Tournament: Blake | Round: 2 | Opponent: Valley IN | Judge: Nick Smith
The United States Federal Government should repeal the Patriot Act – that’s key to increase free speech and foster progressive criticism of the status quo on campuses.
Macdonald 03 Morgan MacDonald, Patriot Act stifles dissent on campus, Baltimore Sun, 11/24/03, http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2003-11-24/news/0311240117_1_student-groups-student-information-college-campuses LADI
AS A COLLEGE student, I am acutely aware of both the legal and social effects of the USA Patriot Act on my life and on the lives of my peers. Passed after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Patriot Act has led to a broadening of governmental power to define protest as terrorism and to intrude on our fundamental rights as citizens.  I am concerned by the Patriot Act's impact on the lives of all citizens, but especially on my peers in colleges across the country. No matter what provision of the Patriot Act we examine, its effects are tenfold on a college campus. A college campus is highly interconnected in every imaginable way, and in that sense differs from the typical small American city. Students are plugged into one central Internet server, student records are compiled in one database, students live in centralized college housing, student groups meet on campus, and so on. To monitor for "subversive" activity or to track a specific e-mail account is made exponentially easier when all the information is centralized and in the control of school administrations.  Students on college campuses have far less privacy than the average person. When this problem is compounded by the expansion of government oversight, students' rights are placed in the most precarious of positions. Under the Patriot Act, student groups can be labeled "terrorist" organizations if they engage in certain types of protest or civil disobedience. In Minnesota, student groups such as Anti-Racist Action and Students Against War were labeled as potential terrorist threats. The government can demand that schools hand over student information without presenting probable cause that a crime has been committed. According to the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, more than 200 colleges and universities have turned over student information to the FBI, Immigration and Naturalization Service and other law enforcement agencies. Some college police are reporting directly to federal law enforcement agencies, thus allowing the government to monitor the actions of student groups and individual students without notification to the students or even college administrators. Beyond violating constitutionally guaranteed rights, the effect of the Patriot Act on college campuses is to create a suffocating educational and social atmosphere. The result of this legislation is the slow deterioration of student involvement and full intellectual participation on college campuses.  If students are not allowed to express themselves in college - to question authority and to team with other students for positive social change - America's future is bleak. I am infuriated when I sit in a student anti-war strategy meeting and one of my peers says she cannot participate in our protest because she is not from the United States and fears the consequences of her actions. That is not the American way. That is not how universities contribute to progress in this country. Those who drafted the Patriot Act failed to create legislation that protects both the safety and the rights of each American. That lack of attention to our country's fundamental values is striking college campuses like a hidden illness. America is a country that advocates free speech and free expression because of the belief that a marketplace of contradictory opinions is beneficial to the progress of society. When students are deterred from participating in free discussion and demonstrations of individuality, the marketplace of ideas loses one of its biggest and most essential contributors. We are not afraid to oppose the Patriot Act because we know the consequences of its implementation. The destruction of our educational freedom must not be allowed.

Tournament: Blake | Round: 2 | Opponent: Valley IN | Judge: Nick Smith
Endowments are high now but dropping rapidly - protests are alienating alumni donors, who are of older generations
Hartocollis 8/4 – Anemona Hartocollis, writer for NYT: August 4, 2016(“College Students Protest, Alumni’s Fondness Fades and Checks Shrink” New York Times Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/05/us/college-protests-alumni-donations.html?_r=0 Accessed on 12/15/16)IG
Scott MacConnell cherishes the memory of his years at Amherst College, where he discovered his future métier as a theatrical designer. But protests on campus over cultural and racial sensitivities last year soured his feelings.
Now Mr. MacConnell, who graduated in 1960, is expressing his discontent through his wallet. In June, he cut the college out of his will.
“As an alumnus of the college, I feel that I have been lied to, patronized and basically dismissed as an old, white bigot who is insensitive to the needs and feelings of the current college community,” Mr. MacConnell, 77, wrote in a letter to the college’s alumni fund in December, when he first warned that he was reducing his support to the college to a token $5.
A backlash from alumni is an unexpected aftershock of the campus disruptions of the last academic year. Although fund-raisers are still gauging the extent of the effect on philanthropy, some colleges — particularly small, elite liberal arts institutions — have reported a decline in donations, accompanied by a laundry list of g5.
Alumni from a range of generations say they are baffled by today’s college culture. Among their laments: Students are too wrapped up in racial and identity politics. They are allowed to take too many frivolous courses. They have repudiated the heroes and traditions of the past by judging them by today’s standards rather than in the context of their times. Fraternities are being unfairly maligned, and men are being demonized by sexual assault investigations. And university administrations have been too meek in addressing protesters whose messages have seemed to fly in the face of free speech.
Scott C. Johnston, who graduated from Yale in 1982, said he was on campus last fall when activists tried to shut down a free speech conference, “because apparently they missed irony class that day.” He recalled the Yale student who was videotaped screaming at a professor, Nicholas Christakis, that he had failed “to create a place of comfort and home” for students in his capacity as the head of a residential college.
A rally at New Haven Superior Court demanding justice for Corey Menafee, an African-American dining hall worker at Yale’s Calhoun College who was charged with breaking a window pane that depicted black slaves carrying cotton. Credit Peter Hvizdak/New Haven Register, via Associated Press
“I don’t think anything has damaged Yale’s brand quite like that,” said Mr. Johnston, a founder of an internet start-up and a former hedge fund manager. “This is not your daddy’s liberalism.”
“The worst part,” he continued, “is that campus administrators are wilting before the activists like flowers.” Yale College’s alumni fund was flat between this year and last, according to Karen Peart, a university spokeswoman.
Among about 35 small, selective liberal arts colleges belonging to the fund-raising organization Staff, or Sharing the Annual Fund Fundamentals, that recently reported their initial annual fund results for the 2016 fiscal year, 29 percent were behind 2015 in dollars, and 64 percent were behind in donors, according to a steering committee member, Scott Kleinheksel of Claremont McKenna College in California. His school, which was also the site of protests, had a decline in donor participation but a rise in giving.
At Amherst, the amount of money given by alumni dropped 6.5 percent for the fiscal year that ended June 30, and participation in the alumni fund dropped 1.9 percentage points, to 50.6 percent, the lowest participation rate since 1975, when the college began admitting women, according to the college. The amount raised from big donors decreased significantly. Some of the decline was because of a falloff after two large reunion gifts last year, according to Pete Mackey, a spokesman for Amherst.
At Princeton, where protesters unsuccessfully demanded the removal of Woodrow Wilson’s name from university buildings and programs, undergraduate alumni donations dropped 6.6 percent from a record high the year before, and participation dropped 1.9 percentage points, according to the university’s website. A Princeton spokesman, John Cramer, said there was no evidence the drop was connected to campus protests.

Protest lead to reduced donations, enrollments, and financial support by the government
Keller 2/21 – Rudi Keller writer for the Columbia tribune: 2/21/16(“University of Missouri fundraising takes $6 million hit in December as donors hold back funds” Available at http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/education/turmoil_at_mu/university-of-missouri-fundraising-takes-million-hit-in-december-as/article_ed7cfd5b-3b3e-5b18-95d9 f2945ac51172.html Accessed on 12/15/16)IF
New pledges and donations to the University of Missouri fell $6 million in December as the campus weathered the fallout of public discontent that also threatens to erode the school’s finances via state support and tuition revenue. December combines Christmas generosity and the promise of tax deductions on returns due April 15, making it a prime time for fundraisers at major institutions.
In December 2014, new pledges and donations for all campus activities including athletics totaled $19.6 million, according to figures compiled by the university’s advancement office. Only $13.6 million came in this December, a drop of about 31 percent. The figures represent new commitments and donations that are not given in fulfillment of previous pledges, Vice Chancellor of University Advancement Tom Hiles said.
For the three complete months since campus protests made international news in November, new pledges and donations to MU declined by about $7.4 million. Along with the decrease in new support, pledges totaling about $2 million were withdrawn, Hiles said. About 10 were gifts of $25,000 or more, including one for $500,000, he said.
Total new pledges and donations in fiscal year 2015 totaled $147.6 million, down from a record $164.1 million in fiscal year 2014.
The advancement office has fielded more than 2,000 calls from people upset with the university and tracks them by topic on a heat map.
“It ran the gamut from” Assistant Professor Melissa “Click to Planned Parenthood to just a general lack of leadership,” Hiles said. “‘Who’s in charge? Are the students running it?’ If I heard inmates are running the asylum one more time I was going to … . Those were the general categories.”
Student demonstrations over racism and marginalization on campus made international headlines after the Tiger football team announced it would boycott athletic activities in support of a hunger strike by Concerned Student 1950 member Jonathan Butler.
Athletic donations also have dipped, including a 68 percent drop in December cash gifts compared to December 2014 and a 38 percent decline in new pledges and donations as tallied in Hiles’ office during November, December and January. The Athletic Department’s decreased fundraising over that period — $1.3 million — is included in the total campus decline of $7.4 million.
Giving by smaller donors, defined as those who give less than $10,000, declined by about 5 percent in the three-month period, with drops in November and December somewhat offset by a January increase in giving. Small donors gave or pledged $4.76 million in the period, down from $5.02 million the previous year. “We definitely got hit in our annual fund and other points,” Hiles said. “It was rough because normally December is our best month.”
While his office fielded calls, Hiles said staff members researched callers who said they would never donate again. The result, he said, was “about a 90 percent correlation with people who ... have never given.”
The final word on other financial issues is unresolved. A House committee already has denied the university a portion of the budget increase allocated to other state colleges and universities. Chairwoman Donna Lichtenegger, R-Jackson, cited Click’s continued employment and a demonstration that interrupted a UM System Board of Curators meeting for the cut. At a Wednesday hearing of the Joint Committee on Education, interim MU Chancellor Hank Foley said figures show an anticipated enrollment drop of 900 students, which roughly equates to a $20 million loss of tuition revenue.
Endowment funds are key to US competitiveness – ensures college quality
Leigh 14 Steven R. Leigh (dean of CU-Boulder’s College of Arts and Sciences), "Endowments and the future of higher education," UColorado Boulder, March 2014 AZ
These broad trends point directly to the need for CU-Boulder’s College of Arts and Sciences to increase endowment funding across the college. Endowments drive improvements in the quality of an institution and reflect alums, donors and supporters who recognize the importance of research universities in the 21st century. Endowed professorships are the first and most important component of increasing our academic quality. Named chairs recognize significant faculty achievements and help the university support faculty salary and research. CU-Boulder professors are among the most productive in the nation and are heavily recruited by competitors, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Cornell, Berkeley, Illinois, UC Irvine and many others. Often, these competitors offer our faculty endowed professorships, conferring prestige and research support. CU must provide its faculty with comparable support to be competitive. A second major area for endowments is student scholarships and, for graduate students, fellowships. A stable source of income that helps pay tuition is the most direct and effective way to offset the costs of education. Endowed scholarships are also effective recruiting tools for admitting the nation’s best to CU. Our dynamic programs, departments and majors are attracting more and more applicants, including the best in the nation. Like faculty support, endowed scholarships and fellowships confer prestige and, most importantly, allow students to focus entirely on academics without balancing jobs and worrying about future loan repayments. Finally, endowment funding for programs greatly enriches the institution, providing capabilities that are difficult to attain when tuition revenue provides the majority of funding. Institutions funded mainly by tuition must make sure that expenditures directly benefit students, which sometimes limits options for innovation and risk-taking. Programmatic funding enables faculty and students to take risks in their research and creative work. For example, in my own field, this might involve traveling to an unexplored region to prospect for human fossils or archaeological sites. Support for high-risk projects allows our faculty and students to develop new areas of knowledge, benefitting society by broadening the capacity of the institution to innovate. The future of higher education, including CU’s future, depends to a large degree on how successfully we can build major endowments.  Ultimately, U.S. competitiveness and leadership in the global knowledge economy depends on this as well. For alums, donors and supporters, endowments indelibly affirm the importance of higher education and enduringly preserve its viability and vitality.
Innovation solves great power war
Taylor 4 – Professor of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Mark, “The Politics of Technological Change: International Relations versus Domestic Institutions,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 4/1/2004, http://www.scribd.com/doc/46554792/Taylor) RGP
I. Introduction Technological innovation is of central importance to the study of international relations (IR), affecting almost every aspect of the sub-field. First and foremost, a nation’s technological capability has a significant effect on its economic growth, industrial might, and military prowess; therefore relative national technological capabilities necessarily influence the balance of power between states, and hence have a role in calculations of war and alliance formation. Second, technology and innovative capacity also determine a nation’s trade profile, affecting which products it will import and export, as well as where multinational corporations will base their production facilities. Third, insofar as innovation-driven economic growth both attracts investment and produces surplus capital, a nation’s technological ability will also affect international financial flows and who has power over them. Thus, in broad theoretical terms, technological change is important to the study of IR because of its overall implications for both the relative and absolute power of states. And if theory alone does not convince, then history also tells us that nations on the technological ascent generally experience a corresponding and dramatic change in their global stature and influence, such as Britain during the first industrial revolution, the United States and Germany during the second industrial revolution, and Japan during the twentieth century. Conversely, great powers which fail to maintain their place at the technological frontier generally drift and fade from influence on international scene. This is not to suggest that technological innovation alone determines international politics, but rather that shifts in both relative and absolute technological capability have a major impact on international relations, and therefore need to be better understood by IR scholars. Indeed, the importance of technological innovation to international relations is seldom disputed by IR theorists. Technology is rarely the sole or overriding causal variable in any given IR theory, but a broad overview of the major theoretical debates reveals the ubiquity of technological causality. For example, from Waltz to Posen, almost all Realists have a place for technology in their explanations of international politics. At the very least, they describe it as an essential part of the distribution of material capabilities across nations, or an indirect source of military doctrine. And for some, like Gilpin quoted above, technology is the very cornerstone of great power domination, and its transfer the main vehicle by which war and change occur in world politics. Jervis tells us that the balance of offensive and defensive military technology affects the incentives for war. Walt agrees, arguing that technological change can alter a state’s aggregate power, and thereby affect both alliance formation and the international balance of threats. Liberals are less directly concerned with technological change, but they must admit that by raising or lowering the costs of using force, technological progress affects the rational attractiveness of international cooperation and regimes. Technology also lowers information and transactions costs and thus increases the applicability of international institutions, a cornerstone of Liberal IR theory. And in fostering flows of trade, finance, and information, technological change can lead to Keohane’s interdependence or Thomas Friedman et al’s globalization. Meanwhile, over at the “third debate”, Constructivists cover the causal spectrum on the issue, from Katzenstein’s “cultural norms” which shape security concerns and thereby affect technological innovation; to Wendt’s “stripped down technological determinism” in which technology inevitably drives nations to form a world state. However most Constructivists seem to favor Wendt, arguing that new technology changes people’s identities within society, and sometimes even creates new cross-national constituencies, thereby affecting international politics. Of course, Marxists tend to see technology as determining all social relations and the entire course of history, though they describe mankind’s major fault lines as running between economic classes rather than nation-states. Finally, Buzan and Little remind us that without advances in the technologies of transportation, communication, production, and war, international systems would not exist in the first place.

Tournament: Blake | Round: 2 | Opponent: Valley IN | Judge: Nick Smith
International law banned hate speech
Matsuda 89 Mari J. Matsuda (Associate Professor of Law, University of Hawaii, the William S. Richardson School of Law), "Public Response to Racist Speech: Considering the Victim's Story," Michigan Law Review, 1989 AZ
The international community has chosen to outlaw racist hate propaganda. Article 4 of the International Convention on the Elimi- nation of All Forms of Racial Discrimination states: Article 4 States Parties condemn all propaganda and all organizations which are based on ideas or theories of superiority of one race or group of per- sons of one colour or ethnic origin, or which attempt to justify or pro- mote racial hatred and discrimination in any form, and undertake to adopt immediate and positive measures designed to eradicate all incite- ment to, or acts of, such discrimination and, to this end, with due regard to the principles embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the rights expressly set forth in article 5 of this Convention, inter alia: (a) Shall declare as an offence punishable by law all dissemination of ideas based on racial superiority or hatred, incitement to racial discrimi- nation, as well as all acts of violence or incitement to such acts against any race or group of persons of another colour or ethnic origin, and also the provision of any assistance to racist activities, including the financing thereof; (b) Shall declare illegal and prohibit organizations, and also organ- ized and all other propaganda activities, which promote and incite racial discrimination, and shall recognize participation in such organization or activities as an offence punishable by law; and (c) Shall not permit public authorities or public institutions, national or local, to promote or incite racial discrimination.105 Under this treaty, states are required to criminalize racial hate messages. Prohibiting dissemination of ideas of racial superiority or hatred is not easily reconciled with American concepts of free speech. The Convention recognizes this conflict. Article 4 acknowledges the need for "due regard" for rights protected by the Universal Declara- tion of Human Rights and by article 5 of the Convention - including the rights of freedom of speech, association, and conscience. Recognizing these conflicting values, and nonetheless concluding that the right to freedom from racist hate propaganda deserves affirm- ative recognition, represents the evolving international view. An American lawyer, trained in a tradition of liberal thought, would read article 4 and conclude immediately that it is unworkable. Acts of vio- lence, and perhaps imminent incitement to violence are properly pro- hibited, but the control of ideas is doomed to failure. This position was voiced continually in the debates'06 preceding adoption of the Convention, leading to the view that article 4 is both controversial and troublesome. 107 To those who struggled through early international attempts'08 to deal with racist propaganda, the competing values had a sense of ur- gency. 09 The imagery of both book burnings and swastikas was clear in their minds. 10 Hitler had banned ideas. He had also murdered six million Jews in the culmination of a campaign that had as a major theme the idea of racial superiority. While the causes of fascism are complex,11 the knowledge that anti-Semitic hate propaganda and the rise of Nazism were clearly connected guided development of the emerging international law on incitement to racial hatred. In 1959 and 1960, the United Nations faced an "outburst of anti- Semitic incidents in several parts of the world.""'2 The movement to implement the human rights goals of the United Nations Charter and of the Universal Declaration gained momentum as member states sought effective means of eliminating discrimination.
Prefer – it explicitly compares international obligations to protect free speech against the need to ban hate speech and concludes that banning hate speech is more important

US adherence to international law concerning hate speech is key to credibility in international human rights
Cohen 15 Tanya Cohen, "It’s Time To Bring The Hammer Down On Hate Speech In The U.S." Thought Catalog, 5/1/2015 AZ
Recent scandals involving right-wing hatemongers like Phil Robertson, Donald Sterling, Bill Maher, and the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity have brought to light one of America’s biggest embarrassments: the fact that America remains the only country in the world without any legal protections against hate speech. In any other country, people like Phil Robertson and Donald Sterling would have been taken before a Human Rights Commission and subsequently fined and/or imprisoned and/or stripped of their right to public comment for making comments that incite hatred and violence against vulnerable minorities. But, in the US, such people are allowed to freely incite hatred and violence against vulnerable minorities with impunity, as the US lacks any legal protections against any forms of hate speech – even the most vile and extreme forms of hate speech remain completely legal in the so-called “land of the free”. Not only is this a violation of the most basic and fundamental human rights principles, but it’s also an explicit violation of legally-binding international human rights conventions. For many decades, human rights groups around the world – from Amnesty International to Human Rights First to the United Nations Human Rights Council – have told the United States that it needs to pass and enforce strong legal protections against hate speech in accordance with its international human rights obligations. As of 2015, the US is the only country in the world where hate speech remains completely legal. This is, in fact, a flagrant violation of international human rights law. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) both mandate that all countries outlaw hate speech, including “propaganda for war” and the dissemination of any “ideas based on racial superiority or hatred”. The ICCPR and ICERD are both legally-binding international human rights conventions, and all nations are required to uphold them in the fullest. By failing to prosecute hate speech, the US is explicitly and flippantly violating international human rights law. No other country would be allowed to get away with this, so why would the US? The United Nations has stated many times that international law has absolute authority. This is quite simply not optional. The US is required to outlaw hate speech. No other country would be able to get away with blatantly ignoring international human rights standards, so why should the US be able to? The US is every bit as required to follow international human rights law as the rest of the world is.

The impact is unrestrained use of force in conflict
Modirzadeh 14 Naz K. Modirzadeh 14, Senior Fellow at Harvard Law School-Brookings Project on Law and Security, Folk International Law: 9/11 Lawyering and the Transformation of the Law of Armed Conflict to Human Rights Policy and Human Rights Law to War Governance, http://harvardnsj.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Modirzadeh-Final.pdf
The central purpose of the convergence of IHL and IHRL is to increase the protection of individuals in armed conflict. The notion behind the insistence that IHL and IHRL are part of the same discipline suggests that IHL is part of the far larger and more broadly applicable legal realm of IHRL. Indeed, the very idea of the “humanization of humanitarian law”159 is that the cold, brutal balancing of IHL, its perceived deference to the military and the needs of the state is opened up and mitigated by a body of law that protects the individual’s human rights against the state. Yet here the story flips: It is IHRL that seems to become part of IHL. It is IHRL that, by the end of our narrative, seems to be brought into the service of conflict, to act not as a powerful check on the brute force of the sovereign, not as the voice of the international community against those who wish to prioritize national security over individual liberties, but rather as a means to regulate the use of lethal violence. Having argued vociferously that IHRL applies in all situations of armed conflict at all times in order to protect individuals, the argument suddenly turns in the other direction. It becomes possible to say that IHRL can be utilized to allow for one state to invade another state’s territory in order to murder individuals without an attempt to arrest, detain, charge, and try these individuals. What is so striking in this view is how well—if that is the right word—the convergence argument worked, or at least how much work convergence ended up doing. Remarkably, many who wish to justify a far broader and even more aggressive CIA drone program cite convergence as a basis for doing so.160
For the application of IHL, on the other hand, the dominant assumption of convergence—that human rights law and IHL are part of the same general field, that they apply simultaneously, and that they are part of the same conversation—may have had the effect of loosening the boundaries around the field of application of IHL. As the two bodies of law began to be used interchangeably—as an attack utilizing a five hundred pound bomb is analogized to a police officer using a weapon when faced with the imminent danger of a hostage situation—one effect on the perception of IHL may be that it is no longer seen as a tightly controlled body of law. As many leading IHL lawyers warned in 2001 and 2002, once IHL is applied, many ugly things that we generally see as illegal, as outside the realm of rule of law, suddenly become lawful. Those IHRL lawyers who argued that IHRL applies simultaneously to IHL during armed conflict may have contributed to the blurring of the line between war and not-war.

Global war
Goodman 09 Ryan Goodman, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Professor of Law, New York University School of Law, December 2009, CONTROLLING THE RECOURSE TO WAR BY MODIFYING JUS IN BELLO, Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law / Volume 12
A substantial literature exists on the conflation of jus ad bellum and jus in bello. However, the consequences for the former side of the equation – the resort to war – is generally under-examined. Instead, academic commentary has focused on the effects of compliance with humanitarian rules in armed conflict and, in particular, the equality of application principle. In this section, I attempt to help correct that imbalance. In the following analysis, I use the (admittedly provocative) short-hand labels of ‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’ wars. The former consists of efforts that aim to promote the general welfare of foreign populations such as humanitarian interventions and, on some accounts, peacekeeping operations. The latter – undesirable wars – include conflicts that result from security spirals that serve neither state’s interest and also include predatory acts of aggression. 4.1.1 Decreased likelihood of ‘desirable wars’ A central question in debates about humanitarian intervention is whether the international community should be more concerned about the prospect of future Kosovos – ambitious military actions without clear legal authority – or future Rwandas – inaction and deadlock at the Security Council. Indeed, various institutional designs will tend to favor one of those outcomes over the other. In 1999, Kofi Annan delivered a powerful statement that appeared to consider the prospect of repeat Rwandas the greater concern; and he issued a call to arms to support the ‘developing international norm in favor of intervention to protect civilians from wholesale slaughter’.95 Ifoneassumesthatthereis,indeed,aneedforcontinuedorgreatersupport for humanitarian uses of force, Type I erosions of the separation principle pose a serious threat to that vision. And the threat is not limited to unilateral uses of force. It also applies to military operations authorized by the Security Council. In short, all ‘interventions to protect civilians from wholesale slaughter’ are affected. Two developments render desirable interventions less likely. First, consider implications of the Kosovo Commission/ICISS approach. The scheme imposes greater requirements on armed forces engaged in a humanitarian mission with respect to safeguarding civilian ives.96 If that scheme is intended to smoke out illicit intent,97 it is likely to have perverse effects: suppressing sincere humanitarian efforts at least on the margins. Actors engaged in a bona fide humanitarian intervention generally tend to be more protective of their own armed forces than in other conflicts. It is instructive to consider, for instance, the precipitous US withdrawal from the UN mission in Somalia – code-named Operation Restore Hope – after the loss of eighteen American soldiers in the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993, and the ‘lesson’ that policymakers drew from that conflict.98 Additionally, the Kosovoc ampaign – code-named Operation Noble Anvil – was designed to be a ‘zero-casualty war’ for US soldiers, because domestic public support for the campaign was shallow and unstable. The important point is that the Kosovo Commission/ICISS approach would impose additional costs on genuine humanitarian efforts, for which it is already difficult to build and sustain popular support. As a result, we can expect to see fewer bona fide interventions to protect civilians from atrocities.99 Notably, such results are more likely to affect two types of states: states with robust, democratic institutions that effectively reflect public opinion and states that highly value compliance with jus in bello. Both of those are the very states that one would most want to incentivize to initiate and participate in humanitarian interventions. The second development shares many of these same consequences. Consider the implications of the British House of Lords decision in Al-Jedda which cast doubt on the validity of derogations taken in peacekeeping operations as well as other military efforts in which the homeland is not directly at stake and the state could similarly withdraw. The scheme imposes a tax on such interventions by precluding the government from adopting measures that would otherwise be considered lawful and necessary to meet exigent circumstances related to the conflict. Such extraordinary constraints in wartime may very well temper the resolve to engage in altruistic intervention and military efforts that involve similar forms of voluntarism on the part of the state. Such a legal scheme may thus yield fewer such operations and the participation of fewer states in such multilateral efforts. And, the impact of the scheme should disproportionately affect the very states that take international human rights obligations most seriously. Notably, in these cases, the disincentives might weigh most heavily on third parties: states that decide whether and to what degree to participate in a coalition with the principal intervener. It is to be expected that the commitment on the part of the principal intervener will be stronger, and thus not as easily shifted by the erosion of the separation principle. The ability, however, to hold together a coalition of states is made much more difficult by these added burdens. Indeed, as the United States learned in the Kosovo campaign, important European allies were wary about the intervention, in part due to its lack of an international legal pedigree. And the weakness of the alliance, including German and Italian calls for an early suspension of the bombing campaign, impeded the ability to wage war in the first place. It may be these third party states and their decision whether to join a humanitarian intervention where the international legal regime matters most. Without such backing of important allies, the intervention itself is less likely to occur. It is also those states – the more democratic, the more rights respecting, and the more law abiding – that the international regime should prefer to be involved in these kinds of interventions. The developments regulating jus ad bellum through jus in bello also threaten to make ‘undesirable wars’ more likely. In previous writing, I argue that encouraging states to frame their resort to force through humanitarian objectives rather than other rationales would, in the aggregate, reduce the overall level of disputes that result in uncontrolled escalation and war.100 A reverse relationship also holds true. That is, encouraging states to forego humanitarian rationales in favor of other justifications for using force may culminate in more international disputes ending in uncontrolled escalation and war. This outcome is especially likely to result from the pressures created by Type I erosions of the separation principle. First, increasing the tax on humanitarian interventions (the Kosovo Commission/ICISS approach) and ‘wars of choice’ (the Al-Jedda approach) would encourage states to justify their resort to force on alternative grounds. For example, states would be incentivized to invoke other legitimated frameworks – such as security rationales involving the right to self-defense, collective self-defense, anticipatory self-defense, and traditional threats to international peace and security. And, even if military action is pursued through the Security Council, states may be reluctant to adopt language (in resolutions and the like) espousing or emphasizing humanitarian objectives. Second, the elevation of self-regarding – security and strategic – frameworks over humanitarian ones is more likely to lead to uncontrolled escalation and war. A growing body of social science scholarship demonstrates that the type of issue in dispute can constitute an important variable in shaping the course of interstate hostilities. The first generation of empirical scholarship on the origins of war did not consider this dimension. Political scientists instead concentrated on features of the international system (for example, the distribution of power among states) and on the characteristics of states (for example, forms of domestic governance structures) as the key explanatory variables. Research agendas broadened considerably, however, in subsequent years. More recently, ‘several studies have identified substantial differences in conflict behavior over different types of issues’.101 The available evidence shows that states are significantly more inclined to fight over particular types of issues that are elevated in a dispute, despite likely overall material and strategic losses.102 Academic studies have also illuminated possible causal explanations for these empirical patterns. Specifically, domestic (popular and elite) constituencies more readily support bellicose behavior by their government when certain salient cultural or ideological issues are in contention. Particular issue areas may also determine the expert communities (humanitarian versus security mindsets) that gain influence in governmental circles – a development that can shape the hard-line or soft-line strategies adopted in the course of the dispute. In short, these links between domestic political processes and the framing of international disputes exert significant influence on whether conflicts will eventually culminate in war. Third, a large body of empirical research demonstrates that states will routinely engage in interstate disputes with rivals and that those disputes which are framed through security and strategic rationales are more likely to escalate to war. Indeed, the inclusion of a humanitarian rationale provides windows of opportunity to control and deescalate a conflict. Thus, eliminating or demoting a humanitarian rationale from a mix of justifications (even if it is not replaced by another rationale) can be independently destabilizing. Espousing or promoting security rationales, on the other hand, is more likely to culminate in public demands for increased bellicosity, unintended security spirals, and military violence.103 Importantly, these effects may result even if one is skeptical about the power of international law to influence state behavior directly. It is reasonable to assume that international law is unlikely to alter the determination of a state to wage war, and that international law is far more likely to influence only the justificatory discourse states employ while proceeding down the warpath. However, as I argue in my earlier work, leaders (of democratic and nondemocratic) states become caught in their official justifications for military campaigns. Consequently, framing the resort to force as a pursuit of security objectives, or adding such issues to an ongoing conflict, can reshape domestic political arrangements, which narrows the subsequent range of policy options. Issues that initially enter a conflict due to disingenuous representations by political leaders can become an authentic part of the dispute over time. Indeed, the available social science research, primarily qualitative case studies, is even more relevant here. A range of empirical studies demonstrate such unintended consequences primarily in the case of leaders employing security-based and strategic rationales to justify bellicose behavior.104 A central finding is that pretextual and superficial justifications can meaningfully influence later stages of the process that shape popular and elite conceptions of the international dispute. And it is those understandings that affect national security strategies and the ladder of escalation to war. Indeed, one set of studies – of empires – suggests these are mechanisms for powerful states entering into disastrous military campaigns that their leaders did not initially intend.

Tournament: Blake | Round: 2 | Opponent: Valley IN | Judge: Nick Smith
Moral uncertainty means we should prevent extinction
Bostrom 12 Nick Bostrom. Faculty of Philosophy and Oxford Martin School University of Oxford. “Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority.” Global Policy (2012)
These reflections on moral uncertainty suggest an alternative, complementary way of looking at existential risk; they also suggest a new way of thinking about the ideal of sustainability. Let me elaborate.¶ Our present understanding of axiology might well be confused. We may not now know — at least not in concrete detail — what outcomes would count as a big win for humanity; we might not even yet be able to imagine the best ends of our journey. If we are indeed profoundly uncertain about our ultimate aims, then we should recognize that there is a great option value in preserving — and ideally improving — our ability to recognize value and to steer the future accordingly. Ensuring that there will be a future version of humanity with great powers and a propensity to use them wisely is plausibly the best way available to us to increase the probability that the future will contain a lot of value. To do this, we must prevent any existential catastrophe.
Government must be practical and cannot concern itself with metaphysical questions – its only role is to protect citizens’ interests
Rhonheimer 05 (Martin, Prof Of Philosophy at The Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome). “THE POLITICAL ETHOS OF CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY AND THE PLACE OF NATURAL LAW IN PUBLIC REASON: RAWLS’S “POLITICAL LIBERALISM” REVISITED” The American Journal of Jurisprudence vol. 50 (2005), pp. 1-70
It is a fundamental feature of political philosophy to be part of practical philosophy. Political philosophy belongs to ethics, which is practical, for it both reflects on practical  knowledge and aims at action. Therefore, it is not only normative, but must consider the concrete conditions of realization. The rationale of political institutions and action must be understood as embedded in concrete cultural and, therefore, historical contexts and as meeting with problems that only in these contexts are understandable. A normative political philosophy which would abstract from the conditions of  realizability would be  trying to establish norms for realizing the “idea of the good” or of “the just” (as Plato, in  fact, tried to do in his Republic). Such a purely metaphysical view, however, is doomed to failure. As a theory of political praxis, political philosophy must include in its reflection the concrete historical context, historical experiences and the corresponding knowledge of the proper logic of the political. 14 Briefly: political philosophy is not metaphysics, which contemplates the necessary order of being, but practical philosophy, which  deals with partly contingent matters and aims at action.  Moreover, unlike moral norms in general—natural law included,—which rule the  actions of a person—“my acting” and pursuing the good—, the logic of the political is characterized by acts like framing institutions and establishing legal rules by which not only personal actions but the actions of a multitude of persons are regulated by the coercive force of state power, and by which a part of citizens exercises power over others.  Political actions are, thus, both actions of the whole of the body politic and referring to  the whole of the community of citizens. 15 Unless we wish to espouse a platonic view according to which some persons are by  nature rulers while others are by nature subjects, we will stick to the Aristotelian differentiation between the “domestic” and the “political” kind of rule 16 : unlike domestic rule,  which is over people with a common interest and harmoniously striving after the same good despotism and, therefore, according to Aristotle is essentially “despotic,” political rule is exercised over free persons who represent a plurality of interests and pursue, in the common context of the polis, different goods. The exercise of such political rule, therefore, needs justification and is continuously in search of  consent among those who are  ruled, but who potentially at the same time are also the rulers.
Only utilitarianism can serve as the basis to legitimately justify policy to the public. Government actions will inevitably lead to trade-offs between citizens. The only justifiable way to resolve these conflicts is utilitarianism – means their framing fails and leads to irresolvable impact weighing
Gary Woller BYU Prof., “An Overview by Gary Woller”, A Forum on the Role of Environmental Ethics, June 1997, pg. 10
Moreover, virtually all public policies entail some redistribution of economic or political resources, such that one group's gains must come at another group's ex- pense. Consequently, public policies in a democracy must be justified to the public, and especially to those who pay the costs of those policies. Such justification cannot simply be assumed a priori by invoking some higher-order moral principle. Appeals to a priori moral principles, such as environmental preservation, also often fail to acknowledge that public policies inevitably entail trade-offs among competing values. Thus since policymakers cannot justify inherent value conflicts to the public in any philosophical sense, and since public policies inherently imply winners and losers, the policymakers' duty to the public interest requires them to demonstrate that the redistributive effects and value trade-offs implied by their polices are somehow to the overall advantage of society. At the same time, deontologically based ethical systems have severe practical limitations as a basis for public policy. At best, a priori moral principles provide only general guidance to ethical dilemmas in public affairs and do not themselves suggest appropriate public policies, and at worst, they create a regimen of regulatory unreasonableness while failing to adequately address the problem or actually making it worse. For example, a moral obligation to preserve the environment by no means implies the best way, or any way for that matter, to do so, just as there is no a priori reason to believe that any policy that claims to preserve the environment will actually do so. Any number of policies might work, and others, although seemingly consistent with the moral principle, will fail utterly. That deontological principles are an inadequate basis for environmental policy is evident in the rather significant irony that most forms of deontologically based environmental laws and regulations tend to be implemented in a very utilitarian manner by street-level enforcement officials. Moreover, ignoring the relevant costs and benefits of environmental policy and their attendant incentive structures can, as alluded to above, actually work at cross purposes to environmental preservation. (There exists an extensive literature on this aspect of regulatory enforcement and the often perverse outcomes of regulatory policy. See, for example, Ackerman, 1981; Bartrip and Fenn, 1983; Hawkins, 1983, 1984; Hawkins and Thomas, 1984.) Even the most die-hard preservationist/deontologist would, I believe, be troubled by this outcome. The above points are perhaps best expressed by Richard Flathman, The number of values typically involved in public policy decisions, the broad categories which must be employed and above all, the scope and complexity of the consequences to be anticipated militate against reasoning so conclusively that they generate an imperative to institute a specific policy. It is seldom the case that only one policy will meet the criteria of the public interest (1958, p. 12). It therefore follows that in a democracy, policymakers have an ethical duty to establish a plausible link between policy alternatives and the problems they address, and the public must be reasonably assured that a policy will actually do something about an existing problem; this requires the means-end language and methodology of utilitarian ethics. Good intentions, lofty rhetoric, and moral piety are an insufficient though perhaps at times a necessary, basis for public policy in a democracy.
People psychologically prefer util – governments are obligated to use it since it’s more justifiable for citizens
Gino et al 2008 Francesca Gino Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Don Moore Tepper Business School, Carnegie Mellon University, Max H. Bozman Harvard Business School, Harvard University “No harm, no foul: The outcome bias in ethical judgments” http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/08-080.pdf AT
The present studies provide strong evidence of the existence of outcome effects in ethically-relevant contexts, when people are asked to judge the ethicality of others’ behavior. It is worth noting that what we show is not the same as the curse of knowledge or the hindsight bias. The curse of knowledge describes people’s inability to recover an uninformed state of mind (Camerer, Loewenstein, and Weber, 1989). Likewise, the hindsight bias leads people to misremember what they believed before they knew an event’s outcome (e.g., Fischhoff, 1975; Fischhoff and Beyth, 1975). By contrast, we show that that outcomes of decisions lead people to see the decisions themselves in a different light, and that this effect does not depend on misremembering their prior state of mind. In other words, people will see it as entirely appropriate to allow a decision’s outcome to determine their assessment of the decision’s quality.
Thus the standard is maximizing expected well being

Tournament: Damus | Round: 2 | Opponent: San Marino ED | Judge:
CP: The United States federal government should mandate a community based implementation of the California AB 65 and California AB 66 plan for police body cameras including but not limited to mandates to assume criminal activity if police fail to use or tamper with cameras, protect civilian rights to film, and use special prosecutors to try police officers. The full list of mandates and links to the two California bills are below.
That increases accountability, transparency, and prosecution of police misconduct
Friedman et al 15 - Andrew Friedman, Brian Kettenring, and Ana Maria Archila, Co-Executive Directors, The Center for Popular Democracy, Alana Greer, Community Justice Project; Alyssa Aguilera, VOCAL NY; Anthony Newby, Minnesota Neighborhoods Organizing for Change; Bill Henry, Baltimore City Council; Brendan Roediger, Arch City Defenders; Bukky Gbadesgesin, Organization for Black Struggle; Curtis Sails, Coalition 4 Justice; Dante Barry, Million Hoodies; Deray McKesson, WeTheProtestors; Jackie Byers, Black Organizing Project; James Hayes, Ohio Student Association; Je  Ordower, Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment; Jennifer Epps-Addison, Wisconsin Jobs Now; John Chasno , Coalition Against Police Crimes and Repression; Jose Lopez, Make the Road NY; Justin Hansford, St. Louis University School of Law; Kassandra Frederique, Drug Policy Alliance; Kim McGill, Youth 4 Justice; Lynn Lewis, Picture the Homeless; Meena Jagannath, Community Justice Project; Nahal Zamani, Center for Constitutional Rights; Opal Tometi, Black Alliance for Justice Immigration; Paolo Harris, Ingoma Foundation; Patrisse Cullors, Dignity and Power Now/Coalition to End Sheri ’s Violence in L.A. Jails; Pete White, Los Angeles Community Action Network; Rachel Herzing, Critical Resistance; Ralikh Hayes, Baltimore BLOC; Sco  Roberts, Advancement Project; Tara Hu man, Open Society Institute Baltimore; Thenjiwe McHarris, US Human Rights Network, and Valantina Amalraj, Columbia Law School: June 2015(“Building Momentum from the Ground Up: A Toolkit for Promoting Justice” The Center for Popular Democracy Available at http://www.justiceinpolicing.com/docs/JusticeInPolicing.pdf Accessed on 11/15/16)IG
Body cameras have become the most popular political response to recent incidents of police misconduct and brutality. There is much debate about the e ectiveness and desirability of body worn cameras by community groups and advocates. Some communities and many elected o - cials believe that if properly regulated, body-worn cameras for police o cers may be a tool to increase accountability, transparency, and collect evidence of police misconduct. Communities must decide whether these potential bene ts outweigh privacy and other concerns, such as police misuse. Additionally, communities must be involved in the development of departmental protocols to shape when body cameras are mandated for use. If community members advocate for a body cameras, the policy should include a community agreed upon provision outlining when cameras must be activated and a provision applying a presumption of police misconduct if footage is unavailable (when it was supposed to be recorded).

Tournament: Damus | Round: 3 | Opponent: San Marino JC | Judge:
CP: The United States Congress should repeal loco parentis for school resource officers, mandate that school resource officers abide by probable cause standards, mandate use of IEPs by all schools, require that misdemeanor acts be responded to with a warning and a mediation referral before a referral to the juvenile legal system, use restorative justice programs in schools, and disqualify officers with any history of  misconduct, aggression or civil rights violations from being hired for school programs
Solves all of case
Rosen 5 – their author Michael M. Rosen (Attorney in San Diego at Fish and Richardson PC, an intellectual property law firm; JD, Harvard Law). “A Qualified Defense: In Support of the Doctrine of Qualified Immunity in Excessive Force Cases, With Some Suggestions for its Improvement.” 35GoldenGateU.L.Rev. (2005). http://digitalcommons.law.ggu.edu/ggulrev/vol35/iss2/2
Student Rights and Ways to Protect Them
According to Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), students do not "shed their constitutional rights at the school house gate." Even so, students' rights are restricted under the principle of in loco parentis, which states that school officials are allowed to act "in place of the parent." For example, according to the Fourth Amendment, a police officer cannot conduct a search without probable cause. As a result of in loco parentis, though, school officials are allowed to search a child's locker with only reasonable suspicion. In the case of school resource officers, there is no federal consensus on whether a police officer is acting as a law enforcement official or as a school official.
As a result, some states have protected students by ruling that officers must uphold the Fourth Amendment and abide by probable cause standards. Others have left students vulnerable by saying that school resource officers are acting in the capacity of school officials, have the authority to invoke in loco parentis and as a result can abandon probable cause in favor of reasonable suspicion. Similarly, in states where police officers are granted in loco parentis, students are placed under arrest without being read their Miranda rights. This has put into question the Fifth Amendment rights of students nationwide.
While federal protections for students have not yet been secured, and state and local rights are still largely ambiguous, there are local and statewide efforts that have functioned to protect the rights of students and protect students from police contact. For example, the Pacer Center reports that in some states and school districts parents can "write into the IEP individualized education program that your child may not be interviewed by the police or the school's police liaison officer without a parent present." Additionally, local and state initiatives have been put into place by community members and advocates working to protect children from police contact.
At the local level, the Justice Policy Institute describes how the cooperative agreement implemented in Clayton County, Georgia, ensures that misdemeanor acts must be responded to with a warning and a mediation referral before a referral to the juvenile legal system. Similar steps were taken in Jefferson County, Alabama. The school discipline code was revised in Baltimore, Maryland, to implement different levels of response to different levels of offense and dictate that only the most serious offenses be reported to law enforcement. In Oakland, California, restorative justice programs have been put in place as a buffer between students and law enforcement. At the state level, less has been accomplished, but legislation was passed in Florida, Colorado and Texas discouraging arrests for basic discipline, misdemeanors and minor offenses.
Other strategies may also prove successful in terms of fighting police presence in public schools. For example, funding restrictions and redirection may prove to be another effective way to disincentivize police presence in schools. Grant application requirements can be implemented to ensure that schools engaged in disproportionate disciplining of disadvantaged communities or law enforcement agencies with disproportionate arrest numbers are disqualified from receiving funding. Officers with any history of misconduct, aggression or civil rights violations can also be disqualified from participating in school programs through hiring policies. Funding for law enforcement can be eliminated altogether and redirected into community education programs. Civil rights advocates can also organize to pass legislation that ensures that police officers are still considered police officers once they pass the schoolhouse gate, in order to safeguard the Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights of students. These efforts can be made at the local, state and federal levels.

Tournament: Damus | Round: 3 | Opponent: San Marino JC | Judge:
CP: The United States Congress should ban the use of excessive force by school resource officers
Solves all of their police brutality offence and clarifies the law which is the internal link in their harms evidence

Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 5 | Opponent: Harker EM | Judge: John Sims
CP: The United States federal government ought to abolish sexual deviance frameworks as they pertain to the criminal justice system.
Woods 14 - J. B. Woods (and) Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law, Los Angeles, CA, USA, ‘‘Queering Criminology’’: Overviewof the State of the Field
Abstract This chapter provides an overview of the treatment of sexual orientation and gender identity issues and LGBTQ populations in the field of criminology. The chapter advances three main points. First, it argues that there is very little data on LGBTQ people’s experiences of crime, both in terms of victimization and offending. Second, the overwhelming majority of criminological engagement with sexual orientation and gender identity occurred prior to the 1980s, and discussed these concepts insofar as assessing whether ‘‘homosexuality’’—a term that was often employed to describe non-heterosexual sexualities and gender nonconforming identities/expressions—was or was not a form of criminal sexual deviance. Third, to date, there is little to no theoretical engagement with sexual orientation and gender identity in each of the four major schools of criminological thought: biological, psychological, sociological, and critical. I argue that these three points are a reflection of the historical and continuing stigma of the sexual deviance framework on the treatment of sexual orientation and gender identity concepts, and LGBTQ people in the field. This chapter makes a call to ‘‘queer criminology,’’ which in my view, requires overcoming the sexual deviance framework and reorienting criminological inquiry to give due consideration to sexual orientation and gender identity as non-deviant differences that may shape people’s experiences of crime and experiences in the criminal justice system more generally.

Tournament: Damus | Round: 2 | Opponent: San Marino ED | Judge:
Current application of qualified immunity arose in response to, solves for, excessive litigation.
Wurman, Ilan, from the Stanford Law School, “Qualified Immunity and Statutory Interpretation”, 2013, Seattle University Law Review, http://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2227andcontext=sulr
The Glick test posed a challenge for plaintiffs. It is difficult to prove that an officer acted maliciously and without good faith. Because many instances of force may be excessive but very few will truly “shock the conscience,” Glick was an effective bar to recovery. Graham v. Connor 16—the decision that changed the standard for all excessive force cases—demonstrates these propositions.
In Graham, the plaintiff (Graham) had his friend take him to a store to resolve a blood sugar problem.17 Because the line in the store was too long, he ran out of the store back to his friend.18 Officers who saw him grew suspicious and detained him while another officer went to investigate.19 The officers refused his friend’s request to give him orange juice, though Graham was manifestly having some reaction.20 When they learned that nothing was wrong the officers drove Graham home, but Graham had by then “sustained a broken foot, cuts on his wrists, a bruised forehead, . . . an injured shoulder, and developed a loud ringing in his right ear that continues to this day.”21
Few who read the Court’s full opinion can doubt that the officers acted excessively and unreasonably. Of course, they probably did not intend to act unreasonably, but surely they should have known better? Under Glick that question hardly matters: even if their acts were unreasonable, they were not acting maliciously or sadistically, and they were acting on a good faith belief that Graham may have committed a crime at the store he had hastily exited.
That is exactly what the district court, relying on Glick, found in Graham. 22 The trial had even proceeded to a jury, but the district judge granted the officers’ motion for a directed verdict.23 Graham did not have a claim as a matter of law because the court found that the use of force was “‘appropriate under the circumstances,’ that ‘there was no discernable injury inflicted,’ and that the force used ‘was not applied maliciously or sadistically for the very purpose of causing harm,’ but in ‘a good faith effort to maintain or restore order in the face of a potentially explosive situation.’”24
The Supreme Court reversed and held that all excessive force cases arising out of arrests or investigatory stops must be analyzed under the Fourth Amendment, the proper textual home for them.25 The Court eliminated the subjective components of the excessive-force inquiry in favor of an objective multi-factor test to determine the reasonableness of the application of force. The proper application of the test requires careful attention to the facts and circumstances of each particular case, including 1 the severity of the crime at issue, 2 whether the suspect poses an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others, and 3 whether he is actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight.26
This is an explicitly objective test, with no reference to subjective intent.27 This test opened the floodgates to plaintiffs litigating excessive force claims against police officers. Those floodgates were promptly reclosed by the application of the Court’s reinvented qualified immunity doctrine.
B. Qualified Immunity: A Mess in the Circuits
Qualified immunity had already been established as a doctrine divorced from the common law at this point.28 The Court held in Saucier v. Katz29 that in excessive force cases qualified immunity requires, as a first step, an inquiry into whether a cognizable constitutional violation has occurred and thus a determination of whether excessive force was used under the Graham standard.30 Then, as a second step, the courts must determine whether it was “clearly established” at the time that the particular use of force was unconstitutional.31
Excessive litigation kills tech innovation.
Kirk 6, Executive Director of the American Intellectual Property Law Association, 3-24-6 (Michael, http://www.aipla. org/Content/ContentGroups/Legislative_Action/109th_Congress/Testimony5/ImmigrationBillSenatorSpecter.pdf)
I am writing to you on behalf of the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA) regarding the pending immigration reform legislation that would transfer jurisdiction over immigration appeals to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. We believe that such broadening of the Federal Circuit’s jurisdiction would seriously hinder the court’s ability to render high quality, timely decisions on patent appeals from district courts, and patent and trademark appeals from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. This runs directly counter to the present efforts of Congress to otherwise reform and improve this nation’s patent system. We take no position on other specific elements of the legislation or on the underlying need for immigration reform. Our concern focuses solely on the proposed shift in appellate jurisdiction, which we believe will do more harm than good. AIPLA is a national bar association whose approximately 16,000 members are primarily lawyers in private and corporate practice, in government service, and in the academic community. AIPLA represents a wide and diverse spectrum of individuals, companies, and institutions involved directly or indirectly in the practice of patent, trademark, copyright, and unfair competition law, as well as other fields of law affecting intellectual property. Our members represent both owners and users of intellectual property, and have a keen interest in an efficient federal judicial system. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit was established in 1982 after more than a decade of deliberate study and Congressional consideration. The Hruska Commission (chaired by Senator Roman Hruska) conducted a study lasting nearly three years before recommending to Congress the establishment of a national appeals court to consider patent cases. It took two Administrations, several Congresses, and a number of hearings in both the House and Senate before legislation establishing the Federal Circuit was finally enacted. Over the past 26 years the Court, through its thoughtful and deliberate opinions, has made great progress in providing stability and consistency in the patent law. Removing immigration appeals from the general jurisdiction of the twelve regional Courts of Appeals and centralizing it in the Federal Circuit is an enormous change. Leaving aside the impact, both pro and con, on the affected litigants, the Federal Circuit is simply not equipped to undertake the more than 12,000 requests for review of deportation orders that twelve courts now share each year. The Federal Circuit currently has no expertise or experience in the field of immigration law. While the legislation envisions adding three judges to the twelve currently on the Court, we have serious concerns whether this increase will be adequate. Judge Posner has calculated that, even with the three additional judges proposed in the legislation, each of the fifteen Federal Circuit judges would be responsible for about 820 immigration cases per year, on the average—an incredibly large number that we believe will have a significant adverse impact on the remainder of the court’s docket. It seems inevitable that the proposed legislation will have a dramatic, negative impact on Federal Circuit decisions in patent cases and appeals from the USPTO. Such an increased caseload will necessarily delay decisions in these appeals, which in turn will cause uncertainty over patent and trademark rights and interfere with business investments in technological innovation. Beyond mere delay, the Federal Circuit's ability to issue consistent, predictable opinions in patent cases will be complicated by an increase in the number of judges. If conflicts in panel opinions increase, the inefficient and often contentious en banc process will have to be used more often, further adding to the overall burden on the court. Business can effectively deal with decisions, positive or negative, but it cannot deal with protracted uncertainty caused by inconsistent opinions or long delays in judicial review. Demand for reform of the patent system has been the topic of considerable public debate of late. Congress held extensive hearings on this subject last year, and more are scheduled in coming weeks. The House is currently considering legislation that would dramatically change the patent statute, and we understand that patent reform legislation may soon be introduced in the Senate as well. It would be unfortunate for Congress to inadvertently compound the challenges facing the patent system by weakening the ability of the Federal Circuit to give timely and consistent consideration to patent cases.
Innovation solves great power war
Taylor 4 – Professor of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Mark, “The Politics of Technological Change: International Relations versus Domestic Institutions,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 4/1/2004, http://www.scribd.com/doc/46554792/Taylor) RGP
I. Introduction Technological innovation is of central importance to the study of international relations (IR), affecting almost every aspect of the sub-field. First and foremost, a nation’s technological capability has a significant effect on its economic growth, industrial might, and military prowess; therefore relative national technological capabilities necessarily influence the balance of power between states, and hence have a role in calculations of war and alliance formation. Second, technology and innovative capacity also determine a nation’s trade profile, affecting which products it will import and export, as well as where multinational corporations will base their production facilities. Third, insofar as innovation-driven economic growth both attracts investment and produces surplus capital, a nation’s technological ability will also affect international financial flows and who has power over them. Thus, in broad theoretical terms, technological change is important to the study of IR because of its overall implications for both the relative and absolute power of states. And if theory alone does not convince, then history also tells us that nations on the technological ascent generally experience a corresponding and dramatic change in their global stature and influence, such as Britain during the first industrial revolution, the United States and Germany during the second industrial revolution, and Japan during the twentieth century. Conversely, great powers which fail to maintain their place at the technological frontier generally drift and fade from influence on international scene. This is not to suggest that technological innovation alone determines international politics, but rather that shifts in both relative and absolute technological capability have a major impact on international relations, and therefore need to be better understood by IR scholars. Indeed, the importance of technological innovation to international relations is seldom disputed by IR theorists. Technology is rarely the sole or overriding causal variable in any given IR theory, but a broad overview of the major theoretical debates reveals the ubiquity of technological causality. For example, from Waltz to Posen, almost all Realists have a place for technology in their explanations of international politics. At the very least, they describe it as an essential part of the distribution of material capabilities across nations, or an indirect source of military doctrine. And for some, like Gilpin quoted above, technology is the very cornerstone of great power domination, and its transfer the main vehicle by which war and change occur in world politics. Jervis tells us that the balance of offensive and defensive military technology affects the incentives for war. Walt agrees, arguing that technological change can alter a state’s aggregate power, and thereby affect both alliance formation and the international balance of threats. Liberals are less directly concerned with technological change, but they must admit that by raising or lowering the costs of using force, technological progress affects the rational attractiveness of international cooperation and regimes. Technology also lowers information and transactions costs and thus increases the applicability of international institutions, a cornerstone of Liberal IR theory. And in fostering flows of trade, finance, and information, technological change can lead to Keohane’s interdependence or Thomas Friedman et al’s globalization. Meanwhile, over at the “third debate”, Constructivists cover the causal spectrum on the issue, from Katzenstein’s “cultural norms” which shape security concerns and thereby affect technological innovation; to Wendt’s “stripped down technological determinism” in which technology inevitably drives nations to form a world state. However most Constructivists seem to favor Wendt, arguing that new technology changes people’s identities within society, and sometimes even creates new cross-national constituencies, thereby affecting international politics. Of course, Marxists tend to see technology as determining all social relations and the entire course of history, though they describe mankind’s major fault lines as running between economic classes rather than nation-states. Finally, Buzan and Little remind us that without advances in the technologies of transportation, communication, production, and war, international systems would not exist in the first place.
Perception of inaction against securities fraud undermines confidence -~-- crushes the global economy
Lerach 2 (William, fmr. partner, Milbreg Weiss Bershad Hynes and Lerach LLP, “ENRON: LESSONS AND IMPLICATIONS: Plundering America: How American Investors Got Taken for Trillions by Corporate Insiders--The Rise of the New Corporate Kleptocracy,” 8 Stan. J.L. Bus. and Fin. 69, LexisNexis
What happened was quite the opposite. Within a few years after corporate and Wall Street interests got Congress to pass the 1995 Act, "the chickens came home to roost." n28 As night follows day, after these powerful interests achieved their goal of *79 curtailing the ability of investors to hold them accountable for securities fraud, there has been a massive upsurge in securities fraud. The results are clear for all to see. Every metric to measure fraud in our markets soared. Financial scandal after financial scandal--accounting restatement after accounting restatement--surfaced. The huge market bubble burst, leaving investors holding a multi-trillion dollar bag, lay-offs sky-rocketed, the IPO window all but closed, and capital formation collapsed. Reality has overtaken deceit. While there have always been high-profile financial frauds--Equity Funding, U.S. Financial, National Student Marketing, Penn Square Bank and Miniscribe come to mind--these were isolated instances. Even the savings-and-loan scandals of the 1980s were confined to that industry. Historically, our public-company accounting has been of high quality and one of the major factors that has led to investor confidence in our markets, making them the envy of the world and helping to fuel the strong capital formation and economic growth we enjoyed for years. n29 Over the past several years, important changes in our financial markets occurred which, exacerbated by the negative consequences of the late 1990s legislative bonanza for corporate and financial interests, contributed to the massive increase in financial fraud we have witnessed. Over 9,000 new public companies were created by the IPO boom of the 1980s-1990s. Many of these new companies were smaller, high-tech or bio-tech companies where the pressure to show earnings growth was intense. Others were dot-com enterprises which had no earnings and were under pressure to show revenue increases--or create apparent profits by using so-called "pro forma" accounting to generate financial results which Generally Accepted Accounting Principles would never sanction. However dubious these enterprises may have been as public companies, bringing them public generated billions in fees for the investment bankers and gargantuan returns to venture capital investors--as well as making countless instant corporate insider multi-millionaires of people who had never even run a business before. But now each of these *80 companies was a public company, subject to all the pressures inherent on public companies to meet the revenue and earnings growth forecasts necessary to support a high stock price valuation. Executive compensation also changed. Executives now got cash bonuses only if earnings reached preset targets or the company's stock hit targeted prices. They received gigantic stock options, not to hold for the long term, but rather to exercise and sell each quarter, in a trading window that opened a day or two after the company reported its quarterly numbers. Also during the 1990s, the amounts paid to accounting firms by their corporate clients for consulting services skyrocketed, and the profitability of the huge accounting firms increasingly came to depend on their high-margin consulting fees from their audit clients, creating powerful incentives for these so-called "watchdogs" to accommodate their corporate clients. These were important structural changes that altered the type of public companies that dominated our financial markets, the relationship of the auditors to their corporate clients and the incentives that shape the behavior of corporate executives and their professional assistors. This explosion of new "high-growth" public companies, plus an executive-compensation system based on meeting predetermined earnings and stock-price appreciation targets, with stock options to be exercised and sold quarterly, created very powerful incentives to falsify results. This was exacerbated by executives' knowledge that markets, increasingly dominated by momentum investors, would instantly crush stocks for missing the "whisper" earnings numbers by just a penny or two. Add to this that it turned out that the supposedly "independent" accountants were routinely violating independence rules while pocketing lavish consulting payments that outweighed their audit fees many times over. While all of this was going on, Congress via the 1995 and 1998 Acts and several courts--via a series of anti-investor decisions implementing these Acts--were curtailing investor rights and remedies more severely than at any time since the enactment of the 1933 and 1934 Acts, n30 a toxic mixture in the making. *81 These factors created a "race to the bottom" in financial reporting that undermined the integrity of public-company financial reports which is essential to informed investor decisions, investor confidence in our markets, and the efficient allocation of capital to honest entrepreneurs whose efforts will create long-term economic job growth and positive investor returns. n31 Remember, Adam Smith's invisible hand guides us all. When there was so much to be gained by those who create the financial results of public companies by meeting expectations--and so much to be lost by missing them--we should not be surprised that corporate managers and their professional assistors yielded to temptation--especially when their legal responsibility and accountability had been drastically curtailed. Under these circumstances, it is not hard to see the temptation to manipulate reported results - especially when the efficient market (it's really a ruthless market) would savage a stock for the slightest earnings disappointment. It is not as if Congress was not warned. Consumer, labor, and investor groups testified that the drastic cutback on investor protections and remedies for securities fraud embodied in the 1995 Act, and reduction of corporate executives' and securities professionals' accountability for misconduct that would follow, would inevitably result in an increase in securities fraud and investor losses. They told Congress this would impair investor confidence, harm capital formation and our economy. The 1995 Act was opposed by major consumer, worker, and investor groups. The vast majority of America's newspapers also editorialized against the 1995 Act. They warned that it would grant those best positioned to profit from stock inflation a license to lie and would result in a massive upsurge of fraudulent conduct and investor losses. *82 A review of these editorials is telling. How accurate their warnings and predictions were. Two bills before Congress reveal how reckless the Republicans have become in their zeal to reduce regulation. The bills--which would "reform" laws governing securities firms and banks--go far beyond their stated purpose of ending frivolous litigation. What they would actually do is insulate corporate officials who commit fraud from legal challenge by their victims. The securities bill would erect a nearly insurmountable barrier to suing officials who peddle recklessly false information. It would block suits against accountants, lawyers and other professionals who look the other way when the companies they serve mislead investors. The high-sounding Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 . . . might come to be remembered as legislation that steeply tilted the playing field against investors. n32 "The bill . . . would bar . . . charges of fraud against those who make false projections . . . . By granting "safe harbor" to all statements of a "forward-looking" nature, it essentially tells companies . . . . Go ahead, lie about the future . . . you can fleece investors in any way that your imagination allows." n33 Gone, if these bills ever become law, is the uniquely American system of open, accessible civil justice . . . Gone, too, would be vital rights of ordinary Americans to seek redress against fraudulent securities hucksters. . . . The "Securities Litigation Reform Act" is a gift to the boiler-room crowd in the securities profession. It would raise the standards of evidence required to bring fraud cases to court while lowering the standards of professional conduct considered legally fraudulent. n34 "Companies and their agents could make false "projections" and "estimates" of future performance, even if they were deliberate lies, without fear of lawsuits by those defrauded." n35 Talk about a twist of fate. Rep. Christopher Cox, a California Republican, wrote a tough, aggressive bill on securities-law reform, which passed the House of Representatives in March. If it becomes law, investors who think they've been defrauded will find it incredibly hard to bring a class-action lawsuit to recoup their loss. Just two months after his bill passed Cox found himself tagged by just such a suit, brought by some victims of the noxious *83 First Pension fraud. In a second suit last week, First Pension's court-appointed receiver charged Cox, among others, with contributing to the hoax. n36 How, in the light of overwhelming consumer, labor and investor group opposition and widespread editorial warnings, could this special-interest legislation have possibly been enacted? In truth, the fault lies not with the corporate and financial interests that used their financial and political power to get this legislation. After all, they were only exercising their First Amendment rights to advance their interests. Nor does it really lie with the likes of Senators Domenici, Gramm, Bennett, D'Amato n37 and their ilk, who were just doing the bidding of their corporate and financial supporters. The real responsibility lies with those in positions of public trust who defaulted, who gave in and even actively assisted these special interests to help get this legislation passed when they were in a position--and had a responsibility--to stop it. Notable among those who defaulted was then SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt, the quintessential man of Wall Street who became the first Chairman in history to support legislation curtailing investor protections against securities fraud. n38 Levitt *84 often bragged how he had dined every month with corporate executives to hear their views. n39 It is unfortunate he never dined with victims of securities fraud to listen to their plight. While the Levitt of late has become a prominent critic of financial abuse, in truth, he abandoned the investors he was supposed to protect when the corporate and financial interests besieged Congress in 1994-1995 and again in 1998. n40 As the new Republican Congress arrived in Washington, the SEC--the investor protection agency--was in the hands of only two Commissioners--with three seats vacant. Clinton, paralyzed by his recent election rebuke, failed to fill the empty seats. Thus, it remained for the Chairman, former Wall Street executive Levitt, and the only commissioner, Steve Wallman, an attorney who represented the Business Roundtable, to protect investors from the new, pro-corporate Congressional onslaught that was shaping up. Instead of fighting for investors, Levitt and Wallman actually helped the corporate community and its new Republican Congress pass the most damaging assault on investor protection since the federal securities laws came into being. Next comes Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), a senior Democrat on the Banking Committee and the Chairman of the Democratic Party. n41 A purported progressive, n42 Dodd energetically championed the accounting firms and insurance and Wall Street interests, i.e., his contribution base, which all benefited so *85 handsomely from his efforts in making the attempt to gut the securities laws appear to be "bipartisan." n43 He actually led the veto override efforts to enact the 1995 Act--challenging his own party's President--blind to all the warnings of the frauds to come. This is a cautionary tale of how money and power and the promise of lucrative post-Beltway staff jobs can produce special interest legislation that harms America's workers and investors--and in the end all of us. F. The "Cop on the Beat" Sleeps Also in the mix here was the failure of the SEC--the supposed "cop on the beat"--to do its job. Despite some public "jawboning" and an aggressive public-relations program casting former SEC Chairman Levitt as an investor's champion, n44 after the SEC was turned over to that alumnus of Wall Street, the SEC was anything but aggressive in cracking down on financial manipulation and insider trading by corporate executives. n45 Until recently, the SEC was headed by a lawyer who, while in *86 private practice, championed passage of the 1995 Act and represented the big accounting firms, Wall Street banks, and some of the corporations which are among those whose credibility has been tarnished and are under regulatory scrutiny. n46 He even wrote an article telling them how to cover their tracks by destroying incriminating evidence before anyone has sued them. n47 According to Forbes, in October, 2000 video cameras recorded Pitt giving a seminar for in-house corporate counsel and saying that chief financial officers whose e-mails detail too-cozy conversations with analysts about earnings estimates should "destroy" the incriminating messages "because somebody is going to find this, and it will probably be the SEC when they investigate." n48 Incredibly, this new head of the SEC early on signaled he wanted a "gentler" relationship with the accounting profession and that his SEC might actually seek to further restrict corporate liability for false forecasts. n49 In a belated response to the upsurge in corporate fraud, Pitt put forth what are at best meek proposals. For instance, Pitt recently had the SEC require corporate CEOs and CFOs to "swear" that their corporate financial results are accurate. n50 But the securities laws have required CEOs and CFOs to prepare and file accurate financial reports for public companies for sixty-eight years! CEOs and CFOs have had to sign corporate 10-Ks and 10-Qs for years. Wilfully filing false financial statements has long been a felony, subject to a prison term, since 1934. n51 And do you doubt that Enron's, WorldCom's, Adelphia's, Dynegy's, Qwest's, RiteAid's, and Global Crossing's CEOs and CFOs would have so sworn, if they had not been previously exposed. This would be humorous, if it weren't so sad. n52 *87 It now is clear that the worst stock market debacle in the history of postwar America did not just happen by chance or by the greed of the masses (although they were invaluable participants, as the sucker always is) but happened in large part because of conspiracy, greed in high places, incredible ignorance by those in high places, and a federal regulatory failure of unique proportions . . . . . . In the Internet/high-tech boom, completely worthless companies, with no prospect of earnings, were flogged insanely by the very people who should have been labeling them as unsound, the "analysts" and "market gurus" of the big investment banks. Companies that existed as no more than dreams and fantasies were touted as multi-billion dollar entities by people and investment houses whose job was to defend against exactly such viruses. What happened did not happen by accident, and a full accounting is owed to the people who were fleeced. n53 G. Pro-Corporate Courts Protect Fraudsters The courts are also responsible. For instance, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers the high-tech and venture-capital havens of California (the Silicon Valley) and Washington (the Silicon Forest), which pushed so hard for the 1995 Act, was once a progressive court with a reputation for protecting investors. n54 Yet since the 1995 Act it has thrown 18 consecutive securities fraud suits by investors out of court. Eighteen times in a row, using the 1995 Act, the Ninth Circuit has sided with corporate interests and closed the courthouse door to defrauded investors. Not one complaint out of 18 upheld or permitted to go forward! It all started with the Ninth Circuit's 2-1 In re Silicon Graphics decision in 1999, n55 one of the first to interpret the 1995 Act's elevated pleading standard which laid out a roadmap for judges who wanted to use that pleading standard to bar defrauded investors from pursuing any remedy and thus insulate corporate fraudsters from liability. n56 That precedent has resulted in an unbroken string of *88 follow-on affirmances of dismissals of securities class action suits by the Ninth Circuit n57 and the dismissal of scores of cases in the lower courts in the Ninth Circuit where judges are bound to follow Silicon Graphics. Given the current revelations of the gross frauds that have infested our securities markets in recent years, is it really reasonable to conclude that investors who sued in the Ninth Circuit have been unable to plead a securities fraud case in sufficient detail eighteen times in a row? The conduct of some judges in using the 1995 Act to block valid securities suits has contributed to the attitude of executive arrogance that led to the upsurge in corporate fraud. Can you imagine the stockholder fraud suits filed against WorldCom and Ebbers n58 in March 2000 and against Tyco and Kozlowski n59 in December 1999 alleging securities fraud were thrown out of court by federal judges? These were detailed complaints setting forth major frauds. Their allegations were true. Yet judges used the 1995 Act to throw these cases out of court, denying damaged investors any remedy and allowing these very serious frauds to continue--ultimately inflicting far greater harm on investors. A shareholder suit against Oracle and Larry Ellison, where Ellison sold off 900 million dollars of stock just a few weeks before Oracle revealed financial reversals and the stock collapsed, was also dismissed. n60 These are not isolated examples. Many other procorporate judges have repeatedly used the 1995 Act to protect dishonest corporate executives who falsify financial statements while insider trading and bar innocent investors from court. n61 *89 Forbes, one of the most probusiness and anti-lawyer publications in our Country, was scandalized by the dismissal of the WorldCom suit. It wrote: Over a year ago a raft of former WorldCom employees gave statements outlining a scandalous litany of misdeeds--deliberately understating costs, hiding bad debt, backdating contracts to book orders earlier than accounting rules allow. But it appears that WorldCom's directors never followed up to investigate the allegations . . . They should have. The alleged chicanery served to falsify hundreds of millions of dollars in profit and sales to give a veneer of stability and strength to WorldCom. The unheeded accusations first emerged in June 2001 n62 with the filing of a shareholder lawsuit against WorldCom in federal court on its home turf, Jackson, Miss. The complaint was backed by 100 interviews with former WorldCom employees and related parties. The allegations were startling in their breadth and detail. In smacking down the class action, the judge decreed: "The numbers are so large, the stakes were so high, and the fall of the dollar value of WorldCom stock so precipitous, that the reader reacts by thinking that there must have been some corporate misbehavior . . . However, after a thorough examination, it becomes apparent that the Complaint is a classic example of 'puzzle pleading,'" or using an onrush of "cross-references and repetition" in lieu of real substance. n63 Judge Barbour was an ideal adjudicator for the home team . . . Barbour and his family reside in a state where WorldCom was the biggest source of local pride and a major supplier of high-paying jobs. Mississippi is undergoing a highly charged tort reform battle, with Republicans squarely on the side of curtailing shareholder lawsuits. A Reagan appointee to the bench . . . Barbour is a first cousin and former law partner of Haley Barbour, former Republican National Committee chairman and now a high-powered Washington lobbyist mulling a run for Mississippi governor . . . . *90 More intriguing still, Judge Barbour's second cousin, Henry Barbour, is the campaign chairman for U.S. Representative Charles W. (Chip) Pickering. The Mississippi Republican was the largest congressional recipient of contributions from MCI, WorldCom and related individuals, receiving $ 83,750 from 1989 to 2002. n64 With judicial protection like this, it is no wonder corporate executives became emboldened and misbehaved--and investors ended up damaged and dismayed! Investors realize that purchasing securities entails risks, including the risk of loss. But if victims of securities fraud perceive that they have lost a fair chance to hold perpetrators legally responsible, that has to contribute to undermining investor confidence. n65 If corporate executives realize they can get away with it they will be all the more emboldened to try to do so. The truth is, in the last half of the 1990s, Congress, the SEC and several courts caved in to the corporate and financial interests and badly impaired the investor protections historically provided by our federal securities laws. n66 As a *91 result, the integrity of public--company financial reporting and disclosure practices became severely undermined at the very time the IPO boom and the greatest bull market in history roared on--attracting all-time record levels of pension funds' and individuals' investment of retirement savings monies. These investors got creamed. Over 14 trillion dollars was lost in just over two years--a lot of that due to fraud. 

Economic decline causes nuclear war
Tønnesson 15 (Stein, Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, Leader of the East Asia Peace program at Uppsala university, “Deterrence, interdependence and Sino–US peace,” International Area Studies Review, Volume 18, Number 3, p. 297—311
Several recent works on China and Sino–US relations have made substantial contributions to the current understanding of how and under what circumstances a combination of nuclear deterrence and economic interdependence may reduce the risk of war between major powers. At least four conclusions can be drawn from the review above: first, those who say that interdependence may both inhibit and drive conflict are right. Interdependence raises the cost of conflict for all sides but asymmetrical or unbalanced dependencies and negative trade expectations may generate tensions leading to trade wars among inter-dependent states that in turn increase the risk of military conflict (Copeland, 2015: 1, 14, 437; Roach, 2014). The risk may increase if one of the interdependent countries is governed by an inward-looking socio-economic coalition (Solingen, 2015); second, the risk of war between China and the US should not just be analysed bilaterally but include their allies and partners. Third party countries could drag China or the US into confrontation; third, in this context it is of some comfort that the three main economic powers in Northeast Asia (China, Japan and South Korea) are all deeply integrated economically through production networks within a global system of trade and finance (Ravenhill, 2014; Yoshimatsu, 2014: 576); and fourth, decisions for war and peace are taken by very few people, who act on the basis of their future expectations. International relations theory must be supplemented by foreign policy analysis in order to assess the value attributed by national decision-makers to economic development and their assessments of risks and opportunities. If leaders on either side of the Atlantic begin to seriously fear or anticipate their own nation’s decline then they may blame this on external dependence, appeal to anti-foreign sentiments, contemplate the use of force to gain respect or credibility, adopt protectionist policies, and ultimately refuse to be deterred by either nuclear arms or prospects of socioeconomic calamities. Such a dangerous shift could happen abruptly, i.e. under the instigation of actions by a third party – or against a third party. Yet as long as there is both nuclear deterrence and interdependence, the tensions in East Asia are unlikely to escalate to war. As Chan (2013) says, all states in the region are aware that they cannot count on support from either China or the US if they make provocative moves. The greatest risk is not that a territorial dispute leads to war under present circumstances but that changes in the world economy alter those circumstances in ways that render inter-state peace more precarious. If China and the US fail to rebalance their financial and trading relations (Roach, 2014) then a trade war could result, interrupting transnational production networks, provoking social distress, and exacerbating nationalist emotions. This could have unforeseen consequences in the field of security, with nuclear deterrence remaining the only factor to protect the world from Armageddon, and unreliably so. Deterrence could lose its credibility: one of the two great powers might gamble that the other yield in a cyber-war or conventional limited war, or third party countries might engage in conflict with each other, with a view to obliging Washington or Beijing to intervene.

Tournament: Damus | Round: 3 | Opponent: San Marino JC | Judge:
Qualified immunity is a key protection against uses of section 1983 claims to encroach on states rights and laws – immunity returns power to state courts
Putnam 92 – Charles Putnam, Office of the New Hampshire Attorney General: 1992(“Defending a Maligned Defense: The Policy Bases of the Qualified Immunity Defense in Actions Under 42 U.S.C. § 1983”, Bridgeport Law Review Available at  https://www.qu.edu/prebuilt/pdf/SchoolLaw/LawReviewLibrary/26_12UBridgeportLRev665(1991-1992).pdf Accessed on 11/04/16)IG
To place this analysis in perspective, the authors first review the four policy considerations that we believe the qualified immunity defense furthers. We then briefly retrace the history of litigation under section 1983 and review the mechanics of the statute as it exists today. Next, we review the development of the qualified immunity defense and examine its current application in excessive force, arrest and detention, jail-cell suicide, and malicious prosecution claims against law enforcement officials. Finally, we examine how courts apply the defense to claims brought against correctional officials arising from strip searches, emergency situations, and medical treatment.
I. POLICY CONCERNS
Although the historical purposes of section 1983 clearly reflect the distrust of state courts and other state entities that was prevalent in 1871, the current view of some of the justices of the Supreme Court and increasing numbers of federal judges is that claims alleging misconduct by state and municipal officials do not belong in federal court. They believe such claims should in- stead be brought in state court in the first instance, if at all.3 This federalist view is based on the belief that state courts are as competent as federal courts to decide such claims and the belief that federal courts ought to minimize their involvement in and supervision of state and local government matters." Daniels v. Williams' is a case that demonstrates the heightened federalism concern where a section 1983 action appears only to be a state law tort claim masquerading as a constitutional claim. In Daniels, an inmate filed suit for alleged violations of his constitutional rights after he supposedly slipped on a pillow negligently left on a stairway by a corrections officer.6 In an opinion by Justice Rehnquist, the Supreme Court held that the due process clause is not implicated by negligent acts of state officials that cause unintended loss or injury, as these do not "deprive" a person of life, liberty, or property under the Fourteenth Amendment.7
This concern for federalism also is evidenced by the decision of the First Circuit in Amsden v. Moran.8 There, the plaintiff sought monetary damages, as well as declaratory and injunctive relief arising from the revocation of his surveyor's license by the New Hampshire Board of Licensure for Land Surveyors.9 The plaintiff argued that his federal constitutional rights had been violated because his license had been revoked without due process of law. The appellate court found that the plaintiff already had been granted ample opportunities to present his case in state fora and held that "in the qualified immunity/summary judgment milieu, federal courts have been well advised to steer clear of the potential quagmire inherent in disputes, like this one, which come down to matters of state-law jurisdictional and administrative requirements."' 0 The court went on to hold that, "at bottom, this appeal exemplifies that section 1983 is not a panacea for every remonstrant disappointed either by his treatment at the hands of a state agency or by the outcome of state administrative proceedings.'1
The federalism concern may also be heightened where a section 1983 action appears to be an effort to interfere with the operation of state government without the benefit of express statutory or constitutional mandate."2
The plan overturns a delicate balance of federalism: police and court power are key – especially to public health law and the medical system
Hodge 98 James G. Hodge Jr. (Professor of Public Health Law and Ethics at Arizona State University), "The Role of New Federalism and Public Health Law," Journal of Law and Health AZ
Because of the intersection of federal and state powers in the field of public health, legal struggles over the exercise of limited powers occur. The resolution of such disputes is uniquely within the province of federalism. States’ traditional abilities to control and maintain public health remains contingent on the scope of their police powers and the extent of federal intrusion. Likewise, the scope of states' police powers is contingent on the treatment states receive in the exercise of these powers by the courts. This in turn depends on the emphasis courts place on the principle of federalism." When federalism concerns are more strongly emphasized, states have more ability to regulate matters of public health pursuant to their police powers. When federalism principles are weakened or ignored, states lose out to federal interventions over such traditional exercises. Thus, federalism preserves the police powers of the states and acts as a barrier to federal legislative intervention in matters within the scope of those powers.“1 lt simultaneously restricts the federal government’s ability to regulate in the interests of public health since such regulation has traditionally been the responsibility of state governments. Hanging in the balance of these observations are the very goals of public health which rely on the role federalism plays. 111. STATE Police Powers UNDER TENTH AMENDMENT The integral component of federalism is the division of powers among the national and state governments. Consistent with this component, states are reserved those powers not delegated to the federal government nor prohibited to them by the Constitution. This Part examines the theoretical, historical, and legal underpinnings of the reserved powers of states via the Tenth Amendment"2 and their application to public health law. A. Defining Police Powers As James Madison stated in The Federalist series: The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. . . The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people.
Lack of detection and health infrastructure makes disease spread likely – and US infrastructure spills over
Schermerhorn 14 (Jordan, Global Health and the Middle East at Duke University) “Bioterrorism is Already Here” Medium Apr 29, 2014 AT
The fact that our “global health security agenda” focuses on future pandemics and deliberate bioterror threats is laughable in the face of reemerging infectious diseases and slaughtered immunization workers. True health insecurity is present globally, and it should not require a mystery test tube and ill intent to be perceived as valid and pressing threat. Disease distributions in three countries, with red representing infectious disease. Images from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Data obtained from 2012 State Department budget and CIA Factbook population statistics. The least health-secure areas are often conflict zones, where the U.S. is heavily invested militarily but where health assistance often lags far behind. There is no better example than the Middle East, where poor health access tends to be masked; statelessness, migrancy, and the sheer law of averages merge oil conglomerates and marginalized masses into a bland middle-income yellow. View from the Taybeh Health Center in Amman, Jordan, which serves a catchment area of 18,000 Palestinian refugees. Though a model clinic in the region, Taybeh is managed by UNRWA, which is struggling to absorb Palestinian-Syrian double refugees. 27 polio cases have surfaced in Syria since October. That may seem negligible compared to the SARS numbers cited by Kerry, but it represents the tip of an iceberg. When polio “appears,” this often means the case expresses symptoms in the iconic FDR sense — otherwise, it’s rather difficult to tell you have it. The cases easiest to detect, where the virus enters the central nervous system and causes paralysis — obviously signaling a need for prompt medical attention even for people with so much else on their plates — represent roughly 5 of all infections. 27 identified infections imply over 500 total infections. That’s 27 identified infections in a war-torn nation with a decimated capacity for disease surveillance, a barely-existent ability to prevent further spread, and fighters pouring in from an estimated 83 countries. And to top it all off, that same state is hemorrhaging hundreds of refugees by the day. Lucky thing this is happening on the other side of the world, right? A health-insecure United States is not a distant threat. It’s here now. And it will remain as long as health aid is granted to conflict zones as an afterthought to military aid, as long as the idiot proponents of the homegrown anti-vaccine movement are granted airtime, as long as health disparities exist within and between countries, and as long as planes and trains and automobiles propel the modern global economy forward across porous borders. In short, international health issues will always pose a security risk. Our capacity to prioritize those risks is what will help us remain secure. However, the present agenda does not provide reason for optimism. Our inability to smother “simple” diseases — those with vaccines and known transmission patterns — is a direct reflection of our global capacity to tame more virulent diseases, many of which we may not anticipate. Diseases do not back down in the face of international condemnation, and they have a pesky habit of ignoring borders. If the United States crafts a health security agenda around distant pandemics while refusing to take action in places where intervention is politically untenable, we are deluding ourselves. We are all but ignoring the resurgence of a disease from another era in a place where the government actively promotes conditions that facilitate its spread. Meanwhile, we center our panic and policy agendas on milder outbreaks in developed countries. Will we gather the courage to confront health challenges in uncomfortable places when the stakes are higher? The true nature of global health security depends on it, but polio in Syria does not provide an encouraging model.
Extinction
Quammen 12 David, award-winning science writer, long-time columnist for Outside magazine for fifteen years, with work in National Geographic, Harper's, Rolling Stone, the New York Times Book Review and other periodicals, 9/29, “Could the next big animal-to-human disease wipe us out?,” The Guardian, pg. 29, Lexis
Infectious disease is all around us. It's one of the basic processes that ecologists study, along with predation and competition. Predators are big beasts that eat their prey from outside. Pathogens (disease-causing agents, such as viruses) are small beasts that eat their prey from within. Although infectious disease can seem grisly and dreadful, under ordinary conditions, it's every bit as natural as what lions do to wildebeests and zebras. But conditions aren't always ordinary. Just as predators have their accustomed prey, so do pathogens. And just as a lion might occasionally depart from its normal behaviour - to kill a cow instead of a wildebeest, or a human instead of a zebra - so a pathogen can shift to a new target. Aberrations occur. When a pathogen leaps from an animal into a person, and succeeds in establishing itself as an infectious presence, sometimes causing illness or death, the result is a zoonosis. It's a mildly technical term, zoonosis, unfamiliar to most people, but it helps clarify the biological complexities behind the ominous headlines about swine flu, bird flu, Sars, emerging diseases in general, and the threat of a global pandemic. It's a word of the future, destined for heavy use in the 21st century. Ebola and Marburg are zoonoses. So is bubonic plague. So was the so-called Spanish influenza of 1918-1919, which had its source in a wild aquatic bird and emerged to kill as many as 50 million people. All of the human influenzas are zoonoses. As are monkeypox, bovine tuberculosis, Lyme disease, West Nile fever, rabies and a strange new affliction called Nipah encephalitis, which has killed pigs and pig farmers in Malaysia. Each of these zoonoses reflects the action of a pathogen that can "spillover", crossing into people from other animals. Aids is a disease of zoonotic origin caused by a virus that, having reached humans through a few accidental events in western and central Africa, now passes human-to-human. This form of interspecies leap is not rare; about 60 of all human infectious diseases currently known either cross routinely or have recently crossed between other animals and us. Some of those - notably rabies - are familiar, widespread and still horrendously lethal, killing humans by the thousands despite centuries of efforts at coping with their effects. Others are new and inexplicably sporadic, claiming a few victims or a few hundred, and then disappearing for years. Zoonotic pathogens can hide. The least conspicuous strategy is to lurk within what's called a reservoir host: a living organism that carries the pathogen while suffering little or no illness. When a disease seems to disappear between outbreaks, it's often still lingering nearby, within some reservoir host. A rodent? A bird? A butterfly? A bat? To reside undetected is probably easiest wherever biological diversity is high and the ecosystem is relatively undisturbed. The converse is also true: ecological disturbance causes diseases to emerge. Shake a tree and things fall out. Michelle Barnes is an energetic, late 40s-ish woman, an avid rock climber and cyclist. Her auburn hair, she told me cheerily, came from a bottle. It approximates the original colour, but the original is gone. In 2008, her hair started falling out; the rest went grey "pretty much overnight". This was among the lesser effects of a mystery illness that had nearly killed her during January that year, just after she'd returned from Uganda. Her story paralleled the one Jaap Taal had told me about Astrid, with several key differences - the main one being that Michelle Barnes was still alive. Michelle and her husband, Rick Taylor, had wanted to see mountain gorillas, too. Their guide had taken them through Maramagambo Forest and into Python Cave. They, too, had to clamber across those slippery boulders. As a rock climber, Barnes said, she tends to be very conscious of where she places her hands. No, she didn't touch any guano. No, she was not bumped by a bat. By late afternoon they were back, watching the sunset. It was Christmas evening 2007. They arrived home on New Year's Day. On 4 January, Barnes woke up feeling as if someone had driven a needle into her skull. She was achy all over, feverish. "And then, as the day went on, I started developing a rash across my stomach." The rash spread. "Over the next 48 hours, I just went down really fast." By the time Barnes turned up at a hospital in suburban Denver, she was dehydrated; her white blood count was imperceptible; her kidneys and liver had begun shutting down. An infectious disease specialist, Dr Norman K Fujita, arranged for her to be tested for a range of infections that might be contracted in Africa. All came back negative, including the test for Marburg. Gradually her body regained strength and her organs began to recover. After 12 days, she left hospital, still weak and anaemic, still undiagnosed. In March she saw Fujita on a follow-up visit and he had her serum tested again for Marburg. Again, negative. Three more months passed, and Barnes, now grey-haired, lacking her old energy, suffering abdominal pain, unable to focus, got an email from a journalist she and Taylor had met on the Uganda trip, who had just seen a news article. In the Netherlands, a woman had died of Marburg after a Ugandan holiday during which she had visited a cave full of bats. Barnes spent the next 24 hours Googling every article on the case she could find. Early the following Monday morning, she was back at Dr Fujita's door. He agreed to test her a third time for Marburg. This time a lab technician crosschecked the third sample, and then the first sample. The new results went to Fujita, who called Barnes: "You're now an honorary infectious disease doctor. You've self-diagnosed, and the Marburg test came back positive." The Marburg virus had reappeared in Uganda in 2007. It was a small outbreak, affecting four miners, one of whom died, working at a site called Kitaka Cave. But Joosten's death, and Barnes's diagnosis, implied a change in the potential scope of the situation. That local Ugandans were dying of Marburg was a severe concern - sufficient to bring a response team of scientists in haste. But if tourists, too, were involved, tripping in and out of some python-infested Marburg repository, unprotected, and then boarding their return flights to other continents, the place was not just a peril for Ugandan miners and their families. It was also an international threat. The first team of scientists had collected about 800 bats from Kitaka Cave for dissecting and sampling, and marked and released more than 1,000, using beaded collars coded with a number. That team, including scientist Brian Amman, had found live Marburg virus in five bats. Entering Python Cave after Joosten's death, another team of scientists, again including Amman, came across one of the beaded collars they had placed on captured bats three months earlier and 30 miles away. "It confirmed my suspicions that these bats are moving," Amman said - and moving not only through the forest but from one roosting site to another. Travel of individual bats between far-flung roosts implied circumstances whereby Marburg virus might ultimately be transmitted all across Africa, from one bat encampment to another. It voided the comforting assumption that this virus is strictly localised. And it highlighted the complementary question: why don't outbreaks of Marburg virus disease happen more often? Marburg is only one instance to which that question applies. Why not more Ebola? Why not more Sars? In the case of Sars, the scenario could have been very much worse. Apart from the 2003 outbreak and the aftershock cases in early 2004, it hasn't recurred. . . so far. Eight thousand cases are relatively few for such an explosive infection; 774 people died, not 7 million. Several factors contributed to limiting the scope and impact of the outbreak, of which humanity's good luck was only one. Another was the speed and excellence of the laboratory diagnostics - finding the virus and identifying it. Still another was the brisk efficiency with which cases were isolated, contacts were traced and quarantine measures were instituted, first in southern China, then in Hong Kong, Singapore, Hanoi and Toronto. If the virus had arrived in a different sort of big city - more loosely governed, full of poor people, lacking first-rate medical institutions - it might have burned through a much larger segment of humanity. One further factor, possibly the most crucial, was inherent in the way Sars affects the human body: symptoms tend to appear in a person before, rather than after, that person becomes highly infectious. That allowed many Sars cases to be recognised, hospitalised and placed in isolation before they hit their peak of infectivity. With influenza and many other diseases, the order is reversed. That probably helped account for the scale of worldwide misery and death during the 1918-1919 influenza. And that infamous global pandemic occurred in the era before globalisation. Everything nowadays moves around the planet faster, including viruses. When the Next Big One comes, it will likely conform to the same perverse pattern as the 1918 influenza: high infectivity preceding notable symptoms. That will help it move through cities and airports like an angel of death. The Next Big One is a subject that disease scientists around the world often address. The most recent big one is Aids, of which the eventual total bigness cannot even be predicted - about 30 million deaths, 34 million living people infected, and with no end in sight. Fortunately, not every virus goes airborne from one host to another. If HIV-1 could, you and I might already be dead. If the rabies virus could, it would be the most horrific pathogen on the planet. The influenzas are well adapted for airborne transmission, which is why a new strain can circle the world within days. The Sars virus travels this route, too, or anyway by the respiratory droplets of sneezes and coughs - hanging in the air of a hotel corridor, moving through the cabin of an aeroplane - and that capacity, combined with its case fatality rate of almost 10, is what made it so scary in 2003 to the people who understood it best. Human-to-human transmission is the crux. That capacity is what separates a bizarre, awful, localised, intermittent and mysterious disease (such as Ebola) from a global pandemic. Have you noticed the persistent, low-level buzz about avian influenza, the strain known as H5N1, among disease experts over the past 15 years? That's because avian flu worries them deeply, though it hasn't caused many human fatalities. Swine flu comes and goes periodically in the human population (as it came and went during 2009), sometimes causing a bad pandemic and sometimes (as in 2009) not so bad as expected; but avian flu resides in a different category of menacing possibility. It worries the flu scientists because they know that H5N1 influenza is extremely virulent in people, with a high lethality. As yet, there have been a relatively low number of cases, and it is poorly transmissible, so far, from human to human. It'll kill you if you catch it, very likely, but you're unlikely to catch it except by butchering an infected chicken. But if H5N1 mutates or reassembles itself in just the right way, if it adapts for human-to-human transmission, it could become the biggest and fastest killer disease since 1918. It got to Egypt in 2006 and has been especially problematic for that country. As of August 2011, there were 151 confirmed cases, of which 52 were fatal. That represents more than a quarter of all the world's known human cases of bird flu since H5N1 emerged in 1997. But here's a critical fact: those unfortunate Egyptian patients all seem to have acquired the virus directly from birds. This indicates that the virus hasn't yet found an efficient way to pass from one person to another. Two aspects of the situation are dangerous, according to biologist Robert Webster. The first is that Egypt, given its recent political upheavals, may be unable to staunch an outbreak of transmissible avian flu, if one occurs. His second concern is shared by influenza researchers and public health officials around the globe: with all that mutating, with all that contact between people and their infected birds, the virus could hit upon a genetic configuration making it highly transmissible among people. "As long as H5N1 is out there in the world," Webster told me, "there is the possibility of disaster. . . There is the theoretical possibility that it can acquire the ability to transmit human-to-human." He paused. "And then God help us." We're unique in the history of mammals. No other primate has ever weighed upon the planet to anything like the degree we do. In ecological terms, we are almost paradoxical: large-bodied and long-lived but grotesquely abundant. We are an outbreak. And here's the thing about outbreaks: they end. In some cases they end after many years, in others they end rather soon. In some cases they end gradually, in others they end with a crash. In certain cases, they end and recur and end again. Populations of tent caterpillars, for example, seem to rise steeply and fall sharply on a cycle of anywhere from five to 11 years. The crash endings are dramatic, and for a long while they seemed mysterious. What could account for such sudden and recurrent collapses? One possible factor is infectious from disease, and viruses in particular.

Tournament: Damus | Round: 2 | Opponent: San Marino ED | Judge:
Belief that police are under attack inspires right wing backlash, spurs militia recruitment
Blue, 16, Miranda Blue, July 8, 2016, “Oath Keepers Calls For Establishment Of Militias In Response To Dallas Ambush” Right Wing Watch
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/oath-keepers-calls-for-establishment-of-militias-in-response-to-dallas-ambush/
Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers, responded today to last night’s sniper ambush of police officers near a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas by calling for “patriotic Americans” to “go armed at all times” and “reestablish the militia system.” Rhodes wrote on the Oath Keepers website that the shooting was the product of “the Marxist agenda to divide and conquer along racial lines and inspire blind hatred against all police, and against this nation in general,” warning that it would be used to “further militarize” the police and “trample on the right of the people to keep and bear arms.” Tying the shooting in Dallas to the attack on an Orlando gay nightclub by an ISIS-inspired terrorist, Rhodes wrote that what “is now needed, more than ever, is the reestablishment of the militia of the people, trained, equipped and organized in each town, to defend against what is now clearly a ‘Tet Offensive’ American style.” “Therefore, I call on all Oath Keepers, and all patriotic Americans, to come to the aid of their local police, and to the aid of their communities, and unite and coordinate in mutual defense against this orchestrated campaign of Marxist terrorism, which is the modern version of the wave of terrorism we saw in the late 60s and early 70s by the Marxist Weather Underground and related groups (who also frequently targeted police), along with the closely related Jihadist terrorism offensive, with Orlando being merely the latest in an ongoing wave of attacks. What is now needed, more than ever, is the reestablishment of the militia of the people, trained, equipped and organized in each town, to defend against what is now clearly a “Tet Offensive” American style, as Navy SEAL veteran Matt Bracken warned. While we work to reestablish that militia system, you must go armed at all times, and be prepared, at all times, to defend your community against these Marxist terrorists as well as their Islamist terror allies. Remember, they are in league, and you are their common enemy and their common targets. The power elites who control, aid, abet and fund these terrorists will attempt to use these attacks to further destroy what little is left of our Constitution, but the one thing they do not want, and the one thing they truly fear, is for We the People, who are still armed, to come together and restore the militia of the several states. And the elites’ terrorist proxies among the Marxists and Islamacists also fear such a revitalization and restoration. So, let’s do what our enemies all fear most. Let us resurrect and restore the militia system of this nation, which the Founders told us is necessary for the security of a free state, and which must consist of ALL of the able bodied citizens of your community. It is time to finally get down to doing what is necessary. It starts with you and your neighbors coming together, now, to address this grave threat, and for you to lead them toward the only constitutional solution – the revitalization of the militia.”
Turns case—right-wing militia groups threaten minority groups and critical infrastructure, including power grids
Potok, 16, Mark Potok, United Nations High Commission on Human Rights and University of Chicago, February 17, 2016, “The Year in Hate and Extremism”, Southern Poverty Law Center, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2016/year-hate-and-extremism
The number of hate and antigovernment ‘Patriot’ groups grew last year, and terrorist attacks and radical plots proliferated. Charleston. Chattanooga. Colorado Springs. In these towns and dozens of other communities around the nation, 2015 was a year marked by extraordinary violence from domestic extremists — a year of living dangerously. Antigovernment militiamen, white supremacists, abortion foes, domestic Islamist radicals, neo-Nazis and lovers of the Confederate battle flag targeted police, government officials, black churchgoers, Muslims, Jews, schoolchildren, Marines, abortion providers, members of the Black Lives Matter protest movement, and even drug dealers. They laid plans to attack courthouses, banks, festivals, funerals, schools, mosques, churches, synagogues, clinics, water treatment plants and power grids. They used firearms, bombs, C-4 plastic explosives, knives and grenades; one of them, a murderous Klansman, was convicted of trying to build a death ray. The armed violence was accompanied by rabid and often racist denunciations of Muslims, LGBT activists and others — incendiary rhetoric led by a number of mainstream political figures and amplified by a lowing herd of their enablers in the right-wing media. Reacting to demographic changes in the U.S., immigration, the legalization of same-sex marriage, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, and Islamist atrocities, these people fostered a sense of polarization and anger in this country that may be unmatched since the political upheavals of 1968. When it comes to mainstream politics, the hardcore radical right typically says a pox on both their houses. Not this time. Donald Trump’s demonizing statements about Latinos and Muslims have electrified the radical right, leading to glowing endorsements from white nationalist leaders such as Jared Taylor and former Klansman David Duke. White supremacist forums are awash with electoral joy, having dubbed Trump their “Glorious Leader.” And Trump has repaid the compliments, retweeting hate posts and spreading their false statistics on black-on-white crime. In the midst of these developments, hate groups continued to flourish. The number of groups on the American radical right, according to the latest count by the Southern Poverty Law Center, expanded from 784 in 2014 to 892 in 2015 — a 14 increase. The increase in hate groups was not even across extremist sectors. The hardest core sectors of the white supremacist movement—white nationalists, neo-Nazis and racist skinheads—actually declined somewhat, a reflection, perhaps, that hate in the mainstream had absorbed some of the hate on the fringes But there were significant increases in Klan as well as black separatist groups. Klan chapters grew from 72 in 2014 to 190 last year, invigorated by the 364 pro-Confederate battle flag rallies that took place after South Carolina took down the battle flag from its Capitol grounds following the June massacre of nine black churchgoers by a white supremacist flag enthusiast in Charleston, S.C. Rallies in favor of the battle flag were held in 26 states — concentrated, but by no means limited to the South — and reflected widespread white anger that the tide in the country was turning against them. On the opposite end of the political spectrum, black separatist hate groups also grew, going from 113 chapters in 2014 to 180 last year. The growth was fueled largely by the explosion of anger fostered by highly publicized incidents of police shootings of black men. But unlike activists for racial justice such as those in the Black Lives Matter movement, the black separatist groups did not stop at demands for police reforms and an end to structural racism. Instead, they typically demonized all whites, gays, and, in particular, Jews. Just as the number of hate groups rose by 14 in 2015, so did the number of conspiracy-minded antigovernment “Patriot” groups, going from 874 in 2014 to 998 last year. The growth was fueled by the euphoria felt in antigovernment circles after armed activists forced federal officials to back down at gunpoint from seizing cattle at Cliven Bundy’s ranch to pay his grazing fees. So emboldened were activists by the failure of the federal government to arrest anyone following their “victory” at the Bundy ranch that armed men, led by Bundy’s son, began occupying a wildlife refugee in Oregon in January 2016 as a protest against federal land ownership in the West. The 2015 hate group count almost certainly understates the true size of the American radical right. White supremacists are increasingly opting to operate mainly online, where the danger of public exposure and embarrassment is far lower, where younger people tend to gather, and where it requires virtually no effort or cost to join in the conversation. The major hate forum Stormfront now has more than 300,000 members, and the site has been adding about 25,000 registered users annually for several years — the size of a small city. The milieu of the web is an ideal one for “lone wolves” — terrorists who operate on their own and are radicalized online. Dylann Roof is the perfect example. His journey began with absorbing propaganda about black-on-white crime from the website of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a hate group that enjoyed the attention of Republican lawmakers in the 1990s, and ended with the June massacre in Charleston. Like increasing numbers in white supremacist circles, Roof was convinced after drinking radical-right Kool-Aid on the Internet claiming that white people worldwide were the targets of genocide. Violence Hits a New Peak Last year brought more domestic political violence, both from the American radical right and from American jihadists, than the nation has seen in many years (see timeline of violence, below). According to a year-end report from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “domestic extremist killers” slew more people in 2015 than in any year since 1995, when the Oklahoma City bombing left 168 men, women and children dead. Counting both political and other violence from extremists, the ADL said “a minimum of 52 people in the United States were killed by adherents of domestic extremist movements in the past 12 months.” Another tally, by the respected New America Foundation, found that by year’s end, 45 people in America had been killed in “violent jihadist attacks” since the Al Qaeda massacre of Sept. 11, 2001, just short of the 48 people killed in the same 14-year period in “far right wing attacks.” (Unlike the ADL, the foundation does not count non-political violence by extremists.) A Timeline: The Year In Domestic Terror The impact of terrorism goes far beyond the body count. Violence motivated by racial, ethnic or religious animus fractures society along its most fragile fault lines, and sends shock waves through entire targeted communities. More hatred and fear, particularly of diversity, are often the response. Several political figures have harnessed that fear, calling for bans on mosques, Muslim immigrants and refugees fleeing violence in the Middle East. And terror can breed hate crimes, as evidenced by a string of physical attacks on mosques and Muslims, particularly after a jihadist couple in San Bernardino, Calif., murdered 14 people in December. From start to finish, the year 2015 was remarkable for its terrorist violence, the penetration of the radical right and its conspiracy theories into mainstream politics, and the boost far-right ideas and groups received from pandering politicians like Donald Trump. And the situation appears likely to get worse, not better, as the country continues to come to terms with its increasing diversity. .
Turns case—grid failure cause massive starvation and structural violence.
Lewis 14 (Patrice Lewis is a freelance writer. WND Commentary: “If the grid fails, will you die?” published May 23rd, 2014 accessed June 26th, 2015. http://www.wnd.com/2014/05/if-the-grid-fails-will-you-die/)
It seems too many people are flippant or dismissive of the potential hardships. “An electromagnetic pulse is a joke and would be minor at best,” notes one person. “I say that because most people know how to survive without all the modern conveniences.” Or, “We’d go back to the 1800s. Big deal. People lived just fine in the 1800s.” I’m not here to argue about the odds of an EMP taking out the grid. I’m not going to discuss the technicalities of Faraday cages or the hardening of electronics. I’m here to state that if you think life in America without electricity will merely revert us to pioneer days, you are dead wrong (no pun intended, I hope). We wouldn’t regress to the 1800s; we would regress to the 1100s or earlier. Life would become a bitter, brutal struggle for survival. Society thrived in the 1800s for four very simple reasons: 1) a non-electric infrastructure already existed; 2) people had the skills, knowledge and tools to make do; 3) our population levels were far lower, and most people lived rural and raised a significant portion of their own food; and 4) there were relatively few people who didn’t earn their way. To be blunt, if you didn’t work, you seldom ate. Those who couldn’t work (the disabled, the elderly, etc.) were cared for by family members or charitable institutions. There were no other options. These conditions no longer exist. Homes do not come equipped with outhouses, hand water pumps and a trained horse stabled in the back. Many people don’t have the faintest clue how to cook from scratch, much less grow or raise their own food. Eighty percent of Americans live in cities and are fed by less than 2 percent of the population, which means farmers must mass-produce food for shipments to cities. And there are far too many people on multi-generational entitlement programs who literally know no other lifestyle except an endless cycle of EBT cards and welfare payments. Additionally, the interconnectivity that exists in today’s society is complex beyond belief. It’s been proven again and again that a single weak link can bring down the whole chain. A trucker’s strike or a massive storm at one end of the country can mean interrupted food deliveries at the other end. Even the most humble object – a pencil, for example – has a pedigree of such unimaginable complexity that its manufacture requires the cooperation of millions, and not one single person on the planet knows how to make one from start to finish. Read this essay to see what I mean. How much more complex would it be to rebuild a fallen electrical grid than a pencil? And yet some people claim that a grid-down situation will be a minor inconvenience. They think that because they line-dry their clothes and have a few tomatoes on their patio, that they’ll be able to survive a situation in which all services cease. They think food production and distribution is somehow independent of fuel and electricity. In fact, it’s intimately connected. Ever try to till a 3,500-acre wheat field by horse-drawn plow? Shut off power and you shut off food. Period. Some people contemptuously dismiss the hardships that would ensue after grid-down by noting that we already posses the know-how for technological and medical advances. We know how to treat or cure illness and injury. We know how to provide electrical power. We know how to make engines. Therefore, it will be easy to rebuild America’s infrastructure in the event of a grid-down situation. And these people are right – we do possess the knowledge. What we would lack is the infrastructure to rebuild the infrastructure. We lack the stop-gap services that would allow engineers and manufacturers to rebuild society without facing starvation first. And if the people with the specialized knowledge to rebuild die off in the interim before the infrastructure gets rebuilt, then where will we be? America’s connectivity, more than anything else, will cripple our society should the power fail. It’s all well and good for a surgeon to have the knowledge of how to operate on a cancerous tumor, but if sterile scalpels and anesthesia and dressings and other surgical accouterments are not available, the surgeon’s abilities regress almost to the point of a tribal witch doctor by the lack of infrastructure, services and supplies.
Causes global wars and instability
Femia 12 (Francesco and Caitlin Werrell, Write for The Center For Climate and Security, When National Climate Disasters Go Global: On Drought, Food, And Global Insecurity, July, Accessed Online at Think Progress)

The security implications of food price spikes
What we’ve also seen is that spikes in world food prices have increased the likelihood of instability and riots. In some instances, crop failure in one part of the world associated with instability halfway around the globe, can contribute to serious diplomatic crises between the U.S. and its allies, as occurred with Egypt, and could conceivably result in U.S. military involvement.
This is part of a larger phenomenon Dr. Troy Sternberg calls “the globalization of hazards,” where natural hazards in one region can have a significant impact on regions halfway across the globe. This is not to say that the current U.S. drought will necessarily lead to unrest. However, it is not unprecedented for droughts, and other climatic events that damage crop production, to do so.
Collective impact of crop failure across the globe
It is also important to consider that the drought and crop failures in the U.S. are not happening in isolation.  In recent years, extreme hot and dry weather has forced Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan to reduce their harvest forecasts (and two studies explicitly link the devastating Russian heat wave of 2010 to climate change). European Union wheat yields this year will be smaller, in part, because Spain is suffering from the second worst drought in fifty years. North and South Korea are facing the worst drought in a century. Shifts in glacial melt and rainfall are threatening crops in Pakistan. The proliferation of locusts throughout West Africa is threatening household food security. Recent floods in Japan, India and Bangladesh are threatening rice crops. Argentina’s soy crops were severely depleted because of a shortage of rain. And in Mali, drought combined with other factors led to a major humanitarian disaster in the region. The list goes on.
Many of these conditions are record-setting, or the worst of their kind in decades and sometimes centuries. And climate projections threaten to make matters worse. What this means is that it is possible that the global food market is about to witness an unusual amount of stress. It is not entirely clear if the market is prepared for it, or even if nations have the capacity to adequately respond.
Impact on U.S. assistance and diplomacy
Food, for better or worse, is also used as a form of diplomacy. For example, the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Food for Peace program has sent 106 million metric tons to the hungry of the world, feeding billions of people and saving countless lives. The program depends on the unparalleled productivity of American farmers and the American agricultural system. Without this vast system there would be no Food for Peace program, or any of the other food assistance programs either run by the U.S. government, or heavily supported by the U.S. such as the UN’s World Food Program.
On average, American food aid provides 60 percent of the world’s food aid, feeding millions of desperately hungry people every year. This means that in addition to facing an increasing risk from lower crop and animal stock yields and global food market shocks, the U.S. may also be limiting its ability to respond rapidly to global disasters, including global food crises. This is bad news for the global poor, and for U.S. diplomacy.

Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 5 | Opponent: Harker EM | Judge: John Sims
Interpretation: All affirmative offense must come from the hypothetical enactment of a policy that limits qualified immunity for police officers
Resolved means the affirmative must defend the implementation of a policy action by a government
Parcher 1 (Jeff, Fmr. Debate Coach at Georgetown University, February, http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200102/0790.html)
Pardon me if I turn to a source besides Bill. American Heritage Dictionary: Resolve: 1. To make a firm decision about. 2. To decide or express by formal vote. 3. To separate something into constituent parts See Syns at *analyze* (emphasis in orginal) 4. Find a solution to. See Syns at *Solve* (emphasis in original) 5. To dispel: resolve a doubt. - n 1. Frimness of purpose; resolution. 2. A determination or decision.  (2) The very nature of the word "resolution" makes it a question. American Heritage: A course of action determined or decided on. A formal statemnt of a deciion, as by a legislature. (3) The resolution is obviously a question. Any other conclusion is utterly inconcievable. Why? Context. The debate community empowers a topic committee to write a topic for ALTERNATE side debating. The committee is not a random group of people coming together to "reserve" themselves about some issue. There is context - they are empowered by a community to do something. In their deliberations, the topic community attempts to craft a resolution which can be ANSWERED in either direction. They focus on issues like ground and fairness because they know the resolution will serve as the basis for debate which will be resolved by determining the policy desireablility of that resolution. That's not only what they do, but it's what we REQUIRE them to do. We don't just send the topic committee somewhere to adopt their own group resolution. It's not the end point of a resolution adopted by a body - it's the prelimanary wording of a resolution sent to others to be answered or decided upon. (4) Further context: the word resolved is used to emphasis the fact that it's policy debate. Resolved comes from the adoption of resolutions by legislative bodies. A resolution is either adopted or it is not. It's a question before a legislative body. Should this statement be adopted or not. (5) The very terms 'affirmative' and 'negative' support my view. One affirms a resolution. Affirmative and negative are the equivalents of 'yes' or 'no' - which, of course, are answers to a question.
Topical version of the aff
Topical limits are key to falsifiability –non-falsifiable claims shut down debate– in spaces like debate that mandate contestation, conversation becomes impossible
Subutonik 98 Professor of Law, Touro College, Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center. 7 Cornell J. L. and Pub. Pol'y 681
Having traced a major strand in the development of CRT, we turn now to the strands' effect on the relationships of CRATs with each other and with outsiders. As the foregoing material suggests, the central CRT message is not simply that minorities are being treated unfairly, or even that individuals out there are in pain - assertions for which there are data to serve as grist for the academic mill - but that the minority scholar himself or herself hurts and hurts badly.¶ An important problem that concerns the very definition of the scholarly enterprise now comes into focus. What can an academic trained to *694 question and to doubt n72 possibly say to Patricia Williams when effectively she announces, "I hurt bad"? n73 "No, you don't hurt"? "You shouldn't hurt"? "Other people hurt too"? Or, most dangerously - and perhaps most tellingly - "What do you expect when you keep shooting yourself in the foot?" If the majority were perceived as having the well- being of minority groups in mind, these responses might be acceptable, even welcomed. And they might lead to real conversation. But, writes Williams, the failure by those "cushioned within the invisible privileges of race and power... to incorporate a sense of precarious connection as a part of our lives is... ultimately obliterating." n74¶ "Precarious." "Obliterating." These words will clearly invite responses only from fools and sociopaths; they will, by effectively precluding objection, disconcert and disunite others. "I hurt," in academic discourse, has three broad though interrelated effects. First, it demands priority from the reader's conscience. It is for this reason that law review editors, waiving usual standards, have privileged a long trail of undisciplined - even silly n75 - destructive and, above all, self-destructive arti cles. n76 Second, by emphasizing the emotional bond between those who hurt in a similar way, "I hurt" discourages fellow sufferers from abstracting themselves from their pain in order to gain perspective on their condition. n77¶ *696 Last, as we have seen, it precludes the possibility of open and structured conversation with others. n78 *697 It is because of this conversation-stopping effect of what they insensitively call "first-person agony stories" that Farber and Sherry deplore their use. "The norms of academic civility hamper readers from challenging the accuracy of the researcher's account; it would be rather difficult, for example, to criticize a law review article by questioning the author's emotional stability or veracity." n79 Perhaps, a better practice would be to put the scholar's experience on the table, along with other relevant material, but to subject that experience to the same level of scrutiny.¶ If through the foregoing rhetorical strategies CRATs succeeded in limiting academic debate, why do they not have greater influence on public policy? Discouraging white legal scholars from entering the national conversation about race, n80 I suggest, has generated a kind of cynicism in white audiences which, in turn, has had precisely the reverse effect of that ostensibly desired by CRATs. It drives the American public to the right and ensures that anything CRT offers is reflexively rejected.¶ In the absence of scholarly work by white males in the area of race, of course, it is difficult to be sure what reasons they would give for not having rallied behind CRT. Two things, however, are certain. First, the kinds of issues raised by Williams are too important in their implications *698 for American life to be confined to communities of color. If the lives of minorities are heavily constrained, if not fully defined, by the thoughts and actions of the majority elements in society, it would seem to be of great importance that white thinkers and doers participate in open discourse to bring about change. Second, given the lack of engagement of CRT by the community of legal scholars as a whole, the discourse that should be taking place at the highest scholarly levels has, by default, been displaced to faculty offices and, more generally, the streets and the airwaves.
Transformative politics must adapt to the realities of implementation – critique alone cannot overcome existing juridical limitations
Carisa R. Showden 12, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, "Theorising maybe: A feminist/queer theory convergence," 2012, Feminist Theory 13(1), pp. 3-25
Sex radicals assert that criminalising prostitution restricts women’s sexual freedom by contributing to the stigma surrounding prostitution specifically and sex more generally. Many further argue that sex has multiple meanings depending upon the context in which it is engaged, but that legal and regulatory schemes flatten nuance, thereby promoting a singular meaning of sex for all citizens.28 And while I, too, would insist that sex acts can have multiple meanings, the interpretive limits imposed by the historically and culturally specific contexts in which they take place must always be borne in mind. We need to take seriously the sex radical critiques of existing juridical limits on sexual activities and cultural norms of ‘good womanhood’. But we should also remember, as legal scholar Jane Scoular writes, that sex work should be viewed with ambivalence: ‘It is an activity which challenges the boundaries of heterosexist, married, monogamy but may also be an activity which reinforces the dominant norms of heterosexuality and femininity’ (2004: 348). Because sex and sex work have many meanings, but those meanings and the ability to deploy them are restricted by the material conditions under which prostitutes labour (and clients and outsiders come to understand sexuality), the sex radicalism perspective needs to be amended to fit more clearly within a Foucauldian power frame. Note the convergence of feminist and queer epistemologies here. On the queer hand, sex does not have to reveal anything about one’s core identity, and sex is a mode of transgression. But on the feminist hand, sex is about power, subordination is part of sex, and sometimes that subordination is problematic. Because of its affinities with both queer theory and feminism, this ‘sex-positive queer feminism’ is feminism as ‘maybe’: a qualified endorsement of sexual practices as politically resistant but fully within the definition of feminism as a theory of subordination and hegemonic heterosexuality. This theory can provide located, specific, non-universal norms of sexual resistance by excavating specific sites of sexual and political practice in order to see how subordination works in the particular location under study and what might count as resistance within these contexts given differentiated practices, conceptual frameworks, and material resources. These excavations need not assume in advance that because the practice involves commercialisation, or sexual interactions, or men, that it will be bad or good for women. By remaining agnostic on this question, sex-positive queer feminism might be better able to locate resources that can facilitate resistance without assuming that equality or non-subordination is universally required for it. One danger of such local analyses is in potentially failing to see systemic links between practices in multiple sites. These links are important, and radical feminism has produced compelling analyses of these imbricated structures. But structural links are not the same as practices of power that precisely map onto each other in their intentions and effects. Both the linkages, and the differences, are important in developing a theory of freedom and equality. In the frame of our two narratives of the sex/gender wars, while there are obvious affinities between queer theory and sex-positive feminist theory, they are, fundamentally, different bodies of arguments. If we revive sex radicalism, we are continuing the first story, not the second. Even if we think of sex-positive feminism as the queering of feminist theory, it is not queer through and through: it is animated by its brief for F; and while it has a more complicated relationship to the function of subordination – questioning the linear through-line posited by radical feminism from heterosexual intercourse to women’s civil rights, political standing, and social welfare – it still has a theory of subordination and harm. Pro-sex feminism can, finally, stay within the heterosexual frame (M/F) without assuming its totality. As feminism, sex radicalism starts from the assumption that M/F is a significant, though not exclusive, feature of sexuality and power relations, but still contests the epistemic rigidity that dominance feminism proclaims for ‘sex’. One does not need to go all the way to queer theory to get the epistemic critique of dominance feminism. It is possible to know something about sex that is outside the dominance feminist frame and still carry a brief for F. Theory, politics, and prostitution One way to think about sex-positive queer feminist norms is that they are multiple and therefore must be balanced. To balance them one must consider the various constraints on subjects in practice. If what is required to realise particular norms (anti-subordination or sexual autonomy or economic stability) is different practices in similar institutions, and if the norms most needed for resistance are also variable, then one resulting argument is that some situations of prostitution are more ethically defensible than others. A sex-positive queer feminism then leads us to think about sex generally and prostitution specifically as multiple; rather than ‘prostitution’ we are led to think about ‘prostitutions’. This is problematic, perhaps, from a legal perspective, which, as I noted above, might be one reason why Halley and others argue that MacKinnon’s work ‘won’ the legal feminist sex wars. But politics and policy can be (slightly) more nuanced and context-sensitive. Here sex-positive queer feminism needs to be (warily) more governance-oriented. It needs to infuse prostitution policy with a different ethics – to take the norms it brings to queer theory and make them work for women, to fight the subordination produced by stigmatising ‘deviant’ sex as well as the subordination produced by poverty and coercion into sex. The epistemological shift I am endorsing matters ethically for public policy debates, even recognising the inconsistent relationship between a policy’s goals and its actual material effects, as these debates create frameworks of understanding and subjectification.

State criminal justice education is good for deconstructing queer oppression by the state – turns all of the 1AC offence and their CI. It is necessary to use queer theory to reconfigure the state
Woods 14 - J. B. Woods (and) Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law, Los Angeles, CA, USA, ‘‘Queering Criminology’’: Overviewof the State of the Field
Abstract This chapter provides an overview of the treatment of sexual orientation and gender identity issues and LGBTQ populations in the field of criminology. The chapter advances three main points. First, it argues that there is very little data on LGBTQ people’s experiences of crime, both in terms of victimization and offending. Second, the overwhelming majority of criminological engagement with sexual orientation and gender identity occurred prior to the 1980s, and discussed these concepts insofar as assessing whether ‘‘homosexuality’’—a term that was often employed to describe non-heterosexual sexualities and gender nonconforming identities/expressions—was or was not a form of criminal sexual deviance. Third, to date, there is little to no theoretical engagement with sexual orientation and gender identity in each of the four major schools of criminological thought: biological, psychological, sociological, and critical. I argue that these three points are a reflection of the historical and continuing stigma of the sexual deviance framework on the treatment of sexual orientation and gender identity concepts, and LGBTQ people in the field. This chapter makes a call to ‘‘queer criminology,’’ which in my view, requires overcoming the sexual deviance framework and reorienting criminological inquiry to give due consideration to sexual orientation and gender identity as non-deviant differences that may shape people’s experiences of crime and experiences in the criminal justice system more generally.
Their aff avoids neg prep that applies to limits on qualified immunity. The topic is the basis for predictable limits – abandoning it means the affirmative can argue for anything, which the negative cannot possibly prepare for.
Topical fairness requirements are key to effective dialogue—monopolizing strategy makes the discussion one-sided and exclusionary – turns the 1AC epistemology and pedagogy framing
Galloway 7—Samford Comm prof (Ryan, Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28, 2007)
Debate as a dialogue sets an argumentative table, where all parties receive a relatively fair opportunity to voice their position. Anything that fails to allow participants to have their position articulated denies one side of the argumentative table a fair hearing. The affirmative side is set by the topic and fairness requirements. While affirmative teams have recently resisted affirming the topic, in fact, the topic selection process is rigorous, taking the relative ground of each topic as its central point of departure. Setting the affirmative reciprocally sets the negative. The negative crafts approaches to the topic consistent with affirmative demands. The negative crafts disadvantages, counter-plans, and critical arguments premised on the arguments that the topic allows for the affirmative team. According to fairness norms, each side sits at a relatively balanced argumentative table. When one side takes more than its share, competitive equity suffers. However, it also undermines the respect due to the other involved in the dialogue. When one side excludes the other, it fundamentally denies the personhood of the other participant (Ehninger, 1970, p. 110). A pedagogy of debate as dialogue takes this respect as a fundamental component. A desire to be fair is a fundamental condition of a dialogue that takes the form of a demand for equality of voice. Far from being a banal request for links to a disadvantage, fairness is a demand for respect, a demand to be heard, a demand that a voice backed by literally months upon months of preparation, research, and critical thinking not be silenced. Affirmative cases that suspend basic fairness norms operate to exclude particular negative strategies. Unprepared, one side comes to the argumentative table unable to meaningfully participate in a dialogue. They are unable to “understand what ‘went on…’” and are left to the whims of time and power (Farrell, 1985, p. 114). Hugh Duncan furthers this line of reasoning: Opponents not only tolerate but honor and respect each other because in doing so they enhance their own chances of thinking better and reaching sound decisions. Opposition is necessary because it sharpens thought in action. We assume that argument, discussion, and talk, among free an informed people who subordinate decisions of any kind, because it is only through such discussion that we reach agreement which binds us to a common cause…If we are to be equal…relationships among equals must find expression in many formal and informal institutions (Duncan, 1993, p. 196-197). Debate compensates for the exigencies of the world by offering a framework that maintains equality for the sake of the conversation (Farrell, 1985, p. 114). For example, an affirmative case on the 2007-2008 college topic might defend neither state nor international action in the Middle East, and yet claim to be germane to the topic in some way. The case essentially denies the arguments that state action is oppressive or that actions in the international arena are philosophically or pragmatically suspect. Instead of allowing for the dialogue to be modified by the interchange of the affirmative case and the negative response, the affirmative subverts any meaningful role to the negative team, preventing them from offering effective “counter-word” and undermining the value of a meaningful exchange of speech acts. Germaneness and other substitutes for topical action do not accrue the dialogical benefits of topical advocacy.
Debate inevitably involves exclusions and normative constraints---making sure that those exclusions occur along reciprocal lines is necessary to foster democratic habits which turn and solves the whole case
Amanda Anderson 6, prof of English at Johns Hopkins The Way We Argue Now, 33-6
In some ways, this is understandable as utopian writing, with recognizable antecedents throughout the history of leftist thought. But what is distinctive in Butler’s writing is the way temporal rhetoric emerges precisely at the site of uneasy normative commitment. In the case of performative subversion, a futural rhetoric displaces the problems surrounding agency, symbolic constraint, and poststructuralist ethics. Since symbolic constraint is constitutive of who we can become and what we can enact,¶ 34¶ there is clearly no way to truly envision a reworked symbolic. And since embracing an alternative symbolic would necessarily involve the imposition of newly exclusionary and normalizing norms, to do more than gesture would mean lapsing into the very practices that need to be superseded. Indeed, despite Butler’s insistence in Feminist Contentions that we must always risk new foundations, she evinces a fastidious reluctance to do so herself.¶ The forward-looking articulation of performative politics increasingly gives way, in Bodies That Matter, to a more reflective, and now strangely belated, antiexclusionary politics. Less sanguine about the efficacy of outright subversion, Butler more soberly attends to ways we might respond to the politically and ontologically necessary error of identity categories. We cannot choose not to put such categories into play, but once they are in play, we can begin to interrogate them for the exclusions they harbor and generate. Butler here is closely following Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s position on essentialism, a position Butler earlier sought to sublate through the more exclusive emphasis on the unremitting subversion of identity.18 If performative subversion aimed to denaturalize identity and thus derail its pernicious effects, here, by contrast, one realizes the processes of identity formation will perforce proceed, and one simply attempts to register and redress those processes in a necessarily incomplete way. The production of exclusion, or a constitutive outside, is  butler quote starts “the necessary and founding violence of any truth-regime,” but we should not simply accept that fact passively:¶ The task is to refigure this necessary “outside” as a future horizon, one in which the violence of exclusion is perpetually in the process of being overcome. But of equal importance is the preservation of the outside, the site where discourse meets its limits, where the opacity of what is not included in a given regime of truth acts as a disruptive site of linguistic impropriety and unrepresentability, illuminating the violent and contingent boundaries of that normative regime precisely through the inability of that regime to represent that which might pose a fundamental threat to its continuity. . . . If there is a violence necessary to the language of politics, then the risk of that violation might well be followed by another in which we begin, without ending, without mastering, to own—and yet never fully to own—the exclusions by which we proceed. (BTM, 53)¶ butler quote endsBecause the exclusionary process is productive of who and what we are, even in our oppositional politics, our attempts to acknowledge and redress it are always post hoc. Here the future horizon is ever-receding¶ 35¶ precisely because our own belated making of amends will never, and should never, tame the contingency that also begets violence. But the question arises: does Butler ever propose that we might use the evaluative criteria governing that belated critical recognition to guard against such processes of exclusion in the first place? Well, in rare moments she does project the possibility of cultivating practices that would actually disarm exclusion (and I will be discussing one such moment presently). But she invariably returns to the bleak insistence on the impossibility of ever achieving this. This retreat is necessitated, fundamentally, by Butler’s failure to distinguish evaluative criteria from the power-laden mechanisms of normalization. Yet the distinction does reappear, unacknowledged, in the rhetoric of belatedness, which, like performative thresholdism, serves to underwrite her political purism. As belated, the incomplete acts of “owning” one’s exclusions are more seemingly reactive and can appear not to be themselves normatively implicated.¶ We can see a similar maneuver in Butler’s discussion of universalist traditions in Feminist Contentions. Here she insists that Benhabib’s universalism is perniciously grounded in a transcendental account of language (communicative reason), and is hence not able to examine its own exclusionary effects or situated quality (FC, 128–32). This is, to begin with, a mischaracterization. Benhabib’s account of communicative reason is historically situated (if somewhat loosely within the horizon of modernity) and aims to justify an ongoing and self-critical process of interactive universalism—not merely through the philosophical project of articulating a theory of universal pragmatics but more significantly through the identification and cultivation of practices that enable democratic will formation.19 Butler then introduces, in contrast to Benhabib, an exemplary practice of what she calls “misappropriating” universals (Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic is cited here). Now, it is hard not to see this as a species of dogmatism. Bad people reinscribe or reinforce universals, good people “misappropriate” them. Benhabib calls for the reconstruction of Enlightenment universals, but presumably even reconstruction is tainted. The key point, however, is that misappropriation is a specifically protected derivative process, one whose own belatedness and honorific disobedience are guaranteed to displace the violence of its predecessor discourse.¶ Let me pursue here for a moment why I find this approach unsatisfactory. Simply because the activity of acknowledging exclusion or misappropriating universals is belated or derivative does not mean that such¶ 36¶ an activity is not itself as powerfully normative as the “normative political philosophy” to which Butler refers with such disdain. There is a sleight of hand occurring here: Butler attempts to imply that because such activities exist at a temporal and critical remove from “founding regimes of truth,” they more successfully avoid the insidious ruse of critical theory. But who’s rusing who here? Because Butler finds it impossible to conceive of normativity outside of normalization, she evades the challenging task of directly confronting her own normative assumptions. Yet Butler in fact advocates ethical practices that are animated by the same evaluative principles as communicative ethics: the rigorous scrutiny of all oppositional discourse for its own newly generated exclusions, and the reconfiguration of debilitating identity terms such as “women” as sites “of permanent openness and resignifiability” (FC, 50). Both these central practices rely fundamentally on democratic principles of inclusion and open contestation. Communicative ethics does no more than to clarify where among our primary social practices we might locate the preconditions for such activities of critique and transformation. By justifying its own evaluative assumptions and resources it aims not to posit a realm free of power but rather to clarify our own ongoing critiques of power. This does not mean that such critiques will not themselves require rigorous scrutiny for harboring blindnesses and further exclusions, but neither does it mean that such critiques will necessarily be driven by exclusionary logic. And communicative ethics is by no means a “merely theoretical” or “philosophical” project inasmuch as it can identify particular social and institutional practices that foster democratic ends. By casting all attempts to characterize such practices as pernicious normalizing, Butler effectively disables her own project and leaves herself no recourse but to issue dogmatic condemnations and approvals.
Switch-side debate

Tournament: Loyola | Round: 2 | Opponent: Brentwood ELi | Judge: Michael OKrent
CP Text: Only the governments of India and Japan ought to ban the production of nuclear power

Tournament: Voices | Round: 4 | Opponent: San Marino KW | Judge: Shania Hunt
The United States Federal Government and Indigenous Nations ought to designate sub-seabed disposal as the sole candidate for their permanent nuclear waste repositories.
Solves waste disposal
Wilson 14 Wilson, founder of BuildingGreen, Inc. and executive editor of Environmental Building News, founded the Resilient Design Institute Alex, "Safe Storage of Nuclear Waste", Green Building Advisor, www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/energy-solutions/safe-storage-nuclear-waste SP
The big question now is how long it will be until the plant can be decommissioned and what to do with the large quantities of radioactive waste that are being stored onsite. Terrorism risks with nuclear power My concern with nuclear power has always been more about terrorism than accidents during operation or storage. I continue to worry that terrorists could gain entry to nuclear plant operations and sabotage plants from the inside — disabling cooling systems and causing a meltdown. There is also a remote risk of unanticipated natural disasters causing meltdowns or radiation release, as we saw so vividly with the Fukushima Power Plant catastrophe in Japan in March, 2011. For more than 30 years, the nuclear industry in the U.S. and nuclear regulators have been going down the wrong path with waste storage — seeking a repository where waste could be buried deep in a mountain. Nevada’s Yucca Mountain was the place of choice until… it wasn’t. Any time we choose to put highly dangerous waste in someone’s backyard, it’s bound to cause a lot of controversy, even in a sparsely populated, pro-resource-extraction place like Nevada. NIMBY opposition can be boosted by people in powerful places, and in the case of Yucca Mountain, Nevada senator Harry Reid has played such a role. (He has been the Senate Majority Leader since 2006 and served prior to that as the Minority Leader and Democratic Whip.) Aside from NIMBYism, the problem with burying nuclear waste in a mountain (like Yucca Mountain) or salt caverns (like New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns — an earlier option that was pursued for a while in the 1970s) is that the maximum safety is provided at Day One, and the margin of safety drops continually from there. The safety of such storage sites could be compromised over time due to seismic activity (Nevada ranks fourth among the most seismically active states), volcanism (the Yucca Mountain ridge is comprised mostly of volcanic tuff, emitted from past volcanic activity), erosion, migrating aquifers, and other natural geologic actions. A better storage option I believe a much better solution for long-term storage of high-level radioactive waste is to bury it deep under the seabed in a region free of seismic activity where sediment is being deposited and the seafloor getting thicker. In such a site, the level of protection would increase, rather than decrease, over time. In some areas of seabed, more than a centimeter of sediment is being deposited annually. Compacted over time, such sediment deposition could be several feet in a hundred years, and in the geologic time span over which radioactive waste is hazardous, hundreds to thousands of feet of protective sedimentary rock would be formed. The oil and gas industry — for better or worse — knows a lot about drilling deep holes beneath a mile or two of ocean. I suspect that the deep-sea drilling industry would love such a growth opportunity to move into seabed waste storage, and I believe the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or other agencies could do a good job regulating such work. The waste could be placed in wells extending thousands of feet below the seabed in sedimentary rock in geologically stable regions. Let's say a 3,000-foot well is drilled beneath the seabed two miles beneath the surface of the ocean. Waste could be inserted into that well to a depth of 1,000 feet, and the rest of the well capped with 2,000 feet of concrete or some other material. Hundreds of these deep-storage wells could be filled and capped, and such a sub-seabed storage field could be designated as forever off-limits. Industry or the Department of Energy would have to figure out how to package such waste for safe handling at sea, since the material is so dangerous, but I believe that is a surmountable challenge. For example, perhaps the radioactive waste could be vitrified (incorporated into molten glass-like material) to reduce leaching potential into seawater should an accident occur at sea, and that waste could be tagged with radio-frequency emitters so that any lost containers could be recovered with robotic submarines in the event of such accidents. While I’m not an expert in any of this, I’ve looked at how much money taxpayers and industry have already poured into Yucca Mountain — about $15 billion by the time the Obama Administration terminated federal funding for it in 2010, according to Bloomberg News — and the estimates for how much more it would take to get a working waste storage facility of that sort operational had risen to about $96 billion by 2008, according to the U.S. Department of Energy at the time. I believe that sub-seabed storage would be far less expensive.

Tournament: Loyola | Round: 5 | Opponent: Harvard Westlake SK | Judge: Ellen Ivens-Duran
Countries should authorize the World Association of Nuclear Operators and the Institute of Nuclear Power Operators to run nuclear power plants as test facilities for new nuclear technologies when they are scheduled to close.
The counterplan allows the development and testing of new tech that solves meltdowns.
Terry 16 (Jeff Terry, Jeff Terry is a professor of physics at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where his main research focus is on energy systems) Use failing power plants to improve the safety and efficiency of clean energy, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists March 31 2016 AT
Nuclear energy is currently the largest generator of low-carbon electricity in the United States. It could play an important role in mitigating climate change, but fears about safety impede its spread. These fears aren’t always grounded in reality. The US nuclear energy industry is overseen by two industry groups—the World Association of Nuclear Operators and the Institute of Nuclear Power Operators—and multiple government regulators dedicated to passing on lessons learned from nuclear accidents. It is one of the safest industries around in terms of occupational hazards. Severe accidents are rare, and nuclear professionals embrace a strong culture of safety. But is a culture of safety enough? And if it’s not, what can be done to improve? The answer may be found in some of the many US nuclear power plants in danger of closing their doors. The nuclear power industry could take a lesson from the history of car safety. The automobile industry saw a dramatic reduction in fatalities in recent years: From 1995 to 2009, the rate of fatalities per 100 million miles driven fell by 26 percent, with much of the decrease taking place from 2005 onward. What contributed to this large improvement in driver safety over such a short period? Certainly, there were big changes in cultural attitudes toward car safety. From 2006 to 2010, seat belt use by drivers increased from 81 to 85 percent. Calculations by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration suggest a change of this magnitude would save around 800 to 900 lives per year. In fact, though, by 2010, fatalities were down by nearly 10,000 lives per year, as shown in Figure 1. So while the change in safety culture was significant, another factor must have also contributed to improved driver safety. During the 2000s, car manufacturers implemented many technical improvements to increase safety. These measures were aimed at both improving the odds of surviving a crash and avoiding accidents in the first place. Airbag technology and better passenger restraint systems are now the norm in automobiles. Advanced technology such as lane-change warnings and front collision avoidance systems were also deployed during this time. It took both improved safety culture and technological advances to significantly reduce car fatalities. There is a strong culture of safety in the nuclear power industry, but as the auto industry shows, you need technological improvement as well. Terry-auto-industry-graph.jpg That’s where those old power plants come in. It still remains difficult to implement new technology in the nuclear industry. One reason is that US nuclear plants are producing electricity at more than 90 percent of capacity. It is hard to justify experimenting with commercial reactors running so reliably. That makes it hard to test new technology, such as new fuels or claddings designed to improve safety on a commercial scale. A number of US commercial nuclear reactors are either likely to close or have already. The James M. FitzPatrick Nuclear Power Plant in New York is among those on the shutdown list. As it is a significant source of low-carbon electricity for the region, the state is trying to save it, in part by providing $100 million for fuel purchase. For the moment, though, that doesn’t seem to have reversed plant operator Entergy’s decision to close in less than a year. (Entergy has said it is closing for financial reasons, but some of us remain skeptical.)  It may be, though, that struggling nuclear facilities offer a way to improve safety across the industry. The sector needs to be able to test new technology. In order to do that, the US Energy Department could take over soon-to-close reactors and run them as commercial-scale test facilities that also continue to produce clean electricity. One useful test, for example, would involve new claddings. Claddings are the materials around the radioactive fuel pellets that prevent the coolant from being contaminated. During the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster, Zircaloy cladding reacted with steam at high temperature, which produced hydrogen that exploded. The industry would like to prevent this kind of thing from happening again. As a test, a plant operator could rotate fuels with new, non-hydrogen-producing claddings into different bundles in the reactor. By monitoring the process, researchers could see how the new claddings performed under normal operating conditions, and use the process to develop and test new sensors. In short, an Energy Department takeover of this kind would enable researchers to test new safety technologies on a commercial scale, while still allowing states to meet their clean energy goals. For the inconvenience of dealing with a test site, electricity for those living with 15 miles of the reactor could be provided for free or at reduced cost, as has been suggested in relation to a proposed public-private nuclear project in South Australia. This would be a novel use of a reactor that would otherwise just be closed and allowed to sit and decay for decades. Outgoing nuclear power plant operators would still be financially responsible for decommissioning, as laid out by US law, but they would benefit from the arrangement: While the Energy Department used the reactor as a testbed, the previous operator’s decommissioning fund would grow, so that by the time of final decommissioning, the original owner would have more funds and newer technology available for the task. In fact, the Energy Department could bring commercial-scale testing to other industries, too. Recent reports put California’s Ivanpah concentrated solar power plant in danger of closing. It would be a tremendous waste to allow the $2.2 billion dollar facility to close without giving researchers the ability to study what problems occurred. The ability to data mine Ivanpah’s weather and production information would be invaluable for improving future facilities. The site could also be used to test methods for preventing bird deaths and mitigating visual impact on pilots. Instead of wasting away in the desert, Ivanpah would be of valuable service to society. The Energy Department should not pass up the opportunity to take over closing facilities as commercial-scale testbeds to improve current energy technology. Having seen how new technology has improved safety in other industries, we need to make sure there is a method for testing new methods and materials in the energy sector as well. Resources like the FitzPatrick nuclear plant and the Ivanpah solar plant are too valuable to let fade away. It is in our best interest to allow researchers to collect data using these facilities. Subjecting that trove of information to new experimental techniques and computational data mining will allow scientists and engineers to make other facilities more efficient and safe. The Energy Department should take a lead role in keeping these no-longer-competitive commercial facilities alive. The data they provide can be used to improve our future.

Tournament: Loyola | Round: 3 | Opponent: Palo Alto | Judge: BH
Counterplan Text: The United States Federal Government in conjunction with the indigenous nations ought to prohibit production of nuclear power with the exception of traveling wave technology reactors and small modular reactors.
SMR’s and TWTR’s are vital to stop Chinese energy leadership
Palley 12— Reece Palley - author of many books and articles, including The Answer: Why Only Mini Nuclear Power Plants Can Save the World. The London School of Economics 1949-52 and The School for Social Research 1945-49; January 20, 2012 (“U.S. cedes the lead on nuclear energy”, Available Online at http://articles.philly.com/2012-01-20/news/30647588_1_nuclear-reactors-nuclear-energy-nuclear-waste)
Recent news that Gates has been meeting with the Chinese about traveling wave technology is particularly ominous. This could help put China at the forefront of a new industry and leave the United States, in nuclear terms, a banana republic.
The Chinese lack the contentious, partisan political structure that prevents some alternative technologies from growing in the United States. One is reminded of Mao's injunction to "let a hundred flowers blossom," which is still the Chinese government's attitude toward technological innovation. With this approach, and no need to contend with uninformed public opinion or political bickering, China threatens to rapidly outpace America in developing tomorrow's means of energy production.
In the 1980s, I went to China to help build factories for the manufacture of fiberglass luxury yachts. The Chinese started from absolute scratch, never having even seen a fiberglass yacht, yet in relatively short order, they were exporting million-dollar boats. If they start applying this kind of innovative energy to the construction and export of small, modular nuclear reactors, the world will cease to look to America for energy solutions. The Chinese, standing on the shoulders of half a century of American ingenuity, will inherit the leadership of the world's most vital industry.
Green leadership solves extinction – tech spills over and reduces geopolitical confrontation
Klarevas 11 –Louis Klarevas, Professor for Center for Global Affairs @ New York University, May 25, 2011, ("Securing American Primacy While Tackling Climate Change: Toward a National Strategy of Greengemony," http://www.huffingtonpost.com/louis-klarevas/securing-american-primacy_b_393223.html)IG
By not addressing climate change more aggressively and creatively, the United States is squandering an opportunity to secure its global primacy for the next few generations to come. To do this, though, the U.S. must rely on innovation to help the world escape the coming environmental meltdown. Developing the key technologies that will save the planet from global warming will allow the U.S. to outmaneuver potential great power rivals seeking to replace it as the international system’s hegemon. But the greening of American strategy must occur soon.
The U.S., however, seems to be stuck in time, unable to move beyond oil-centric geo-politics in any meaningful way.
Often, the gridlock is portrayed as a partisan difference, with Republicans resisting action and Democrats pleading for action.
This, though, is an unfair characterization as there are numerous proactive Republicans and quite a few reticent Democrats.
The real divide is instead one between realists and liberals.
Students of realpolitik, which still heavily guides American foreign policy, largely discount environmental issues as they are not seen as advancing national interests in a way that generates relative power advantages vis-à-vis the other major powers in the system: Russia, China, Japan, India, and the European Union.
Liberals, on the other hand, have recognized that global warming might very well become the greatest challenge ever faced by mankind. As such, their thinking often eschews narrowly defined national interests for the greater global good. This, though, ruffles elected officials whose sworn obligation is, above all, to protect and promote American national interests.
What both sides need to understand is that by becoming a lean, mean, green fighting machine, the U.S. can actually bring together liberals and realists to advance a collective interest which benefits every nation, while at the same time, securing America’s global primacy well into the future.
To do so, the U.S. must re-invent itself as not just your traditional hegemon, but as history’s first ever green hegemon.
Hegemons are countries that dominate the international system - bailing out other countries in times of global crisis, establishing and maintaining the most important international institutions, and covering the costs that result from free-riding and cheating global obligations. Since 1945, that role has been the purview of the United States.
Immediately after World War II, Europe and Asia laid in ruin, the global economy required resuscitation, the countries of the free world needed security guarantees, and the entire system longed for a multilateral forum where global concerns could be addressed. The U.S., emerging the least scathed by the systemic crisis of fascism’s rise, stepped up to the challenge and established the postwar (and current) liberal order.
But don’t let the world “liberal” fool you. While many nations benefited from America’s new-found hegemony, the U.S. was driven largely by “realist” selfish national interests. The liberal order first and foremost benefited the U.S.
With the U.S. becoming bogged down in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, running a record national debt, and failing to shore up the dollar, the future of American hegemony now seems to be facing a serious contest: potential rivals - acting like sharks smelling blood in the water - wish to challenge the U.S. on a variety of fronts. This has led numerous commentators to forecast the U.S.’s imminent fall from grace.
Not all hope is lost however.
With the impending systemic crisis of global warming on the horizon, the U.S. again finds itself in a position to address a transnational problem in a way that will benefit both the international community collectively and the U.S. selfishly.
The current problem is two-fold. First, the competition for oil is fueling animosities between the major powers. The geopolitics of oil has already emboldened Russia in its ‘near abroad’ and China in far-off places like Africa and Latin America. As oil is a limited natural resource, a nasty zero-sum contest could be looming on the horizon for the U.S. and its major power rivals - a contest which threatens American primacy and global stability.
Second, converting fossil fuels like oil to run national economies is producing irreversible harm in the form of carbon dioxide emissions. So long as the global economy remains oil-dependent, greenhouse gases will continue to rise. Experts are predicting as much as a 60 increase in carbon dioxide emissions in the next twenty-five years. That likely means more devastating water shortages, droughts, forest fires, floods, and storms.
In other words, if global competition for access to energy resources does not undermine international security, global warming will. And in either case, oil will be a culprit for the instability.
Oil arguably has been the most precious energy resource of the last half-century. But “black gold” is so 20th century. The key resource for this century will be green gold - clean, environmentally-friendly energy like wind, solar, and hydrogen power. Climate change leaves no alternative. And the sooner we realize this, the better off we will be.
What Washington must do in order to avoid the traps of petropolitics is to convert the U.S. into the world’s first-ever green hegemon.
For starters, the federal government must drastically increase investment in energy and environmental research and development (EandE RandD). This will require a serious sacrifice, committing upwards of $40 billion annually to EandE RandD - a far cry from the few billion dollars currently being spent.
By promoting a new national project, the U.S. could develop new technologies that will assure it does not drown in a pool of oil. Some solutions are already well known, such as raising fuel standards for automobiles; improving public transportation networks; and expanding nuclear and wind power sources. Others, however, have not progressed much beyond the drawing board: batteries that can store massive amounts of solar (and possibly even wind) power; efficient and cost-effective photovoltaic cells, crop-fuels, and hydrogen-based fuels; and even fusion.
Such innovations will not only provide alternatives to oil, they will also give the U.S. an edge in the global competition for hegemony. If the U.S. is able to produce technologies that allow modern, globalized societies to escape the oil trap, those nations will eventually have no choice but to adopt such technologies. And this will give the U.S. a tremendous economic boom, while simultaneously providing it with means of leverage that can be employed to keep potential foes in check.

Tournament: St Marks | Round: 3 | Opponent: Strake VL | Judge: Srikar Pyda
Nuclear shut down will have a huge fiscal impact – nuclear energy constitutes a massive portion of Armenian exports and domestic power production
ENPI 13 (European Neighborhood and Partnership Instrument, “ARMENIA: COUNTRY STRATEGY PAPER,” 2007-2013, https://eeas.europa.eu/enp/pdf/pdf/country/enpi_csp_armenia_en.pdf)
Decommissioning of the Medzamor nuclear power plant will have significant fiscal implications. Despite longstanding international requests to close down Medzamor, the power plant continues to cover 40  of Armenia's electricity consumption. The international community remains worried because this type of nuclear power plants cannot be upgraded to current safety levels and because Medzamor is located in a highly seismic zone. The GoA has now decided to build an even bigger new nuclear power plant in the same area when Medzamor is decommissioned. In the EU’s view it remains doubtful whether such action is needed in order to generate sufficient replacement capacity. The country has developed enough alternative energy sources to replace the 400 Megawatt currently stemming from Medzamor. Current Armenian ideas go however towards export of energy. Armenia's external trade remains very low and little diversified (main exports are base metals and precious stones) in spite of Armenia being a WTO member since 2003 and benefiting from the EU’s GSP. Improvements in this regard should be pursued as a matter of priority. The current account deficit decreased slightly to about 4 of GDP in 2005. The current account and debt position is sustainable. The EU is Armenia’s main trade partner, accounting for 46.5 of Armenia's exports and 28.2 of its imports. EU-Armenia trade has been growing over the last five years, but similarly to Armenia's trade with the world in general, it is still very low and nondiversified. Exports to and imports from the EU increased to about € 416 million and €528 million, respectively, in 2005.

Armenia econ weak
Gadimova 16 Nazrin Gadimova, Armenia on edge of economic collapse," Azer News, 3/1/2016 AZ
Extremely unstable socio-economic situation in Armenia would be better described as a decay of the country. Various international organizations make unfavorable forecasts regarding the economic situation that Armenia faced. The Eurasian Development Bank (EDB) analysts expect deterioration of Armenia's balance of payments in 2016. This was noted in the “CIS Macromonitor” report published by analysts of the EDB. “The possible deterioration of the payments balance is linked with the expansion of foreign trade deficit due to reduced exports and increased imports in monthly terms. During this period, there was recorded return to the trend of depreciating dram, which was intensified by strengthening of the dollar on world markets,” EBD analysts believe. Probably, under the influence of the foreign trade and the current account deficit expansion, as well as further cheapening of dram and increased short-term external debt, the payments balance could deteriorate, the report says. Earlier during the discussions over the state budget at the country’s parliament, many opposition parliamentarians have predicted the collapse of the country. MP Mger Shakhgeldian claimed that the economic growth index shown in the draft budget is not sufficient to ensure the development and competitiveness of Armenia in the region. He said the GDP growth of 2.2 percent in general should not be considered as a growth for a country like Armenia, because this growth cannot lead to any positive effects.

It's key to their economy – past growth proves and Russia is funding repairs/fortifications to the site now
NTI 15 Nuclear Threat Initiative, "Fact Sheet: Armenia," July 2015 AZ
There are two known nuclear research facilities in Armenia: the Yerevan Institute of Physics and the Analitsark Research Facility in Gyumri. 2 Neither houses fissile material. Armenia has one nuclear power plant, Metsamor, (also known as the Armenian Nuclear Power Plant), which contains two VVER-440 reactor units and produces approximately 40 of the country's electricity. 3 Unit 1 went critical in 1976 and Unit 2 in 1980. 4 Both units were shut down after the 1988 earthquake. Unit 1 is permanently out of operation, while Unit 2 was re-commissioned in 1995. 5 The re-opening of Unit 2 played a crucial role during the period of economic recovery following Armenia's independence by providing Armenia with surplus power capacity. 6 While the government had planned to close the unit by 2017, it decided in October 2012 to extend the life of the old reactor for another ten years. 7 In March 2014, the Armenian government approved a plan to extend the plant's operational lifespan further until 2026 with repairs to be made beginning in 2017. 8 These repairs will be funded by the Russian Federation, which has offered Armenia a grant of $30 million and a loan of $270 million to complete the necessary work. 9 The Russian Federation supplies the nuclear fuel necessary for Metsamor's operation under a 2003 agreement between Moscow and Yerevan that ceded management of the plant to Russia's electricity monopoly Unified Energy Systems (UES). 10

Economic collapse causes competition for resources and instability that triggers hotspots around the globe – co-opts all other causes of war
Harris and Burrows 9 Mathew, PhD European History @ Cambridge, counselor in the National Intelligence Council (NIC) and Jennifer is a member of the NIC’s Long Range Analysis Unit “Revisiting the Future: Geopolitical Effects of the Financial Crisis” http://www.ciaonet.org/journals/twq/v32i2/f_0016178_13952.pdf Increased Potential for Global Conflict
Of course, the report encompasses more than economics and indeed believes the future is likely to be the result of a number of intersecting and interlocking forces. With so many possible permutations of outcomes, each with ample Revisiting the Future opportunity for unintended consequences, there is a growing sense of insecurity. Even so, history may be more instructive than ever. While we continue to believe that the Great Depression is not likely to be repeated, the lessons to be drawn from that period include the harmful effects on fledgling democracies and multiethnic societies (think Central Europe in 1920s and 1930s) and on the sustainability of multilateral institutions (think League of Nations in the same period). There is no reason to think that this would not be true in the twenty-first as much as in the twentieth century. For that reason, the ways in which the potential for greater conflict could grow would seem to be even more apt in a constantly volatile economic environment as they would be if change would be steadier. In surveying those risks, the report stressed the likelihood that terrorism and nonproliferation will remain priorities even as resource issues move up on the international agenda. Terrorism’s appeal will decline if economic growth continues in the Middle East and youth unemployment is reduced. For those terrorist groups that remain active in 2025, however, the diffusion of technologies and scientific knowledge will place some of the world’s most dangerous capabilities within their reach. Terrorist groups in 2025 will likely be a combination of descendants of long established groups_inheriting organizational structures, command and control processes, and training procedures necessary to conduct sophisticated attacks_and newly emergent collections of the angry and disenfranchised that become self-radicalized, particularly in the absence of economic outlets that would become narrower in an economic downturn. The most dangerous casualty of any economically-induced drawdown of U.S. military presence would almost certainly be the Middle East. Although Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons is not inevitable, worries about a nuclear-armed Iran could lead states in the region to develop new security arrangements with external powers, acquire additional weapons, and consider pursuing their own nuclear ambitions. It is not clear that the type of stable deterrent relationship that existed between the great powers for most of the Cold War would emerge naturally in the Middle East with a nuclear Iran. Episodes of low intensity conflict and terrorism taking place under a nuclear umbrella could lead to an unintended escalation and broader conflict if clear red lines between those states involved are not well established. The close proximity of potential nuclear rivals combined with underdeveloped surveillance capabilities and mobile dual-capable Iranian missile systems also will produce inherent difficulties in achieving reliable indications and warning of an impending nuclear attack. The lack of strategic depth in neighboring states like Israel, short warning and missile flight times, and uncertainty of Iranian intentions may place more focus on preemption rather than defense, potentially leading to escalating crises. 36 Types of conflict that the world continues to experience, such as over resources, could reemerge, particularly if protectionism grows and there is a resort to neo-mercantilist practices. Perceptions of renewed energy scarcity will drive countries to take actions to assure their future access to energy supplies. In the worst case, this could result in interstate conflicts if government leaders deem assured access to energy resources, for example, to be essential for maintaining domestic stability and the survival of their regime. Even actions short of war, however, will have important geopolitical implications. Maritime security concerns are providing a rationale for naval buildups and modernization efforts, such as China’s and India’s development of blue water naval capabilities. If the fiscal stimulus focus for these countries indeed turns inward, one of the most obvious funding targets may be military. Buildup of regional naval capabilities could lead to increased tensions, rivalries, and counterbalancing moves, but it also will create opportunities for multinational cooperation in protecting critical sea lanes. With water also becoming scarcer in Asia and the Middle East, cooperation to manage changing water resources is likely to be increasingly difficult both within and between states in a more dog-eat-dog world.

Tournament: Loyola | Round: 2 | Opponent: Brentwood ELi | Judge: Michael OKrent
Uranium mining is key to the African economy – the aff collapses demand for uranium fuel
Dasnois 12 Nicholas Dasnois, Political analyst at the Governance of Africa’s Resources Programme, "Uranium Mining in Africa: A Continent at the Centre of a Global Nuclear Renaissance," South African Institute Of International Affairs, September, 2012 AZ
Contrary to popular belief, uranium mining in Africa1 did not start with the relatively recent ‘nuclear renaissance’. The Shinkolobwe mine in Katanga province in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) first attracted interest from colonial Belgium, when Union Minière du Haut Katanga discovered uranium there in 1915 and Société Générale Métallurgique de Hoboken began extracting uranium in its plant in Olen. At that time, experts used the radium extracted from uranium for a form of radiotherapy against certain cancers. Shinkolobwe was closed briefly in 1937 before the US revived it and bought around 30 000 tonnes of uranium (tU) from the mine between 1942 and 1944. The uranium was used to manufacture the first atomic bombs.2 The mine was closed when the DRC became independent in 1960 because mining uranium from Shinkolobwe was too expensive and too dangerous. Although for the next four decades nuclear powers still mined and bought uranium, mining it in Africa attracted less attention. This is not to say that it stopped altogether. In Niger mining began in 1971, with all the output going to French nuclear reactors, and in Namibia, the Rössing mine has been operating since 1976. South Africa’s uranium extraction from gold mines in the Witwatersrand area near Johannesburg began in 1951.3 Yet Africa’s share in the global uranium market remained relatively small, for several reasons. These included the low price of uranium worldwide (which reflected low demand, especially after the 1979 Three Mile Island and 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant accidents); the high cost of establishing and running a uranium mine; an adequate supply of uranium from mines in the US, Canada and Australia; and the ready availability of uranium from dismantled weapons in military nuclear stockpiles as the Cold War came to a close in the 1980s. Today, the position is different. Africa accounts for 18 of world uranium production with mining operations taking place in Namibia (8 of global production), Niger (7), Malawi (1.2) and South Africa (1). The other large producers of uranium are Kazakhstan (33 of world production), Canada (18) and Australia (11). At respective prices of $80 a kilogramme of uranium ($/kgU), $130/kgU and $260/kgU, Africa represents 8.5, 16 and 14.7 of world reserves. The largest are in Namibia, Niger and South Africa.4 By comparison, the world’s main uranium reserves at $80/kgU, $130/ kgU and $260/kgU are in Australia.5 Annex I shows which countries produce the world’s uranium and the location of reserves (at different prices).6This paper first examines Africa’s place in the global nuclear renaissance through its four current uranium producers, and those African countries where exploration is taking place and where mining is likely in the future. Secondly, it analyses the effects of uranium mining on the African continent at political, economic, social and environmental levels, examining stakeholders’ efforts and challenges. Thirdly, the paper looks into international and African tools that either exist or are being set up to improve the governance of uranium mining in Africa. Its conclusion is that improvement requires, in particular, attention to strengthening government capacity and ensuring wider consultative processes. Interest in nuclear power has greatly increased over the past decade, for a number of reasons. First, global demand for energy is growing rapidly. World primary energy demand is expected to grow by 40 from 2007 to 2030 and demand for electricity will increase by 76 over the same period. Secondly, rising concern about climate change is encouraging the search for energy sources with lower carbon emissions. At present, nuclear power is the only such source that could adequately meet global demand.7 Thirdly, the world supply of uranium is sufficient to meet government concerns over security of supply; uranium supply is less uncertain than that of, say, oil and gas. Fourthly, over the past decade fossil fuel price rises and price volatility have increased the relative cost-efficiency of nuclear power. Fifth, because the main cost in producing nuclear power lies in building the power plant itself, not in buying the uranium (as opposed to energy derived from fossil fuels, where the larger investment is in oil or coal as fuels) countries investing in nuclear power are less exposed to long-term raw material price fluctuations.8 Although uranium prices dropped after the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe on 11 March 2011 (from $300/kg in June 2007 to $110/kg in August 2011), they have since started to rise again, to $115/kg at the time of writing.9 As the appeal of nuclear power for governments increases, so does their interest in countries that can supply uranium.

Economic collapse causes competition for resources and instability that triggers hotspots around the globe – co-opts all other causes of war
Harris and Burrows 9 Mathew, PhD European History @ Cambridge, counselor in the National Intelligence Council (NIC) and Jennifer is a member of the NIC’s Long Range Analysis Unit “Revisiting the Future: Geopolitical Effects of the Financial Crisis” http://www.ciaonet.org/journals/twq/v32i2/f_0016178_13952.pdf Increased Potential for Global Conflict
Of course, the report encompasses more than economics and indeed believes the future is likely to be the result of a number of intersecting and interlocking forces. With so many possible permutations of outcomes, each with ample Revisiting the Future opportunity for unintended consequences, there is a growing sense of insecurity. Even so, history may be more instructive than ever. While we continue to believe that the Great Depression is not likely to be repeated, the lessons to be drawn from that period include the harmful effects on fledgling democracies and multiethnic societies (think Central Europe in 1920s and 1930s) and on the sustainability of multilateral institutions (think League of Nations in the same period). There is no reason to think that this would not be true in the twenty-first as much as in the twentieth century. For that reason, the ways in which the potential for greater conflict could grow would seem to be even more apt in a constantly volatile economic environment as they would be if change would be steadier. In surveying those risks, the report stressed the likelihood that terrorism and nonproliferation will remain priorities even as resource issues move up on the international agenda. Terrorism’s appeal will decline if economic growth continues in the Middle East and youth unemployment is reduced. For those terrorist groups that remain active in 2025, however, the diffusion of technologies and scientific knowledge will place some of the world’s most dangerous capabilities within their reach. Terrorist groups in 2025 will likely be a combination of descendants of long established groups_inheriting organizational structures, command and control processes, and training procedures necessary to conduct sophisticated attacks_and newly emergent collections of the angry and disenfranchised that become self-radicalized, particularly in the absence of economic outlets that would become narrower in an economic downturn. The most dangerous casualty of any economically-induced drawdown of U.S. military presence would almost certainly be the Middle East. Although Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons is not inevitable, worries about a nuclear-armed Iran could lead states in the region to develop new security arrangements with external powers, acquire additional weapons, and consider pursuing their own nuclear ambitions. It is not clear that the type of stable deterrent relationship that existed between the great powers for most of the Cold War would emerge naturally in the Middle East with a nuclear Iran. Episodes of low intensity conflict and terrorism taking place under a nuclear umbrella could lead to an unintended escalation and broader conflict if clear red lines between those states involved are not well established. The close proximity of potential nuclear rivals combined with underdeveloped surveillance capabilities and mobile dual-capable Iranian missile systems also will produce inherent difficulties in achieving reliable indications and warning of an impending nuclear attack. The lack of strategic depth in neighboring states like Israel, short warning and missile flight times, and uncertainty of Iranian intentions may place more focus on preemption rather than defense, potentially leading to escalating crises. 36 Types of conflict that the world continues to experience, such as over resources, could reemerge, particularly if protectionism grows and there is a resort to neo-mercantilist practices. Perceptions of renewed energy scarcity will drive countries to take actions to assure their future access to energy supplies. In the worst case, this could result in interstate conflicts if government leaders deem assured access to energy resources, for example, to be essential for maintaining domestic stability and the survival of their regime. Even actions short of war, however, will have important geopolitical implications. Maritime security concerns are providing a rationale for naval buildups and modernization efforts, such as China’s and India’s development of blue water naval capabilities. If the fiscal stimulus focus for these countries indeed turns inward, one of the most obvious funding targets may be military. Buildup of regional naval capabilities could lead to increased tensions, rivalries, and counterbalancing moves, but it also will create opportunities for multinational cooperation in protecting critical sea lanes. With water also becoming scarcer in Asia and the Middle East, cooperation to manage changing water resources is likely to be increasingly difficult both within and between states in a more dog-eat-dog world. 

African conflicts cause great power war
Glick 7 (Caroline – senior Middle East fellow at the Center for Security Policy, Condi’s African holiday, p. http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/home.aspx?sid=56andcategoryid=56andsubcategoryid=90andnewsid=11568)
The Horn of Africa is a dangerous and strategically vital place. Small wars, which rage continuously, can easily escalate into big wars. Local conflicts have regional and global aspects. All of the conflicts in this tinderbox, which controls shipping lanes from the Indian Ocean into the Red Sea, can potentially give rise to regional, and indeed global conflagrations between competing regional actors and global powers. Located in and around the Horn of Africa are the states of Eritrea, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan and Kenya. Eritrea, which gained independence from Ethiopia in 1993 after a 30-year civil war, is a major source of regional conflict. Eritrea has a nagging border dispute with Ethiopia which could easily ignite. The two countries fought a bloody border war from 1998-2000 over control of the town of Badme. Although a UN mandated body determined in 2002 that the disputed town belonged to Eritrea, Ethiopia has rejected the finding and so the conflict festers. Eritrea also fights a proxy war against Ethiopia in Somalia and in Ethiopia's rebellious Ogaden region. In Somalia, Eritrea is the primary sponsor of the al-Qaida-linked Islamic Courts Union which took control of Somalia in June, 2006. In November 2006, the ICU government declared jihad against Ethiopia and Kenya. Backed by the US, Ethiopia invaded Somalia last December to restore the recognized Transitional Federal Government to power which the ICU had deposed. Although the Ethiopian army successfully ousted the ICU from power in less than a week, backed by massive military and financial assistance from Eritrea, as well as Egypt and Libya, the ICU has waged a brutal insurgency against the TFG and the Ethiopian military for the past year. The senior ICU leadership, including Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys and Sheikh Sharif Ahmed have received safe haven in Eritrea. In September, the exiled ICU leadership held a nine-day conference in the Eritrean capital of Asmara where they formed the Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia headed by Ahmed. Eritrean President-for-life Isaias Afwerki declared his country's support for the insurgents stating, "The Eritrean people's support to the Somali people is consistent and historical, as well as a legal and moral obligation." Although touted in the West as a moderate, Ahmed has openly supported jihad and terrorism against Ethiopia, Kenya and the West. Aweys, for his part, is wanted by the FBI in connection with his role in the bombing of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Then there is Eritrea's support for the Ogaden separatists in Ethiopia. The Ogaden rebels are Somali ethnics who live in the region bordering Somalia and Kenya. The rebellion is run by the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) which uses terror and sabotage as its preferred methods of warfare. It targets not only Ethiopian forces and military installations, but locals who wish to maintain their allegiance to Ethiopia or reach a negotiated resolution of the conflict. In their most sensationalist attack to date, in April ONLF terror forces attacked a Chinese-run oil installation in April killing nine Chinese and 65 Ethiopians. Ethiopia, for its part has fought a brutal counter-insurgency to restore its control over the region. Human rights organizations have accused Ethiopia of massive human rights abuses of civilians in Ogaden. Then there is Sudan. As Eric Reeves wrote in the Boston Globe on Saturday, "The brutal regime in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, has orchestrated genocidal counter-insurgency war in Darfur for five years, and is now poised for victory in its ghastly assault on the region's African populations." The Islamist government of Omar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir is refusing to accept non-African states as members of the hybrid UN-African Union peacekeeping mission to Darfur that is due to replace the undermanned and demoralized African Union peacekeeping force whose mandate ends on December 31. Without its UN component of non-African states, the UN Security Council mandated force will be unable to operate effectively. Khartoum's veto led Jean-Marie Guehenno, the UN undersecretary for peacekeeping to warn last month that the entire peacekeeping mission may have to be aborted. And the Darfur region is not the only one at risk. Due to Khartoum's refusal to carry out the terms of its 2005 peace treaty with the Southern Sudanese that ended Khartoum's 20-year war and genocide against the region's Christian and animist population, the unsteady peace may be undone. Given Khartoum's apparent sprint to victory over the international community regarding Darfur, there is little reason to doubt that once victory is secured, it will renew its attacks in the south. The conflicts in the Horn of Africa have regional and global dimensions. Regionally, Egypt has played a central role in sponsoring and fomenting conflicts. Egypt's meddling advances its interest of preventing the African nations from mounting a unified challenge to Egypt's colonial legacy of extraordinary rights to the waters of the Nile River which flows through all countries of the region.

Tournament: Voices | Round: 1 | Opponent: Harvard Westlake IP | Judge: Michael Dittmer
US manufacturing is sky high thanks to low electricity prices
Mark Perry, 7/13/2016. Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor of economics at the University of Michigan’s Flint campus. “American Manufacturing, Re-energized,” US News. http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-07-13/how-shale-gas-is-re-energizing-american-manufacturing
Those claims that America doesn't produce anything anymore just aren't true. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. manufacturing output reached an all-time high of $2.17 trillion in 2015, making last year the best in at least a generation by all relevant measures of economic performance: output growth, employment gains and profits. In fact, today the U.S is the world's number two manufacturing nation, ranking behind only China. Also, consider that in 2014, the U.S. produced more manufacturing output than the combined output of Germany, South Korea, India, Italy and France.
Another reason for the resurgence of U.S. manufacturing: lower electricity prices. Adjusted for inflation, the cost of electricity to industrial users in the U.S. is lower this year than almost any year in history. Compared to 2008 in the early days of the shale revolution, industrial electricity prices are 17 percent lower today. That's because virtually every new power plant constructed in recent years has been fueled with natural gas. Gas plants are relatively inexpensive to build, and gas prices are projected to remain low for many decades.

Death of the nuclear industry causes massive price volatility
Spencer 7 (Jack, Research Fellow in Nuclear Energy in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation, “Competitive Nuclear Energy Investment: Avoiding Past Policy Mistakes,” November 15th, 2007, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2007/11/competitive-nuclear-energy-investment-avoiding-past-policy-mistakes)
The Effect on Ratepayers The near death of the U.S. nuclear energy industry has harmed both investors and consumers. First, ratepayers eventually pay for the increased costs of generating electricity. More important, by removing nuclear energy from America's energy portfolio, anti-nuclear activists have limited the choices available to America's energy producers and consumers. Limiting choice has two inevitable results: higher prices and lower quality. Without nuclear energy as an option and with coal being frowned upon, utilities started moving toward natural gas power plants. This growing reliance on natural gas has caused electricity prices to follow the volatility of natural gas prices. As demand for natural gas has increased, prices have become even more volatile.

The agriculture industry is uniquely sensitive to electricity costs
WALLACE 2—CSU Chico Research Foundation Staff Henry Wallace, Agricultural Electricity Rates in California, Consultant Report, http://www.energy.ca.gov/reports/2002-05-13_400-01-020.PDF

Today, agricultural commodity prices have been driven down by worldwide competition, greatly reducing the net returns to all California agricultural operations. Growers and food processors are now more vulnerable to increased costs, such as higher electricity rates, that cannot be passed along in higher prices. Significant reductions in profitability could lead to bankruptcies, and concomitant reductions in agricultural output. The recent spate of cooperative failures (e.g., Tri Valley and Farmers’ Rice) and processing plant closures are examples of the current weakness in the agricultural economy.

Causes global wars and instability
Femia 12 (Francesco and Caitlin Werrell, Write for The Center For Climate and Security, When National Climate Disasters Go Global: On Drought, Food, And Global Insecurity, July, Accessed Online at Think Progress)

The security implications of food price spikes
What we’ve also seen is that spikes in world food prices have increased the likelihood of instability and riots. In some instances, crop failure in one part of the world associated with instability halfway around the globe, can contribute to serious diplomatic crises between the U.S. and its allies, as occurred with Egypt, and could conceivably result in U.S. military involvement.
This is part of a larger phenomenon Dr. Troy Sternberg calls “the globalization of hazards,” where natural hazards in one region can have a significant impact on regions halfway across the globe. This is not to say that the current U.S. drought will necessarily lead to unrest. However, it is not unprecedented for droughts, and other climatic events that damage crop production, to do so.
Collective impact of crop failure across the globe
It is also important to consider that the drought and crop failures in the U.S. are not happening in isolation.  In recent years, extreme hot and dry weather has forced Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan to reduce their harvest forecasts (and two studies explicitly link the devastating Russian heat wave of 2010 to climate change). European Union wheat yields this year will be smaller, in part, because Spain is suffering from the second worst drought in fifty years. North and South Korea are facing the worst drought in a century. Shifts in glacial melt and rainfall are threatening crops in Pakistan. The proliferation of locusts throughout West Africa is threatening household food security. Recent floods in Japan, India and Bangladesh are threatening rice crops. Argentina’s soy crops were severely depleted because of a shortage of rain. And in Mali, drought combined with other factors led to a major humanitarian disaster in the region. The list goes on.
Many of these conditions are record-setting, or the worst of their kind in decades and sometimes centuries. And climate projections threaten to make matters worse. What this means is that it is possible that the global food market is about to witness an unusual amount of stress. It is not entirely clear if the market is prepared for it, or even if nations have the capacity to adequately respond.
Impact on U.S. assistance and diplomacy
Food, for better or worse, is also used as a form of diplomacy. For example, the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Food for Peace program has sent 106 million metric tons to the hungry of the world, feeding billions of people and saving countless lives. The program depends on the unparalleled productivity of American farmers and the American agricultural system. Without this vast system there would be no Food for Peace program, or any of the other food assistance programs either run by the U.S. government, or heavily supported by the U.S. such as the UN’s World Food Program.
On average, American food aid provides 60 percent of the world’s food aid, feeding millions of desperately hungry people every year. This means that in addition to facing an increasing risk from lower crop and animal stock yields and global food market shocks, the U.S. may also be limiting its ability to respond rapidly to global disasters, including global food crises. This is bad news for the global poor, and for U.S. diplomacy.

Tournament: St Marks | Round: 3 | Opponent: Strake VL | Judge: Srikar Pyda
Armenia’s nuclear power is key to relations with Russia
http://arka.am/en/news/economy/levitin_armenia_s_nuclear_power_plant_enables_armenia_and_russia_to_step_up_their_cooperation_in_ene/
Arka ‘15
YEREVAN, October 15. /ARKA/. Armenia’s nuclear power plant in Metsamor enables Armenia and Russia to step up their cooperation in energy sector, Igor Levitin, the Russian president’s advisor who long years led the Armenian-Russian intergovernmental commission, said Saturday in Yerevan. “Our relations in this area very firm, and there is a good potential for developing them by using atomic energy,” he said answering ARKA News Agency’s question. Leviting said that Armenia can generate more electric power by using new technologies in the atomic energy. He said the two countries’ presidents gave appropriate instructions to the ministers when they met earlier this year. Armenia plans to build a new unit for the NPP which is expected to be commissioned in 2019-2020. In order to attract foreign investors, the Armenian parliament in 2006 abolished the state monopoly on ownership of new nuclear power units. The Armenian Metsamor nuclear power plant is located some 30 kilometers west of Yerevan. It was built in the 1970s but was closed following a devastating earthquake in 1988. One of its two VVER 440-V230 light-water reactors was reactivated in 1995. Armenian authorities said they will build a new nuclear power plant to replace the aging facility. The new plant is supposed to operate at twice the capacity of the Soviet-constructed facility. Metsamor currently generates some 40 percent of Armenia's electricity. But the government has yet to attract funding for the project that was estimated by a U.S.-funded feasibility study to cost at as much as $5 billion.
Relations are on the brink now – they’re key to manage Nagorno-Karabakh conflict – energy’s the key internal link
Anna Nemtsova 16 (Anna Nemtsova, ) In Nagorno-Karabakh, a Bloody New War With Putin on Both Sides, Daily Beast 4-4-2016 AT
Armenia's relationship with Russia was tested this year, despite that Armenia joined Russia's Eurasian Union and received financial assistance and weapons deliveries from Moscow. In January, a Russian soldier killed an entire Armenian family in Giumri. Moscow eventually allowed the Armenian government to conduct its own trial of the soldier, but not before igniting protests across Armenia and raising anti-Russia sentiments. Protests later sprang up in Yerevan against a price hike for electricity demanded by a Russia company. Although the protesters claimed their discontent was only with social issues, Russian politicians were visibly worried that the protest would turn to overall discontent with Armenia's pro-Russia stance. Armenia's economy, hurt by Russia's economic decline in the face of Western sanctions, also declined, which has further enflamed domestic anger. Moreover, Armenia and the European Union started to work on a new cooperation agreement, which could also cause some problems with Moscow by complicating its standoff with the West. Empowering Russia-based Armenian politicians amenable to Moscow's interests would certainly benefit Russia's negotiations with Sarkisian's government, especially on another, more important issue: Nagorno-Karabakh. Stratfor recently noted numerous efforts on Azerbaijan's part to change an existing status quo regarding the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Usually, small-scale clashes along the contact line that define the conflict result in mostly Armenian casualties and loss of military equipment. However, Yerevan suspects that a recent Russian-Azerbaijani diplomatic rapprochement might lead Russia to allegedly agree to a possible change of this status quo. Several theories have been propounded, from withdrawing Armenian forces from the seven regions adjacent to Nagorno-Karabakh, to the placement of Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) — the Russia-led military bloc — peacekeepers. But Armenia's political elite, predominantly made up of politicians originating from Nagorno-Karabakh (like Sarkisian), has staunchly objected to any of these scenarios. Thus it may not be entirely coincidental that Yerevan, following the alleged Russian-Azerbaijani talks, decided to ramp up its forces along the contact line as well as to overtly criticize the CSTO. Moreover, Armenian leaders even threatened that in case of an Azerbaijani military attack, Yerevan would consider recognizing Nagorno-Karabakh as an independent state, which would make placing any peacekeepers there virtually impossible. The Kremlin's decision to overtly support Russia-based Armenians is a direct response to Moscow's challenges with the Armenian government. More important, Russia's overall strategy of isolating the former Soviet state to keep it dependent is part of its grand design to maintain a grip on the entire former Soviet periphery. Since the collapse of the pro-Russia government in Ukraine in 2014 and the conflicts and regional political maneuvers that followed, Russia has feared the loss of this sphere of influence to the West. Hence, losing clout in Armenia, even to a non-Western country such as Iran, let alone Europe, risks putting another dent in Russia's weakened buffer zone. So in the long term, pro-Russia figures such as Karapetian and Abrahamian are likely to play important role in Armenian politics. The influence of Russian companies in Armenia's energy sector will have equally strategic repercussions, limiting the country's ability to become a transit country for Iranian exports and increasing its dependence on Russia. 

Failure to manage the conflict causes a proxy war in the Caucasus
Anna Nemtsova 16 (Anna Nemtsova, ) In Nagorno-Karabakh, a Bloody New War With Putin on Both Sides, Daily Beast 4-4-2016 AT
MOSCOW — Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave in Azerbaijan that became breakaway republic backed by Armenia in all spheres of life, has been living in a not-quite-frozen state of war since 1994. Every schoolboy in the mountainous little republic has grown up knowing that after graduation he will put on a uniform and join the military to police the unstable cease-fire. The republic’s 150,000 people, mostly ethnic Armenians, remember rockets destroying apartment buildings in the fighting more than 20 years ago, and have long feared that their worst nightmare of full-scale war would return. Now it looks like it has. The war woke up on Saturday night with both sides of the front using armored vehicles, battle tanks, and aviation, launching multiple rockets, and shooting artillery at each other. Over 30 people were killed and dozens wounded in the worst combat in the last two decades. The regional implications are hard to miss. Armenia is one of Russia’s closest allies and Turkey immediately backed up Azerbaijan at a time when relations between Moscow and Ankara are bitter and vindictive. Given the war in Syria, where Russia and Turkey back opposing sides, and Turkey shot down a Russian warplane in November, the current eruption between Armenia and Azerbaijan is even more geopolitically dangerous than two decades ago. On the eve of violent clashes Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev and Armenia’s President Serzh Sargsyan were attending the Nuclear Summit in Washington, but obviously had no chance to shake hands and make peace to prevent the tragedy. Among the first victims of the latest violent clashes in Nagorno-Karabakh were children: a 12 year old boy, Vaginak Grigorian, was killed in the cross fire by one of Azerbaijan’s Grad multiple-rocket launchers, the Armenian papers reported; two more children were wounded among dozens of civilian victims. On Monday, the Karabakh ministry of defense claimed its forces had destroyed 19 of Azerbaijan’s tanks, and posted dreadful images on Twitter of buildings shelled the night before, of burned vehicles, of dead bodies, and of victims covered in blood. The Armenian government claimed that a bus with Armenian volunteers going to Karabakh was hit by an Azerbaijani drone. Five volunteers were killed. Azerbaijan meanwhile reported on dozens of casualties. It would be hard to overstate the dependence of the Armenian contingent on Moscow. Nagorno-Karabakh’s officials told The Daily Beast in interviews last summer that neither Armenia nor Nagorno-Karabakh could survive without Russia’s support in the conflict with Azerbaijan. In 2014 Armenia joined Vladimir Putin’s dream project, the Eurasian Economic Union, together with Belarus and Kazakhstan. Armenian military doctrine holds that Russia is the guarantor of the country’s military security, and in the last few years Russia equipped its military bases in Armenian Gyumri and Erebuni with MiG-29 fighters, Mi-24 helicopters, as well as with more than 70 tanks, armored vehicles and artillery systems. Last December, Russia delivered new helicopters to its aviation base in Erebuni. In February Moscow announced it was selling $200 million worth of arms to Armenia. But, here’s the rub: at the same time, Russia sold hundreds of tanks to Armenia’s long time enemy, Azerbaijan. Last year the contracts for Russian military exports to Azerbaijan included armored vehicles, artillery and mortar systems. While in Yerevan, Armenia’s capital, many wondered what else they had to do to prove their loyalty and devotion to the Kremlin, in Moscow it was clear that President Putin needed Azerbaijan as Russia’s ally, too, especially as relations between Russia and Turkey worsened. There are many reasons it’s not in the Kremlin’s interest to lose Azerbaijan’s friendship. In 2014 Russia’s Rosneft and Azerbaijan’s Socar oil companies created a joint venture to explore oil and gas fields together in both countries, and Azerbaijan’s exports to Russia have been growing. Experts both in Moscow and in Baku believe that president Putin would do almost anything to avoid a full-scale conflict between Russia and Azerbaijan. “Putin cannot afford to lose Azerbaijan, he would do everything to negotiate the peace for Nagorno-Karabakh now,” an independent political analyst, Dmitriy Oreshkin, told The Daily Beast on Monday. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was planning to visit Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, this week, while Russian Prime Minister Dmitriy Medvedev planned to visit Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. Many in Yerevan wish that U.S. President Barack Obama had managed somehow to play a peacemaker’s role in Washington last week to prevent the escalation of Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. That was not to be. But, as Armenian parliament member Tevan Poghosyna told The Daily Beast, “If the international community does not manage to stop the war now, several countries might be involved in the conflict, including Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan supporting Azerbaijan and Russia, we hope, supporting Armenia.” Another descent into chaos and proxy war is, to be sure, the last thing the world needs right now.This is also an alt cause to the relations advantage
Causes a full-scale US-Russia war
Friedman 9 George, Fall. Founder and Chief Executive Officer of STRATFOR, Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University. “The Coming Conflict With Russia,” Journal of International Security Affairs No 17, http://www.securityaffairs.org/issues/2009/17/friedman.php
The Caucasus serves as the boundary between Russian and Turkish power, and has historically been a flash point between the two empires. It was also a flash point during the Cold War. The Turkish–Soviet border ran through the Caucasus, with the Soviet side consisting of three separate republics: Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, all now independent. The Caucasus also ran north into the Russian Federation itself, including into the Muslim areas of Dagestan and, most important, Chechnya, where a guerrilla war against Russian domination raged after the fall of Communism.  From a purely defensive point of view, the precise boundaries of Russian and Turkish influence don’t matter, so long as both are based somewhere in the Caucasus. The rugged terrain makes defense relatively easy. Should the Russians lose their position in the Caucasus altogether and be pushed north into the lowlands, however, Russia’s position would become difficult. With the gap between Ukraine and Kazakhstan only a few hundred miles wide, Russia would be in strategic trouble.  This is the reason the Russians are so unwilling to compromise on Chechnya. The southern part of Chechnya is deep in the northern Caucasus. If that were lost, the entire Russian position would unravel. Given a choice, the Russians would prefer to be anchored farther south, in Georgia. Armenia is already an ally of Russia. If Georgia were Russian, Moscow’s entire position would be much more stable. Controlling Chechnya is indispensable. Reabsorbing Georgia is desirable. Holding Azerbaijan does not provide a strategic advantage—but the Russians would not mind having it as a buffer with the Iranians. Russia’s position here is not intolerable, but Georgia, not incidentally closely allied with the United States, is a tempting target, as was seen in the August 2008 conflict.  The situation in the Caucasus is not only difficult to understand but also difficult to deal with. The Soviet Union actually managed to solve the complexity by incorporating all these countries after World War I and ruthlessly suppressing their autonomy. It is impossible for Russia to be indifferent to the region now or in the future—unless it is prepared to lose its position in the Caucasus. Therefore, the Russians can be expected to reassert their position, most likely starting with Georgia. And since the United States sees Georgia as a strategic asset, Russia’s reassertion there will lead to confrontation with the United States. Unless the Chechen rebellion completely disappears, the Russians will have to move south, then isolate the rebellion and nail down their position in the mountains.  There are two powers that will not want this to happen. The United States is one, and the other is Turkey. Americans will see Russian domination of Georgia as undermining their position in the region. The Turks will see this as energizing the Armenians and returning the Russian army in force to their borders. The Russians will become more convinced of the need to act because of this resistance. A duel in the Caucasus will be the likely result.
Russia war=extinction
Barrett et al 13—PhD in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University, Fellow in the RAND Stanton Nuclear Security Fellows Program, and Director of Research at Global Catastrophic Risk Institute—AND Seth Baum, PhD in Geography from Pennsylvania State University, Research Scientist at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, and Executive Director of Global Catastrophic Risk Institute—AND Kelly Hostetler, BS in Political Science from Columbia and Research Assistant at Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (Anthony, 24 June 2013, “Analyzing and Reducing the Risks of Inadvertent Nuclear War Between the United States and Russia,” Science and Global Security: The Technical Basis for Arms Control, Disarmament, and Nonproliferation Initiatives, Volume 21, Issue 2, Taylor and Francis)

War involving significant fractions of the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, which are by far the largest of any nations, could have globally catastrophic effects such as severely reducing food production for years, 1 potentially leading to collapse of modern civilization worldwide, and even the extinction of humanity. 2 Nuclear war between the United States and Russia could occur by various routes, including accidental or unauthorized launch; deliberate first attack by one nation; and inadvertent attack. In an accidental or unauthorized launch or detonation, system safeguards or procedures to maintain control over nuclear weapons fail in such a way that a nuclear weapon or missile launches or explodes without direction from leaders. In a deliberate first attack, the attacking nation decides to attack based on accurate information about the state of affairs. In an inadvertent attack, the attacking nation mistakenly concludes that it is under attack and launches nuclear weapons in what it believes is a counterattack. 3 (Brinkmanship strategies incorporate elements of all of the above, in that they involve intentional manipulation of risks from otherwise accidental or inadvertent launches. 4 ) Over the years, nuclear strategy was aimed primarily at minimizing risks of intentional attack through development of deterrence capabilities, and numerous measures also were taken to reduce probabilities of accidents, unauthorized attack, and inadvertent war. For purposes of deterrence, both U.S. and Soviet/Russian forces have maintained significant capabilities to have some forces survive a first attack by the other side and to launch a subsequent counter-attack. However, concerns about the extreme disruptions that a first attack would cause in the other side's forces and command-and-control capabilities led to both sides’ development of capabilities to detect a first attack and launch a counter-attack before suffering damage from the first attack. 5 Many people believe that with the end of the Cold War and with improved relations between the United States and Russia, the risk of East-West nuclear war was significantly reduced. 6 However, it also has been argued that inadvertent nuclear war between the United States and Russia has continued to present a substantial risk. 7 While the United States and Russia are not actively threatening each other with war, they have remained ready to launch nuclear missiles in response to indications of attack. 8 False indicators of nuclear attack could be caused in several ways. First, a wide range of events have already been mistakenly interpreted as indicators of attack, including weather phenomena, a faulty computer chip, wild animal activity, and control-room training tapes loaded at the wrong time. 9 Second, terrorist groups or other actors might cause attacks on either the United States or Russia that resemble some kind of nuclear attack by the other nation by actions such as exploding a stolen or improvised nuclear bomb, 10 especially if such an event occurs during a crisis between the United States and Russia. 11 A variety of nuclear terrorism scenarios are possible. 12 Al Qaeda has sought to obtain or construct nuclear weapons and to use them against the United States. 13 Other methods could involve attempts to circumvent nuclear weapon launch control safeguards or exploit holes in their security. 14 It has long been argued that the probability of inadvertent nuclear war is significantly higher during U.S.–Russian crisis conditions, 15 with the Cuban Missile Crisis being a prime historical example. It is possible that U.S.–Russian relations will significantly deteriorate in the future, increasing nuclear tensions. There are a variety of ways for a third party to raise tensions between the United States and Russia, making one or both nations more likely to misinterpret events as attacks. 16

Tournament: Loyola | Round: 2 | Opponent: Brentwood ELi | Judge: Michael OKrent
Nuclear power is key to solve warming--it's the only possible option that can meet demand in time to avoid warming
Biello 13 David Biello, Associate editor at Scientific American, "How Nuclear Power Can Stop Global Warming ," Scientific American, 12/12, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-nuclear-power-can-stop-global-warming/
In addition to reducing the risk of nuclear war, U.S. reactors have also been staveing off another global challenge: climate change. The low-carbon electricity produced by such reactors provides 20 percent of the nation's power and, by the estimates of climate scientist James Hansen of Columbia University, avoided 64 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas pollution. They also avoided spewing soot and other air pollution like coal-fired power plants do and thus have saved some 1.8 million lives. And that's why Hansen, among others, such as former Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, thinks that nuclear power is a key energy technology to fend off catastrophic climate change. "We can't burn all these fossil fuels," Hansen told a group of reporters on December 3, noting that as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy source they will continue to be burned. "Coal is almost half the global emissions. If you replace these power plants with modern, safe nuclear reactors you could do a lot of pollution reduction quickly." Indeed, he has evidence: the speediest drop in greenhouse gas pollution on record occurred in France in the 1970s and ‘80s, when that country transitioned from burning fossil fuels to nuclear fission for electricity, lowering its greenhouse emissions by roughly 2 percent per year. The world needs to drop its global warming pollution by 6 percent annually to avoid "dangerous" climate change in the estimation of Hansen and his co-authors in a recent paper in PLoS One. "On a global scale, it's hard to see how we could conceivably accomplish this without nuclear," added economist and co-author Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, where Hansen works.
Climate change sucks and Nuclear power is key- low carbons.
IAEA 2 International Atomic Energy Agency “CLIMATE CHANGE AND NUCLEAR POWER 2015” Vienna Austria 2015
The contribution of WG II to the IPCC’s AR5 8 assesses the patterns of risks and potential benefits resulting from the above changes in the climate system. The key risks include: death, injury, ill health and disrupted livelihoods in low lying coastal zones and small islands due to storm surges, coastal flooding and sea level rise, and for large urban populations due to inland flooding in some regions; extreme weather events leading to breakdown of infrastructure networks and critical services such as electricity, water supply, and health and emergency services; mortality and morbidity during periods of extreme heat; food insecurity and the breakdown of food systems caused by warming, drought, flooding, and precipitation variability and extremes; loss of rural livelihoods and income due to insufficient access to drinking and irrigation water and reduced agricultural productivity; and loss of terrestrial, marine and coastal ecosystems, biodiversity, and ecosystem goods, functions and services. These key risks create particular challenges for the least developed countries and vulnerable communities owing to their limited ability to adapt. In order to reduce the potentially severe risks of climate change, Parties to the UNFCCC adopted the Copenhagen Accord at the COP 15 held in 2009, recognizing “the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 degrees Celsius” (Ref. 9, p. 1). This means that global GHG emissions will need to peak in the next few years and then be reduced at an accelerating rate. Nuclear power and other low carbon technologies will be fundamental in putting the world on this ambitious mitigation pathway. Considering the fast increasing GHG emissions in recent decades and the emissions pathways underlying the RCPs, the world faces an enormous mitigation challenge over the next decades in order to follow RCP2.6. The latest report of the IPCC WG III 10 concludes that mitigation scenarios consistent with the Copenhagen Accord (reaching GHG concentrations around 450 ppm CO2-eq by 2100) involve large scale reductions of CO2 emissions from the energy supply sector in order to reach a level of 90 or more below 2010 emissions between 2040 and 2070, declining to below zero thereafter. These scenarios also feature efficiency improvements and behavioural changes to reduce energy demand in the transport, buildings and industry sectors and thereby provide more flexibility for reducing carbon intensity in the energy supply sector and avoid lock‐in to carbon intensive infrastructures. Nevertheless, low carbon energy technologies such as nuclear power will play a decisive role in reducing the carbon intensity of global energy supply and addressing the climate change challenge.
Natives will be the first to be hit by climate change since they’re so tied to the environment. This also multiplies all other impacts.  
United Nations 07 “Climate change and indigenous peoples” http://www.un.org/en/events/indigenousday/pdf/Backgrounder_ClimateChange_FINAL.pdf
  The effects of climate change on indigenous peoples Indigenous peoples are among the first to face the direct consequences of climate change, owing to their dependence upon, and close relationship with the environment and its resources. Climate change exacerbates the difficulties already faced by vulnerable indigenous communities, including political and economic marginalization, loss of land and resources, human rights violations, discrimination and unemployment. Examples include: • In the high altitude regions of the Himalayas, glacial melts affecting hundreds of millions of rural dwellers who depend on the seasonal flow of water is resulting in more water in the short term, but less in the long run as glaciers and snow cover shrink. • In the Amazon, the effects of climate change include deforestation and forest fragmentation, and consequently, more carbon released into the atmosphere exacerbating and creating further changes. Droughts in 2005 resulted in fires in the western Amazon region. This is likely to occur again as rainforest is replaced by savannas, thus having a huge affect on the livelihoods of the indigenous peoples in the region. • Indigenous peoples in the Arctic region depend on hunting for polar bears, walrus, seals and caribou, herding reindeer, fishing and gathering, not only for food to support the local economy, but also as the basis for their cultural and social identity. Some of the concerns facing indigenous peoples there include the change in species and availability of traditional food sources, perceived reduction in weather predictions and the safety of traveling in changing ice and weather conditions, posing serious challenges to human health and food security. • In Finland, Norway and Sweden, rain and mild weather during the winter season often prevents reindeer from accessing lichen, which is a vital food source. This has caused massive loss of reindeer, which are vital to the culture, subsistence and economy of Saami communities. Reindeer herders must, as a result, feed their herds with fodder, which is expensive and not economically viable in the long term. • Rising temperatures, dune expansion, increased wind speeds, and loss of vegetation are negatively impacting traditional cattle and goat farming practices of indigenous peoples in Africa’s Kalahari Basin, who must now live around government-drilled bores in order to access water and depend on government support for their survival.

Tournament: Loyola | Round: 2 | Opponent: Brentwood ELi | Judge: Michael OKrent
Prioritize existence because value to life is subjective and can change in the future – turns their oppression framing
Torbjörn Tännsjö 11, the Kristian Claëson Professor of Practical Philosophy at Stockholm University, 2011, “Shalt Thou Sometimes Murder? On the Ethics of Killing,” online: http://people.su.se/~jolso/HS-texter/shaltthou.pdf
I suppose it is correct to say that, if Schopenhauer is right, if life is never worth living, then according to utilitarianism we should all commit suicide and put an end to humanity. But this does not mean that, each of us should commit suicide. I commented on this in chapter two when I presented the idea that utilitarianism should be applied, not only to individual actions, but to collective actions as well.¶ It is a well-known fact that people rarely commit suicide. Some even claim that no one who is mentally sound commits suicide. Could that be taken as evidence for the claim that people live lives worth living? That would be rash. Many people are not utilitarians. They may avoid suicide because they believe that it is morally wrong to kill oneself. It is also a possibility that, even if people lead lives not worth living, they believe they do. And even if some may believe that their lives, up to now, have not been worth living, their future lives will be better. They may be mistaken about this. They may hold false expectations about the future.¶ From the point of view of evolutionary biology, it is natural to assume that people should rarely commit suicide. If we set old age to one side, it has poor survival value (of one’s genes) to kill oneself. So it should be expected that it is difficult for ordinary people to kill themselves. But then theories about cognitive dissonance, known from psychology, should warn us that we may come to believe that we live better lives than we do.¶ My strong belief is that most of us live lives worth living. However, I do believe that our lives are close to the point where they stop being worth living. But then it is at least not very far-fetched to think that they may be worth not living, after all. My assessment may be too optimistic.¶ Let us just for the sake of the argument assume that our lives are not worth living, and let us accept that, if this is so, we should all kill ourselves. As I noted above, this does not answer the question what we should do, each one of us. My conjecture is that we should not commit suicide. The explanation is simple. If I kill myself, many people will suffer. Here is a rough explanation of how this will happen: ¶ ... suicide “survivors” confront a complex array of feelings. Various forms of guilt are quite common, such as that arising from (a) the belief that one contributed to the suicidal person's anguish, or (b) the failure to recognize that anguish, or (c) the inability to prevent the suicidal act itself. Suicide also leads to rage, loneliness, and awareness of vulnerability in those left behind. Indeed, the sense that suicide is an essentially selfish act dominates many popular perceptions of suicide. ¶ The fact that all our lives lack meaning, if they do, does not mean that others will follow my example. They will go on with their lives and their false expectations — at least for a while devastated because of my suicide. But then I have an obligation, for their sake, to go on with my life. It is highly likely that, by committing suicide, I create more suffering (in their lives) than I avoid (in my life).
Moral Tunnel vision is complacent with evil
Issac 2—Professor of Political Science at Indiana-Bloomington, Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life, PhD from Yale (Jeffery C., Dissent Magazine, Vol. 49, Iss. 2, “Ends, Means, and Politics,” p. Proquest)
As a result, the most important political questions are simply not asked. It is assumed that U.S. military intervention is an act of "aggression," but no consideration is given to the aggression to which intervention is a response. The status quo ante in Afghanistan is not, as peace activists would have it, peace, but rather terrorist violence abetted by a regime--the Taliban--that rose to power through brutality and repression. This requires us to ask a question that most "peace" activists would prefer not to ask: What should be done to respond to the violence of a Saddam Hussein, or a Milosevic, or a Taliban regime? What means are likely to stop violence and bring criminals to justice? Calls for diplomacy and international law are well intended and important; they implicate a decent and civilized ethic of global order. But they are also vague and empty, because they are not accompanied by any account of how diplomacy or international law can work effectively to address the problem at hand. The campus left offers no such account. To do so would require it to contemplate tragic choices in which moral goodness is of limited utility. Here what matters is not purity of intention but the intelligent exercise of power. Power is not a dirty word or an unfortunate feature of the world. It is the core of politics. Power is the ability to effect outcomes in the world. Politics, in large part, involves contests over the distribution and use of power. To accomplish anything in the political world, one must attend to the means that are necessary to bring it about. And to develop such means is to develop, and to exercise, power. To say this is not to say that power is beyond morality. It is to say that power is not reducible to morality. As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an unyielding concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility. The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of one's intention does not ensure the achievement of what one intends. Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness; it is often a form of complicity in injustice. This is why, from the standpoint of politics--as opposed to religion--pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most significant. Just as the alignment with "good" may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of "good" that generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that one's goals be sincere or idealistic; it is equally important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits this judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it undermines political effectiveness.

The standard is maximizing expected well being

Tournament: Damus | Round: 3 | Opponent: San Marino JC | Judge:
Moral uncertainty means we should prevent extinction
Bostrom 12 Nick Bostrom. Faculty of Philosophy and Oxford Martin School University of Oxford. “Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority.” Global Policy (2012)
These reflections on moral uncertainty suggest an alternative, complementary way of looking at existential risk; they also suggest a new way of thinking about the ideal of sustainability. Let me elaborate.¶ Our present understanding of axiology might well be confused. We may not now know — at least not in concrete detail — what outcomes would count as a big win for humanity; we might not even yet be able to imagine the best ends of our journey. If we are indeed profoundly uncertain about our ultimate aims, then we should recognize that there is a great option value in preserving — and ideally improving — our ability to recognize value and to steer the future accordingly. Ensuring that there will be a future version of humanity with great powers and a propensity to use them wisely is plausibly the best way available to us to increase the probability that the future will contain a lot of value. To do this, we must prevent any existential catastrophe.
Independent of considerations of future happiness or life, death is ontologically the worst possible evil since it destroys the subject iself
Paterson, 03 – Department of Philosophy, Providence College, Rhode Island (Craig, “A Life Not Worth Living?”, Studies in Christian Ethics, http://sce.sagepub.com)
Contrary to those accounts, I would argue that it is death per se that is really the objective evil for us, not because it deprives us of a prospective future of overall good judged better than the alter- native of non-being. It cannot be about harm to a former person who has ceased to exist, for no person actually suffers from the sub-sequent non-participation. Rather, death in itself is an evil to us because it ontologically destroys the current existent subject — it is the ultimate in metaphysical lightening strikes.80 The evil of death is truly an ontological evil borne by the person who already exists, independently of calculations about better or worse possible lives. Such an evil need not be consciously experienced in order to be an evil for the kind of being a human person is. Death is an evil because of the change in kind it brings about, a change that is destructive of the type of entity that we essentially are. Anything, whether caused naturally or caused by human intervention (intentional or unintentional) that drastically interferes in the process of maintaining the person in existence is an objective evil for the person. What is crucially at stake here, and is dialectically supportive of the self-evidency of the basic good of human life, is that death is a radical interference with the current life process of the kind of being that we are. In consequence, death itself can be credibly thought of as a ‘primitive evil’ for all persons, regardless of the extent to which they are currently or prospectively capable of participating in a full array of the goods of life.81  In conclusion, concerning willed human actions, it is justifiable to state that any intentional rejection of human life itself cannot therefore be warranted since it is an expression of an ultimate disvalue for the subject, namely, the destruction of the present person; a radical ontological good that we cannot begin to weigh objectively against the travails of life in a rational manner. To deal with the sources of disvalue (pain, suffering, etc.) we should not seek to irrationally destroy the person, the very source and condition of all human possibility.82
Thus the standard is maximizing expected well being