gestures toward the view of dignity he is rejecting, the view in which dignity wells up from the inside of a man (or woman) and depends on an inner strength that asserts itself no matter how adverse or hostile external circumstances may be, including the circumstance in which the individual is confronted with signs, posters and pamphlets demeaning his race or ethnic origin or religion or sexual preference. In this picture, the responsibility for maintaining dignity rests with the individual and not with any state duty to devise rules and regulations to protect it. ¶ Some who take this position argue that if the individual feels victimized by expressions of hate directed at the group to which he “willy-nilly” belongs, that is his or her own choice. Waldron’s example is C. Edwin Baker (“Harm, Liberty and Free Speech,” Southern California Law Review, 1997), who writes: “A speaker’s racial epithet … harms the hearer only through her understanding of the message … and harm occurs only to the extent that the hearer (mentally) responds one way rather than another, for example, as a victim rather than as a critic of the speaker.” ¶ In this classic instance of blaming the victim, the fault lies with a failure of resolve; self-respect was just not strong enough to rise to the occasion in a positive way. Waldron calls this position “silly” (it is the majority’s position in Plessy v. Ferguson) and points out that it mandates and celebrates a harm by requiring victims of hate speech to grin and bear it: “It should not be necessary,” he declares, “for hate speech victims to laboriously conjure up the courage to go out and try to flourish in what is now presented to them as a … hostile environment.” The damage, Waldron explains, is already done by the speech “in requiring its targets to resort to the sort of mental mediation that Baker recommends.” To the extent that those targets are put on the defensive, “racist speech has already succeeded in one of its destructive aims.” ¶ Notice that here (and elsewhere in the book), Waldron refuses to distinguish sharply between harm and representation. In the tradition he opposes, harm or hurt is physically defined; one can be discomforted and offended by speech; but something more than speech or image is required for there to be genuine (and legally relevant) damage. After all, “sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” ¶ No, says Waldron (and here he follows Catharine MacKinnon’s argument about pornography), the speech is the damage: “The harms emphasized in this book are often harms constituted by speech rather than merely caused by speech.” If the claim were that the harm is caused by speech, there would be room to challenge the finding by pointing to the many intervening variables that break or complicate the chain of causality. But there is no chain to break if harm is done the moment hate speech is produced. “The harm is the dispelling of assurance, and the dispelling of assurance is the speech act.” ¶ Waldron knows that the underlying strategy of those he writes against is to elevate the status of expression to an ultimate good and at the same time either deny the harm – the statistics are inconclusive; the claims cannot be proved — or minimize it in relation to the threat regulation poses to free expression. If “free speech trumps any consideration of social harm … almost any showing of harm resulting from hate speech … will be insufficient to justify restrictions on free speech of the kind that we are talking about.” ¶ In short, the game is over before it begins if your opponent can be counted on to say that either there is no demonstrated harm or, no matter how much harm there may be, it will not be enough to justify restrictions on speech. If that’s what you’re up against, there is not much you can do except point out the categorical intransigence of the position and offer an (unflattering) explanation of it. ¶ Waldron’s explanation is that the position is formulated and presented as an admirable act of unflinching moral heroism by white liberal law professors who say loudly and often that we must tolerate speech we find hateful. Easy to say from the protected perch of a faculty study, where the harm being talked about is theoretical and not experienced. ¶ But what about the harm done “to the groups who are denounced or bestialized in pamphlets, billboards, talk radio and blogs? … Can their lives be led, can their children be brought up, can their hopes be maintained and their worst fears dispelled in a social environment polluted by those materials”? ¶ Waldron answers “no,” and he challenges society and its legal system to do something about it. But the likelihood that something will be done is slim if Waldron is right about the state of First Amendment discourse: “In the American debate, the philosophical arguments about hate speech are knee-jerk, impulsive and thoughtless.” Not the arguments of this book, however; they hit the mark every time.
1/12/17
JAN FEB Hate Speech PIC
Tournament: NDCA | Round: 3 | Opponent: HW VC | Judge: Pranav Reddy CP Text: Public colleges and universities ought not restrict any constitutionally protected journalist speech except in the instance of hate speech and will construct new hate speech codes according to Byrne 90’s recommendations Byrne, J. Peter. Faculty Director; Georgetown Environmental Law and Policy Institute; Faculty Director, Georgetown State-Federal Climate Resource Center, John Hampton Baumgartner, Jr. Professor of Real Property Law B.A., Northwestern; M.A., J.D., University of Virginia "Racial Insults and Free Speech Within the University." Geo. LJ 79 (1990): 399. MC A central argument of this article has been that the university can be trusted to administer rules prohibiting racial insults because it has the proper moral basis and adequate expertise to do so. It is not surprising, therefore, that I believe that vagueness concerns about such university rules are largely misplaced. This is not to deny that a university should adopt safeguards to protect accused students from the concerns that the courts have highlighted. First, the rules should state explicitly that no one may be disciplined for the good faith statement of any proposition susceptible to reasoned response, no matter how offensive. The possibility that punishment is precluded by this limitation should be addressed at every stage of the disciplinary process. Second, some response between punishment and acquittal should be available when the university concludes that the speaker was subjectively unaware of the offensive character of his speech; these cases seem to present mainly educational concerns. Third, all controversial issues of interpretation of the rules should be entrusted to a panel of faculty and students who are representative of the institution. Rules furthering primarily academic concerns about the quality of speech and the development of students should be given meaning by those most directly concerned with the academic enterprise rather than by administrators who may register more precisely external political pressures on the university. Given these safeguards and a comprehensible definition of an unacceptable insult, such as the one ventured in the introduction to this article,179 a court which accepts the underlying proposition that a university has the constitutional authority to regulate racial insults should not be troubled independently by vagueness. Hate speech is precalent in newspapers so there is always a link. Also he made the debate small already so any impact is important. Competition A. Mutual exclusivity: The aff must reject all restrictions on constitutionally protected speech. If the aff tries to perm the CP, it would be severance. The First Amendment protects hate speech. Eko ‘06 - Lyombe Eko Associate Professor, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Iowa, “New Medium, Old Free Speech Regimes: The Historical and Ideological Foundations of French and American Regulation of Bias-Motivated Speech and Symbolic Expression on the Internet,” 28 Loy. L.A. Int’l and Comp. L. Rev. 69 (2006). AT Under American jurisprudence, speech and communicative acts-including symbolic speech and expressive conduct-cannot be regulated on the basis of the content of the message.264 The American First Amendment regime is based on what Don Pember and Clay Calvert call "a preferred position balancing theory" whereby courts give freedom of expression a preferred position and "presume that the limitation on freedom of speech or freedom of the press is illegal., 265 This makes the United States unique in matters of freedom of speech and expression.¶ In contrast to French law, which bans the display of swastikas and other insignia of groups found guilty of crimes against S266 humanity, the First Amendment protects the public or private display of flags, emblems, insignia, and other indicia of unpopular, discredited, or even genocidal groups such as the Nazi party. Indeed, over the years the U.S. Supreme Court has invalidated several attempts to ban emblems and other indicia of political affiliation.267 As early as 1931, the Supreme Court struck down a California statute which criminalized the display of flags, badges, banners, or other devices that symbolized opposition to organized government.268¶ Furthermore, on appeal after remand from the U.S. Supreme Court, the Supreme Court of Illinois upheld displaying the swastika (the symbol of Hitler's National Socialist (Nazi) Party and its American progeny, the National Socialist (Nazi) Party of America) as protected symbolic political speech intended to convey to the public the political beliefs of those who displayed it in a controversial march.269 This decision followed after the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Nazi Party of America had a right to due process as well as a right to be free from government-imposed prior restraints.2 As Rodney Smolla aptly put it, "the Supreme Court did not say that the Nazis had a constitutional right to march in Skokie, but only that they had a constitutional right to be free of "prior restraints" against such a march., 271¶ These decisions are rooted in the fundamental principle under the First Amendment that the U.S. is a marketplace of ideas in which more speech and less regulation is favored.272 This free speech jurisprudence permits all speech except obscenity, 273 fighting words,274 and deceptive and misleading advertisements.275 In thes eUat.Str.la dt ho ef conc2e7p1t of hate crime has recently become a more settled area of law. Many American courts have noted that the motive for criminal behavior is often relevant in the sentencing of criminal conduct.2 77 Fighting words are not considered to be speech, and thus not within First Amendment protection.278 In contrast, restrictions on bias-motivated utterances must still satisfy the requirements of First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech.279 Bias-motivated utterances can be criminalized, however, if they are associated with acts of violence or hate crimes.280¶ A number of American court cases show that even vile, repugnant and hateful speech, absent violence or threatening behavior, is protected. In Near v. Minnesota, the U.S. Supreme Court held that pre-publication censorship of repugnant anti- Semitic material defies First Amendment guarantees.281 In Rockwell v. Morris, the New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division, held that refusing to issue a permit to a "self-styled American Nazi and... a rabid racist" constituted a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.282 The court explained, "The unpopularity of his views, their shocking quality, their obnoxiousness, and even their alarming impact was not enough" to warrant prior restraint. 281¶ In Brandenburg v. Ohio, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and of the press do not permit states to forbid or ban mere advocacy of the use of force or violation of the law unless such advocacy is designed to incite or produce imminent lawless action'8 In his concurring opinion, Justice Douglas suggested that racial animus and bias could be considered a type of belief system that the government had no business regulating.285¶ In R.A.V. v. The City of St. Paul, the U.S. Supreme Court stated that the First Amendment bars the government from silencing speech "because of disapproval of the ideas expressed. Content-based regulations are presumptively invalid. '' 286 In Capitol Square Review and Advisory Board v. Pinette, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the KKK had a constitutional right to place a cross in a public square.287 The Court found that even speakers or writers S 288 motivated by hatred, and ill-will are protected. Thus, when it comes to bias-motivated or hate speech and expressive conduct, the posture of the U.S. Supreme Court is that: "under the First Amendment, there is no such thing as a false idea. However pernicious an opinion may seem, we depend for its correction not on the conscience of judges and juries but on the competition of other ideas." 9 Thus, the U.S. Supreme Court's posture contrasts sharply with France's content-based regulatory regime.
Solvency
A. Speech codes successfully challenge the words we use which are inexplicably linked to our thoughts. Therefore, they are able to target the deep rooted racism that usually goes unaddressed. Yun and Delgado ‘94 Yun, David H. Member of the Colorado bar. J.D., University of Colorado and Richard Delgado Charles Inglis Thomson Professor of Law, University of Colorado. J.D., U.C.- Berkeley. "The Neoconservative Case Against Hate-Speech Regulation—Lively, D'Souza, Gates, Carter, and the Toughlove Crowd." Vanderbilt Law Review 47 (1994). MC A second reason why even neoconservatives ought to pause before throwing their weight against hate-speech rules has to do with the nature of latter-day racism. Most neoconservatives, like many white people, think that acts of out-and-out discrimination are rare today. The racism that remains is subtle, "institutional," or "latter- day."4 It lies in the arena of unarticulated feelings, practices, and patterns of behavior (like promotions policy) on the part of institutions as well as individuals. A forthright focus on speech and language may be one of the few means of addressing and curing this kind of racism. Thought and language are inextricably connected. A speaker who is asked to reconsider his or her use of language may begin to reflect on the way he or she thinks about a subject. Words, external manifestations of thought, supply a window into the unconscious. Our choice of word, metaphor, or image gives signs of the attitudes we have about a person or subject. No readier or more effective tool than a focus on language exists to deal with subtle or latter-day racism. Since neoconservatives are among the prime pro- ponents of the notion that this form of racism is the only (or the main) one that remains, they should think carefully before taking a stand in opposition to measures that might make inroads into it. Of course, speech codes would not reach every form of demeaning speech or depiction. But a tool's unsuitability to redress every aspect of a prob- lem is surely no reason for refusing to employ it where it is effective. Impact: Psychological Violence Racist speech causes immense psychological harm which spills-over into the victims’ personal lives, forces some to disassociate from their identity, and communities who continue to excuse these events as pranks ostracizes them even more. Matsuda ‘89 Matsuda, Mari J. "Public response to racist speech: Considering the victim's story." Michigan Law Review 87.8 (1989): 2320-2381.ZW Racist hate messages are rapidly increasing and are widely distributed in this country using a variety of low and high technologies.82 The negative effects of hate messages are real and immediate for the victims.83 Victims of vicious hate propaganda have experienced physiological symptoms and emotional distress ranging from fear in the gut, rapid pulse rate and difficulty in breathing, nightmares, post-traumatic stress disorder, hypertension, psychosis, and suicide.84 Professor Patricia Williams has called the blow of racist messages "spirit murder" in recognition of the psychic destruction victims experience.85 ¶ Victims are restricted in their personal freedom. In order to avoid receiving hate messages, victims have had to quit jobs, forgo education, leave their homes, avoid certain public places, curtail their own exercise of speech rights, and otherwise modify their behavior and demeanor.86 The recipient of hate messages struggles with inner turmoil. One subconscious response is to reject one's own identity as a victim-group member.87 As writers portraying the African-American experience have noted, the price of disassociating from one's own race is often sanity itself.88 ¶ As much as one may try to resist a piece of hate propaganda, the effect on one's self-esteem and sense of personal security is devastating.89 To be hated, despised, and alone is the ultimate fear of all human beings. However irrational racist speech may be, it hits right at the emotional place where we feel the most pain. The aloneness comes not only from the hate message itself, but also from the government response of tolerance. When hundreds of police officers are called out to protect racist marchers,90 when the courts refuse redress for racial insult, and when racist attacks are officially dismissed as pranks, the victim becomes a stateless person. Target-group members can either identify with a community that promotes racist speech, or they can admit that the community does not include them.
4/8/17
JAN FEB Pessimism K
Tournament: NDCA | Round: 6 | Opponent: Sunset AB | Judge: Alston Link The aff is a postmodern rejection of censorship. The problem is that postmodernism does not have a meaningful program that can adequately address the harms of the state and has no way of solving for the atrocities of the state. These politics of aesthetics in the AC is all just pomo stuff. Interrogate the AC. What does the aff do for the victim of violence. The K is a K of his method, we should not have the depoliticized form of agency, we should be radically political not radical apolitical.
By adopting the pessimistic view that the government will always be an overzealous censoring body that harms minorities, the Aff assumes that running away from the government and trying to restrict it as much as possible is the only solution to combating oppression when really it provides the vehicle necessary to combat institutional problems. Nozick ’89 Robert Nozick Prof., Harvard University, The Examined Life: Philosophical Mediations, New York: Simon and Schuster (1989), p. 286-287 WE WANT our individual lives to express our conceptions of reality (and of responsiveness to that); so too we want the institutions demarcating our lives together to express and saliently symbolize our desired mutual relations. Democratic institutions and the liberties coordinate with them are not simply effective means toward controlling the powers of government and directing these toward matters of joint concern; they themselves express and symbolize, in a pointed and official way, our equal human dignity, our autonomy and powers of self-direction. We vote, although we are cognizant of the minuscule probability that our own actual vote will have some decisive effect on the outcome, in part as an expression and symbolic affirmation of our status as autonomous and self-governing beings whose considered judgments or even opinions have to be given weight equal to those of others. That symbolism is important to us. Within the operation of democratic institutions, too, we want expressions of the values that concern us and bind us together. The libertarian position I once propounded now seems to me seriously inadequate, in part because it did not fully knit the humane considerations and joint cooperative activities it left room for more closely into its fabric. It neglected the symbolic importance of an official political concern with issues or problems, as a way of marking their importance or urgency, and hence of expressing, intensifying, channeling, encouraging, and validating our private actions and concerns toward them. Joint goals that the government ignores completely – it is different with private or family goals – tend to appear unworthy of our joint attention and hence to receive little. There are some things we choose to do together through government in solemn marking of our human solidarity, served by the fact that we do them together in this official fashion and often also by the content of the action itself. Link turns resantemant: it takes away the notion that minorities are helpless or that they have no self efficacy because it affirms the power of minorities and denies the idea that the state will always coopt. The K allows for the minority groups to take control of the state and have power. Faith in your collective efficacy is what the K does
Their strategy of negativity assumes the foundational premises of racism as its starting point for politics and teaches white people and the government to act as though they can’t help to stop this oppression and forces black Americans to internalize oppression. hooks ’95. hooks, bell (Distinguished Professor in Residence Berea College). “Killing Rage: Ending Racism”. New York: H. Holt and Co, 1995. http://books.google.com/booksid=3JlNFYKLheUCandq=unitary+representations#v=snippetandq=unitary20representationsandf=false, p.269 DM More than ever before in our history, black Americans are succumbing to and internalizing the racist assumption that there can be no meaningful bonds of intimacy between blacks and whites. It is fascinating to explore why it is that black people trapped in the worst situation of racial oppres sion—enslavement—had the foresight to see that it would be disempowering for them to lose sight of the capacity of white people to transform themselves and divest of white supremacy, even as many black folks today who in no way suffer such extreme racist oppression and exploitation are convinced that white people will not repudiate racism. Con temporary black folks, like their white counterparts, have passively accepted the internalization of white supremacist assumptions. Organized white supremacists have always taught that there can never be trust and intimacy between the superior white race and the inferior black race. When black people internalize these sentiments, no resistance to white supremacy is taking place; rather we become complicit in spreading racist notions. It does not matter that so many black people feel white people will never repudiate racism because of being daily assaulted by white denial and refusal of accountability. We must not allow the actions of white folks who blindly endorse racism to determine the direction of our resistance. Like our white allies in struggle we must consistently keep the faith, by always sharing the truth that 270white people can be anti-racist, that racism is not some immutable character flaw. ¶ Of course many white people are comfortable with a rhetoric of race that suggests racism cannot be changed, that all white people are “inherently racist” simply because they are born and raised in this society. Such misguided thinking socializes white people both to remain ignorant of the way in which white supremacist attitudes are learned and to assume a posture of learned helplessness as though they have no agency—no capacity to resist this thinking. Luckily we have many autobiographies by white folks committed to anti-racist struggle that provide documentary testimony that many of these individuals repudiated racism when they were children. Far from passively accepting It as inherent, they instinctively felt it was wrong. Many of them witnessed bizarre acts of white racist aggression towards black folks in everyday life and responded to the injustice of the situation. Sadly, in our times so many white folks are easily convinced by racist whites and black folks who have internalized racism that they can never be really free of racism. ¶ These feelings also then obscure the reality of white privilege. As long as white folks are taught to accept racism as “natural” then they do not have to see themselves as consciously creating a racist society by their actions, by their political choices. This means as well that they do not have to face the way in which acting in a racist manner ensures the maintenance of white privilege. Indeed, denying their agency allows them to believe white privilege does not exist even as they daily exercise it. If the young white woman who had been raped had chosen to hold all black males account able for what happened, she would have been exercising white privilege and reinforcing the structure of racist thought which teaches that all black people are alike. Unfortunately,¶ 271so many white people are eager to believe racism cannot be changed because internalizing that assumption downplays the issue of accountability. No responsibility need be taken for not changing something ¡fit is perceived as immutable. To accept racism as a system of domination that can be changed would demand that everyone who sees him- or herself as embracing a vision of radai social equality would be required to assert anti-racist habits of being. We know from histories both present and past that white people (and everyone else) who commit themselves to living in anti-racist ways need to make sacrifices, to courageously endure the uncomfortable to challenge and change.¶ Whites, people of color, and black folks are reluctant to commit themselves fully and deeply to an anti-racist struggle that is ongoing because there is such a pervasive feeling of hopelessness—a conviction that nothing will ever change. How any of us can continue to hold those feelings when we study the history of racism in this society and see how much has changed makes no logical sense. Clearly we have not gone far enough. In the late sixties, Martin Luther King posed the question “Where do we go from here.” To live in anti-racist society we must collectively renew our commitment to a democratic vision of racial justice and equality. Pursuing that vision we create a culture where beloved community flourishes and is sustained. Those of us who know the joy of being with folks from all walks of life, all races, who are fundamentalls’ anti-racist in their habits of being need to give public testimony. We need to share not only what we have experienced but the conditions of change that make such an experience possible. The interracial circle of love that I know can happen because each individual present in it has made his or her own commitment to living an anti- racist life and to furthering the struggle to end white supremacy 272 will become a reality for everyone only if those of us who have created these communities share how they emerge in our lives and the strategies we use to sustain them. Our devout commitment to building diverse communities is central. These commitments to anti-racist living are just one expression of who we are and what we share with one an other but they form the foundation of that sharing. Like all beloved communities we affirm our differences. It is this generous spirit of affirmation that gives us the courage to challenge one another, to work through misunderstandings, especially those that have to do with race and racism. In a beloved community solidarity and trust are grounded in profound commitment to a shared vision. Those of us who are always anti-racist long for a world in which everyone can form a beloved community where borders can be crossed and cultural hybridity celebrated. Anyone can begin to make such a community by truly seeking to live in an anti-racist world. If that longing guides our vision and our actions, the new culture will be born and anti-racist communities of resis tance will emerge everywhere. That is where we must go from here. He says that resantemant is individual hating themselves because of the state, but the K outweighs the AC because the AC makes it so that the individual is hated by the state AND society and makes it so that the hatred will never go away. K solves 100 of that.
Also, the K IS NOT THE ENDORSEMENT OF THE STATE. IT’s a taking back of control against the state by understanding optimism
Furthermore, their removal of hate speech codes in particular is a manifestation of the idea that governments cannot help minorities and must bow out of the fight against racism. Impacts Hate speech goes hand in hand with racism and not limiting it makes us a society that fosters racism and reinforces stereotypes. Yun and Delgado ‘94 Yun, David H. Member of the Colorado bar. J.D., University of Colorado and Richard Delgado Charles Inglis Thomson Professor of Law, University of Colorado. J.D., U.C.- Berkeley. "The Neoconservative Case Against Hate-Speech Regulation—Lively, D'Souza, Gates, Carter, and the Toughlove Crowd." Vanderbilt Law Review 47 (1994). MC But is it so clear that efforts to control hate speech are a waste of time and resources, at least compared to other problems that the campaigners could be addressing? What neoconservative writers may fail to realize is that eliminating hate speech goes hand in hand with reducing what they term "real racism." Certainly, being the victim of hate speech is a less serious affront than being denied a job, a house, or an education. It is, however, equally true that a society that speaks and thinks of minorities derisively is fostering an environment in which such discrimination will occur frequently. This is so for two reasons. First, hate speech, in combination with an entire panoply of media imagery, constructs and reinforces a picture of minorities in the public mind." This picture or stereotype varies from era to era, but is rarely positive: persons of color are happy and carefree, lascivious. criminal. devious- treacherous, untrustworthy, immoral, of lower intelligence than whites, and so on.
The aff’s ideology excuses the government from standing up against structural problems and ensures that racism continues. This is especially important in our political climate when the president is endorsed by the KKK. We need to take the power of government and use it against structural problems.
Counter speech does not solve on college campuses. There no effective way for minorities to answer racial insults, reason will seldom affect the speaker and often when minorities talk back they are physically assaulted. Delgado and Yun ‘94 Delgado, Richard, Charles Inglis Thomson Professor of Law, University of Colorado. J.D., U.C.- Berkeley and David H. Yun Member of the Colorado bar. J.D., University of Colorado. "Pressure Valves and Bloodied Chickens: An Analysis of Paternalistic Objections to Hate Speech Regulation." California Law Review 82 (1994): 871. MC Defenders of the First Amendment sometimes argue that minorities should talk back to the aggressor. .FN8S Nat Hentoff, for example, writes that antiracism rules teach black people to depend on whites for protection, while talking back clears the air, emphasizes self-reliance, and strengthens one's self-image as an active agent in charge of one's own destiny. FN86 The "talking back" solution to campus racism draws force from the First Amendment principle of "more speech,' according to which additional dialogue is always a preferred response to speech that some find troubling. FN87 *884 Proponents of this approach oppose hate speech rules, then, not so much because they limit speech, but because they believe that it is good for minorities to learn to speak out. A few go on to offer another reason: that a minority who speaks out will be able to educate the speaker who has uttered a racially hurtful remark. FN88 Racism, they hold, is the product of ignorance and fear. If a victim of racist hate speech takes the time to explain matters, he or she may succeed in altering the speaker's perception so that the speaker will no longer utter racist remarks. FN89 ¶ How valid is this argument? Like many paternalistic arguments, it is offered blandly, virtually as an article of faith. ln the nature of paternalism, those who make the argument are in a position of power, and therefore believe themselves able to make things so merely by asserting them as true. FN90 They rarely offer empirical proof of their claims, because none is needed. The social world is as they say because it is their world: they created it that way. FN9l¶ In reality, those who hurl racial epithets do so because they feel empowered to do so. FN92 Indeed, their principal objective is to reassert and reinscribe that power. One who talks back is perceived as issuing a direct challenge to that power. The action is seen as outrageous, as calling for a forceful response. Often racist remarks are delivered in several-on-one situations, in which responding in kind is foolhardy. FN93 Many highly publicized cases of racial homicide began in just this fashion. A group began badgering a black person. The black person talked back, and paid with his life. FN94 Other racist remarks are delivered in a cowardly fashion, by means of graffiti scrawled on a campus wall late at night or on a poster placed outside of a black student's dormitory door. FN95 In these situations, more speech is, of course, impossible. ¶ "'885 Racist speech is rarely a mistake, rarely something that could be corrected or countered by discussion. What would be the answer to 'Nigger, go back to Africa. You don't belong at the University"? "Sir, you misconceive the situation. Prevailing ethics and constitutional interpretation hold that I, an African American, am an individual of equal dignity and entitled to attend this university in the same manner as others. Now that I have informed you of this, I am sure you will modify your remarks in the future"? FN96 ¶ The idea that talking back is safe for the victim or potentially educative for the racist simply does not correspond with reality. It ignores the power dimension to racist remarks, forces minorities to run very real risks, and treats a hateful attempt to force the victim outside the human community as an invitation for discussion. Even when successful, talking back is a burden. Why should minority undergraduates, already charged with their own education, be responsible constantly for educating others?
This means the aff does not solve for domination because counter-speech and speaking out against structural problems that are protected by those with power does not work. 2. Turns case by showing for telling minorities to use their free speech will always end up leading to more death and aggression against minorities.
Alt The ALT is to reject pessimism in the political sphere and embrace optimism.
Optimism is the crucial ingredient in the political struggle for a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. Without an optimistic outlook, global capitalism and neocolonialism become inevitable. Rory ‘15 Rowan, Rory, “Extinction as usual?: Geo-social futures and left optimism”, e-flux journal, May-August 2015. Optimism remains a crucial affective resource for galvanizing political struggles, particularly important in forging enduring alliances across plural collectives dispersed in space and diverse in ethos – exactly the type of articulations needed to ensure more socially just and ecologically sustainable geo-social futures. This is why it is crucial not to cede optimism to reactionary forces or dismiss it as utopian naïveté. Without some basic acceptance of the idea that through collective effort our relations with one another and the planet can be transformed for the better, why would we act at all? Rejecting this possibility would be to consent to an existence that is all stick and no carrot, a purely defensive life governed by ad hoc reactions, that would elevate the contingent ideology of neoliberal individualism into an inescapable anthropological fact and reduce each of us to a little Katechon securing the best worst option until shit really hits the fan. Adopting a worldview from which all optimism has been expunged would in effect naturalize the existing catastrophic trajectories of global capitalism and militarized colonialism as inevitable and accept that indeed “there is no other way,” not due to faith in the brilliance of the plan but because of a lack of recognition that collective capacities may challenge it. The only thing we must fear is fear itself -- lack of a strong sense of collective self-efficacy is the biggest obstacle to mobilizing efforts and marshaling resources necessary to solve pressing global problems. Bandura ‘98 Bandura, Albert, “Personal and collective efficacy in human adaptation and change”, Advances in Psychological Science: Social, personal, and cultural aspects, 1998. The psychological barriers created by beliefs of collective powerlessness are more demoralizing, and debilitating than are external impediments. The less people bring their influence to bear on conditions that affect their lives the more control they relinquish to others. People who have high collective efficacy will mobilize their efforts and resources to surmount the obstacles to the changes they seek. But those convinced of their collective powerlessness will cease trying, even though changes are attainable through perseverant collective effort. As a society, we enjoy the benefits left by those before us who collectively fought inhumanities and worked for social reforms that permit a better life. Our own collective efficacy will, in turn, shape how future generations will live their lives. The times call for social initiative that build people’s sense of collective efficacy to influence conditions that shape their lives and that of future generations.
4/9/17
JanFeb - T Any Updated
Tournament: USC | Round: Doubles | Opponent: poly | Judge: panel T-Any Interpretation Interpretation: Cambridge Dictionary ’17 defines “Any” Cambridge Dictionary ‘17 - English Grammar Today, “Any,” Cambridge Dictionary (Web). Eds: Ronald Carter, Michael McCarthy, Geraldine Mark, and Anne O’Keeffe. Cambridge University Press. 2017. Accessed February 19, 2017. (used in negative statements and questions) some, or even the smallest amount(of): To clarify, if we replace the word any in the resolution with this definition, it reads “Public colleges and universities ought not to restrict (some, or even the smallest amount of) constitutionally protected speech.” This interpretation means that the aff plan may not specify a type of speech, but it may specify a subset of colleges. Prefer this definition because it contextualized by what any means in a negative statement like the resolution whereas the AC’s google definition in the underview does not define “any” in a NEGATIVE statement. Also, his Von Eintel card has two issues
It just says that when interpreting a statute, the meaning of any is limited by the objects that the legislature intended any to apply to. You need to go a step further and define an object that the meaning of any would apply to. 2. Also this card talks about any being restricted in a statute. The resolution is not a statute. Violation The aff only removes restrictions on constitutionally protected speech in gag orders which is one subset in the entirety of what speech is. It does not claim to categorically prevent unconstitutional censorship because things like disinviting controversial speakers, hate speech codes, and restrictions on professors’ research could still occur. Standards:
Grammar A. Prefer my interpretation because it correctly contextualizes the definition of “any” to its use in negative sentences, which the resolution is because it uses the word “not.” Cambridge Dictionary 2 - Cambridge Dictionary. “Any,” Def. 1. Cambridge Academic Content. Dictionary (Web). Cambridge University Press. 2017. Accessed March 3, 2017. We use any for indefinite quantities in questions and negative sentences. We use some in affirmative sentences:¶ Have you got any eggs?¶ I haven’t got any eggs.¶ I’ve got some eggs.
B. Their interpretation is semantically wrong; if someone says “I don’t need anything from the supermarket” and then you bring them a carton of milk, you have misinterpreted their statement. If you say, “I interpreted that as meaning that you don’t need bananas from the supermarket,” they’re just going to give you a weird look. Gut check this argument – as a competent speaker of English you know that nobody would say “Public college and universities ought not to restrict ANY constitutionally protected speech,” to mean they should unrestrict one form of speech but regulating all the others is completely fine.
C. Here is another definition that agrees Language.com NO DATE (Online English grammar textbook, Unit 42: - Indefinite Pronouns,” http://www.1-language.com/englishcoursenew/unit42_grammar.htm///LADI) Indefinite pronouns replace specific things with general, non-specific concepts. For example: - I want to live abroad in Italy. - I want to live abroad somewhere. This unit covers indefinite pronouns made with some, any, no, and every. Some / any Some and any can be combined with "-thing" to refer to an undefined object. For example: - There's someone outside the door. - There isn't anyone in the office. Some and any can be combined with "-where" to refer to an undefined location. For example: - I'm looking for somewhere to live. - We don't want to live anywhere near here. Some and any can be combined with "-body" or "-one" to refer to an undefined person. There is very little difference in meaning between "-body" and "-one". For example: - If you have a problem, someone/somebody will help you. - Do you know anyone/anybody who can help? These compound nouns follow the same rules as some and any, that is some is used in affirmative statements, and any is used in negative statements and questions. For example: - I need something from the supermarket. - I don't need anything from the supermarket. - Do you need anything from the supermarket? And, semantics outweigh pragmatics: A. Case-by-case determinations of what interpretations are most fair and educational will be manipulated in debaters’ favor if not tied to the semantics of the resolution. Nebel ’15 - Jake Nebel, “The Priority of Resolutional Semantics,” VBriefly (Web). February 20, 2015. Accessed March 2, 2017. AT There is an obvious objection to my argument above. If the topicality rule is justified for reasons that have to do with fairness and education, then shouldn’t we just directly appeal to such considerations when determining what proposition we ought to debate? There are at least three ways I see of responding to this objection.¶ One way admits that such pragmatic considerations are relevant—i.e., they are reasons to change the topic—but holds that they are outweighed by the reasons for the topicality rule. It would be better if everyone debated the resolution as worded, whatever it is, than if everyone debated whatever subtle variation on the resolution they favored. Affirmatives would unfairly abuse (and have already abused) the entitlement to choose their own unpredictable adventure, and negatives would respond (and have already responded) with strategies that are designed to avoid clash—including an essentially vigilantist approach to topicality in which debaters enforce their own pet resolutions on an arbitrary, round-by-round basis. Think here of the utilitarian case for internalizing rules against lying, murder, and other intuitively wrong acts. As the great utilitarian Henry Sidgwick argued, wellbeing is maximized not by everyone doing what they think maximizes wellbeing, but rather (in general) by people sticking to the rules of common sense morality. Otherwise, people are more likely to act on mistaken utility calculations and engage in self-serving violations of useful rules, thereby undermining social practices that promote wellbeing in the long run. That is exactly what happens if we reject the topicality rule in favor of direct appeals to pragmatic considerations. Sticking to a rule that applies regardless of the topic, of the debaters’ preferred variations on the topic, and of debaters’ familiarity with the national circuit’s flavor of the week, avoids these problems. B. If we decided what resolution to debate on the basis of pragmatics, there would be no limit on what advocacy the affirmative could defend. Nebel ’15 - Jake Nebel, “The Priority of Resolutional Semantics,” VBriefly (Web). February 20, 2015. Accessed March 2, 2017. AT Here is a third kind of response to the view that we should directly appeal to pragmatic considerations when evaluating topicality. This view justifies debating propositions that are completely irrelevant to the resolution but are much better to debate. Once you say that pragmatic benefits can justify debating a proposition that isn’t really what the resolution means, or that the resolution means whatever it would be best for it to mean, there is no principled way of requiring any particular threshold of similarity in order to be an eligible interpretation of the resolution. This means that the pragmatic approach justifies affirmatives that have nothing to do with the resolution. Of course some see no problem with nontopical affirmatives whose impacts outweigh the reasons to debate the resolution. But suppose you want a principled response to such strategies. You have one if you take seriously the idea that the debate should be about the resolution, and the idea that the proposition expressed by the resolution is independent of what proposition would be best to debate. Without a commitment to debating the proposition that the resolution actually means, I don’t think there is a principled response to such strategies, as I discuss below. E. Dialogue - Topicality is a norm of basic fairness, which reflects the underlying value that all voices should have an equal chance to participate in the dialogue. This controls the internal link to inclusion. Galloway 2007 - Ryan Galloway Samford U., “Dinner and Conversation at the Argumentative Table: Reconceptualizing Debate as an Argumentative Dialogue,” Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28 (2007) AT Debate as a dialogue sets an argumentative table, where all parties receive a relatively fair opportunity to voice their position. Anything that fails to allow participants to have their position articulated denies one side of the argumentative table a fair hearing. The affirmative side is set by the topic and fairness requirements. While affirmative teams have recently resisted affirming the topic, in fact, the topic selection process is rigorous, taking the relative ground of each topic as its central point of departure.¶ Setting the affirmative reciprocally sets the negative. The negative crafts approaches to the topic consistent with affirmative demands. The negative crafts disadvantages, counter-plans, and critical arguments premised on the arguments that the topic allows for the affirmative team. According to fairness norms, each side sits at a relatively balanced argumentative table.¶ When one side takes more than its share, competitive equity suffers. However, it also undermines the respect due to the other involved in the dialogue. When one side excludes the other, it fundamentally denies the personhood of the other participant (Ehninger, 1970, p. 110). A pedagogy of debate as dialogue takes this respect as a fundamental component. A desire to be fair is a fundamental condition of a dialogue that takes the form of a demand for equality of voice. Far from being a banal request for links to a disadvantage, fairness is a demand for respect, a demand to be heard, a demand that a voice backed by literally months upon months of preparation, research, and critical thinking not be silenced.¶ Affirmative cases that suspend basic fairness norms operate to exclude particular negative strategies. Unprepared, one side comes to the argumentative table unable to meaningfully participate in a dialogue. They are unable to “understand what ‘went on…’” and are left to the whims of time and power (Farrell, 1985, p. 114). Hugh Duncan furthers this line of reasoning:¶ Opponents not only tolerate but honor and respect each other because in doing so they enhance their own chances of thinking better and reaching sound decisions. Opposition is necessary because it sharpens thought in action. We assume that argument, discussion, and talk, among free an informed people who subordinate themselves to rules of discussion, are the best ways to decisions of any kind, because it is only through such discussion that we reach agreement which binds us to a common cause…If we are to be equal…relationships among equals must find expression in many formal and informal institutions (Duncan, 1993, p. 196-197).¶ Debate compensates for the exigencies of the world by offering a framework that maintains equality for the sake of the conversation (Farrell, 1985, p. 114).¶ For example, an affirmative case on the 2007-2008 college topic might defend neither state nor international action in the Middle East, and yet claim to be germane to the topic in some way. The case essentially denies the arguments that state action is oppressive or that actions in the international arena are philosophically or pragmatically suspect. Instead of allowing for the dialogue to be modified by the interchange of the affirmative case and the negative response, the affirmative subverts any meaningful role to the negative team, preventing them from offering effective “counter-word” and undermining the value of a meaningful exchange of speech acts. Germaneness and other substitutes for topical action do not accrue the dialogical benefits of topical advocacy. I. Evaluate I-meets in the context of common usage – if they fabricate an I-meet on an unfair and nonsensical interpretation of English, you should neglect it for those reasons.
2. Limits A. Allowing plan affs around specified kinds of speech justifies a limitless number of affs that ban types of speech i.e. hate speech, specific words, and speech in specified time and places, the list goes on and on. Two impacts— A. Fairness—means that the neg has an unlimited number of affs to prepare for which results in shallow engagement and the same generics you’ve heard every day like the politics DA and a process CP. B. Education—shallow engagement means we never actually learn about the aff topic lit in depth—it results in generic debates B. Topical Version of the Aff Solves - Remove restrictions surrounding all forms of constitutionally protected speech – solves 100 of your offense because it ensures we can still discuss the aff advantages but allows for the neg to access links to our generics. Voters Fairness Fairness is axiomatic in debate – nobody would play a rigged game, and allowing unfair strategies would make outcomes a result of luck rather than skill. Education Education is the constitutive purpose of debate – schools wouldn’t fund it and teachers wouldn’t teach it were it not an important vehicle for building portable skills and teaching important information.
Theory Framework No RVIs
Chills legitimate theory - Debaters won’t be as likely to run theory because their fear of loss from an RVI discourages theory to check back abuse.
2. Illogical - You don’t win just for being fair or just for being topical. These are prima facie burdens of the AC. Especially important on T because the burden of the AC going into the round is to be topical.
3. Substantive engagement – RVIs allow every round to be decided on theory and therefore create a strategic incentive for debaters to channel their development into theory skills rather than discussion of topic-relevant issues. It also encourages them to run abusive positions to bait theory, which results in even less substantive engagement and more abuse.
4/8/17
NOV DEC Body Cameras CP
Tournament: Alta | Round: 4 | Opponent: San Marino | Judge: Nicholas Rogers Text: The United States Federal Government ought to mandate that all police officers wear body cameras and regulate police usage of those cameras. Body cameras are key to increase transparency, performance, and accountability of police officers. Miller, Lindsay JD. Senior Research Associate at the Police Executive Research Forum, Jessica Toliver PERF's Director of Technical Assistance, and Police Executive Research Forum. Implementing a Body-Worn Camera Program: Recommendations and Lessons Learned. Washington, DC: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services 2014. Police leaders who have deployed body-worn cameras say there are many benefits associated with the devices. They note that body-worn cameras are useful for documenting evidence; officer training; preventing and resolving complaints brought by members of the public; and strengthening police transparency, performance, and accountability. In addition, given that police now operate in a world in which anyone with a cell phone camera can record video footage of a police encounter, body-worn cameras help police departments ensure events are also captured from an officer’s perspective. Scott Greenwood of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said at the September 2013 conference: ¶ The average interaction between an officer and a citizen in an urban area is already recorded in multiple ways. The citizen may record it on his phone. If there is some conflict happening, one or more witnesses may record it. Often there are fixed security cameras nearby that capture the interaction. So the thing that makes the most sense—if you really want accountability both for your officers and for the people they interact with—is to also have video from the officer’s perspective
Empirics from California prove that the usage of body cameras significantly decreases excessive force. Friedman, Andrew Co-Executive Director for the Center for Popular Democracy, JD NYU . "Building Momentum From the Ground Up: A Toolkit for Promoting Justice in Policing." Building Momentum From The Ground: n. pag. Popular Democracy. The Center for Popular Democracy, Apr. 2015. Web. 10 Nov. 2016. A 2012 study evaluating the use of body-worn cameras by the Rialto police department in California over a period of 12 months suggests more than a 50 reduction in the total number of incidents of use-of-force. Force was twice as likely to have been used by officers who were not wearing cameras. Complaints about police officers fell 88 compared to the previous 12-month period.
12/3/16
NOV DEC Court Clog DA
Tournament: HW Damus | Round: 1 | Opponent: Unversity Irvine | Judge: Thomas Angus Link Qualified immunity reduces the number of cases there will be in the courts because attorneys will be deterred from taking the cases, federal judges defer federal agents, the inability to attain attorney’s fees, and individual agents don’t pay indemnification fees. Reinert ’10 - Reinert, Alexander A. "Does Qualified Immunity Matter." U. St. Thomas LJ 8 (2010): 477. Nearly every respondent, regardless of the breadth of her experience, confirmed that concerns about the qualified immunity defense play a substantial role at the screening stage.91 For some, qualified immunity was theprimary factor when evaluating a case for representation. Most of these re-spondents focused on the hostility to Bivens and other civil rights actions within our own circuits whgen explaining why qualified immunity was so significant a case-evaluation tool. For inctance, one advocate operating in the Fourth Circuit explained that the court’s approach forced him to take qualified immunity concerns into account at the outset of client screening. Similarly, a lawyer working in Illinois stated that because of the Seventh Circuit’s case law, he will not take a case if there is even the “slightest chance” the dismissal will be base on qualified immunity.∂ For those respondents who felt that qualified immunity was less signif-icant, the explanation often addressed other case-selection criteria. For in-stance, multiple respondents indicated that they only accepted the most egregious casa for representation, which made it unlikely that qualified immunity would play a role.94 While acceptance of egregious cases was not designed to avoid qualified immunity concerns, it had this incidental effect because it is unlikely that a defendant who committed an egregious viola-tion would also be protected by qualified immunity. For a few other respon-dents, qualified immunity did not play a role either because of self-professed hubris” or a unique mission. Respondents who worked at non-profit organizations or who had other law reform goals, for instance, ex-pressed concern about qualified immunity but stated that it was not disposi-tive because of their organization's mission.“∂ Only one respondent, with a small amount of experience litigating Biv-ens actions, the role of qualified immunity.” Instead, this re-spondent’s concerns about Riven: litigation had more to do with the “special factors” analysis than qualified immunity. Thus, my study suggests nearly overwhelming support for the proposition that qualified immunity considerations matter at the screening stage, and some attorneys consider them dispositive. 0n the substantive side, some respondents accounted for qualified immunity by not taking cases in which it could be raised, taking only the most egregious cases, or attempting to limit the impact of circuit precedent by litigating cases in state court (something that is a non-starter for Bivens claims).98∂ Qualified immunity also mattered to these attorneys on the procedural side. That is, the aspect of qualified immunity that permits interlocutory appeal at every stage of the proceeding, with stays of discovery routinely granted pending the resolution of a qualified immunity defense, also oper-ates as a substantial factor in case screening. Two respondents indepen-dently referred to the interlocutory appeal issue as a “killer,” because it slowa down the litigation.99 While an appeal is being resolved, evidence may become stale, witnesses may disappear, and a client may lose hope.100 For defendents in a case with political implications, the delays occasioned by the procedural aspect of qualified immunity may stretch litigation on so that it becomes the problem of a new administration.101∂ Finally, the attorneys offer some explanations regarding the relative scarcity of Bivens litigation and its perceived lack of success. Some respon-dents noted that one explanations for the difficulty bringing Bivens suits relates to the tendency of federal judges to defer to federal agents, particularly law enforcement agents.102 Others pointed to the related observation that federal agents are, as a matter of both perceptions and reality, more sophisti-cated, professional, and well-trained than their state counterparts.103 Finally, some respondents indicated that the inability to obtain attorneys’ fees for Bivens actions, as well as the formal position that the federal government takes regarding indemnification of individual employees, deters lawyers form bringing such claims. 104
Qualified immunity is essential in preventing court clog. Putnam ’92 - Charles T. Putnam Senior Assistant Attorney General, New Hampshire and Charles T. Ferris JD, Franklin Pierce Law Center, “Defending a Maligned Defense: The Policy Bases of the Qualified Immunity Defense in Actions Under 42 USC 1983,” Bridgeport Law Review, Vol. 12, 1992. MC National resources are obviously scarce, yet increasing numbers of section 1983 actions are being filed in overburdened federal courts. Reducing the load of these cases on the court system is a third essential policy consideration. Some courts have questioned whether the abundance of section 1983 cases in fed-eral courts is an efficient use of judicial resources in light of the perception that many such actions are of questionable merit."6¶ The Supreme Court has thus encouraged the use of summary judgment where courts are faced with such cases. For instance, in Butz v. Economou,7 the Court held: Insubstantial lawsuits can be quickly terminated by federal courts alert to the possibilities of artful pleading. Unless the complaint states a compensable claim for relief under the Federal Constitution, it should not survive a motion to dismiss. Moreover, the Court recognized in Scheuer that damages suits concerning constitutional violations need not proceed to trial, but can be terminated on a properly supported motion for summary judgment based on the defense of immunity.... In responding to such a motion, plaintiffs may not play dog in the manger; and firm application of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure will ensure that federal officials are not harassed by frivolous lawsuits.18 The courts' use of summary judgment and other procedural devices is thus an important safety measure for both the courts and defendants facing suit.
Impacts 1: Makes Civil Litigation Harder Court clog increases the cost of civil litigation and the amount of time it takes for civil cases to get to trial. turns case. Thanawala ’15 - Thanawala, Sudhin Legal affairs expert and reporter for US News and Associated Press “Overloaded federal courts lead to delays in civil, criminal cases as judges try to keep up,” US News, September 27, 2015. http://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2015/09/27/wheels-of-justice-slow-at-overloaded-federal-courts. LG Across the country, federal district courts have seen a rise in recent years in the time it takes to get civil cases to trial and resolve felony criminal cases as judges' workloads have increased, according to statistics from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.∂ The problem is particularly acute in some federal courts such as California's and Texas's Eastern Districts. Judges there have workloads about twice the national average and say they are struggling to keep up.∂ The result, the judges and attorneys say, is longer wait times in prison for defendants awaiting trial, higher costs for civil lawsuits and delays that can render those suits moot.∂ "I think it's fair to say that things are quite bad," said Matt Menendez, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law who has studied judicial caseloads.∂ Legal scholars say Congress needs to fill judicial vacancies more quickly but also increase the number of judges in some districts — both issues that get bogged down in partisan political fights over judicial nominees.∂ California's Eastern District, which covers a large swath of the state that includes Sacramento and Fresno, has had an unfilled judicial vacancy for nearly three years, and it has the same number of judicial positions — six — it had in 1978, according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.∂ The Judicial Conference of the United States, the national policy-making body for the federal courts, has recommended Congress double the number of judicial positions in the district.∂ In the late 1990s, the median time for civil cases to go to trial in the district averaged 2 years and four months. From 2009 to 2014, that number jumped by more than a year. The median time to resolve criminal cases nearly doubled to an average of 13 months.∂ "You're never out from under it," said Morrison England, the court's chief judge. "You're constantly trying to do what you can to get these cases resolved, and we just can't do it."∂ The weighted caseload per judge has climbed from an average of nearly 600 in the late 1990s to over a 1,000.∂ The Eastern District of Texas has seen similar increases.
Court clog decreases the quality of judgments. turns case. Oakley ’96 - Oakley, John B. “The Myth of Cost-Free Jurisdictional Reallocation.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 543, 1996, pp. 52–63. www.jstor.org/stable/1048447. Personal effects: The hidden costs of greater workloads. The hallmark of federal justice traditionally has been the searching analysis and thought-ful opinion of a highly competent judge, endowed with the time as well as the intelligence to grasp and re-solve the most nuanced issues of fact and law. Swollen dockets create assembly-line conditions, which threaten the ability of the modern federal judge to meet this high standard of quality in federal adjudication. ∂ No one expects a federal judge to function without an adequate level of available tangible resources: suffi-cient courtroom and chambers space, competent administrative and re-search staff, a good library, and a comfortable salary that relieves the judge from personal financial pressure. Although salary levels have leased—encouraging judges to engage in the limited teaching and publica-tion activities that are the sole means of meeting such newly pressing fi- nancial obligations as the historically high mortgage expenses and college tuitions of the present decade—in the main, federal judges have received a generous allocation of tangible re- sources. It is unlikely that there is any further significant gain to be re-alized in the productivity of individ-ual federal judges through increased levels of tangible resources, other than by redressing the pressure to earn supplemental income. ∂ On a personal level, the most important resource available to the federal judge is time.” Caseload pressures secondary to the indisr-criminate federalization of state law are stealing time from federal judges, shrinking the increments available for each case. Federal judges have been forced to compensate by operat-ing more like executives and less like judges. They cannot read their briefs as carefully as they would like, and they are driven to rely unduly on law clerks for research and writing that they would prefer to do themselves."∂ If federal judges need more time to hear and decide each case, an obvious and easy solution is to spread the work by the appointment of more and more federal judges. Congress has been generous in the recent creation of new judgeships," and enlargement of the federal judiciary is likely to continue to be the default response, albeit a more grudging one, to judi-cial concern over the caseload consequences of jurisdictional reallocation.∂ Systemic effects: The hidden costs of adding more judges. Increasing the size of the federal judiciary creates institutional strains that reduce and most ultimately rule out its continued acceptability as a countermeasure to caseload growth. While the dilution of workload through the ad-dition of judges is always incremen-tally attractive, in the long run it will cause the present system to collapse.
2: Hurt the Poor Court clog hurts small businesses: Ashley Post Managing Editor, “Frivolous lawsuits clogging U.S. courts, stalling economic growth,” Inside Counsel (Web). July 22, 2011. Accessed November 5, 2016. http://www.insidecounsel.com/2011/07/22/frivolous-lawsuits-clogging-us-courts-stalling-eco?slreturn=1478366454 AT The entrepreneurial system that we’ve developed for litigation in this country has always been an impetus to bringing cases that are close to the line or even over the line,” says Dechert Partner Sean Wajert. “When you have that kind of encouragement, you have a slippery slope, which sometimes people will slide down and get into questionable and even abusive and frivolous claims along the way.”¶ The result is clogged courts and corporate funds that finance defense costs instead of economic investment. Small businesses and startups with less than $20 million in revenue suffer the most because they pay a higher percentage of their revenues toward tort costs than larger companies do, and therefore they become less able to invest in research and development, create new jobs, and give raises and benefits to employees.
Job loss and financial hardship exacts a tremendous human cost. Dao and Loungani ’10 - Dao, Mai, and Loungani, Prakash. “The Human Cost of Recessions: Assessing It, Reducing It.” November 11, 2010. IMF Staff Position Note, IMF Research Department. MO.
The human and social costs of unemployment are more far-reaching than the immediate temporary loss of income. They include loss of lifetime earnings, loss of human capital, worker discouragement, adverse health outcomes, and loss of social cohesion. Moreover, parents’ unemployment can even affect the health and education outcomes of their children. The costs can be particularly high for certain groups, such as youth and the long-term unemployed (see Katz, 2010; von Wachter, 2010a, 2010b; Holzer, 2010). A. Cost to Individuals and Families Loss of earnings: Layoffs are associated with substantial loss of earnings both over the short and long run. That is, even when workers are re-employed shortly after displacement, they suffer a decline in wages compared to the pre-displacement job and compared to similar workers that were not displaced. The decline in earnings is on average observed for job losers in any period, but is most pronounced for job losers during a recession (see Farber, 2005). Studies for the United States show that these earnings losses persist even in the long run: 15–20 years after a job loss in a recession, the earnings loss amounts on average to 20 (see e.g. Jacobson et al., 1993; von Wachter et al., 2009). An illustration of an average earnings path before and after job separation during the recession in the 1980s using U.S. administrative data is taken from von Wachter et al. (2009) and reproduced in Figure 4. These sustained earnings losses stem from the decline in value of certain occupation- or industry-specific skills that become obsolete, from the time-intensive process of finding an appropriate job, in particular for a mature worker, but also from so called “cyclical downgrading”— when workers take up worse jobs than they otherwise would have had in the absence of a recession. There is also evidence that the adverse effects on lifetime earnings are most pronounced for unemployment spells experienced at youth, especially upon college graduation, making the rising youth unemployment rate a particularly serious concern (see Oreopoulos et al., 2008; Kondo, 2008; Kahn, 2010). Using similar data and empirical methodology as the U.S. studies above, Schmieder et al. (2009) also find that workers who lost their stable jobs in 1982 in Germany suffered earnings losses of 10–15 that lasted at least 15 years. Thus even in countries with more generous welfare systems and lower earnings inequalities, workers are not shielded from long lasting and large income losses caused by job displacement. Impact on health: The hardship of job loss also has serious negative impacts on health. In the short run, layoffs are associated with higher risk of heart attacks and other stress-related illnesses (Burgard et al., 2007). But even in the long term, the mortality rate of workers that have been laid off is on average higher than that of comparable workers that did not lose their jobs, controlling for other relevant individual and aggregate characteristics. Based on social security data for the United States, Sullivan and von Wachter (2009) estimate that increased mortality rate due to unemployment can persist up to 20 years after the job loss and lead to an average loss of life expectancy from 1 to 1.5 years (see Figure 5). Moreover, displaced workers’ loss in earnings is associated with the increase in mortality odds: workers that are displaced but are lucky enough not to suffer a loss in subsequent earnings are not found to have a higher rate of mortality (Figure 6). This suggests that financial resources serve as an important determinant of individual health by influencing the ability to invest in good health care (and access to health insurance) and a healthy lifestyle, while a shortage of resources leads to poor lifestyle choices and can also be the reason for stress and depression.
11/5/16
NOV DEC Indemnification CP
Tournament: Damus | Round: 1 | Opponent: University Irvine | Judge: Thomas Angus Plan Text: The aff actor will adopt limited indemnification in which officers are required to pay a percentage of any damages awarded and cities will pay the rest depending upon the culpability of the officer and their ability to pay. Emery and Maazel 02 describe the plan - Richard Emery J.D. Columbia, 1970; B.A. Brown University, 1967; senior partner at Emery Cuti Brinckerhoff and Abady PC, and has represented victims of police misconduct throughout the country, arguing cases before the highest courts at both the state and federal level and Ilann Margalit Maazel J.D. University of Michigan, 1997; B.A. Harvard University, 1993; is a lawyer at Emery Cuti Brinckerhoff and Abady PC, and is the former law clerk to the Hon. John M. Walker of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.. "Why Civil Rights Lawsuits Do Not Deter Police Misconduct: The Conundrum of Indemnification and a Proposed Solution." Fordham Urb. LJ 28 (2000): 587. MC A better solution compensates and deters. That can be achieved by the following: After the jury's verdict as to liability and dam- ages, the judge presiding over the civil rights case should determine what portion of the judgment the city must indemnify. The court's decision should be informed by a number of factors targeted towards deterrence. An officer who is more culpable, who commits intentional wrongdoing, or who acts brutally or with particular disregard for a victim's constitutional rights, or whose behavior could not have been anticipated or controlled by the city, should pay a greater percentage of the judgment. This would provide the greatest deterrent for the most egregious constitutional violations. The court also should examine the officer's prior disciplinary history. If an officer has a history of misconduct, and received little, no, or inadequate prior discipline from the NYPD, then the city should indemnify a greater part of the judgment. This would put the city on notice that its disciplinary procedures are inadequate, and provide financial incentives to improve them. Conversely, if an officer has a history of police misconduct, and received proper and adequate discipline by the city, then the officer should be required to pay more of the judgment himself. This would reward the city for instituting internal disciplinary measures to deter police misconduct, and deter problem officers from committing misconduct yet again. Similarly, if the city did not adequately discipline the officer for the misconduct at issue in the instant lawsuit, then the city should be required to indemnify a greater part of the judgment. And if an officer was properly disciplined by the city for the misconduct at issue in the lawsuit, then the officer would be required to pay more of the judgment himself. This again encourages the city to mete out appropriate discipline to officers who violate the law.
Solvency Current indemnification policy does not deter police offers and the public is forced to shoulder the monetary burden. Emery and Maazel 2 - Richard Emery J.D. Columbia, 1970; B.A. Brown University, 1967; senior partner at Emery Cuti Brinckerhoff and Abady PC, and has represented victims of police misconduct throughout the country, arguing cases before the highest courts at both the state and federal level and Ilann Margalit Maazel J.D. University of Michigan, 1997; B.A. Harvard University, 1993; is a lawyer at Emery Cuti Brinckerhoff and Abady PC, and is the former law clerk to the Hon. John M. Walker of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.. "Why Civil Rights Lawsuits Do Not Deter Police Misconduct: The Conundrum of Indemnification and a Proposed Solution." Fordham Urb. LJ 28 (2000): 587. MC New York City represents and indemnifies police officers in the overwhelming majority of civil rights cases. 2 The city regularly indemnifies police officers regardless of whether they acted intentionally, recklessly, or brutally; whether or not they violated federal or state law; or whether or not they violated the rules and regulations of the New York City Police Department ("NYPD"). Basic political realities explain this practice. Police officers organ- ize in very powerful unions, most notably the Patrolmen's Benevo- lent Association in New York, which in turn exert pressure on the mayor and the city's lawyer, the "Corporation Counsel," 3 to re- present and indemnify the officers. And the mayor, of course, de- pends on his police force to preserve the low crime rate that remains the perceived crown jewel of this administration. When the city errs on the side of indemnifying every officer, no one complains. The unions are satisfied-they successfully protect their members. The police officers are satisfied-they avoid per- sonal liability for their wrongdoing. The victims, for the most part, are satisfied-they recover, relatively quickly, from a deep-pocket municipal defendant that, unlike most police officers, can actually pay the judgment or settlement. There is simply no one with a voice in the process with any interest in disturbing the status quo. Not everyone wins, of course. The taxpayers lose. They pay millions of dollars to fund these judgments and settlements. The community loses, because this system perpetuates and protects police misconduct. And the victims who care more about principle than money lose, because the law gives the city near absolute discretion to defend and pay for police wrongdoing, but little incentive to investigate or discipline officers who violate the law.
The plan would solve better than the aff because police officers would be liable for more damages. Emery and Maazel 3 - Richard Emery J.D. Columbia, 1970; B.A. Brown University, 1967; senior partner at Emery Cuti Brinckerhoff and Abady PC, and has represented victims of police misconduct throughout the country, arguing cases before the highest courts at both the state and federal level and Ilann Margalit Maazel J.D. University of Michigan, 1997; B.A. Harvard University, 1993; is a lawyer at Emery Cuti Brinckerhoff and Abady PC, and is the former law clerk to the Hon. John M. Walker of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.. "Why Civil Rights Lawsuits Do Not Deter Police Misconduct: The Conundrum of Indemnification and a Proposed Solution." Fordham Urb. LJ 28 (2000): 587. MC
Such an indemnification scheme has many immediate advan- tages. It places the indemnification decision in the hands of courts, not the municipality itself, ostensibly removing political pressure from the indemnification decision. 3 9 Most importantly, such a law would say loudly and clearly to every officer: "You are not insured; you have no security that your misconduct will cost you nothing." With the indemnification decision in the hands of courts, not city lawyers, no officer could be at all sure that the city and the tax-payer will foot the entire bill for violations of clearly established constitutional law. That decision would be made-after the evidence is presented, after trial, and after the jury's verdict-by a fair and neutral arbiter. Deprived of near absolute impunity from the financial consequences of their unconstitutional acts, police officers will, finally, be and feel accountable for their conduct in some tangible way.
This system has worked empirically in New York and Cleveland. It solves the Aff through multiple mechanisms: Schwartz ’14 - Joanna C. Schwartz Assistant Prof. of Law, UCLA Law School "Police indemnification." New York University Law Review, Vol. 89:885 (June2014). MC Yet the obvious alternative—eliminating indemnification and imposing the full force of financial liability for civil rights damages actions on individual officers—also seems to be the wrong tool for deterrence. Even with the protections of qualified immunity, officers in my study would have been personally responsible for over $730 million in payouts over six years. In New York, the median payout for plaintiffs during my six-year study period was $20,000, a significant but payable sum given officers’ salaries.326 But in twenty-six civil rights damages cases resolved in New York between 2006 and 2011, plaintiffs received over $1 million, and plaintiffs’ recoveries in another 595 cases were in the six figures. Given the inevitable inaccuracies of litigation outcomes,327 an officer could be bankrupted if he committed a relatively minor error that resulted in significant injuries to the plaintiff.328 Although widespread indemnification likely lessens the deterrent effect of lawsuits on individual officers, it does spread risk in a way that makes some sense.329 The practices in place in New York City and Cleveland offer a promising middle ground. In New York and Cleveland, officers paid¶ between $250 and $25,000 in thirty-six cases during the study period.330 One might believe that the financial sanctions on officers should be higher (or lower), or that they should be imposed more (or less) frequently. But the general idea—imposing financial sanctions on officers as part of settlements and judgments—could, in theory, accommodate § 1983’s somewhat conflicting compensation and deterrence goals. Requiring officers to pay thousands, or even tens of thousands, of dollars (calculated, ideally, based on their culpability and resources)331 could punish the involved officers and send a message to others.332 Yet, because the government would pay the bulk of any award, wronged plaintiffs would still be compensated for the violations of their constitutional rights. Refusing to indemnify officers’ punitive damages awards is another way to punish officers found to have engaged in reckless or malicious conduct.333 This adjustment would not, however, punish officer wrongdoing in the vast majority of cases that are resolved before trial.
And, the system ensures that victims are compensated and have incentive to bring suits that deter civil rights violations. Emery and Maazel 4- Richard Emery J.D. Columbia, 1970; B.A. Brown University, 1967; senior partner at Emery Cuti Brinckerhoff and Abady PC, and has represented victims of police misconduct throughout the country, arguing cases before the highest courts at both the state and federal level and Ilann Margalit Maazel J.D. University of Michigan, 1997; B.A. Harvard University, 1993; is a lawyer at Emery Cuti Brinckerhoff and Abady PC, and is the former law clerk to the Hon. John M. Walker of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.. "Why Civil Rights Lawsuits Do Not Deter Police Misconduct: The Conundrum of Indemnification and a Proposed Solution." Fordham Urb. LJ 28 (2000): 587. MC Finally, prevailing plaintiffs should always be compensated. Not- withstanding the above factors, it should be the rare case (if any) where the city will not indemnify a police officer at all. To guarantee real compensation, the city must pay at least some portion of the judgment. Compensation is not only a central purpose of the civil rights laws; it induces plaintiffs to bring the very lawsuits that deter (or should deter) the police from committing unconstitutional conduct in the first instance. If, for example, a plaintiff were the subject of particularly brutal and outrageous misconduct, 3 6 resulting in the NYPD's termination of the perpetrating officer, the above factors (the horrible nature of the misconduct and the NYPD's appropriate disciplinary response) would otherwise counsel against indemnification. This would be unfair and cruelly ironic-since the severe nature of the police misconduct caused the plaintiff unusually severe damage. This final factor-the plaintiff's right to actual compensation-would help prevent such an unfair and unintended result. In addition, a legislative presumption favoring the city's indemnification of at least fifty percent of the judgment would all but ensure that plaintiffs are fairly compensated.
11/5/16
NOV DEC Insurance CP
Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 3 | Opponent: Ashland | Judge: Cort Sylvester Plan Text: The Aff Actor will require police officers to carry professional liability insurance and maintain the current parameters on qualified immunity. Kaste ’16 explaing the plan - Kaste, Martin. correspondent on NPR's National desk "To Change Police Practices, A Push For Liability Insurance In Minneapolis." NPR. NPR, 27 June 2016. Web. 10 Nov. 2016. MC – brackets in original Some officers already carry liability insurance, on a voluntary basis. Gross' group wants to make it a condition of employment in Minneapolis. Their proposal would have the city cover the cost of basic insurance, but any premium increases due to misconduct would be the officer's responsibility. Dave Bicking, also a member of the ballot campaign, says the beauty of this scheme is that bad cops would pay more; the worse the track record, the more expensive the premium. "We have one officer in Minneapolis who's had five significant settlements against him just in a year and a half," Bicking says. "Someone like that could never, ever buy insurance. They'd have to charge him $60000-$70,000 a year. That officer would be gone." The plan has a simple appeal. But police call it simplistic
Solvency Professional liability insurance, like doctors’ malpractice insurance, solve for the exorbitant amounts of money that citizens end up paying to cover liability suits filed against officers, and problematic officers’ premiums rise to the point where they become uninsurable which would force them out of police departments. Syrmopoulos ’16 - Syrmopoulos, Jay Investigative Journalist Free Thought Project, Master of Liberal Sciences: Global Affairs U Denver. "Here's How to Force Police Accountability in Your City." The Free Thought Project. N.p., 18 Sept. 2014. Web. 10 Nov. 2016. GK Minneapolis - In almost every city across the US, tax dollars are used to cover the damages and settlements from lawsuits filed against their police departments due to officer misconduct. Taxpayers in essence pay out massive amounts in damages for officers not doing their job properly. Additionally, the cost is compounded because taxpayers are forced to continue paying the salaries of these criminal cops.¶ City officials don’t have the guts to hold officers accountable for their actions. So a new approach is necessary to hold rogue officers responsible for their conduct.¶ Just like doctors have to carry malpractice insurance, police officers should be required to carry professional liability insurance as a condition of employment.¶ How this can be achieved is through an amendment to the city charter itself.¶ In Minneapolis, this process is already taking shape due to the efforts of Communities United Against Police Brutality and the Committee for Professional Policing.¶ Over the past seven years, taxpayers in Minneapolis have paid out over $20 million dollars to settle cases stemming from police brutality. In just 2011, $4.7 million taxpayer dollars went to cover the costs of officer misconduct. Many other cities across the US have faced similar losses with seemingly no recourse.¶ Some cities, such as Minneapolis, self indemnify for police claims, while others rely on the League of Cities coverage. Most large metropolitan areas don’t engage in effective risk management strategies, as it would be a political liability due to the strength of the police lobby and unions. Thus, police are rarely held accountable for their actions.¶ Requiring police officers in large cities to carry professional liability insurance coverage would be an excellent risk management strategy and provide accountability for officers in ways that city administrations cannot or will not provide.¶ Similarly to how other professionals, such as doctors who are sued too many times become uninsurable, the demands of professional liability insurance will ensure risk reduction takes place. Meaning basically that if city officials won’t hold police accountable for their actions an insurance company on the hook for large police misconduct payouts certainly will.¶ Problem officers would find their rates up until eventually they would become uninsurable, a wonderful way to have problem officers forced out of policing entirely.
Right now cities pay for police misconduct which is ineffective for deterrence. Kaste ’16 Kaste, Martin. correspondent on NPR's National desk "To Change Police Practices, A Push For Liability Insurance In Minneapolis." NPR. NPR, 27 June 2016. Web. 10 Nov. 2016. MC When cities settle cases of inappropriate or illegal force by police officers, they pay — a lot. Chicago alone has paid out more than half a billion dollars since 2004. Yet some advocates say all those payouts haven't had much of an effect on policing practices. In Minneapolis, longtime activist Michelle Gross says when cities pay damages, individual police officers often aren't held accountable, which means they're not likely to change their behavior. That's why she and a group calling itself the Committee for Professional Policing are now pushing a completely different approach.
And, because under the CP cities still pay the baseline cost of insurance for its officers, it has a strong incentive to improve its policies, training, and oversight. More abusive departments will necessarily have higher baseline premiums. This controls the internal link to the principle solvency mechanism in the AC.
11/19/16
NOV DEC Municipality Spending DA
Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 3 | Opponent: Ashland | Judge: Cort Sylvester Municipal Spending DA The aff increases the number of successful lawsuits against the police. The costs of civil suits against police are paid by taxpayers. Kristian ’16 - Bonnie Kristian Writer; communications consultant for Young Americans for Liberty; graduate student at Bethel Seminary, “Seven Reasons Police Brutality Is Systemic, Not Anecdotal,” American Conservative (Web). July 2, 2014. Accessed November 1, 2016. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/2014/07/02/seven-reasons-police-brutality-is-systematic-not-anecdotal/ AT 4. Settlements are shifted to taxpayers.¶ Those officers who are found guilty of brutality typically find the settlement to their victims paid from city coffers. Research from Human Rights Watch reveals that in some places, taxpayers “are paying three times for officers who repeatedly commit abuses: once to cover their salaries while they commit abuses; next to pay settlements or civil jury awards against officers; and a third time through payments into police ‘defense’ funds provided by the cities.” In larger cities, these settlements easily cost the public tens of millions of dollars annually while removing a substantial incentive against police misconduct.
Expanding liability decimates city finances. Worral 04 - John L. Worral Assoc. Prof. of Criminal Justice, CSU San Bernardino; PhD in Political Science from Washington State U., “Chapter 10: Police Officers, Excessive Force, and Civil Liability,” Controversies in Policing. Eds Quint C. Thurman Texas State U., San Marcos and Andrew Giacomazzi Boise State U.. Cincinnati: Anderson Publishing, Lexis Nexis Group. pp. 139-155 (2004) – brackets in original. AT Notwithstanding its effects on officers themselves, civil liability can take a financial toll on cities and counties. Researchers have reported an increase in both the size and number of awards given to plaintiffs who sue the police (e.g., Fabrizio, 1990; Rudovsky, 1992). For example del Carmen (1987) estimated that the cost of the average jury award of liability against the typical municipality is about $2 million. In 1982, for example, there were more than 250 cases where juries awarded at least $1 million to plaintiffs (National League of Cities, 1985). Bates, Cutler, and Clink (1981) took this figure and speculated that if current estimates of jury award figures were applied to the existing 39,000 local governments, there could be as much as $780 billion in pending litigation against police agencies. More recent studies, however, have revealed that the average reported award is $118,698 (Kappeler et al., 1993).¶ Litigation is costly not just because of settlements or jury awards, but also because of potential jumps in liability insurance premiums. In 1975, for example, before the decision in Monell v. Department of Social Services (1978) insurance premiums for Dade County, Florida increased from $60,000 to $150,000 in the space of one year (these figures would obviously be higher in today’s dollars). Monell exposed municipalities – not just police officers and supervisors – to litigation, and, consequently, many municipal governments are facing an “insurance crisis” (Hagerty, 1976). Some commentators have noted:¶ Quite clearly, absent insurance, a substantial judgment or series of judgments could monetarily cripple a municipality and force it to forgo or reduce services in vital areas. Yet insurance is unavailable to some municipalities and for many others it has become prohibitively expensive. Due to the expanding liability of local governments and concomitant disappearing legal defenses, insurers are facing greater underwriting costs and will not significantly lower municipal premiums (Vitullo and Peters, 1981:335).
The push for revenue causes over policing of communities of color and mistrust of the police. Kopf, Dan. "The Fining of Black America." Priceonomics. Priceonomics, 24 June 2016. Web. 10 Nov. 2016. https://priceonomics.com/the-fining-of-black-america/.ZW In March 2010, years before Ferguson, Missouri, became known for sparking the Black Lives Matter movement, the city’s Finance Director contacted the Chief of Police with a solution to the city’s budget problems. ¶ The Finance Director wanted the police to generate more revenues from fines — money paid for infractions like traffic violations and missing court appointments. He warned that the city would be in financial trouble “unless ticket writing ramps up significantly before the end of the year.” “Given that we are looking at a substantial sales tax shortfall,” he wrote, “it’s not an insignificant issue.”¶ The Finance Director’s request surfaced as part of the U.S. Department of Justice’s investigation of the Ferguson Police Department. The investigation was instigated by the civil unrest that followed the fatal shooting of an 18-year-old African American man named Michael Brown in August 2014. Its goal was to better understand why the citizens of Ferguson felt so at odds with the police department chartered to protect them.¶ The Justice Department concluded that the mistrust between the police and the community primarily resulted from excessive fining. “Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs,” the report read. The use of fines to fund the government undermined “law enforcement legitimacy among African Americans in particular.” ¶ Ferguson has a population of just over 20,000 that is 67 African American, and it raised over $2 million from fines and fees in 2012. This accounted for around 13 of all government revenue, and a disproportionate amount of this money came from the African American population.¶ Is Ferguson an anomaly?¶ Using the U.S. Census’s Survey of Local and State Finances, we investigated the proportion of revenues that cities typically receive from fines, as well as the characteristics of cities that rely on fines the most. What are these cities like? Are they rich or poor? In certain parts of the country? Heavily Black or White?¶ We found one demographic that was most characteristic of cities that levy large amounts of fines on their citizens: a large African American population. Among the fifty cities with the highest proportion of revenues from fines, the median size of the African American population—on a percentage basis—is more than five times greater than the national median.¶ Surprisingly, we found that income had very little connection to cities’ reliance on fines as a revenue source. Municipalities that are overwhelming White and non-Hispanic do not exhibit as much excessive fining, even if they are poor.¶ Our analysis indicates that the use of fines as a source of revenue is not a socioeconomic problem, but a racial one. The cities most likely to exploit residents for fine revenue are those with the most African Americans. And this controls the internal link to overpolicing because it throws more militarized police officers into communities that already disproportionately suffer from police brutality and overpolicing
Community distrust of the police undermines democratic legitimacy and the effectiveness of law enforcement. NIJ 2016 - National Institute of Justice the research, development and evaluation agency of the U.S. Department of Justice, “Race, Trust and Police Legitimacy,” National Institute of Justice. July 14, 2016. Accessed November 17, 2016. http://www.nij.gov/topics/law-enforcement/legitimacy/pages/welcome.aspx AT The public's perceptions about the lawfulness and legitimacy of law enforcement are an important criterion for judging policing in a democratic society. Lawfulness means that police comply with constitutional, statutory and professional norms. Legitimacy is linked to the public's belief about the police and its willingness to recognize police authority.¶ Racial and ethnic minority perceptions that the police lack lawfulness and legitimacy, based largely on their interactions with the police, can lead to distrust of the police. Distrust of police has serious consequences. It undermines the legitimacy of law enforcement, and without legitimacy police lose their ability and authority to function effectively.
11/19/16
NOV DEC TRC Updated
Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 1 | Opponent: West | Judge: Scoggin The affirmative holds out the hope that monetary judgments can stamp out the stain of systematic violence one racist cop at a time, but they grossly underestimate the magnitude of the problem. Last week 60 million Americans voted for the Presidential candidate endorsed by the KKK and the American Nazi Party. Micro-Retributions are cathartic but ultimately impotent. The affirmative will never solve so long as it fails to undertake a radical reexamination of the deep racism at the heart of our culture and the magnitude of the suffering perpetrated against people of color.
Counterplan Text: The United States Federal Government will authorize a standing Truth and Reconciliation Commission to solicit testimony from victims and perpetrators of police brutality and misconduct and to provide policy recommendations for social and criminal justice reform. No proceedings of the Commission may be used as evidence in a court of law, and nobody may be charged with a crime on the basis of their testimony to the Commission.
The model is Post-Apartheid South Africa. Minnow elaborates: Martha Minnow Morgan and Helen Chu Dean and Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence, 1998. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission launches not only an inquiry into what happened, but also a process intended to promote reconciliation. Other truth commissions seek information to support prosecutions. The information unearthed by the TRC may lead to some legal charges and trials, but its central direction, enhanced by its power to grant amnesty to perpetrators on the condition that they cooperate fully, moves away from prosecutions toward an ideal of restorative justice. Unlike punishment, which imposes a penalty or injury for a violation, restorative justice seeks to repair the injustice, to make up for it, and to effect corrective changes in the record, in relationships, and in future behavior. Offenders have responsibility in the resolution. The harmful act, rather than the offender, is to be renounced. Repentance and forgiveness are encouraged.¶ By design, the TRC includes a committee devoted to proposing economic and symbolic acts of reparation for survivors and for devastated communities. Monetary payments to the victimized, health and social services, memorials and other acts of symbolic commemoration would become governmental policies in an effort to restore victims and social relationships breached by violence and atrocity. The range of money, services, and public art suggests the kinds of steps that can be pursued in the search for restorative justice.
Immunity is to key to compelling full and open testimony. Jack M. Balkin, “A Body of Inquiries”, The New York Times, Jan 10, 2009. The South African model offered witnesses potential amnesty (which was not always given) to coax testimony (which did not always occur). American commissions and hearings should have the power to bestow immunity to compel testimony, either “use” immunity (the testimony cannot be used in any future prosecution) or “transactional” immunity (no prosecution for acts connected to the subject of the testimony). Sensitive evidence that affects national security could be taken in closed proceedings and summarized or published in redacted form.
Competition
First, Mutual Exclusivity: The aff and the CP are dispositionally opposed. Civil litigation entails an adversarial relationship and a finding of fault coupled with a symbolic act of blaming, whereas Minnow explains that the CP focuses on forgiveness and mutual solidarity. It’s impossible to engage in good-faith reconciliation with someone who you have sued. At absolute worst, the perm fails because either one eviscerates the solvency of the other. Minnow furthers with additional warrants: (each color is an individual warrant) Martha Minnow, “The Hope For Healing: What Can Truth Commissions Do?”, Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions, Eds. Robert Rotberg and Dennis Thomas, July 2010. Yet arguments for alternatives may be founded not just in search for a substitute when trials are not workable. The trial as a form of response to injustice has its own internal limitations. Litigation is not an ideal form of social action. The financial and emotional costs of litigation may be most apparent when private individuals sue one another, but there are parallel problems when a government or an international tribunal prosecutes. Victims and other witnesses undergo the ordeals of testifying and facing cross-examination. Usually, they are given no simple opportunity to convey directly the narrative of their experience. Evidentiary rules and rulings limit the factual material that can be included. Trial procedure makes for laborious and even boring sessions that risk anesthetizing even the most avid listener and dulling sensibilities even in the face of recounted horrors. The simplistic questions of guilt or innocence framed by the criminal trial can never capture the multiple sources of mass violence. If the social goals include gaining public acknowledgment and producing a complete account of what happened, the trial process is at best an imperfect means. If the goals extend to repairing the dignity of those who did survive and enlarging their chances for rewarding lives, litigation falls even farther short. Trials focus on perpetrators, not victims. They consult victims only to illustrate the fact or scope of the defendants’ guilt. Victims are not there for public acknowledgment or even to tell, fully, their own stories. Trials interrupt and truncate victim testimony with direct and cross examination and conceptions of relevance framed by the elements of the charges. Judges and juries listen to victims with skepticism tied to the presumption of defendants’ innocence. Trials afford no role in their process or content for bystanders or for the complex interactions among ideologies, leaders, mass frustrations, historic and invented lines of hatred, and acts of brutality.
Net Benefits First is Systemic Reform Addressing institutional violence against people of color requires a much broader lens than individual civil trials can provide. Only the CP can solve. Martha Minnow, The Hope For Healing: What Can Truth Commissions Do?, Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions, Eds. Robert Rotberg and Dennis Thomas, July 2010. The aspiration to develop as full an account as possible requires a process of widening the lens, sifting varieties of evidentiary materials, and drafting syntheses of factual material that usually does not accompany a trial. Yet truth commissions typically undertake to write the history of what happened in precisely these ways. Putting together distinct events and the role of different actors is more likely to happen when people have the chance to look across incidents and to connect the stories of many victims and many offenders. A truth commission can examine the role of entire sectors of a society—such as the medical profession, the media, and business—in enabling and failing to prevent mass violence. The sheer narrative project of a truth commission makes it more likely than trials to yield accounts of entire regimes. Trials in contrast focus on particular individuals and their conduct in particular moments in time, with decisions of guilt or nonguilt, and opinions tailored to these particular questions of individual guilt.
A truth and reconciliation process exposes the magnitude of the atrocity for all to see and allow us to begin to deploy the resources needed to heal the trauma. Fania Davis civil rights attorney, “This Country Needs a Truth and Reconciliation Process on Violence Against African Americans—Right Now”, Yes Magazine, July 8, 2016. Bearing in mind its expansive historical context, the Truth and Reconciliation process would set us on a collective search for shared truths about the nature, extent, causes, and consequences of extrajudicial killings of black youth, say, for the last two decades. Through the process, those truths will be told, understood, and made known far and wide. Its task would also include facing and beginning to heal the massive historical harms that threaten us all as a nation but take the lives of black and brown children especially. We would utilize the latest insights and methodologies from the field of trauma healing.
Amnesty results in the revelation of evidence that would never be appear in a court trial. Only TRCs can expose the institutional and systemic nature of police brutality. Martha Minnow, “The Hope For Healing: What Can Truth Commissions Do?”, Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions, Eds. Robert Rotberg and Dennis Thomas, July 2010. The trade of amnesty for testimony allowed the TRC to use the participation by some to gain the participation of others. Five mid-level political officers sought amnesty and in so doing implicated General Johan van der Merwe as the one who gave the order to fire on demonstrators in 1992.13 The general then himself applied for amnesty before the commission and confessed that he had indeed given the order to fire. He in turn implicated two cabinet-level officials who gave him orders.14 Evidence of this kind, tracing violence to decisions at the highest governmental levels, is likely to be held only by those who themselves participated in secret conversations, and the adversarial processes of trials are not likely to unearth it. Combining information from amnesty petitions and hearings with victim testimony and independent investigations, the TRC had the chance to develop a much richer array of evidence than the courts would have had in expensive and lengthy criminal prosecutions.
Second is Liberalism Adversarial legal processes fail to honor the degree to which violence distorts the basic fabric of human society. Peter Gabel, "From Individual Rights to the Beloved Community: A New Vision of Justice", Tikkun, Winter 2012. As you read this from within your own private space, as you float through the solitude of your day, consider how the institutions of American law condition and envelop you in the spiritual prison of your separation. You are a citizen in a democracy, but the most fundamental right that defines that democracy is the “secret ballot” rather than a process expressive of any communal bond that unites us. You are legally bound to all others through a “constitution” that protects you against, and therefore affirms the constant threat of, infringement on your right to freedom of speech, of religion, of association, and your right to be protected against others searching your house or making you quarter soldiers or taking away your guns … but that binding constitution affirms nothing about our connection to one another and therefore offers no commitment to making End Page 18 sure that our social connection will be realized through our legal process. The substantive law of property guarantees that we can own separate land parcels and exclude others from those parcels, but affirms no binding obligation to share the land, or the food that it produces, or the shelters that we construct upon it. The law of contracts guarantees our freedom to enter binding agreements with others, but in a social context that assumes we are competitors in a marketplace whose goal is to get the benefit of our bargains, rather than “cooperators” whose intention is to realize ourselves through mutual fulfillment and shared objectives. Tort law assures we are protected against others who might pull a chair out from under us as we sit down to the dinner table, or intentionally or negligently harm us on highways or in the operating room or through the consumer goods we buy in their stores, but it does not affirm that we have any duty to care for each other, to rescue each other if we are in distress, or to otherwise act in accordance with a bond emanating from our common humanity. Under the law of corporations, shareholders are assumed to be anonymous investors seeking as discrete individuals to maximize their short-term profits and to be bound to each other solely by that goal, rather than to be socially responsible beings united by a corporate aspiration that will further the well-being of the community or the planet. And finally there is the criminal law, which understands social violence of all kinds as freely chosen individual acts against the state calling for punishment of the individual actor rather than as social acts expressive of distortions within an inherently social fabric that call for repair of the social fabric itself.
11/19/16
NOV DEC Truth and Reconciliation FrameworkCP
Tournament: Damus | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Loyola | Judge: Panel Framework Employing discourse that permits the subject to construct ethical obligations is lexically prior to any particular system of moral rules. Therefore we are obliged to critique the normative context in which the subject arises before we consider any particular set of norms. Failure to attend to this process can not only render our moral assertions meaningless but also make them a guise for ethical violence Judith Butler Prof. Rhetoric and Comp. Literature at Berkeley, Giving an Account of Oneself, New York: Fordham U. Press (2005), p. 135-136 What perhaps emerges most emphatically from the conjunction of these very disparate positions (Adorno, Foucault, Laplanche, Levinas, Nietzsche, Hegel) is that the response to the demand to give an account of oneself is a matter of fathoming at once the formation of the subject (self, ego, moi, first-person perspective) and its relation to responsibility. A subject who can never fully give an account of itself may well be a result of being related at non-narratable levels of existence to others in ways that have a supervenient ethical significance. If the “I” cannot effectively be disjoined from the impress of social life, then ethics will surely not only presuppose rhetoric (and the analysis of the mode of address) but social critique as well. The Nietzschean postulation of the self as a “cause” has a genealogy that must be understood as part of the reduction of ethical philosophy to the inward mutilations of conscience. Such a move not only severs the task of ethics from the matter of social life and the historically revisable grids of intelligibility within which any of us emerge, if we do, but it fails to understand the resource of primary and irreducible relations to others as a precondition of ethical responsiveness. One might rightly quarrel with the postulation of a preontological persecution by the Other in Levinas or offer an account that challenges the primacy of seduction in Laplanche. But either way, one must ask how the formation of the subject implies a framework for understanding ethical response and a theory of responsibility. If certain versions of self-preoccupied moral inquiry return us to a narcissism that is supported through socially enforced modes of individualism, and if that narcissism also leads to an ethical violence that knows no grace of self-acceptance or forgiveness, then it would seem obligatory, if not urgent, to return the question of responsibility to the question “How are we formed within social life, and at what cost?” Thus, the standard is promoting the flourishing of community relationships Counterplan Text: The United States Federal Government will authorize a standing Truth and Reconciliation Commission to solicit testimony from victims and perpetrators of police brutality and misconduct and to provide policy recommendations for social and criminal justice reform. No proceedings of the Commission may be used as evidence in a court of law, and nobody may be charged with a crime on the basis of their testimony to the Comission.
The model is Post-Apartheid South Africa. Minnow elaborates: Minnow, Martha Morgan and Helen Chu Dean and Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence, 1998. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission launches not only an inquiry into what happened, but also a process intended to promote reconciliation. Other truth commissions seek information to support prosecutions. The information unearthed by the TRC may lead to some legal charges and trials, but its central direction, enhanced by its power to grant amnesty to perpetrators on the condition that they cooperate fully, moves away from prosecutions toward an ideal of restorative justice. Unlike punishment, which imposes a penalty or injury for a violation, restorative justice seeks to repair the injustice, to make up for it, and to effect corrective changes in the record, in relationships, and in future behavior. Offenders have responsibility in the resolution. The harmful act, rather than the offender, is to be renounced. Repentance and forgiveness are encouraged.¶ By design, the TRC includes a committee devoted to proposing economic and symbolic acts of reparation for survivors and for devastated communities. Monetary payments to the victimized, health and social services, memorials and other acts of symbolic commemoration would become governmental policies in an effort to restore victims and social relationships breached by violence and atrocity. The range of money, services, and public art suggests the kinds of steps that can be pursued in the search for restorative justice.
Immunity is to key to compelling full and open testimony. Jack M. Balkin, “A Body of Inquiries”, The New York Times, Jan 10, 2009. The South African model offered witnesses potential amnesty (which was not always given) to coax testimony (which did not always occur). American commissions and hearings should have the power to bestow immunity to compel testimony, either “use” immunity (the testimony cannot be used in any future prosecution) or “transactional” immunity (no prosecution for acts connected to the subject of the testimony). Sensitive evidence that affects national security could be taken in closed proceedings and summarized or published in redacted form.
Competition
First, Mutual Exclusivity: The aff and the CP are dispositionally opposed. Civil litigation entails an adversarial relationship and a finding of fault coupled with a symbolic act of blaming, whereas Minnow explains that the CP focuses on forgiveness and mutual solidarity. It’s impossible to engage in good-faith reconciliation with someone who you have sued. At absolute worst, the perm fails because either one eviscerates the solvency of the other. Minnow furthers with additional warrants: (each color is an individual warrant) Martha Minnow, “The Hope For Healing: What Can Truth Commissions Do?”, Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions, Eds. Robert Rotberg and Dennis Thomas, July 2010. Yet arguments for alternatives may be founded not just in search for a substitute when trials are not workable. The trial as a form of response to injustice has its own internal limitations. Litigation is not an ideal form of social action. The financial and emotional costs of litigation may be most apparent when private individuals sue one another, but there are parallel problems when a government or an international tribunal prosecutes. Victims and other witnesses undergo the ordeals of testifying and facing cross-examination. Usually, they are given no simple opportunity to convey directly the narrative of their experience. Evidentiary rules and rulings limit the factual material that can be included. Trial procedure makes for laborious and even boring sessions that risk anesthetizing even the most avid listener and dulling sensibilities even in the face of recounted horrors. The simplistic questions of guilt or innocence framed by the criminal trial can never capture the multiple sources of mass violence. If the social goals include gaining public acknowledgment and producing a complete account of what happened, the trial process is at best an imperfect means. If the goals extend to repairing the dignity of those who did survive and enlarging their chances for rewarding lives, litigation falls even farther short. Trials focus on perpetrators, not victims. They consult victims only to illustrate the fact or scope of the defendants’ guilt. Victims are not there for public acknowledgment or even to tell, fully, their own stories. Trials interrupt and truncate victim testimony with direct and cross examination and conceptions of relevance framed by the elements of the charges. Judges and juries listen to victims with skepticism tied to the presumption of defendants’ innocence. Trials afford no role in their process or content for bystanders or for the complex interactions among ideologies, leaders, mass frustrations, historic and invented lines of hatred, and acts of brutality.
Second, Net Benefits, disads to the aff generate competition.
Net Benefits
First is Reform Qualified immunity only applies to civil suits against individuals. Since qualified immunity only shields civil suits against individual police officers, limiting the doctrine cannot solve for systemic oppression and toxic police cultures. This is characteristic of the Aff’s flawed legal outlook that values retribution over restorative justice and emphasizes punishment. (functions: 1. Da to aff bc aff can’t solve systemic impacts 2. Deterrence fails (solvency takeout to aff) 3. Aff fails under neg fw bc it doesn't actually make people whole) Vitale, Alex New York State Advisory Committee to the US Civil Right Commission, “ 2 Very Different Ways to Punish Killer Cops”, The Nation, May 5, 2015. The role of the state’s attorney is based on a very degraded notion of justice. It relies almost solely on the notion of punishment in the form of incarceration acting as a deterrent on the behavior of the convicted (specific deterrence) and the rest of us (general deterrence). This whole system assumes that people are simplistic engines of rational calculation whose behaviors can be manipulated by a series of escalating threats and punishments. We know that this system rarely provides real justice for victims or communities and often destroys the lives of those being punished. More importantly, it doesn’t work. For generations we’ve been waging a war on drugs that has relied on the ever increasing incarceration of young people, and yet drugs are cheaper, of higher quality, and easier to obtain than ever before. No amount of mass incarceration seems to make any difference. It’s a little like threatening suicide bombers with the death penalty, in that it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of human motivation.
Truth and reconciliation best promotes police culture reform, which solves the root cause of the aff impacts at a higher degree of probability than the aff does Vitale 2 New York State Advisory Committee to the US Civil Right Commission, “ 2 Very Different Ways to Punish Killer Cops”, The Nation, May 5, 2015. Perhaps we would learn more about the nature of police culture and why it so frequently treats young men of color as less than human. Heartfelt accounts from actual police officers about the callousness of their actions and attitudes might lead to some real soul searching on the part of police officers, political leaders, and the public about the caustic nature of much of police culture as well as possible solutions.¶ In return, the officers would be compelled to take actions to try to repair some of the harms they have caused to the victim’s family and community. These offices could be put to work on community projects that would benefit the community such as restoring parks. Perhaps they could be cajoled into living in the community for some length of time to experience firsthand what life is like there. Possibly more importantly, they could be compelled to work with other police officers in Baltimore and elsewhere to try to get to the root of abusive police practices. Police are much more likely to respond to the real-world experiences of fellow officers than to the urgings of the community activists who often appear before them.
Restorative Justice spills over to end mass incarceration and construct a more just and peaceful society based on mutual respect Davis, Fania civil rights attorney, “This Country Needs a Truth and Reconciliation Process on Violence Against African Americans—Right Now”, Yes Magazine, July 8, 2016. It’s impossible to predict whether similar outcomes would emerge from a Truth and Reconciliation process in Ferguson—and the United States. But it’s our best chance. And, if history is any guide, it could result in restitution to those harmed, memorials to the fallen, including films, statues, museums, street renamings, public art, or theatrical re-enactments. It might also engender calls to use restorative and other practices to stop violence and interrupt the school-to-prison pipeline and mass incarceration strategies. New curricula could emerge that teach both about historic injustices and movements resisting those injustices. Teach-ins, police trainings, restorative policing practices, and police review commissions are also among the universe of possibilities.¶ In the face of the immense terrain to be covered on the journey toward a more reconciled America, no single process will Second is Restorative Justice A shift to restorative justice acknowledges our relationships and common humanity and is critical to ending the cycle of division and oppression Minnow, Martha Morgan and Helen Chu Dean and Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence, 1998. Leading statements of the restorative justice vision focus on responses to ordinary crime. 8 Restorative justice emphasizes the humanity of both offenders and victims. It seeks repair of social connections and peace rather than retribution against the offenders. 9 Building connections and enhancing communication between perpetrators and those they victimized and forging ties across the community, takes precedence over punishment or law enforcement.¶ These aims of restorative justice reflect a practical view about human psychology. Unlike retributive approaches, which may reinforce anger and a sense of victimhood, reparative approaches instead aim to help victims move beyond anger and a sense of powerlessness. They also attempt to reintegrate offenders into the community: South Africa's TRC emphasizes truth-telling, public acknowledgment, and actual reparations as crucial elements for restoration of justice and community. The TRC proceeds on the hope that getting as full an account of what happened as possible, and according it public acknowledgment, will lay the foundations for a new, reconciling nation instead of fomenting waves of renewed revenge and divisiveness. Archbishop Desmond Tutu explained the TRC's goals in these terms: “Our nation needs healing. Victims and survivors who bore the brunt of the apartheid system need healing Perpetrators are, in their own way, victims of the apartheid system and they, too, need healing“ 11 Amnesty results in the revelation of evidence that would never be appear in a court trial, strengthening the relative solvency of the CP Minnow 2, “The Hope For Healing: What Can Truth Commissions Do?”, Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions, Eds. Robert Rotberg and Dennis Thomas, July 2010. The trade of amnesty for testimony allowed the TRC to use the participation by some to gain the participation of others. Five mid-level political officers sought amnesty and in so doing implicated General Johan van der Merwe as the one who gave the order to fire on demonstrators in 1992.13 The general then himself applied for amnesty before the commission and confessed that he had indeed given the order to fire. He in turn implicated two cabinet-level officials who gave him orders.14 Evidence of this kind, tracing violence to decisions at the highest governmental levels, is likely to be held only by those who themselves participated in secret conversations, and the adversarial processes of trials are not likely to unearth it. Combining information from amnesty petitions and hearings with victim testimony and independent investigations, the TRC had the chance to develop a much richer array of evidence than the courts would have had in expensive and lengthy criminal prosecutions.
11/7/16
SEPT OCT Ban Waste Dumping on Tao Lands CP
Tournament: Meadows | Round: 4 | Opponent: Brentwood | Judge: Nick Steele TEXT: The republic of China will ban nuclear waste dumping on Orchid Island against the Tao people The Tao people want all nuclear waste dumping banned on their Island, Orchid Island. Cultural Survival this is from their Website. They are a group that “supports Indigenous communities’ self-determination”. "Orchid Island - Nuclear Waste and the Yami." Cultural Survival. Cultural Survival, 19 Feb. 2010. Web. 28 Oct. 2016 Now, the government is planning to establish a second dump on the tiny island. Government spokesmen claim that the natives have little to worry about. The new dump will face the ocean, and hills on three sides will protect the nearest village (which is three miles away). The dump site would be used to store low-radiation-level waste such as contaminated clothing and sludge. "What little radiation that leaks, if any, should be blocked by the hills and residential exposure should be minimal," the spokesman said, reassuringly. But this time Yami are determined to block the new move. "We are too late to stop the construction of the first one, but we can't let our lives be ruined by a second dump or perhaps more will be built," stated a Yami representative. The tribe, thanks to the influx of information, is more aware of the dangers of dumping nuclear waste. In the words of one young Yami, Although the storm at sea is frightening, we can see the waves, feel the wind. So we can fight the storm. But we cannot see or reel this nuclear radiation. How can we fight something we cannot see or feel? But we know it can destroy our land, our life. That is what really frightens us. Competitive through net benefits Net Benefit First, He’s telling the Tao people what they want without engaging with what their protests have been arguing for decades. This is a disad to the aff discourse which means that the aff policy is uniquely bad because it entails paternalistic statements that further oppress the Tao people.
The Tao people have been protesting the nuclear dumping for ages. Chung, Hui-Yun. By. "Nuclear Dump Dispute on Orchid Island." American.edu. ICE Case Studies, 16 Dec. 2005. Web. 28 Oct. 2016. Since an Orchid Island resident wrote an article to question the nuclear dump in 1985, the issue has been taken seriously by the Orchid Island residents and people in mainland Taiwan. More articles and reports have appeared in the newspaper and on TV. The residents on Orchid Island started their protests , which attempted to stop the Taipower company from sending more nuclear waste to the islet. In 1987, an organization, Yamwei Tribe Young Generation Union (YTYG), was set up to organize a series of anti-nuclear movements by the Orchid Island people. The most successful protest formed by the Orchid Island people was the 530 anti-nuclear movement in 1993. The impact of this demonstration was that the Legislative Yuan froze the financial budget for the second stage of construction of the second nuclear waste field on the Orchid Island.
Second, he is using their suffering to justify something that he was going to argue for anyway, so he is not being inclusive of their culture when he uses it to justify something that they might not even want. He is commodifying the voice of the Tao people in order to fit a predetermined frame of banning nuclear power instead of authentically engaging with the voices of the tribe. The CP however, does so
Third, transnational indigenous solidarity. CP increases cultural inclusion by creating a virtual network of indigenous struggles. A rising tide of indigenous struggles. All indigenous peoples have been victims of colonization in the same way that native Americans have been colonized by European peoples and how in Taiwan the Han Chinese pushed the Taiwanese aborigines out of their original lands violently.
The Navajo Nation’s ban on uranium mining confirms that indigenous groups throughout the world are speaking against the EFFECTS of nuclear power. Native peoples are speaking out and we should listen to them Laduke 2005 Laduke, Winona. “Navajos ban uranium mining.” Earth Island Journal 20.3 (37-38), Autumn 2005. MO. Navajos (Dinés) who have lost family members from radioactive contamination – and those fighting new proposals for uranium development – celebrated the passage April 19 of the Dine Natural Resources Protection Act of 2005. Navajo Tribal Chairman Joe Shirley’s signing of the Act into law signaled a bold step in protecting the arid southwest’s most precious natural resource – water – from mining contamination. The Act bans all uranium mining and processing anywhere on the Navajo Reservation.¶ It’s very simple: Uranium kills,” said Mark Maryboy of the Navajo Council Delegate. “This legislation just chopped the legs off the uranium monster,” added Norman Brown of Diné Bidziil, a coalition of 23 Navajo organizations seeking to end uranium mining on Navajo lands. While celebrating the passage of the law, the first of its kind in Indian country, the Diné community vowed to oppose passage of a federal energy bill with subsidies of $30 million for uranium mining.¶ The Navajo Nation’s new law passed as the Bush administration called for new investment in nuclear power to mitigate global climate change. Calling nuclear power “one of the safest and cleanest sources of power in the world,” the Bush administration proposed new subsidies to the US uranium industry. Indeed, global climate change is a leading factor in the push for more nuclear power. As mining conglomerate Rio Tinto Zinc noted in a recent report, climate change worries are prompting renewed debate on nuclear power. After two decades of slack market, uranium prices have doubled in nine months. Rio Tinto Zinc, one of the world’s largest uranium mining corporations, looks to new mines in Australia, the United States, and Kazakhstan to fuel pending and projected reactors in China, and possibly the US.¶ Indigenous lands have historically been the source of most of the world’s uranium production. Native nations in the US, Australia, Canada, and elsewhere are deemed to hold 70 percent of world’s uranium resources. The Navajo Nation alone holds an estimated 25 percent of recoverable uranium in the US. Native people are increasingly concerned about energy proposals for ramping up nuclear power, as new mines will compound the already devastating environmental and health effects of historic mining.
10/29/16
SEPT OCT Blackouts DA
Tournament: St Marks | Round: 6 | Opponent: Anderson SJ | Judge: Bekah Boyer Nuclear plants are a major source of baseload power in the United States. WNA 2016 – World Nuclear Association Industry Advocacy Group, “Nuclear Power in the USA,” World Nuclear Association (Web). September 26, 2016. Accessed October 7, 2016.
Nuclear power plays a major role. The USA has 99 nuclear power reactors in 30 states, operated by 30 different power companies, and in 2015 they produced 798 TWh. Since 2001 these plants have achieved an average capacity factor of over 90, generating up to 807 billion kWh per year and accounting for 20 of total electricity generated. Capacity factor has risen from 50 in the early 1970s, to 70 in 1991, and it passed 90 in 2002, remaining at around this level since. In 2015 it was a record 91.9. The industry invests about $7.5 billion per year in maintenance and upgrades of the plants.
Taking baseload power stations offline dramatically comprises the reliability of the energy grid and the wellbeing of all the people who depend on it. Loris 15 describes the threat of losing baseload power in the context of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, which would decommission a large number of coal-fired plants.
Loris 15 - Nicolas Loris Fellow in Energy and Environmental Policy Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies, “The Many Problems of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan and Climate Regulations: A Primer,” Heritage Foundation: Backgrounder #3025 on Energy and Environment (Web). July 7, 2015. Accessed October 7, 2016. http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2015/07/the-many-problems-of-the-epas-clean-power-plan-and-climate-regulations-a-primer One of the primary concerns among many electricity-grid operators across the country is the power plant regulations’ effect on grid reliability. With uncertainty looming as to which of the EPA’s building blocks will stand in court, taking a massive amount of baseload power offline could create huge strains on the grid that generates and delivers electricity to consumers. The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that more than double the coal-fired power plants will retire as a result of the Clean Power Plan compared to a scenario without the regulation.23 The CPP itself threatens the means to aiding such a traumatic transition from coal by causing the price of natural gas and natural gas infrastructure to increase, making it less economical to build. At the very least, the implementation of the CPP means a very expensive and unnecessary transition for ratepayers.24 A number of regional grid operators as well as the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), an international nonprofit established to ensure the reliability of bulk power in North America, raised issues with the proposed regulation.25¶ NERC wrote in its initial report of the EPA’s regulations that “new reliability challenges may arise with the integration of generation resources that have different ERS Essential Reliability Services characteristics than the units that are projected to retire”—in other words, the intermittent renewables on which the EPA depends to replace retired coal electricity increase the risk of reliability problems. Further, NERC states that the “proposed timeline does not provide enough time to develop sufficient resources to ensure continued reliable operation of the grid by 2020. To attempt to do so would increase the use of controlled load shedding and potential for wide-scale, uncontrolled outages.”26¶ Regional grid operators—the Independent System Operators/Regional Transmission Organizations (ISOs/RTOs)—have expressed similar concerns. The Southwest Power Pool (SPP) warned that “unless the proposed CPP is modified, the SPP region faces serious, detrimental impacts on reliable operation of the bulk electric system—introducing the very real possibility of rolling blackouts or cascading outages that will have significant impacts on human health, public safety, and economic activity.”27
10/16/16
SEPT OCT Coal Shift DA
Tournament: Loyola | Round: 2 | Opponent: idk | Judge: idk Link Nuclear power will be replaced by coal construction and natural gas. Biello 2013, David. “How Nuclear Power Can Stop Global Warming,” December 12, 2013.http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-nuclear-power-can-stop-global-warming/. SD As long as countries like China or the U.S. employ big grids to deliver electricity, there will be a need for generation from nuclear, coal or gas, the kinds of electricity generation that can be available at all times. A rush to phase out nuclear power privileges natural gas—as is planned under Germany's innovative effort, dubbed the Energiewende (energy transition), to increase solar, wind and other renewable power while also eliminating the country's 17 reactors. In fact, Germany hopes to develop technology to store excess electricity from renewable resources as gas to be burned later, a scheme known as “power to gas,” according to economist and former German politician Rainer Baake, now director of an energy transition think tank Agora Energiewende. Even worse, a nuclear stall can lead to the construction of more coal-fired power plants, as happened in the U.S. after the end of the nuclear power plant construction era in the 1980s.∂
After a ban on nuclear power, coal consumption would rise dramatically. Nakata 2002 Toshihiko Nakata Professor at Tohoku University, “Analysis of the impacts of nuclear phase-out on energy systems in Japan” April 2002 Fig. 3 illustrates the changes in the electric power generation under the nuclear phase-out case. The total energy consumption and the carbon dioxide emissions for four scenarios in the year 2041 are shown in Table 4. We can see three ways in which the system has adjusted to make up the nuclear boiler after its phasing out: ∂ The use of coal boiler and coal IGCC rise and the total coal consumption rises by four times. The use of gas combined-cycles and gas boiler rise gradually, and the total gas consumption ∂ grows by three times. The renewables are not seen in the electricity market.
Germany proves that ending the production of nuclear power results in the increased use of coal. Lindsay Abrams (Staff Writer at Salon on sustainable energy), "Germany’s clean energy plan backfired", Salon, 07/30/2013, www.salon.com/2013/07/30/germanys_clean_energy_plan_backfired/ When a nuclear power plant closes, a coal plant opens. At least, that’s the way things are shaping up in Germany, where the move away from nuclear energy appears to have backfired. For the second consecutive year, according to Bloomberg, the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions are set to increase. German Chancellor Angela Merkel made headlines back in 2011 when, in the wake of the reactor meltdown in Tokyo, she announced the impending closure of Germany’s 17 nuclear reactors. Up until then, nuclear-generated energy contributed to a full quarter of the nation’s electricity. At the time, the closings were framed as a positive effort to increase the country’s use of clean energy. As an expert then predicted to the New York Times: “If the government goes ahead with what it said it would do, then Germany will be a kind of laboratory for efforts worldwide to end nuclear power in an advanced economy.” But predictably, when nuclear plants began to shut down, as eight immediately did, something else had to take its place. And coal, which according to Bloomberg is favored by the market, did just that. In the absence of a strong government plan to push natural gas and renewable forms of energy, the share of electricity generated from coal rose from 43 percent in 2010 to 52 percent in the first half of this year, according to the World Nuclear Association.
Impact
The use of coal leads to detrimental health issues and is largely responsible for global warming. Keating 2001. Martha Keating (Policy Advisor at U.S. Environmental Protection Agency), “Cradle to Grave: the Environmental Impacts from Coal”, Clean Air Task Force, June, 2001 SD The electric power industry is the largest toxic polluter in the country, and coal, which is used to generate over half of the electricity produced in the U.S., is the dirtiest of all fuels.1 From mining to coal cleaning, from transportation to electricity generation to disposal, coal releases numerous toxic pollut- ants into our air, our waters and onto our lands.2 Nation- ally, the cumulative impact of all of these effects is magnified by the enormous quantities of coal burned each year – nearly 900 million tons. Promoting more coal use without also providing additional environmental safe- guards will only increase this toxic abuse of our health and ecosystems. ∂ The trace elements contained in coal (and others formed during combustion) are a large group of diverse pollutants with a number of health and environmental effects.3 They are a public health concern because at sufficient exposure levels they adversely affect human health. Some are known to cause cancer, others impair reproduc- tion and the normal development of children, and still others damage the nervous and immune systems. Many are also respira- tory irritants that can worsen respiratory conditions such as asthma. They are an environmen- tal concern because they damage ecosystems. Power plants also emit large quantities of carbon dioxide (CO2), the “greenhouse gas” 2 largely responsible for climate change.
The presence of coalmines in an area detrimentally affects the communities there, who are extremely poor minorities. Keating 2001. Martha Keating (Policy Advisor at U.S. Environmental Protection Agency), “Cradle to Grave: the Environmental Impacts from Coal”, Clean Air Task Force, June, 2001 Children living in the vicinity of power plants have the highest health risks. Adults are also at risk from contami- nated groundwater and from inhaling dust from the facility. The poverty rate of people living within one mile of power plant waste facilities is twice as high as the national average and the percentage of non-white populations within one mile is 30 percent higher than the national average.51 ∂ Consequently, there may be other factors that make these people more vulnerable to health risks from these facilities. These include age (both young and old), nutritional status and access to health care. Also, these people are exposed to numerous other air pollutants emitted from the power plant smokestacks and possibly to air pollution from other nearby industrial facilities or lead paint in the home. Similar high poverty rates are found in 118 of the 120 coal-producing counties in America where power plant combustion wastes are increasingly being disposed of in unlined, under-regulated coal mine pits often directly into groundwater. ∂ Mineworkers and their families also often reside in the communities where the coal is being mined. Some of the additional health risks and dangers to residents of ∂ coal mining communities include injuries and fatalities related to the collapse of highwalls, roads and homes adjacent to or above coal seams being mined; the blasting of flyrock offsite onto a homeowner’s land or public roadway; injury and/ or suffocation at abandoned mine sites; and the inhalation of airborne fine dust particles off-site.
Global warming leads to the extinction of people and animals. Urban 2015 Mark C. Urban “Accelerating extinction risk from climate change” Science 01 May 2015: Overall, 7.9 of species are predicted to become extinct from climate change; (95 CIs, 6.2 and 9.8) (Fig. 1). Results were robust to model type, weighting scheme, statistical method, potential publication bias, and missing studies (fig. S1 and table S2) (6). This proportion supports an estimate from a 5-year synthesis of studies (7). Its divergence from individual studies (1–4) can be explained by their specific assumptions and taxonomic and geographic foci. These differences provide the opportunity to understand how divergent factors and assumptions influence extinction risk from climate change.∂ The factor that best explained variation in extinction risk was the level of future climate change. The future global extinction risk from climate change is predicted not only to increase but to accelerate as global temperatures rise (regression coefficient = 0.53; CIs, 0.46 and 0.61) (Fig. 2). Global extinction risks increase from 2.8 at present to 5.2 at the international policy target of a 2°C post-industrial rise, which most experts believe is no longer achievable (8). If the Earth warms to 3°C, the extinction risk rises to 8.5. If we follow our current, business-as-usual trajectory representative concentration pathway (RCP) 8.5; 4.3°C rise, climate change threatens one in six species (16). Results were robust to alternative data transformations and were bracketed by models with liberal and conservative extinction thresholds (figs. S2 and S3 and table S3).∂ Regions also differed significantly in extinction risk (ΔDIC = 12.6) (Fig. 3 and table S4). North America and Europe were characterized by the lowest risks (5 and 6, respectively), and South America (23) and Australia and New Zealand (14) were characterized by the highest risks. These latter regions face no-analog climates (9) and harbor diverse assemblages of endemic species with small ranges. Extinction risks in Australia and New Zealand are further exacerbated by small land masses that limit shifts to new habitat (10). Poorly studied regions might face higher risks, but insights are limited without more research (for example, only four studies in Asian ). Currently, most predictions (60) center on North America and Europe, suggesting a need to refocus efforts toward less studied and more threatened regions.
Nuclear power is responsible for a large portion of the world’s energy. NPR ‘11 NPR “A Nuclear-Powered World.” May 16, 2011. http://www.npr.org/2011/05/16/136288669/a-nuclear-powered-world LG Nuclear power plants generate 14 percent of the world's electricity, but some countries are more dependent on this power source than others. France relies on nuclear for 75.2 percent of its electricity; the United States, about 20 percent. And while China gets just 1.9 percent of their electricity from nuclear (the lowest proportion of any nuclear country) it plans to boost the number of nuclear power plants in operation by over 1,000 percent by 2020.
Many countries are reliant upon nuclear power. WNA ’15 World Nuclear Association, February 2015, Nuclear Power in the World Today, http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Current-and-Future-Generation/Nuclear-Power-in-the-World-Today/ LG Sixteen countries depend on nuclear power for at least a quarter of their electricity. France gets around three-quarters of its power from nuclear energy, while Belgium, Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, Slovenia and Ukraine get one-third or more. South Korea and Bulgaria normally get more than 30 of their power from nuclear energy, while in the USA, UK, Spain, Romania and Russia almost one-fifth is from nuclear. Japan is used to relying on nuclear power for more than one-quarter of its electricity and is expected to return to that level. Among countries which do not host nuclear power plants, Italy and Denmark get almost 10 of their power from nuclear.
And, other resources can’t make up for the loss in energy that would occur if we ban nuclear production. Our Energy Policy Organization ‘16 Our Energy Policy Organization, July 1-6, 2016, Nuclear Energy: Overview, http://www.ourenergypolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/NEO.pdf DOA: 8-10-16 LG For those who hope that renewables can quickly fill the gap left by closed nuclear energy facilities, NEI points out that wind and solar lack the scale and reliability of nuclear power plants that usually run 24/7 except when they are in refueling outages “Renewable sources are intermittent and do not have the same value to the grid as dispatchable baseload resources like nuclear plants. And renewables do not have the scale necessary to replace existing nuclear plants,” NEI say NEI’s comments also point to analysis by the independent market monitor for the New England and New York independent system operators (ISO) demonstrating that preserving existing nuclear power plants has a lower carbon abatement cost than renewables sources like wind and solar. “Looking to the future, the Energy Information Administration’s Annual Energy Outlook expects nuclear energy to produce 789 billion kWh in 2040. By then, EIA forecasts wind and solar will produce 818 billion kWh. So it will take the next 25 years for wind and solar to catch up to where nuclear energy is today,” NEI says. Impact A shift away from nuclear power impacts the economy. Edward D. Kee, CEO of Nuclear Economics Consulting and expert in nuclear economics August 4, 2016, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “Market failure” and nuclear power, http://thebulletin.org/E2809Cmarket-failureE2809D-and-nuclear-power9703 LG ∂ Recent closures of nuclear power plants hit the bottom line of those who can afford it least: households and businesses. After the shutdown of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating station in 2013, California consumers paid $350 million more for electricity the following year. ∂ “Sooner or later, that nuclear capacity must be replaced and, when it is replaced with new gas- red combined cycle capacity, consumers will pay more on a levelized lifecycle cost basis,” NEI warns. ∂ Shutting down nuclear power plants also results in higher emissions. This is because (zero-emissions) nuclear power plants are usually replaced with natural gas plants which produce significant amounts of carbon emissions. In California, carbon emissions rose 9 million tons per year after the closure of San Onofre. In New England, emissions rose five percent after the closure of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant in 2014. ∂ NEI emphasizes that the reasons for many of these recent premature closures are short-term price signals that are unsustainable, not long-term market fundamentals. Economic decline puts countries at risk of political instability, unrest, authoritarian power. Mathews, Jessica Tuchman. President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace "Redefining Security." Foreign Affairs 68.2 (1989): 162-77. Web. AJ If such resource and population trends are not addressed, as they are not in so much of the world today, the resulting economic decline leads to frustration, resentment, domestic unrest or even civil war. Human suffering and turmoil make countries ripe for authoritarian government or external sub version. Environmental refugees spread the disruption across national borders. Haiti, a classic example, was once so forested and fertile that it was known as the "Pearl of the Antilles." Now deforested, soil erosion in Haiti is so rapid that some farmers believe stones grow in their fields, while bulldozers are needed to clear the streets of Port-au-Prince of topsoil that flows down from the mountains in the rainy season. While many of the boat people who fled to the United States left because of the brutality of the Duvalier regimes, there is no question that--and this is not widely recognized--many Hai tians were forced into the boats by the impossible task of farming bare rock. Until Haiti is reforested, it will never be politically stable.
10/7/16
SEPT OCT Increase CP
Tournament: Loyola | Round: 2 | Opponent: idk | Judge: idk Increase CP Text Text: Countries will increase their production of nuclear power. Competition Mutual exclusivity: you can’t ban nuclear power while increasing it’s production. Solvency Advocate
Increasing nuclear power is economically, environmentally, and socially beneficial, Baddoo, N. R. "Stainless steel in construction: a review of research, applications, challenges and opportunities." Journal of Constructional Steel Research 64.11 (2008): 1199-1206. MC
A number of factors currently weigh in favour of increased nuclear power generation. Firstly, the higher world market price for fossil fuels, largely driven by sustained demand, has put nuclear power on the agenda of many countries. Nuclear power plants have a ‘front-loaded’ cost structure, i.e. they are relatively expensive to build but relatively inexpensive to operate. The low share of uranium costs in total generating costs protects plant operators against resource price volatility. Secondly, strengthening a country’s energy supply security is best achieved by increasing the number and resiliency of energy supply options; for many developing countries, expanding nuclear power would increase the diversity of energy and electricity supplies. Thirdly, environmental considerations weigh increasingly in favour of nuclear power. Nuclear power at the point of electricity generation does not produce any emissions that damage local air quality, cause regional acidification or contribute to climate change. And finally, there are positive statements and newly-expressed interest from governments around the world. ¶ Worldwide, at the beginning of 2007, there were 435 nuclear power reactors in operation, totalling 367 GWe (gigawatt electrical) of generating capacity. In 2005, nuclear power supplied about 16 of the world’s electricity. In 2006, updated projections of nuclear power expansion to 2030 were published by the IAEA 20, and by the IEA in its World Energy Outlook 2006 21 and a further study extended these predictions to 2050 22. Fig. 5 show these projections, which consider a range of scenarios covering a number of drivers such as introduction of measures to reduce CO2 emissions and improve energy security.
Global Warming Net Benefit Nuclear power plants, even with their energy it takes for their construction, have extreme low greenhouse emissions compared to natural gas and coal. World Nuclear Association. "Comparison of lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions of various electricity generation sources." WNA Report, London (2011). MC
Nuclear power plants achieve a high degree of safety through the defence-in-depth approach where, among other things, the plant is designed with multiple physical barriers. These additional physical barriers are generally not built within other electrical generating systems, and as such, the greenhouse gas emissions attributed to construction of a nuclear power plant are higher than emissions resulting from construction of other generation methods. These additional emissions are accounted for in each of the studies included in Figure 2. Even when emissions from the additional safety barriers are included, the lifecycle emissions of nuclear energy are considerably lower than fossil fuel based generation methods. Averaging the results of the studies places nuclear energy’s 30 tonnes CO2e/GWh emission intensity at 7 of the emission intensity of natural gas, and only 3 of the emission intensity of coal fired power plants. In addition, the lifecycle GHG emission intensity of nuclear power generation is consistent with renewable energy sources including biomass, hydroelectric and wind.
Nuclear power plants emit little gas emissions compared to coal. World Nuclear Association. "Comparison of lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions of various electricity generation sources." WNA Report, London (2011). MC
Based on the studies reviewed, the following observations can be made: • Greenhouse gas emissions of nuclear power plants are among the lowest of any electricity generation method and on a lifecycle basis are comparable to wind, hydro-electricity and biomass. • Lifecycle emissions of natural gas generation are 15 times greater then nuclear. • Lifecycle emissions of coal generation are 30 times greater then nuclear. • There is strong agreement in the published studies on life cycle GHG intensities for each generation method. However, the data demonstrates the sensitivity of lifecycle analysis to assumptions for each electricity generation source. • The range of results is influenced by the primary assumptions made in the lifecycle analysis. For instance, assuming either gaseous diffusion or gas centrifuge enrichment has a bearing on the life cycle results for nuclear.
In the squo, we are not doing enough to prevent dirty bomb terror attacks. If we secure nuclear materials and improve protection of nuclear reactors and used uranium, we can stop these attacks. Solves subpoint b and c Ciricione 2016 Joe Ciricione. “Nuclear Terrorist Risk Greater than you Think” CNN. April 1, 2016. http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/01/opinions/nuclear-terrorism-threat-cirincione/ Nuclear policy experts can seem like Cassandra, constantly prophesizing apocalyptic futures. In case you haven't noticed, we don't live in a Mad Max world devastated by nuclear war. Terrorists have not blown up New York with a makeshift nuclear bomb. We haven't bankrupted ourselves, despite the trillions of dollars spent on Cold War weapons.Cassandra's curse, however, was not that she was wrong, but that no one believed her. I don't know a single nuclear expert who thinks that the threat of nuclear terrorism is shrinking. I don't know a single one who thinks that the actions taken by world leaders at this week's Nuclear Security Summit are enough. We are fearful. And you should be, too.Chills went down a lot of experts' spines last month when we saw the news that the Brussels bombers, the ISIS terrorists who blew up the airport and attacked the metro, were secretly videotaping a Belgian nuclear official. This official worked at a facility that had radiological material that terrorists could use for a "dirty bomb." We do not know if they were filming him or his family, if there was a kidnap plot in motion, or what their exact plans were. But this is not some Hollywood fantasy. This is real. A nuclear terrorist event may becloser than you think.What are the risks? First, that terrorists could steal a complete nuclear weapon, like SPECTRE in the James Bond thriller, "Thunderball." This is hard, but not impossible. The key risk is that the outside terrorists get insider help: For example, a radical jihadist working at a Pakistan weapon storage site. Or the Belgian base just outside Brussels where we still stash a half-dozen nuclear weapons left over from Cold War deployments. Or the Incirlik air base in Turkey where we keep an estimated 50 weapons just 200 miles from the Syrian border.Second, terrorists could steal the "stuff" of a bomb, highly enriched uranium or plutonium. They cannot make this themselves -- that requires huge, high-tech facilities that only nations can construct. But if they could get 50 or 100 pounds of uranium -- about the size of a bag of sugar -- they could construct a crude Hiroshima-style bomb. ISIS, with its money, territory and global networks, poses the greatest threat to do this that we have ever seen. Such a bomb brought by truck or ship or FedEx to an urban target could kill hundreds of thousands, destroy a city and put the world's economy and politics into shock.Third, there is the possibility of a dirty bomb. Frankly, many of us are surprised this has not happened already. I spoke to Jon Stewart on his show 15 years ago about the danger. This is not a nuclear explosion unleashed by splitting atoms, but simply a conventional explosive, like dynamite, laced with radioactive material, like cesium or strontium. A 10-pound satchel of dynamite mixed with less than 2 ounces of cesium (about the size of a pencil eraser) could spew a radioactive cloud over tens of square blocks. No one would die, unless they were right next to the explosion. But the material would stick to the buildings. Inhaling just a speck would greatly increase your risk of getting cancer. You could go into the buildings, but no one would. There would be mass panic and evacuations, and the bomb would render a port, financial district, or government complex unusable and uninhabitable for years until scrubbed clean. Economic losses could be in the trillions.Fourth, terrorists could just attack a nuclear power reactor, fuel storage or other site to trigger a massive radioactive release that could contaminate hundreds or thousands of square miles, like Chernobyl or Fukushima. While nuclear reactors are hardened against outside attack, including by the intentional crash of a medium-sized jet plane, larger planes could destroy them. Or a series of suicide truck bombers. But it might not even take a physical explosion. This week, it was reported the United States and the United Kingdom are to simulate a cyberattack on a nuclear power plant.Can we prevent these attacks? Yes, by eliminating, reducing and securing all supplies of nuclear materials so that terrorists would find it too difficult to get them. And by reducing and better protecting nuclear reactors and spent nuclear fuel. Are we doing enough? No. "The capabilities of some terrorist groups, particularly the Islamic State, have grown dramatically," says Harvard scholar and former Bush Administration official William Tobey, "In a net calculation, the risk of nuclear terrorism is higher than it was two years ago."The United States spends about $35 billion on nuclear weapons every year. This year, we will spend $1.8 billion on all our efforts to stop the spread these weapons and stop nuclear terrorism. You don't have to be a nuclear expert to know something is out of whack here.It is time we put our money where our threats are.
9/10/16
SEPT OCT Japanese Politics DA
Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 1 | Opponent: Lexington | Judge: idk Uniqueness/Brink Japanese pacifism in on the brink now -- Abe’s coalition has enough members to change Japan’s constitution after the latest election but lack of intracoalition consensus prevents it Adelstein, Jake, “Japan's ruling coalition wins election, opening door to constitutional change”, Los Angeles Times, July 10, 2016. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's ruling Liberal Democratic Party and its coalition partner won a majority of contested seats in Japan's parliamentary election Sunday, opening a path for them to amend Japan's postwar pacifist constitution. The results were also an endorsement of Abe’s plans to revive Japan’s flagging economy, the issue that he built his campaign around. Abe has been trying for four years to get the political support to fully implement “Abenomics,” a plan for structural reform of the economy through fiscal stimulus and monetary easing. “In the near term, the most pressing question will be finalizing a stimulus package, which will occupy the ruling coalition for the next several months,” said Tobias Harris, a Japan analyst at the political risk advisory firm Teneo Intelligence. Half of the seats in the upper house of parliament were up for grabs in Sunday’s election. Although the lower house is considered more powerful, the election was significant because it appeared to give Abe’s Liberal Democrats and their allies a two-thirds majority in both houses. Previously, they had a two-thirds majority in the lower house, but only a simple majority in the upper chamber. With two-thirds majorities in both houses, Abe could initiate a constitutional amendment – if his parliamentary allies are on board. Harris said it seemed likely that the Komeito party, Abe’s coalition partner, would block a constitutional amendment, though Abe indicated after the vote that he would push for debate in parliament.
The political situation right now is critical -- Abe will never have a better chance at constitutional revision but it depends on his perception of it as a worthwhile investment of political capital Kimberley, Neal, “Abe may never have a better chance of pushing through constitutional change”, South China Morning Post, July 26, 2016. None of this is inevitable and indeed, given the strength of Japanese popular opposition to the abandonment of Article 9, the Abe government might well decide that their efforts are better focused on revitalising Japan’s economy rather than getting bogged down in controversial constitutional reform. Nevertheless, the parliamentary mathematics suggests Abe may never have a better chance of pushing through constitutional change than now. The question is whether he will seek to expend political capital on the issue. Link – Energy Security Absent nuclear power, Japan’s increased reliance on imported energy sources, the bulk of which pass through the South China Sea, makes freedom of navigation critical to Japan’s security Kimberley, Neal, “South China Sea headbutting of nations is about energy security”, South China Morning Post, May 20, 2016. As the US Energy Information Authority (EIA) wrote, in 2013: “The South China Sea is one of the most important energy trade routes in the world” with “almost a third of global crude oil and over half of global liquefied natural gas (LNG)” passing through it each year. In Japan’s case, given its own lack of natural energy resources and with the vast majority of its nuclear power plants offline since the March, 2011 earthquake and tsunami that resulted in very serious damage to and leakage from the reactors at the Fukushima plant, ensuring free navigation through the South China Sea is critical. As the EIA pointed out in January, Japan is now the world’s largest LNG importer, second-largest coal importer and third-largest net importer of crude oil and oil products. And the vast bulk of those energy imports are sea-borne. At the time of the Fukushima disaster Japan generated some 27 per cent of its energy from nuclear power and that has had to be replaced by even larger hydrocarbon imports, such as crude oil. “Japan is primarily dependent on the Middle East for its crude oil imports,” the EIA said, noting that “roughly 84 per cent of Japanese crude oil imports originated from this region in 2014, up from 70 per cent in the mid-1980s.” All those shipments pass through the South China Sea as they wend their way to Japan. As for LNG, 84 per cent of Japan’s imports in 2013 came from eight sources, Australia, Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. All of that too has to pass through the South China Sea. Energy security concerns are central to both official strategic thinking and the perception of the general public in Japan Holter, Dominik thesis for MA in International Relations from Webster University Vienna, The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation: Implications for Japanese Foreign and Security Policy, 2007. Japan is an oil and gas importing country almost completely dependent on imports for its energy. In 2003, fifty percent of Japan's energy needs were met by oil, twenty percent by coal, fourteen percent by natural gas and nine percent by nuclear energy. These sources together covered 93 percent of Japanese energy demands. All of these sources are almost completely imported. It is against this backdrop that Karin Kneissel assesses that Japan cannot become energy self-sufficient, i.e. producing its energy domestically and thus become independent of energy imports, even in the long-run. Securing access to energy, including oil and gas, will by necessity be of importance to Japan in the coming decades, because of the strategic nature of energy due to the importance both to the economy and the armed forces. The effects of trying to ensure access to these commodities on foreign policy is often underestimated. General texts on Japanese foreign policy usually overlook the topic of energy, which is startling, given the centrality the issue of energy security holds in Japanese official strategic thinking and general public perception, including with respect to international relations.
Threats to Japanese energy security strengthen and justify the drive to amend the constitution and jettison pacifism Kimberley, Neal, “Abe may never have a better chance of pushing through constitutional change”, South China Morning Post, July 26, 2016. Fresh from his electoral triumph on 10 July, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will likely seek a national debate on reforming the Japanese constitution. Ironically, though China is opposed to any changes to Japan’s constitutional commitment to pacifism, rhetoric from China may bolster Abe’s case to a Japanese people currently divided on the issue. China will view its assertive rejection of the 12 July South China Sea ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague as justified but the language used could easily be co-opted by Tokyo to push the case for the very constitutional reform that Beijing wishes to avoid seeing implemented. “Japan is not a state directly involved in the South China Sea issue, and thus should exercise caution in its own words and deeds, and stop hyping up and interfering,” Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said on 15 July, according to Xinhua, in response to Tokyo urging China to respect the PCA decision. That’s a diplomatic way of saying butt out. But Japan does have a direct interest because the bulk of its imported energy reaches it via the South China Sea. Japan cannot afford to see territorial disputes in the South China Sea escalate to a point where freedom of navigation becomes impaired and puts at risk Japan’s seaborne energy supply lines. And even if Japan has no territorial claims in the South China Sea, it does have them in the East China Sea where its assertion of sovereignty over the Diaoyu islands, known in Japan as the Senkakus, is rejected by Beijing. Those in favour of dropping Japan’s commitment to pacifism, embodied in Article 9 of the Japanese constitution, could easily spin a narrative that employs China’s own stand on existing territorial disputes to support the arguments for constitutional reform in Japan itself. Link – Political Capital Abe is spending political capital to restart the reactors in order to ensure energy security for Japan Mitchell, Scott, “Someone Flew a Drone Carrying Radioactive Material on to the Japanese PM’s Office”, Vice News, April 22, 2015. Abe and his Liberal Democratic Party have long believed in restarting the country's reactors, having labeled nuclear power a fundamental "base-load power" for the country. Now after winning a snap election in December, the government has the political capital to push through the unpopular policy. A poll conducted on the eve of the election by public broadcaster NHK showed 40 percent of Japanese people opposed the restarts, while only 24 percent supported them. Public doubt over safety standards and the ability of the country's nuclear watchdog has been stoked by errors made during the Fukushima disaster and restarting the reactors has become a sensitive political issue. But without the reactors, Japan faces an unstable energy future. The country is now dependent on imports for 96 percent of its primary energy needs, a figure that would be reduced by 16 percent if the existing reactors were switched back on. Impacts – Human Rights and Democracy The danger posed by revision to Japan’s constitution cannot be understated -- Abe and his government believe in Emperor-worship and a rejection of human rights Adelstein, Jake and Mari Yamamoto, “The Religious Cult Secretly Running Japan”, The Daily Beast, July 9, 2016. The influence of Nippon Kaigi may be hard for an American to understand on a gut level. But try this: Imagine if “future World President” Donald Trump belonged to a right-wing evangelical group, let’s call it “USA Conference,” that advocated a return to monarchy, the expulsion of immigrants, the revoking of equal rights for women, restrictions on freedom of speech—and most of his pre-selected political appointees were from the same group. Sounds incredible… In any case, this would worry people. That is the American equivalent of what has already taken place in Japan with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his cabinet. Impact – Pacifism/War Japan’s pacifist constitution is the cornerstone of peace, collective security, and nonproliferation in East Asia Hein, Patrick, How the Japanese Became Foreign to Themselves, 2009. Article 9 has acted as a restraint on the militarization of Japan, which has maintained what it calls and “exclusively defense-oriented policy” and limited Japan’s Self-Defense Forces(SDF) capability to the “minimum necessary level.” In addition, Article 9 prohibits dispatching SDF to foreign territories to engage of participate in military combat overseas. Japan has also interpreted Article 9 as prohibiting the country from exporting arms, thus preventing the resurgence of Japan’s pre-war military industry complex. Furthermore, Article 9 prevents develop ent of an arms race and nuclear proliferation in East Asia. Article 9 was born out of the direct experience of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. The devastation and immense suffering that followed these attacks led Japan to commit to the three non-nuclear principles which prohibit the country from possessing, producing, or permitting the introduction off nuclear weapons into its territory. The spirit of Article 9 rejects dependence on nuclear weapons in security policies and promotes Nuclear-Weapon-Free-Zones worldwide – an idea long advocated by the victims of the atomic bombings.
9/17/16
SEPT OCT SMR CP
Tournament: Voices RR | Round: 1 | Opponent: Lynbrooks NS | Judge: Dosch, Herman SMR CP Text: Belgium will decommission all currently active nuclear reactors as they are already set to do and substantially expand investment in small modular reactors. Competition: Mutual exclusivity – SMRs produce nuclear power so the aff requires banning them
Net Benefits: First is Power Supply SMR’s are cost-effective and safe, providing more stable access to grid-scale power than any technology currently in use. Kessides and Kuzznetsov ’12 - Ioannis N. Kessides and Vladimir Kuznetsov 12, Ioannis is a researcher for the Development Research Group at the World Bank, Vladimir is a consultant for the World Bank, “Small Modular Reactors for Enhancing Energy Security in Developing Countries”, August 14, Sustainability 2012, 4(8), 1806-1832 SMRs offer a number of advantages that can potentially offset the overnight cost penalty that they suffer relative to large reactors. Indeed, several characteristics of their proposed designs can serve to overcome some of the key barriers that have inhibited the growth of nuclear power. These characteristics include 23,24: * • Reduced construction duration. The smaller size, lower power, and simpler design of SMRs allow for greater modularization, standardization, and factory fabrication of components and modules. Use of factory-fabricated modules simplifies the on-site construction activities and greatly reduces the amount of field work required to assemble the components into an operational plant. As a result, the construction duration of SMRs could be significantly shorter compared to large reactors leading to important economies in the cost of financing. * • Investment scalability and flexibility. In contrast to conventional large-scale nuclear plants, due to their smaller size and shorter construction lead-times SMRs could be added one at a time in a cluster of modules or in dispersed and remote locations. Thus capacity expansion can be more flexible and adaptive to changing market conditions. The sizing, temporal and spatial flexibility of SMR deployment have important implications for the perceived investment risks (and hence the cost of capital) and financial costs of new nuclear build. Today’s gigawatt-plus reactors require substantial up-front investment—in excess of US$ 4 billion. Given the size of the up-front capital requirements (compared to the total capitalization of most utilities) and length of their construction time, new large-scale nuclear plants could be viewed as “bet the farm” endeavors for most utilities making these investments. SMR total capital investment costs, on the other hand, are an order of magnitude lower—in the hundreds of millions of dollars range as opposed to the billions of dollars range for larger reactors. These smaller investments can be more easily financed, especially in small countries with limited financial resources. SMR deployment with just-in-time incremental capacity additions would normally lead to a more favorable expenditure/cash flow profile relative to a single large reactor with the same aggregate capacity—even if we assume that the total time required to emplace the two alternative infrastructures is the same. This is because when several SMRs are built and deployed sequentially, the early reactors will begin operating and generating revenue while the remaining ones are being constructed. In the case of a large reactor comprising one large block of capacity addition, no revenues are generated until all of the investment expenditures are made. Thus the staggered build of SMRs could minimize the negative cash flow of deployment when compared to emplacing a single large reactor of equivalent power 25. * • Better power plant capacity and grid matching. In countries with small and weak grids, the addition of a large power plant (1000 MW(e) or more) can lead to grid stability problems—the general “rule of thumb” is that the unit size of a power plant should not exceed 10 percent of the overall electricity system capacity 11. The incremental capacity expansion associated with SMR deployment, on the other hand, could help meet increasing power demand while avoiding grid instability problems. * • Factory fabrication and mass production economies. SMR designs are engineered to be pre-fabricated and mass-produced in factories, rather than built on-site. Factory fabrication of components and modules for shipment and installation in the field with almost Lego-style assembly is generally cheaper than on-site fabrication. Relative to today’s gigawatt-plus reactors, SMRs benefit more from factory fabrication economies because they can have a greater proportion of factory made components. In fact, some SMRs could be manufactured and fully assembled at the factory, and then transported to the deployment site. Moreover, SMRs can benefit from the “economies of multiples” that accrue to mass production of components in a factory with supply-chain management. * • Learning effects and co-siting economies. Building reactors in a series can lead to significant per-unit cost reductions. This is because the fabrication of many SMR modules on plant assembly lines facilitates the optimization of manufacturing and assembly processes. Lessons learned from the construction of each module can be passed along in the form of productivity gains or other cost savings (e.g., lower labor requirements, shorter and more efficiently organized assembly lines) in successive units (Figure 6). Moreover, additional learning effects can be realized from the construction of successive units on the same site. Thus multi-module clustering could lead to learning curve acceleration. Since more SMRs are deployed for the same amount of aggregate power as a large reactor, these learning effects can potentially play a much more important role for SMRs than for large reactors 26. Also, sites incorporating multiple modules may require smaller operator and security staffing. * • Design simplification. Many SMRs offer significant design simplifications relative to large-scale reactors utilizing the same technology. This is accomplished thorough the adoption of certain design features that are specific to smaller reactors. For example, fewer and simpler safety features are needed in SMRs with integral design of the primary circuit (i.e., with an in vessel location of steam generators and no large diameter piping) that effectively eliminates large break LOCA. Clearly one of the main factors negatively affecting the competitiveness of small reactors is economies of scale—SMRs can have substantially higher specific capital costs as compared to large-scale reactors. However, SMRs offer advantages that can potentially offset this size penalty. As it was noted above, SMRs may enjoy significant economic benefits due to shorter construction duration, accelerated learning effects and co-siting economies, temporal and sizing flexibility of deployment, and design simplification. When these factors are properly taken into account, then the fact that smaller reactors have higher specific capital costs due to economies of scale does not necessarily imply that the effective (per unit) capital costs (or the levelized unit electricity cost) for a combination of such reactors will be higher in comparison to a single large nuclear plant of equivalent capacity 22,25. In a recent study, Mycoff et al. 22 provide a comparative assessment of the capital costs per unit of installed capacity of an SMR-based power station comprising of four 300 MW(e) units that are built sequentially and a single large reactor of 1200 MW(e). They employ a generic mode to quantify the impacts of: (1) economies of scale; (2) multiple units; (3) learning effects; (4) construction schedule; (5) unit timing; and (6) plant design (Figure 7). To estimate the impact of economies of scale, Mycoff et al. 22 assume a scaling factor n = 0.6 and that the two plants are comparable in design and characteristics—i.e., that the single large reactor is scaled down in its entirety to ¼ of its size. According to the standard scaling function, the hypothetical overnight cost (per unit of installed capacity) of the SMR-based power station will be 74 percent higher compared to a single large-scale reactor. Based on various studies in the literature, the authors posit that the combined impact of multiple units and learning effects is a 22 percent reduction in specific capital costs for the SMR-based station. To quantify the impact of construction schedule, the authors assume that the construction times of the large reactor and the SMR units are five and three years respectively. The shorter construction duration results in a 5 percent savings for the SMRs. Temporal flexibility (four sequentially deployed SMRs with the first going into operation at the same time as the large reactor and the rest every 9 months thereafter) and design simplification led to 5 and 15 percent reductions in specific capital costs respectively for the SMRs. When all these factors are combined, the SMR-based station suffers a specific capital cost disadvantage of only 4 percent as compared to the single large reactor of the same capacity. Thus, the economics of SMRs challenges the widely held belief that nuclear reactors are characterized by significant economies of scale 19.
Second is Environment The counterplan results in global SMR exports and helps get rid of coal–massively reduces emissions. Rosner, Robert. Stephen Goldberg, Energy Policy Institute at Chicago, The Harris School of Public Policy Studies, November 2011, SMALL MODULAR REACTORS –KEY TO FUTURE NUCLEAR POWER GENERATION IN THE U.S., https://epic.sites.uchicago.edu/sites/epic.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/EPICSMRWhitePaperFinalcopy.pdf As stated earlier, SMRs have the potential to achieve significant greenhouse gas emission reductions. They could provide alternative baseload power generation to facilitate the retirement of older, smaller, and less efficient coal generation plants that would, otherwise, not be good candidates for retrofitting carbon capture and storage technology. They could be deployed in regions of the U.S. and the world that have less potential for other forms of carbon-free electricity, such as solar or wind energy. There may be technical or market constraints, such as projected electricity demand growth and transmission capacity, which would support SMR deployment but not GW-scale LWRs. From the on-shore manufacturing perspective, a key point is that the manufacturing base needed for SMRs can be developed domestically. Thus, while the large commercial LWR industry is seeking to transplant portions of its supply chain from current foreign sources to the U.S., the SMR industry offers the potential to establish a large domestic manufacturing base building upon already existing U.S. manufacturing infrastructure and capability, including the Naval shipbuilding and underutilized domestic nuclear component and equipment plants. The study team learned that a number of sustainable domestic jobs could be created – that is, the full panoply of design, manufacturing, supplier, and construction activities – if the U.S. can establish itself as a credible and substantial designer and manufacturer of SMRs. While many SMR technologies are being studied around the world, a strong U.S. commercialization program can enable U.S. industry to be first to market SMRs, thereby serving as a fulcrum for export growth as well as a lever in influencing international decisions on deploying both nuclear reactor and nuclear fuel cycle technology. A viable U.S.-centric SMR industry would enable the U.S. to recapture technological leadership in commercial nuclear technology, which has been lost to suppliers in France, Japan, Korea, Russia, and, now rapidly emerging, China.