Tournament: Loyola | Round: 2 | Opponent: Harvard-Westlake AM | Judge: Adam Bistagne Part one is nuclear exploitation and violence Nuclear power exploits minority workers forced by economic necessity into early death. Shrader-Frechette 12 Kristin Shrader-Frechette, O’Neill Family Endowed Professor, Department of Biological Sciences and Department of Philosophy, and also the director of the Center for Environmental Justice and Children’s Health, at the University of Notre Dame, “Nuclear Catastrophe, Disaster-Related Environmental Injustice, and Fukushima, Japan: Prima-Facie Evidence for a Japanese ‘‘Katrina’’” ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE Volume 5, Number 3, 2012 Prima-facie evidence likewise shows buraku nuclear workers are both EI and DREI victims. Internationally, nuclear workers are prominent EI victims because even without accidents, they are allowed to receive ionizingradiation doses (50 mSv annually) 50 times higher than those received by the public. Yet, only low socioeconomic-status people—like buraku—tend to take such risks. This double standard is obviously ethically questionable, given that many developed nations (e.g., Germany, Scandinavian countries) prohibit it because it encourages EI—workers’ trading health for paid work, and innocent worker-descendants’ (future generations’) dying from radiation-induced genomic instability. Thus, both buraku children and their distant descendents face EI—higher radiation-induced death/disease.17,61,62 Prima-facie evidence shows, second, that FD-buraku nuclear workers also are EI and DREI victims because they likely consented to neither normal-, nor accident level, radiation exposures. Why not? Under normal conditions, 90 percent of all 83,000 Japanese nuclear workers are temporary-contract workers who receive about 16 times more radiation than the already-50-times-higherthan-public doses received by normal radiation workers. For non-accident exposures, buraku receive $350–$1,000 per day, for several days of high-radiation work. They have neither full-time employment, nor adequate compensation, nor union representation, nor health benefits, nor full dose disclosure, yet receive the highest workplace-radiation risks. Why? Industry is not required to ‘‘count’’ temporary workers’ radiation exposures when it calculates workers’ average-radiation doses for regulators. However, even if buraku were told their nonaccident doses/risks, they could not genuinely consent. They are unskilled, socially shunned, temporary laborers who are forced by economic necessity to accept even deadly jobs. This two-tier nuclear-worker system—where buraku bear most (unreported) risks, while highly-paid employees bear little (reported) risk—’’ ‘is the hidden world of nuclear power’ said.a former Tokyo University physics professor.’’ In 2010, 89 percent of FD nuclear workers were temporary-contract employees, ‘‘hired from construction sites,’’ local farms, or ‘‘local gangsters.’’ With a ‘‘constant fear of getting fired,’’ they hid their injuries/ doses—to keep their jobs.61–65 Among post-FD-accident buraku, lack of adequate consent also caused prima-facie DREI because government raised workers’ allowable, post-accident-radiation doses to 250 mSv/year—250 times what the public may receive annually.63 Yet IARC says each 250-MSv FD exposure causes 25 percent of fatal cancers. Two-years’ exposure (500 MSv) would cause 50 percent of all fatal cancers. Given such deadly risks and the dire economic situation of buraku, their genuine consent is unlikely.24,25 Still another factor thwarting FD-buraku consent—and indicating prima-facie DREI—is that FD workers likely received higher doses than government admitted. ‘‘The company refused to say how many FD contract workers had been exposed to post-disaster radiation’’; moreover, nuclear-worker-protective clothing and respirators, whether in the US or Japan, protect them only from skin/lung contamination; no gear can stop gamma irradiation of their entire bodies.56,63,66 Neither TECO, nor Japanese regulators, nor IAEA has released statistics on post-FDradiation exposures, especially to buraku inside the plant. IAEA says merely: ‘‘requirements for occupational exposure of remediation workers can be fulfilled’’ at FD, not that they have been or will be fulfilled—a fact also suggesting prima-facie DREI toward buraku.67,68 Nuclear power reactors emit radiation into disadvantaged communities whose residents are too poor to live anywhere else. They also lack the means to evacuate when disasters occur. Shrader-Frechette 12 Kristin Shrader-Frechette, O’Neill Family Endowed Professor, Department of Biological Sciences and Department of Philosophy, and also the director of the Center for Environmental Justice and Children’s Health, at the University of Notre Dame, “Nuclear Catastrophe, Disaster-Related Environmental Injustice, and Fukushima, Japan: Prima-Facie Evidence for a Japanese ‘‘Katrina’’” ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE Volume 5, Number 3, 2012 University scientists, nuclear-industry experts, and physicians say FD radiation will cause at least 20,000- 60,000 premature-cancer deaths.41,42 Japanese poor people are among the hardest hit by FD DREI because, like those abandoned after Hurricane Katrina, Japan’s poor received inadequate post-FD-disaster assistance. Abandoned by government and ‘‘marooned’’ for weeks without roads, electricity, or water, many poor people had no medical care,43,44 transportation, or heat—despite frigid, snowy conditions.45,46 At least four reasons suggest prima-facie evidence that Japanese poor near FD have faced DREI. One prima-facie reason is that because poor people tend to live near dangerous facilities, like reactors, they face the worst accident risks. Within weeks after the FD accident began, long-lived cesium-134 and other radioactive isotopes had poisoned soils at 7.5 million times the regulatory limit; radiation outside plant boundaries was equivalent to getting about seven chest X-rays per hour.47 Roughly 19 miles Northwest of FD, air-radiation readings were 0.8 mSv per hour; after 10 days of this exposure, IARC dose- response curves predict 1 in 5 fatal cancers of those exposed would be attributable to FD; two-months exposure would mean most fatal cancers were caused by FD. Such exposures are likely because many near-Fukushima residents were too poor to evacuate.20 Farther outside the evacuation zone—less than two weeks after the accident began—soil 25 miles Northwest of FD had cesium-137 levels ‘‘twice as high as the threshold for declaring areas uninhabitable around Chernobyl,’’ suggesting ‘‘the land might need to be abandoned.’’48 Not until a month after US and international agencies recommended expanding FD evacuation zones, did Japanese-government officials consider and reject expanding evacuation.49, 50 A second prima-facie reason for Fukushima DREI is that poor people, living near reactors, have higher probabilities of being hurt by both normal and disaster-related radiation releases. Reactors normally cause prima facie EI because they release allowable radiation that increases local cancers and mortality, especially among infants/ children.51–55 Because zero is the only safe dose of ionizing radiation (as the US National Academy of Sciences warns), its cumulative LNT (Linear, No Threshold for increased risk) effects are worst closer to reactors, where poor people live. The US EPA says even normal US radiation releases, between 1970–2020, could cause up to 24,000 additional US deaths.56,57 A third prima-facie reason for Fukushima DREI is that although nearby (poor) people bear both higher preaccident and post-accident risks, others receive little/no risks and most benefits. Wealthier Tokyo residents—140 miles away—received virtually all FD electricity, yet virtually no EI or DREI. A fourth prima-facie reason for DREI burdens on FD poor is that their poverty/powerlessness arguably forced them into EI and accepting reactor siting. Companies hoping to site nuclear facilities target economically depressed areas, both in Japan and elsewhere.17,58 Thus, although FD-owner Tokyo Electric Company (TECO) has long-term safety and ‘‘cover-up scandals,’’ Fukushima residents agreed to accept TECO reactors in exchange for cash. With Fukushima $121 million in debt, in 2007 it approved two new reactors in exchange for ‘‘$45 million from the government.60 percent’’ of total town revenue.17,59 Yet if economic hardship forced poor towns to accept reactors in exchange for basic-services monies, they likely gave no informed consent. Their choice was not voluntary, but coerced by their poverty. Massive Japanese-nuclear-industry PR and media ads also have thwarted risk-disclosure, thus consent, by minimizing nuclear risks.17,53,60–62 Scientists say neither industry nor government disclosed its failure to (1) test reactor-safety equipment; (2) thwart many natural-event disasters; (3) withstand seismic events worse than those that already had occurred; (4) withstand Fukushima-type disasters; (5) admit that new passive-safety reactors require electricity to cool cores and avoid catastrophe; or (6) base reactorsafety on anything but cost-benefit tests.17,53,60–62 Thus, because prima facie evidence suggests Fukushima poor people never consented to FD siting, they are EI victims whose reactor proximity caused them also to become DREI victims. Nuclear power construction and mining emits carbon dioxide, poisoning the environment. Sovacool, 07 Benjamin; Senior Research Fellow for the Virginia Center for Coal and Energy Research and professor of Government and International Affairs at Virginia Tech; “What's Really Wrong With Nuclear Power?”; 11/30; http://scitizen.com/stories/Future-Energies/2007/11/What-s-Really-Wrong-With-Nuclear-Power/; JLB (8/8/2016) Third and finally, nuclear power plants are not carbon neutral. The Oxford Research Group concludes that the nuclear fuel cycle is responsible for emitting 84 to 122 grams of carbon dioxide per every kWh, mostly from uranium mining, plant construction, and plant decommissioning. The report also notes that these emissions are around half of that as natural gas plants (so we are talking about some serious carbon). In addition, the International Atomic Energy Agency notes that uranium is getting harder to mine, meaning that the carbon emissions related to nuclear will get worse as more uranium gets depleted, not better. This is because mining uranium ores of relatively low grades and greater depth is much more energy intensive. If world nuclear generating share remains what it is today, the Oxford Research Group concludes that by 2050 nuclear power would generate as much carbion dioxide per kWh as a comparable gas-fired power station. This results in climate change which disproportionately hurts marginalized groups. Cuomo ‘11 (Chris Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies, and an affiliate faculty member of the Environmental Ethics Certificate Program and the Institute for African-American Studies. The author and editor of many articles and several books in feminist, postcolonial, and environmental philosophy, Cuomo served as Director of the Institute for Women's Studies from 2006-2009. Her book, The Philosopher Queen, a reflection on post-9/11 anti-war feminist politics, was nominated for a Lambda Award and an APA book award, and her work in ecofeminist philosophy and creative interdiciplinary practice has been influential among those seeking to bring together social justice and environmental concerns, as well as theory and practice. She has been a recipient of research grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Ms. Foundation, the National Council for Research on Women, and the Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy, and she has been a visiting faculty member at Cornell University, Amherst College, and Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, “Climate Change, Vulnerability, and Responsibility,” Hypatia 26 no4 Fall 2011 p. 690-714, AM) The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina made it plain that structural inequalities produced by racism can determine who is most affected by severe weather events, and in turn disasters can greatly intensify social and political inequalities. In addition, within nearly any society the poorest and most vulnerable includes disproportionate numbers of females, people of color, and children. Research shows that large-scale disasters are especially devastating for those who lack economic and decision-making power, and that “economic insecurity is a key factor increasing the impact of disasters on women as caregivers, producers, and community actors” (Enarson 2000, viii). But economic security is not the only factor influencing female vulnerabilities. Existing social roles and divisions of labor can also set the stage for increased susceptibility to harm. The tsunami that struck Asia in late 2004 resulted in a much greater loss of life among women and girls in many locations, because women “stayed behind to look for their children and other relatives; men more often than women can swim; men more often than women can climb trees,” and at the time the waves struck, many men and boys were working in small boats or doing errands away from home (Oxfam 2005; see also American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists 2006). Extreme droughts, already occurring due to climate change, exacerbate gender inequalities in places where it is women’s and girls’ responsibility to gather daily water, for when water becomes more scarce, “many poor people, but particularly women and girls, will have to spend more time and energy fetching water from further away” (Stern 2009, 70). Physical hardship for women and girls is multiplied, but there are also auxiliary effects, such as decreased opportunities for girls to attend school and increased risk of assault (American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists 2006; Stern 2009; UN News Centre 2009). And wealthier high emitters with running water are not immune to such ecological pressures. In southeast Australia previously prosperous farmers are suffering due to reduced water availability and accompanying distribution policies. Women married to men in farming families report that their burden is greatly increased, because drought reduces farm income, and when wages are needed women find more opportunities for off-farm work. Some must travel far or temporarily relocate for employment, although their caretaking responsibilities remain. Male partners respond to the compounding impacts of loss of financial security, livelihood, and identity with increased incidences of depression and domestic violence (Alston 2008). Not surprisingly, their vulnerabilities are also shaped by norms of sex and gender. That outweighs—addressing the structural harms of climate change requires no longer thinking of it as a one-time event. Nixon ‘11 (Rob, Rachel Carson Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, pgs. 2-3) Three primary concerns animate this book, chief among them my conviction that we urgently need to rethink-politically, imaginatively, and theoretically-what I call "slow violence." By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence. Climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable representational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively. The long dyings-the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological that result from war's toxic aftermaths or climate change-are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory. Had Summers advocated invading Africa with weapons of mass destruction, his proposal would have fallen under conventional definitions of violence and been perceived as a military or even an imperial invasion. Advocating invading countries with mass forms of slow-motion toxicity, however, requires rethinking our accepted assumptions of violence to include slow violence. Such a rethinking requires that we complicate conventional assumptions about violence as a highly visible act that is newsworthy because it is event focused, time bound, and body bound. We need to account for how the temporal dispersion of slow violence affects the way we perceive and respond to a variety of social afflictions-from domestic abuse to posttraumatic stress and, in particular, environmental calamities. A major challenge is representational: how to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects. Crucially, slow violence is often not just attritional but also exponential, operating as a major threat multiplier; it can fuel long-term, proliferating conflicts in situations where the conditions for sustaining life become increasingly but gradually degraded. Nuclear energy contaminates surrounding water. Maintenance workers are exposed to severe radiation levels as corrosive nuclear waste is released into the coolant system. Caldicott, ‘6 Helen, Founder, President -- Nuclear Policy Research Institute, “Nuclear Power is not the answer,” p. 58-9 Radioactive corrosion or activation products that are not the result of uranium fission are also produced, as neutrons bombard the metal piping and the reactor containment. These elements, which are powerfully radioactive, include cobalt 60, iron 55, nickel 63, radioactive manganese, niobium, zinc, and chromium. These materials slough off from the pipes into the primary coolant. Officially called CRUD, it is so intensely radioactive that it poses a severe hazard to maintenance workers and inspectors in certain areas of the reactor. 36 ¶ According to David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists, during shutdowns of reactors, the utilities not uncommonly flush out pipes, heat exchangers, etc., to remove highly radioactive CRUD build-up. Some of the CRUD is sent to radioactive waste dumps while some is released to the river, lake, or sea nearest the reactor. 37 ¶ Although the nuclear industry claims it is "emission" free, in fact it is collectively releasing millions of curies annually. Reports documenting gaseous and liquid radioactive releases vary enormously depending upon accidental and larger-than-normal routine releases. The Millstone One reactor in Connecticut alone released a remarkable 2.97 million curies of noble gases in 1975, whereas Nine Mile Point One released 1.3 million curies in 1975. In 1974, the total release from all reactors in the United States was 6.48 million curies, and in 1993 it ranged between 96,600 curies to 214,000 curies Releases vary according to equipment failure, which is variable and fickle. By contrast, coal plants release some uranium and uranium daughter products in their smoke but very little radiation compared to atomic plants, and certainly no fission products. ¶ The utilities also admit that about 12 gallons of intensely radioactive primary coolant leaks daily into the secondary coolant via the steam generator through breaks in the pipes. Some of these emissions, which occur when the steam is released to the air, are not even monitored? Likewise, about 4,000 gallons of primary coolant water are intentionally released to the environment on a daily basis, while some just leaks out unplanned. Many other emissions are simply not monitored. And a meta-review of the literature indicates that PTSD and mental stress rates increased as a result of the Fukushima disaster Harada et al 15 Nahoko Harada, Division of Nursing, School of Medicine, National Defense Medical College, “Mental health and psychological impacts from the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake Disaster: a systematic literature review,” Disaster and Military MedicineThe Journal of Prehospital, Trauma and Emergency Care, 2015 Our review compiled a wide array of mental health consequence following the Great East Japan Earthquake, an unprecedented compound disaster with a combination of earthquakes, tsunamis, and a series of nuclear accidents. A considerable proportion of the study population was mentally affected to a substantial degree, and mental health responses ranged from approximately one-tenth to nearly half of the respondents 12, 27. Mental health outcomes included, but were not limited to, PTSD, depression, and anxiety. Physical health changes, such as sleep and eating disturbances, were also reported. Although every disaster is different, disasters are large-scale, stressful, and distressing events that affect a significant number of people. Those who experience higher exposure to traumatic events are likely to show higher mental health responses (i.e., dose–response relationship) 60. For the most people, these acute responses are normal and gradually decrease over time, but a small proportion of the affected individuals will suffer long-term mental health issues. In a review of 160 disaster mental health studies, proportions of subjects with severe impairment were 21.6 for natural disasters and 18.5 for technological disaster samples 6. The articles in this review had relatively higher mental health rates than in previous studies. This trend might be related to the high impact of this disaster as well as the GEJE study timing, because most of the studies were conducted among the direct victims within 2 years after the disaster. Long-term, longitudinal studies are evolving, and they will potentially be useful to understand the trajectories of mental health consequences among these people. In the region affected by the Fukushima nuclear disaster, invisible and imperceptible nature of radioactive materials has been challenged among the affected people. The residents’ responses were diverse and complex; along with high proportions of mental health distress among the Fukushima residents 46, concerns for radiation effect were a prominent concern especially among pregnant women and mothers of young children 43, 49, 61. Safety issues in food and outdoor activities, along with economic issues and distrust in information disclosure were also reported 43, 49. Public psychosocial responses such as discrimination and stigmatization were also reported 48, 56. These findings are in accordance with a series of Chernobyl studies where a complex relationship between radiation exposure and physical/mental health effect has been an ongoing debate. Physical outcome studies tend to be controversial, although firm evidence can be found only on the deaths of first responders due to acute radiation exposures and high prevalence of thyroid cancer among the exposed children 8. Still, psychosocial and economic disruptions to the affected people were significant, and the International Atomic Energy Agency regarded mental health as the major public health sequelae of the Chernobyl accident 62. Mothers of young children and plant clean-up workers were among the two groups of particular concern 63, 64, 65. Psychosocial issues included not only mental health disorders but also stigmatization and discrimination of the affected people 8, suggesting the importance of integrity and accuracy of information as well as risk communication strategies. Two Fukushima studies reported distress among internally displaced people 38, 41. Mandatory evacuation measures have been in place for the area surrounding the nuclear plant, and the evacuees potentially have uncertain and ambiguous perspectives on whether or not they will be able to return home 66. This trend was also compatible with Chernobyl studies reporting challenges in evacuation and resettlement 8. Future studies will be essential to clarify the effect of evacuation following nuclear disasters. Fukushima and Chernobyl studies suggest that substantial public health efforts are crucial to establish a system capable of such exposures. Integrity and accuracy of information will be a critical issue for the public to assess their health status. These studies also have implications for other “tangible” disasters, such as emergencies related to bio-chemical weapons and infectious diseases 67. Long-term studies will be important to increase the psychosocial impact among Fukushima residents, with special focus on children, mothers, and nuclear plant workers. A number of studies assessed a considerable degree of mental distress among disaster workers. This is likely to be owing to work-related exposures of these workers. In the case of GEJE, many of the workers were also local disaster victims, and had struggles as survivors along with their work-related exposures. This effect was prominent in several studies 51, 56, 57. Two worker studies identified experiences of being discriminated against and handling residents’ complaints as risk factors for their adverse mental health 56, 57. In the former study, the Fukushima nuclear plant workers became targets of public criticism because their company was blamed for their post-disaster mismanagement. In the latter, Miyagi Prefecture workers received direct complaints from their residents in a chaotic situation. These results might give hypotheses that mental health of disaster workers is susceptible to their stakeholder’s criticisms. Past literatures identified mortuary work as predictors of PTSD or physical symptoms among disaster workers 68, 69, but in our review, there has yet be an evidence that mortuary work was associated with adverse mental health 50, 51. Further studies will be needed to elucidate the relationship between dead body exposure and mental health outcomes among this population. Previous studies highlighted vulnerable populations for post-disaster mental health, such as children, evacuees, the bereaved, and individuals with preexisting physical/mental health conditions 5, 6. Our compilation overall shows a similar trend, although studies are relatively few, especially in the context of grief. Mentally ill face social stigma in Japan Ando et al 13 Shuntaro Ando, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science, Tokyo, Japan, “Review of mental-health-related stigma in Japan,” Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, September 30, 2013 In Japan, the general public's knowledge of mental illness was found to be relatively poor. Weakness of personality was most often seen as the cause for mental illness, rather than biological factors, such as heritability. A substantial number of Japanese people do not recognize that people with mental illness can recover. In addition, many people have negative attitudes towards people with mental illness, considering them dangerous and unpredictable. Not surprisingly, the majority of the general public in Japan keeps greater social distance from individuals with mental illness in close relationships. Schizophrenia is more stigmatized than depression, and the severity of the illness increases the stigmatizing attitude toward it. In terms of professionals' stigmatization, mental health staff who regularly and directly have contact with individuals with mental illness have less negative attitudes. This may be associated with their accumulation of contact with people who have recovered from mental illness. Compared to Taiwan and Australia, the stigma of mental illness was stronger in Japan, which might be due to institutionalism, the lack of implementation of national campaigns, and society's value of conformity. Although some education programs appeared to be effective in reducing mental-health-related stigma, we found key implications for future interventions. For example, both the general public and professionals need to: eliminate the misunderstanding that mental illness is caused by personal faults; (ii) focus on the adverse effects of institutionalism; (iii) stress the importance of community care; and (iv) offer direct social contact with people with mental illness.
Part two is the advocacy The national government of Japan should ban the production of nuclear power. CCNE 13 Citizens’ Commission on Nuclear Energy, Organization Aiming at Fundamental Reform of Nuclear Energy Policy, “Our path to a nuclear-free Japan: an interim report Executive Summary,” October 2013 Given the Fukushima Nuclear Accident and the many shortcomings found in Japanese civil nuclear policies, Japan – under national consensus - should make it a national virtue to ban the use of atomic energy for power generation and to achieve a society free of nuclear power. A “society free of nuclear power” here means a status where decisions have been taken to decommission all existing nuclear reactors and the process of decommissioning has begun. In order to achieve a shift towards a sustainable energy system, a Fundamental Law on Energy Shift should be enacted. Further, administrative and financial reform should be carried out with the aim to overcome all the past problems associated with energy policies. Part three is solvency Japan hasn’t learned its lesson—the only nuclear power without suffering is no nuclear power at all. Ripley 3/11 Will; award-winning correspondent for CNN, based at the network's Tokyo bureau.; CNN; Fukushima: Five years after Japan's worst nuclear disaster; http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/08/asia/fukushima-five-year-anniversary/; JLB (9/10/16) The moratorium lasted until August 2015, when a reactor was restarted in Sendai, sparking protests outside the plant and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's residence in Tokyo.¶ After the plant resumed operation, Abe said that it, and others in the process of being restarted, had passed "the world's toughest safety screening."¶ Public opinion is still firmly against nuclear and many Japanese politicians and commentators have criticized the government's decision to restart the reactors.¶ Prior to the disaster, around 70 of people supported nuclear energy, according to an official poll. That level dropped to below 36 after the Fukushima meltdown, with opposition to nuclear energy growing to up to 50 or even 70, according to polls by Japanese media.¶ Former Prime Minister Naoto Kan, in office during the crisis, is one of the highest-profile voices to come out against nuclear power, calling repeatedly on the government to change its course.¶ "The safest nuclear policy is not to have any plants at all," he told a parliamentary panel in 2012.¶ While the move back towards nuclear power has been justified on the grounds of the huge cost of importing fossil fuel energy, campaigners expressed disappointment that alternative options weren't explored.¶ "Renewable energy sources such as solar, wind and thermal have so much potential here," said Ai Kashiwagi, of Greenpeace Japan, after the Sendai plant was restarted.¶ Outside of the National Diet, opposition to nuclear power remains high. A February poll by broadcaster NHK found that only 20 thought the reactors should be restarted. Before the disaster, a majority of the country supported the nuclear industry.¶ Greenpeace's Vande Putte said that Japan hasn't "learned the lesson of Fukushima." He pointed to the reactors built in seismic zones, as well as the Sendai plant, which lies 30 kilometers from an active volcano.¶ "In Japan, there's no safe place for nuclear reactors. What we have seen at Fukushima Daiichi can happen at another reactor."¶ "The government should shut down all the nuclear reactors," said Fukushima survivor Toshiki Aso.¶ "I don't want anyone else to have to go through the same suffering we did." Japan is restarting its nuclear reactors despite intense public opposition by affected residents. AFP 8/12 Agence France-Presse; international news agency; 8/12/16; “Japan reactor restarts, despite protests, boosting Tokyo's nuclear push”; http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-12/japan-reactor-restarts-in-post-fukushima-nuclear-push/7729892; JLB (8/17/16) Japan has restarted a nuclear reactor despite a court challenge by local residents, in a boost for Tokyo's faltering post-Fukushima push to bring back atomic power. Operator Shikoku Electric Power said it switched on the No 3 reactor at its Ikata nuclear power plant in Ehime prefecture, about 700 kilometres south-west of Tokyo. The reactor — shuttered along with dozens of others across Japan in the wake of the March 2011 Fukushima accident — was expected to be fully operational by August 22. The prefecture's governor and the mayor of the plant's host town agreed on the restart in October, in the face of opposition from some local residents who filed a lawsuit to halt the refiring. Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and utility companies have been pushing to get reactors back in operation after a huge earthquake and tsunami caused a disastrous meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in north-eastern Japan. The accident forced all of Japan's dozens of reactors offline in the face of public worries over the safety of nuclear power and fears about radiation exposure, forcing a move to pricey fossil fuels. Opposition to nuclear power has seen communities across the country file lawsuits to prevent restarts, marking a serious challenge for Mr Abe's pro-nuclear stance. In April, a court ruled that Japan's only two working nuclear reactors could remain online, rejecting an appeal by residents who said tougher post-Fukushima safety rules were still inadequate. 19 reactors will be operational in Japan by 2018 by standard predictions. WNN 7/28 World Nuclear News, “Japanese institute sees 19 reactor restarts by March 2018,” July 28 2016, http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NP-Japanese-institute-sees-19-reactor-restarts-by-March-2018-2807164.html Seven Japanese nuclear power reactors are likely to be in operation by the end of next March and 12 more one year later, according to an estimate by the Institute of Energy Economics, Japan (IEEJ). Judicial rulings and local consents will influence the rate of restart, it notes. In its Economic and Energy Outlook of Japan Through 2017, the IEEJ has considered the economic and environmental impacts in financial years 2016 and 2017 (ending March 2017 and 2018, respectively) of various scenarios for the restart of reactors in Japan. The organization estimates that if restarts take place according to the current schedule - the "reference scenario" - seven reactors could restart by the end of FY2016 (ending March 2017). By the end of FY2017, 19 units could be restarted, generating some 119.8 TWh of electricity annually, comfchecpared with total nuclear output of 288.2 TWh in FY2010, the year prior to the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Under this scenario, compared with FY2010, total spending on fossil fuel imports in FY2017 decreases by JPY4.7 trillion ($45 billion), while the electricity cost - including fuel costs, feed-in tariffs and grid stabilization costs - increases by about JPY100/MWh. Relative to the same period, energy-related carbon dioxide emissions to 1094 million tonnes CO2. According to the IEEJ, energy-related emissions reached a historical high of 1235 million tonnes CO2 in FY2013. The IEEJ's high-case scenario assumes a total of 25 units are restarted by the end of FY2017, generating 151.2 TWh annually, with total fossil fuel imports spending decreasing by JPY0.7 trillion relative to the low-case scenario where only 12 reactors are assumed to restart, producing 39.1 TWh. In the high-case scenario, the average electricity unit cost is lowered by about JPY600/MWh and energy-related emissions decrease by 52 million tonnes CO2. Part four is framework The standard is mitigating structural violence. 1 Structural violence is based in moral exclusion, it pervades our cognitive processes and encourages us to ignore differences in identity. Winter and Leighton 99 Deborah DuNann Winter and Dana C. Leighton. Winter|Psychologist that specializes in Social Psych, Counseling Psych, Historical and Contemporary Issues, Peace Psychology. Leighton: PhD graduate student in the Psychology Department at the University of Arkansas. Knowledgable in the fields of social psychology, peace psychology, and justice and intergroup responses to transgressions of justice “Peace, conflict, and violence: Peace psychology in the 21st century.” Pg 4-5 She argues that our normal perceptual cognitive processes divide people into in-groups and out-groups. Those outside our group lie outside our scope of justice. Injustice that would be instantaneously confronted if it occurred to someone we love or know is barely noticed if it occurs to strangers or those who are invisible or irrelevant. We do not seem to be able to open our minds and our hearts to everyone, so we draw conceptual lines between those who are in and out of our moral circle. Those who fall outside are morally excluded, and become either invisible, or demeaned in some way so that we do not have to acknowledge the injustice they suffer. Moral exclusion is a human failing, but Opotow argues convincingly that it is an outcome of everyday social cognition. To reduce its nefarious effects, we must be vigilant in noticing and listening to oppressed, invisible, outsiders. Inclusionary thinking can be fostered by relationships, communication, and appreciation of diversity. Like Opotow, all the authors in this section point out that structural violence is not inevitable if we become aware of its operation, and build systematic ways to mitigate its effects. Learning about structural violence may be discouraging, overwhelming, or maddening, but these papers encourage us to step beyond guilt and anger, and begin to think about how to reduce structural violence. All the authors in this section note that the same structures (such as global communication and normal social cognition) which feed structural violence, can also be used to empower citizens to reduce it. In the long run, reducing structural violence by reclaiming neighborhoods, demanding social justice and living wages, providing prenatal care, alleviating sexism, and celebrating local cultures, will be our most surefooted path to building lasting peace. 2 Debate should surround material consequences—ideal theories ignore the concrete nature of the world and legitimize oppression. Curry 14 Dr. Tommy J; “The Cost of a Thing: A Kingian Reformulation of a Living Wage Argument in the 21st Century”, Victory Briefs, 2014 Despite the pronouncement of debate as an activity and intellectual exercise pointing to the real world consequences of dialogue, thinking, and (personal) politics when addressing issues of racism, sexism, economic disparity, global conflicts, and death, many of the discussions concerning these ongoing challenges to humanity are fixed to a paradigm which sees the adjudication of material disparities and sociological realities as the conquest of one ideal theory over the other. In “Ideal Theory as Ideology,” Charles Mills outlines the problem contemporary theoretical-performance styles in policy debate and value-weighing in Lincoln-Douglass are confronted with in their attempts to get at the concrete problems in our societies. At the outset, Mills concedes that “ideal theory applies to moral theory as a whole (at least to normative ethics as against metaethics); since ethics deals by definition with normative/prescriptive/evaluative issues, it is set against factual/descriptive issues.” At the most general level, the conceptual chasm between what emerges as actual problems in the world (e.g.: racism, sexism, poverty, disease, etc.) and how we frame such problems theoretically—the assumptions and shared ideologies we depend upon for our problems to be heard and accepted as a worthy “problem” by an audience—is the most obvious call for an anti-ethical paradigm, since such a paradigm insists on the actual as the basis of what can be considered normatively. Mills, however, describes this chasm as a problem of an ideal-as-descriptive model which argues that for any actual-empirical-observable social phenomenon (P), an ideal of (P) is necessarily a representation of that phenomenon. In the idealization of a social phenomenon (P), one “necessarily has to abstract away from certain features” of (P) that is observed before abstraction occurs. ¶ This gap between what is actual (in the world), and what is represented by theories and politics of debaters proposed in rounds threatens any real discussions about the concrete nature of oppression and the racist economic structures which necessitate tangible policies and reorienting changes in our value orientations. 3 Global justice requires a reduction in inequality and a focus on material rights. Okereke 07 Chukwumerije Okereke (Senior Research Associate at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia). Global Justice and Neoliberal Environmental Governance. Routledge 2007 Notwithstanding these drawbacks, these scholars provide very compelling arguments against mainstream conceptions of justice. In this approach, the obli- gation of justice is derived from the moral equality of human beings irrespective of their race, creed and nationality (O'Neill 1991; Brown 1992: 169; Beitz 1979; Sen 1999). The emphasis is on the positive rights of citizens - that is the kinds of rights that require state authorities to do something in order to provide citizens with the opportunities and abilities to act to fulfil their own potential - as opposed to negative rights/liberty, which refers to freedom from coercion and non-interfer- ence. The notion of justice as meeting needs, as seen in Chapter 2, figures very prominently in quite a number of the influencing materials that form the starting point for the discourse on global sustainable development. It has been suggested, in general, that this idea of justice is 'in-------------creasingly influential on non-governmen- tal organizations and the community of international policy makers' (Brighouse 2004: 67). In general, proponents of justice as need criticize liberal ideas of justice for concentrating on political equality (equal right to speech, vote, etc.) without addressing the problem of material equality - especially in the form of equal access to resources. They also claim that the ability to own property as well as the ability to exercise political rights (say the right to vote) depends first and foremost on the ability of citizens to function effectively. When the basic human needs of citizens, for example food, are not being met, other rights become merely 'hypothetical and empty' (Sen 1999: 75). Following on from this basic reasoning, the rights approach to justice is rejected and, in its place, human basic need is seen as the correct basis of political morality and the right benchmark for the determination of political judgment (Plant 1991: 185). In previous sections we saw that libertarian notions of justice sanction unlimited material inequality between citizens, provided that each person has obtained their possessions through legitimate means. All that matters is that the state should ensure fair rules of transitions and equality before the law. We saw also that liberal accounts of justice, especially Rawls' liberal egalitarianism, reject this formula- tion of justice because it does not secure the welfare of the less able in society. On the contrary, Rawls recommends that political institutions should be structured in ways that protect the interests of the least advantaged individuals in society. Accordingly, he sanctions societal inequities provided that such inequities work to the advantage of the least well-off. On closer reading, however, it turns out that Rawls difference principle (that inequities should work in favour of the least well- off) does not contain any explicit demand relating to the basic needs of the poor. As such, it is possible for Rawls' proviso to be met even when the least well-off in the society are denied their basic needs. For example, a distribution that changes from 20:10:2 to 100:30:4 satisfies Rawls difference principle but tells us noth- ing about the actual well-being of the least well-off. So, whereas some (mainly libertarians) criticize Rawls for not specifying the extent to which other people's liberty can be sacrificed for the sake of the least well-off, others (proponents of justice as meeting need) criticize Rawls for leaving the fate of the least well-off unprotected. Many scholars in the latter group sometimes argue along Marxian lines that as long as the means of production remain in the hands of the 'haves' there is no guarantee that inequities will benefit the least well-off. Maslow (1968), Bradshaw (1972) and Forder (1974) have all consequently argued that only the theory of need provides, as Maslow (1968: 4) puts it, 'the ultimate appeal for the determination of the good, bad, right and wrong' in a po- litical community. Without the theory of need, they say, it would be impossible to justify the welfare state in capitalist Western democracies. On the other hand, the co-existence of welfare and capitalism confirms the place of need as the criterion of moral political judgment. O'Neill (1991), Sen (1999) and Nussbaum (2000) have all extended versions of this argument to the international domain. O'Neill (1980, 1991) argues that adherence to the Kantian categorical imperative entails that the global community must act to remove the aching poverty and famine that threaten the existence of millions of people in developing countries. Sen (1999), for his part, calls for the strengthening of international institutions to make them able to assist the least well in the global society to achieve the measure of actual living that is required for the basic function and well-being of citizens. For Sen, as for O'Neill, all forms of liberty and rights are meaningful only when people have the substantive 'freedom to achieve actual living' (Sen 1999: 73; cf. O'Neill 1989: 288; 1986). Thomas Pogge also places emphasis on human basic need and starts his well-known book World Poverty and Human Rights with the rhetorical ques- tion: 'How can severe poverty of half of humankind continue despite enormous economic and technological progress and despite the enlightened moral norms and values of our heavily dominant Western civilization?' (Pogge 2002: 3). 4—The social stratifications present in Japan along lines of race and class should give structural violence special weight in your impact calculus. Shrader-Frechette 12 Kristin Shrader-Frechette, O’Neill Family Endowed Professor, Department of Biological Sciences and Department of Philosophy, and also the director of the Center for Environmental Justice and Children’s Health, at the University of Notre Dame, “Nuclear Catastrophe, Disaster-Related Environmental Injustice, and Fukushima, Japan: Prima-Facie Evidence for a Japanese ‘‘Katrina’’” ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE Volume 5, Number 3, 2012 One of the first clues about pre-FD-accident Environmental Injustice is that Japanese economic inequality ‘‘is now higher than the OECD average; the ratio of people with incomes below the poverty line.ranks in the highest group’’ among OECD countries.’’4,5 In fact, economic inequality appears worse in Japan than the US—long considered the most economically unequal developed nation.6 Moreover, because Japanese ‘‘social stratification.is quite rigid,’’ its middle class is smaller than in the US and much smaller than in western Europe.7 Yet, the Japanese government neither acknowledges nor measures poverty,8 which contributes to prima facie evidence for pre-FD-accident EI.3 (Following ethicists John Rawls and W.D. Ross, prima-facie evidence is preliminary evidence that—in the absence of available, specific data—establishes a presumptive claim. Ultima-facie evidence is final-analysis (not merely presumptive) evidence based on specific, complete data.9 Because of incomplete FD radiation-risk and demographic data, this article surveys only prima-facie evidence for FD EI.) Besides poor people, prima-facie, pre-FD-accident evidence also suggests ‘‘buraku’’ or ‘‘blacks’’ face Japanese EI. Buraku are historically marginalized or offspring of Japanese-Korean parents, people with experiences like those of US Blacks. Although buraku do not look different, they are marginalized because of their low-level occupations and socio-economic status. Because of buraku, some African-Americans say Japanese racism ‘‘today is as crude’’ as it ever was in Europe/America; indeed, most Japanese viewed Obama’s election as ‘‘an aberration’’ because he would never have won in Japan; if only one of Obama’s parents were Japanese, he could not even have gained Japanese citizenship until 1985.10 Additional evidence for buraku’s and poor people’s social marginalization is their being the main victims of Japan’s ‘‘suicide epidemic’’—32,000 deaths annually.11 Japanese children likewise are prima-facie, pre-FD accident, EI victims, mainly because they have no adult defenses against pollution.12 Because their organ and detoxification systems are still developing, and because they take in more air, water, food, and pollutants than adults, per unit of body mass, ‘‘children are often more susceptible to environmental contaminants than adults.’’ Yet, most nations—including Japan—give no special pollution protections to children.13 Although prima-facie evidence suggests poor people, buraku, and children faced pre-accident EI, Japanese EI is barely recognized. Only after Akira Kurihara’s 2006 work on Minimata Disease, experts say, did Japanese accept ‘‘environmental-pollution diseases’’ and the ‘‘state of social exclusion’’ of EI victims.14 What happened to poor people, buraku, and children after the 2011 FukushimaDaiichi (FD) nuclear catastrophe? Were they DREI victims? To answer these questions, consider first the FD accident. 5 No act omission distinction for states. Sunstein Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule. The University of Chicago Law School. “Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? The Relevance of Life‐Life Tradeoffs.” JOHN M. OLIN LAW and ECONOMICS WORKING PAPER NO. 239. The Chicago Working Paper Series. March 2005 In our view, both the argument from causation and the argument from intention go wrong by overlooking the distinctive features of government as a moral agent. Whatever the general status of the act-omission distinction as a matter of moral philosophy,38 the distinction is least impressive when applied to government.39 The most fundamental point is that unlike individuals, governments always and necessarily face a choice between or among possible policies for regulating third parties. The distinction between acts and omissions may not be intelligible in this context, and even if it is, the distinction does not make a morally relevant difference. Most generally, government is in the business of creating permissions and prohibitions. When it explicitly or implicitly authorizes private action, it is not omitting to do anything, or refusing to act.40 Moreover, the distinction between authorized and unauthorized private action—for example, private killing—becomes obscure when the government formally forbids private action, but chooses a set of policy instruments that do not adequately or fully discourage it. Part 5: Underview
Prefer reasonable aff interps and drop the argument on T. The judge should use reasonability with a bright line of the presence of link and impact turn ground for the negative. Since he has equal access to offense, there’s no abuse because structural access to the ballot is the same. A. There are multiple legitimate interpretations of the topic and the aff goes into the round with no knowledge of 1NC strategy. I had to choose between mutually exclusive interps and the neg can always read T so don’t punish me for having to set grounds.
2. Aff gets RVIs A) Time skew – the 2AR doesn’t have enough time to cover both theory and substance since the 2NR is twice as long so I have half the offense at the end of the debate – I should be able to collapse to the highest layer. B) The 1AR is too short to read theory especially if I have to cover his shell – I need an RVI for theory to be reciprocal, which is key to equal access to the ballot. C) The aff is always open to theory since I have to take a stance on some interpretational issues – RVIs are key to check frivolous theory – key to a discussion of the topic which is key to education, and ensures the aff gets access to the 1AC. D) Only the neg can read T which precludes theory and all aff offense, so I need an RVI on it to compensate for that advantage.
Social injustice is the root of mass-scale violence – it primes society for external violence. Scheper-Hughes 04 (Scheper-Hughes 4 (Prof of Anthropology @ Cal-Berkely; Prof of Anthropology @ UPenn) (Nancy and Philippe, Introduction: Making Sense of Violence, in Violence in War and Peace, pg. 19-22) This large and at first sight “messy” Part VII is central to this anthology’s thesis. It encompasses everything from the routinized, bureaucratized, and utterly banal violence of children dying of hunger and maternal despair in Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33) to elderly African Americans dying of heat stroke in Mayor Daly’s version of US apartheid in Chicago’s South Side (Klinenberg, Chapter 38) to the racialized class hatred expressed by British Victorians in their olfactory disgust of the “smelly” working classes (Orwell, Chapter 36). In these readings violence is located in the symbolic and social structures that overdetermine and allow the criminalized drug addictions, interpersonal bloodshed, and racially patterned incarcerations that characterize the US “inner city” to be normalized (Bourgois, Chapter 37 and Wacquant, Chapter 39). Violence also takes the form of class, racial, political self-hatred and adolescent self-destruction (Quesada, Chapter 35), as well as of useless (i.e. preventable), rawly embodied physical suffering, and death (Farmer, Chapter 34). Absolutely central to our approach is a blurring of categories and distinctions between wartime and peacetime violence. Close attention to the “little” violences produced in the structures, habituses, and mentalites of everyday life shifts our attention to pathologies of class, race, and gender inequalities. More important, it interrupts the voyeuristic tendencies of “violence studies” that risk publicly humiliating the powerless who are often forced into complicity with social and individual pathologies of power because suffering is often a solvent of human integrity and dignity. Thus, in this anthology we are positing a violence continuum comprised of a multitude of “small wars and invisible genocides” (see also Scheper- Hughes 1996; 1997; 2000b) conducted in the normative social spaces of public schools, clinics, emergency rooms, hospital wards, nursing homes, courtrooms, public registry offices, prisons, detention centers, and public morgues. The violence continuum also refers to the ease with which humans are capable of reducing the socially vulnerable into expendable nonpersons and assuming the license - even the duty - to kill, maim, or soul-murder. We realize that in referring to a violence and a genocide continuum we are flying in the face of a tradition of genocide studies that argues for the absolute uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust and for vigilance with respect to restricted purist use of the term genocide itself (see Kuper 1985; Chaulk 1999; Fein 1990; Chorbajian 1999). But we hold an opposing and alternative view that, to the contrary, it is absolutely necessary to make just such existential leaps in purposefully linking violent acts in normal times to those of abnormal times. Hence the title of our volume: Violence in War and in Peace. If (as we concede) there is a moral risk in overextending the concept of “genocide” into spaces and corners of everyday life where we might not ordinarily think to find it (and there is), an even greater risk lies in failing to sensitize ourselves, in misrecognizing protogenocidal practices and sentiments daily enacted as normative behavior by “ordinary” good-enough citizens. Peacetime crimes, such as prison construction sold as economic development to impoverished communities in the mountains and deserts of California, or the evolution of the criminal industrial complex into the latest peculiar institution for managing race relations in the United States (Waquant, Chapter 39), constitute the “small wars and invisible genocides” to which we refer. This applies to African American and Latino youth mortality statistics in Oakland, California, Baltimore, Washington DC, and New York City. These are “invisible” genocides not because they are secreted away or hidden from view, but quite the opposite. As Wittgenstein observed, the things that are hardest to perceive are those which are right before our eyes and therefore taken for granted. In this regard, Bourdieu’s partial and unfinished theory of violence (see Chapters 32 and 42) as well as his concept of misrecognition is crucial to our task. By including the normative everyday forms of violence hidden in the minutiae of “normal” social practices - in the architecture of homes, in gender relations, in communal work, in the exchange of gifts, and so forth - Bourdieu forces us to reconsider the broader meanings and status of violence, especially the links between the violence of everyday life and explicit political terror and state repression, Similarly, Basaglia’s notion of “peacetime crimes” - crimini di pace - imagines a direct relationship between wartime and peacetime violence. Peacetime crimes suggests the possibility that war crimes are merely ordinary, everyday crimes of public consent applied systematically and dramatically in the extreme context of war. Consider the parallel uses of rape during peacetime and wartime, or the family resemblances between the legalized violence of US immigration and naturalization border raids on “illegal aliens” versus the US government- engineered genocide in 1938, known as the Cherokee “Trail of Tears.” Peacetime crimes suggests that everyday forms of state violence make a certain kind of domestic peace possible. Internal “stability” is purchased with the currency of peacetime crimes, many of which take the form of professionally applied “strangle-holds.” Everyday forms of state violence during peacetime make a certain kind of domestic “peace” possible. It is an easy-to-identify peacetime crime that is usually maintained as a public secret by the government and by a scared or apathetic populace. Most subtly, but no less politically or structurally, the phenomenal growth in the United States of a new military, postindustrial prison industrial complex has taken place in the absence of broad-based opposition, let alone collective acts of civil disobedience. The public consensus is based primarily on a new mobilization of an old fear of the mob, the mugger, the rapist, the Black man, theundeserving poor. How many public executions of mentally deficient prisoners in the United States are needed to make life feel more secure for the affluent? What can it possibly mean when incarceration becomes the “normative” socializing experience for ethnic minority youth in a society, i.e., over 33 percent of young African American men (Prison Watch 2002). In the end it is essential that we recognize the existence of a genocidal capacity among otherwise good-enough humans and that we need to exercise a defensive hypervigilance to the less dramatic, permitted, and even rewarded everyday acts of violence that render participation in genocidal acts and policies possible (under adverse political or economic conditions), perhaps more easily than we would like to recognize. Under the violence continuum we include, therefore, all expressions of radical social exclusion, dehumanization, depersonalization, pseudospeciation, and reification which normalize atrocious behavior and violence toward others. A constant self-mobilization for alarm, a state of constant hyperarousal is, perhaps, a reasonable response to Benjamin’s view of late modern history as a chronic “state of emergency” (Taussig, Chapter 31). We are trying to recover here the classic anagogic thinking that enabled Erving Goffman, Jules Henry, C. Wright Mills, and Franco Basaglia among other mid-twentieth-century radically critical thinkers, to perceive the symbolic and structural relations, i.e., between inmates and patients, between concentration camps, prisons, mental hospitals, nursing homes, and other “total institutions.” Making that decisive move to recognize the continuum of violence allows us to see the capacity and the willingness - if not enthusiasm - of ordinary people, the practical technicians of the social consensus, to enforce genocidal-like crimes against categories of rubbish people. There is no primary impulse out of which mass violence and genocide areborn, it is ingrained in the common sense of everyday social life. The mad, the differently abled, the mentally vulnerable have often fallen into this category of the unworthy living, as have the very old and infirm, the sick-poor, and, of course, the despised racial, religious, sexual, and ethnic groups of the moment. Erik Erikson referred to “pseudo- speciation” as the human tendency to classify some individuals or social groups as less than fully human a prerequisite to genocide and one that is carefully honed during the unremarkable peacetimes that precede the sudden, “seemingly unintelligible” outbreaks of mass violence. Collective denial and misrecognition are prerequisites for mass violence and genocide. But so are formal bureaucratic structures and professional roles. The practical technicians of everyday violence in the backlands of Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33), for example, include the clinic doctors who prescribe powerful tranquilizers to fretful and frightfully hungry babies, the Catholic priests who celebrate the death of “angel-babies,” and the municipal bureaucrats who dispense free baby coffins but no food to hungry families. Everyday violence encompasses the implicit, legitimate, and routinized forms of violence inherent in particular social, economic, and political formations. It is close to what Bourdieu (1977, 1996) means by “symbolic violence,” the violence that is often “nus-recognized” for something else, usually something good. Everyday violence is similar to what Taussig (1989) calls “terror as usual.” All these terms are meant to reveal a public secret - the hidden links between violence in war and violence in peace, and between war crimes and “peace-time crimes.” Bourdieu (1977) finds domination and violence in the least likely places - in courtship and marriage, in the exchange of gifts, in systems of classification, in style, art, and culinary taste- the various uses of culture. Violence, Bourdieu insists, is everywhere in social practice. It is misrecognized because its very everydayness and its familiarity render it invisible. Lacan identifies “rneconnaissance” as the prerequisite of the social. The exploitation of bachelor sons, robbing them of autonomy, independence, and progeny, within the structures of family farming in the European countryside that Bourdieu escaped is a case in point (Bourdieu, Chapter 42; see also Scheper-Hughes, 2000b; Favret-Saada, 1989). Following Gramsci, Foucault, Sartre, Arendt, and other modern theorists of power-vio- lence, Bourdieu treats direct aggression and physical violence as a crude, uneconomical mode of domination; it is less efficient and, according to Arendt (1969), it is certainly less legitimate. While power and symbolic domination are not to be equated with violence - and Arendt argues persuasively that violence is to be understood as a failure of power - violence, as we are presenting it here, is more than simply the expression of illegitimate physical force against a person or group of persons. Rather, we need to understand violence as encompassing all forms of “controlling processes” (Nader 1997b) that assault basic human freedoms and individual or collective survival. Our task is to recognize these gray zones of violence which are, by definition, not obvious. Once again, the point of bringing into the discourses on genocide everyday, normative experiences of reification, depersonalization, institutional confinement, and acceptable death is to help answer the question: What makes mass violence and genocide possible? In this volume we are suggesting that mass violence is part of a continuum, and that it is socially incremental and often experienced by perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders - and even by victims themselves - as expected, routine, even justified. The preparations for mass killing can be found in social sentiments and institutions from the family, to schools, churches, hospitals, and the military. They harbor the early “warning signs” (Charney 1991), the “priming” (as Hinton, ed., 2002 calls it), or the “genocidal continuum” (as we call it) that push social consensus toward devaluing certain forms of human life and lifeways from the refusal of social support and humane care to vulnerable “social parasites” (the nursing home elderly, “welfare queens,” undocumented immigrants, drug addicts) to the militarization of everyday life (super-maximum-security prisons, capital punishment; the technologies of heightened personal security, including the house gun and gated communities; and reversed feelings of victimization). No great power war---deterrence, economic interdependence, political and business elites and social changes Aziz 14 John, former economics and business editor at TheWeek.com, Don't worry: World War III will almost certainly never happen, March 6, http://theweek.com/article/index/257517/dont-worry-world-war-iii-will-almost-certainly-never-happen Next year will be the seventieth anniversary of the end of the last global conflict. There have been points on that timeline — such as the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, and a Soviet computer malfunction in 1983 that erroneously suggested that the U.S. had attacked, and perhaps even the Kosovo War in 1999 — when a global conflict was a real possibility. Yet today — in the shadow of a flare up which some are calling a new Cold War between Russia and the U.S. — I believe the threat of World War III has almost faded into nothingness. That is, the probability of a world war is the lowest it has been in decades, and perhaps the lowest it has ever been since the dawn of modernity.¶ This is certainly a view that current data supports. Steven Pinker's studies into the decline of violence reveal that deaths from war have fallen and fallen since World War II. But we should not just assume that the past is an accurate guide to the future. Instead, we must look at the factors which have led to the reduction in war and try to conclude whether the decrease in war is sustainable.¶ So what's changed? Well, the first big change after the last world war was the arrival of mutually assured destruction. It's no coincidence that the end of the last global war coincided with the invention of atomic weapons. The possibility of complete annihilation provided a huge disincentive to launching and expanding total wars. Instead, the great powers now fight proxy wars like Vietnam and Afghanistan (the 1980 version, that is), rather than letting their rivalries expand into full-on, globe-spanning struggles against each other. Sure, accidents could happen, but the possibility is incredibly remote. More importantly, nobody in power wants to be the cause of Armageddon.¶ But what about a non-nuclear global war? Other changes — economic and social in nature — have made that highly unlikely too.¶ The world has become much more economically interconnected since the last global war. Economic cooperation treaties and free trade agreements have intertwined the economies of countries around the world. This has meant there has been a huge rise in the volume of global trade since World War II, and especially since the 1980s.¶ Today consumer goods like smartphones, laptops, cars, jewelery, food, cosmetics, and medicine are produced on a global level, with supply-chains criss-crossing the planet. An example: The laptop I am typing this on is the cumulative culmination of thousands of hours of work, as well as resources and manufacturing processes across the globe. It incorporates metals like tellurium, indium, cobalt, gallium, and manganese mined in Africa. Neodymium mined in China. Plastics forged out of oil, perhaps from Saudi Arabia, or Russia, or Venezuela. Aluminum from bauxite, perhaps mined in Brazil. Iron, perhaps mined in Australia. These raw materials are turned into components — memory manufactured in Korea, semiconductors forged in Germany, glass made in the United States. And it takes gallons and gallons of oil to ship all the resources and components back and forth around the world, until they are finally assembled in China, and shipped once again around the world to the consumer.¶ In a global war, global trade becomes a nightmare. Shipping becomes more expensive due to higher insurance costs, and riskier because it's subject to seizures, blockades, ship sinkings. Many goods, intermediate components or resources — including energy supplies like coal and oil, components for military hardware, etc, may become temporarily unavailable in certain areas. Sometimes — such as occurred in the Siege of Leningrad during World War II — the supply of food can be cut off. This is why countries hold strategic reserves of things like helium, pork, rare earth metals and oil, coal, and gas. These kinds of breakdowns were troublesome enough in the economic landscape of the early and mid-20th century, when the last global wars occurred. But in today's ultra-globalized and ultra-specialized economy? The level of economic adaptation — even for large countries like Russia and the United States with lots of land and natural resources — required to adapt to a world war would be crushing, and huge numbers of business and livelihoods would be wiped out.¶ In other words, global trade interdependency has become, to borrow a phrase from finance, too big to fail.¶ It is easy to complain about the reality of big business influencing or controlling politicians. But big business has just about the most to lose from breakdowns in global trade. A practical example: If Russian oligarchs make their money from selling gas and natural resources to Western Europe, and send their children to schools in Britain and Germany, and lend and borrow money from the West's financial centers, are they going to be willing to tolerate Vladimir Putin starting a regional war in Eastern Europe (let alone a world war)? Would the Chinese financial industry be happy to see their multi-trillion dollar investments in dollars and U.S. treasury debt go up in smoke? Of course, world wars have been waged despite international business interests, but the world today is far more globalized than ever before and well-connected domestic interests are more dependent on access to global markets, components and resources, or the repayment of foreign debts. These are huge disincentives to global war.
Abstract questioning is useless - debate should seek to design concrete alternatives. Bryant 12 (EDITED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE – the author said “she” and it was replaced with the word “to” – Levi Bryant is currently a Professor of Philosophy at Collin College. In addition to working as a professor, Bryant has also served as a Lacanian psychoanalyst. He received his Ph.D. from Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois, where he originally studied 'disclosedness' with the Heidegger scholar Thomas Sheehan. Bryant later changed his dissertation topic to the transcendental empiricism of Gilles Deleuze, “Critique of the Academic Left”, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/underpants-gnomes-a-critique-of-the-academic-left/) I must be in a mood today– half irritated, half amused –because I find myself ranting. Of course, that’s not entirely unusual. So this afternoon I came across a post by a friend quoting something discussing the environmental movement that pushed all the right button. As the post read,¶ For mainstream environmentalism– conservationism, green consumerism, and resource management –humans are conceptually separated out of nature and mythically placed in privileged positions of authority and control over ecological communities and their nonhuman constituents. What emerges is the fiction of a marketplace of ‘raw materials’ and ‘resources’ through which human-centered wants, constructed as needs, might be satisfied. The mainstream narratives are replete with such metaphors carbon trading!. Natural complexity mutuality, and diversity are rendered virtually meaningless given discursive parameters that reduce nature to discrete units of exchange measuring extractive capacities. Jeff Shantz, “Green Syndicalism”¶ While finding elements this description perplexing– I can’t say that I see many environmentalists treating nature and culture as distinct or suggesting that we’re sovereigns of nature –I do agree that we conceive much of our relationship to the natural world in economic terms (not a surprise that capitalism is today a universal). This, however, is not what bothers me about this passage.¶ What I wonder is just what we’re supposed to do even if all of this is true? What, given existing conditions, are we to do if all of this is right? At least green consumerism, conservation, resource management, and things like carbon trading are engaging in activities that are making real differences. From this passage– and maybe the entire text would disabuse me of this conclusion –it sounds like we are to reject all of these interventions because they remain tied to a capitalist model of production that the author (and myself) find abhorrent. The idea seems to be that if we endorse these things we are tainting our hands and would therefore do well to reject them altogether. The problem as I see it is that this is the worst sort of abstraction (in the Marxist sense) and wishful thinking. Within a Marxo-Hegelian context, a thought is abstract when it ignores all of the mediations in which a thing is embedded. For example, I understand a robust tree abstractly when I attribute its robustness, say, to its genetics alone, ignoring the complex relations to its soil, the air, sunshine, rainfall, etc., that also allowed it to grow robustly in this way. This is the sort of critique we’re always leveling against the neoliberals. They are abstract thinkers. In their doxa that individuals are entirely responsible for themselves and that they completely make themselves by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, neoliberals ignore all the mediations belonging to the social and material context in which human beings develop that play a role in determining the vectors of their life. They ignore, for example, that George W. Bush grew up in a family that was highly connected to the world of business and government and that this gave him opportunities that someone living in a remote region of Alaska in a very different material infrastructure and set of family relations does not have. To think concretely is to engage in a cartography of these mediations, a mapping of these networks, from circumstance to circumstance (what I call an “onto-cartography”). It is to map assemblages, networks, or ecologies in the constitution of entities.¶ Unfortunately, the academic left falls prey to its own form of abstraction. It’s good at carrying out critiques that denounce various social formations, yet very poor at proposing any sort of realistic constructions of alternatives. This because it thinks abstractly in its own way, ignoring how networks, assemblages, structures, or regimes of attraction would have to be remade to create a workable alternative. Here I’m reminded by the “underpants gnomes” depicted in South Park:¶ The underpants gnomes have a plan for achieving profit that goes like this: Phase 1: Collect Underpants Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Profit! They even have a catchy song to go with their work:¶ Well this is sadly how it often is with the academic left. Our plan seems to be as follows: Phase 1: Ultra-Radical Critique Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Revolution and complete social transformation! Our problem is that we seem perpetually stuck at phase 1 without ever explaining what is to be done at phase 2. Often the critiques articulated at phase 1 are right, but there are nonetheless all sorts of problems with those critiques nonetheless. In order to reach phase 3, we have to produce new collectives. In order for new collectives to be produced, people need to be able to hear and understand the critiques developed at phase 1. Yet this is where everything begins to fall apart. Even though these critiques are often right, we express them in ways that only an academic with a PhD in critical theory and post-structural theory can understand. How exactly is Adorno to produce an effect in the world if only PhD’s in the humanities can understand him? Who are these things for? We seem to always ignore these things and then look down our noses with disdain at the Naomi Kleins and David Graebers of the world. To make matters worse, we publish our work in expensive academic journals that only universities can afford, with presses that don’t have a wide distribution, and give our talks at expensive hotels at academic conferences attended only by other academics. Again, who are these things for? Is it an accident that so many activists look away from these things with contempt, thinking their more about an academic industry and tenure, than producing change in the world? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound! Seriously dudes and dudettes, what are you doing?¶ But finally, and worst of all, us Marxists and anarchists all too often act like assholes. We denounce others, we condemn them, we berate them for not engaging with the questions we want to engage with, and we vilify them when they don’t embrace every bit of the doxa that we endorse. We are every bit as off-putting and unpleasant as the fundamentalist minister or the priest of the inquisition (have people yet understood that Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus was a critique of the French communist party system and the Stalinist party system, and the horrific passions that arise out of parties and identifications in general?). This type of “revolutionary” is the greatest friend of the reactionary and capitalist because they do more to drive people into the embrace of reigning ideology than to undermine reigning ideology. These are the people that keep Rush Limbaugh in business. Well done!¶ But this isn’t where our most serious shortcomings lie. Our most serious shortcomings are to be found at phase 2. We almost never make concrete proposals for how things ought to be restructured, for what new material infrastructures and semiotic fields need to be produced, and when we do, our critique-intoxicated cynics and skeptics immediately jump in with an analysis of all the ways in which these things contain dirty secrets, ugly motives, and are doomed to fail.
Tournament: Greenhill RR | Round: 3 | Opponent: Cypress Woods LC | Judge: Jacob Koshak, Chris Randall Part one is nuclear exploitation and violence Nuclear power exploits minority workers forced by economic necessity into early death. Shrader-Frechette 12 Kristin Shrader-Frechette, O’Neill Family Endowed Professor, Department of Biological Sciences and Department of Philosophy, and also the director of the Center for Environmental Justice and Children’s Health, at the University of Notre Dame, “Nuclear Catastrophe, Disaster-Related Environmental Injustice, and Fukushima, Japan: Prima-Facie Evidence for a Japanese ‘‘Katrina’’” ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE Volume 5, Number 3, 2012 Prima-facie evidence likewise shows buraku nuclear workers are both EI and DREI victims. Internationally, nuclear workers are prominent EI victims because even without accidents, they are allowed to receive ionizingradiation doses (50 mSv annually) 50 times higher than those received by the public. Yet, only low socioeconomic-status people—like buraku—tend to take such risks. This double standard is obviously ethically questionable, given that many developed nations (e.g., Germany, Scandinavian countries) prohibit it because it encourages EI—workers’ trading health for paid work, and innocent worker-descendants’ (future generations’) dying from radiation-induced genomic instability. Thus, both buraku children and their distant descendents face EI—higher radiation-induced death/disease.17,61,62 Prima-facie evidence shows, second, that FD-buraku nuclear workers also are EI and DREI victims because they likely consented to neither normal-, nor accident level, radiation exposures. Why not? Under normal conditions, 90 percent of all 83,000 Japanese nuclear workers are temporary-contract workers who receive about 16 times more radiation than the already-50-times-higherthan-public doses received by normal radiation workers. For non-accident exposures, buraku receive $350–$1,000 per day, for several days of high-radiation work. They have neither full-time employment, nor adequate compensation, nor union representation, nor health benefits, nor full dose disclosure, yet receive the highest workplace-radiation risks. Why? Industry is not required to ‘‘count’’ temporary workers’ radiation exposures when it calculates workers’ average-radiation doses for regulators. However, even if buraku were told their nonaccident doses/risks, they could not genuinely consent. They are unskilled, socially shunned, temporary laborers who are forced by economic necessity to accept even deadly jobs. This two-tier nuclear-worker system—where buraku bear most (unreported) risks, while highly-paid employees bear little (reported) risk—’’ ‘is the hidden world of nuclear power’ said.a former Tokyo University physics professor.’’ In 2010, 89 percent of FD nuclear workers were temporary-contract employees, ‘‘hired from construction sites,’’ local farms, or ‘‘local gangsters.’’ With a ‘‘constant fear of getting fired,’’ they hid their injuries/ doses—to keep their jobs.61–65 Among post-FD-accident buraku, lack of adequate consent also caused prima-facie DREI because government raised workers’ allowable, post-accident-radiation doses to 250 mSv/year—250 times what the public may receive annually.63 Yet IARC says each 250-MSv FD exposure causes 25 percent of fatal cancers. Two-years’ exposure (500 MSv) would cause 50 percent of all fatal cancers. Given such deadly risks and the dire economic situation of buraku, their genuine consent is unlikely.24,25 Still another factor thwarting FD-buraku consent—and indicating prima-facie DREI—is that FD workers likely received higher doses than government admitted. ‘‘The company refused to say how many FD contract workers had been exposed to post-disaster radiation’’; moreover, nuclear-worker-protective clothing and respirators, whether in the US or Japan, protect them only from skin/lung contamination; no gear can stop gamma irradiation of their entire bodies.56,63,66 Neither TECO, nor Japanese regulators, nor IAEA has released statistics on post-FDradiation exposures, especially to buraku inside the plant. IAEA says merely: ‘‘requirements for occupational exposure of remediation workers can be fulfilled’’ at FD, not that they have been or will be fulfilled—a fact also suggesting prima-facie DREI toward buraku.67,68 Nuclear power reactors emit radiation into disadvantaged communities whose residents are too poor to live anywhere else. They also lack the means to evacuate when disasters occur. Shrader-Frechette 12 Kristin Shrader-Frechette, O’Neill Family Endowed Professor, Department of Biological Sciences and Department of Philosophy, and also the director of the Center for Environmental Justice and Children’s Health, at the University of Notre Dame, “Nuclear Catastrophe, Disaster-Related Environmental Injustice, and Fukushima, Japan: Prima-Facie Evidence for a Japanese ‘‘Katrina’’” ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE Volume 5, Number 3, 2012 University scientists, nuclear-industry experts, and physicians say FD radiation will cause at least 20,000- 60,000 premature-cancer deaths.41,42 Japanese poor people are among the hardest hit by FD DREI because, like those abandoned after Hurricane Katrina, Japan’s poor received inadequate post-FD-disaster assistance. Abandoned by government and ‘‘marooned’’ for weeks without roads, electricity, or water, many poor people had no medical care,43,44 transportation, or heat—despite frigid, snowy conditions.45,46 At least four reasons suggest prima-facie evidence that Japanese poor near FD have faced DREI. One prima-facie reason is that because poor people tend to live near dangerous facilities, like reactors, they face the worst accident risks. Within weeks after the FD accident began, long-lived cesium-134 and other radioactive isotopes had poisoned soils at 7.5 million times the regulatory limit; radiation outside plant boundaries was equivalent to getting about seven chest X-rays per hour.47 Roughly 19 miles Northwest of FD, air-radiation readings were 0.8 mSv per hour; after 10 days of this exposure, IARC dose- response curves predict 1 in 5 fatal cancers of those exposed would be attributable to FD; two-months exposure would mean most fatal cancers were caused by FD. Such exposures are likely because many near-Fukushima residents were too poor to evacuate.20 Farther outside the evacuation zone—less than two weeks after the accident began—soil 25 miles Northwest of FD had cesium-137 levels ‘‘twice as high as the threshold for declaring areas uninhabitable around Chernobyl,’’ suggesting ‘‘the land might need to be abandoned.’’48 Not until a month after US and international agencies recommended expanding FD evacuation zones, did Japanese-government officials consider and reject expanding evacuation.49, 50 A second prima-facie reason for Fukushima DREI is that poor people, living near reactors, have higher probabilities of being hurt by both normal and disaster-related radiation releases. Reactors normally cause prima facie EI because they release allowable radiation that increases local cancers and mortality, especially among infants/ children.51–55 Because zero is the only safe dose of ionizing radiation (as the US National Academy of Sciences warns), its cumulative LNT (Linear, No Threshold for increased risk) effects are worst closer to reactors, where poor people live. The US EPA says even normal US radiation releases, between 1970–2020, could cause up to 24,000 additional US deaths.56,57 A third prima-facie reason for Fukushima DREI is that although nearby (poor) people bear both higher preaccident and post-accident risks, others receive little/no risks and most benefits. Wealthier Tokyo residents—140 miles away—received virtually all FD electricity, yet virtually no EI or DREI. A fourth prima-facie reason for DREI burdens on FD poor is that their poverty/powerlessness arguably forced them into EI and accepting reactor siting. Companies hoping to site nuclear facilities target economically depressed areas, both in Japan and elsewhere.17,58 Thus, although FD-owner Tokyo Electric Company (TECO) has long-term safety and ‘‘cover-up scandals,’’ Fukushima residents agreed to accept TECO reactors in exchange for cash. With Fukushima $121 million in debt, in 2007 it approved two new reactors in exchange for ‘‘$45 million from the government.60 percent’’ of total town revenue.17,59 Yet if economic hardship forced poor towns to accept reactors in exchange for basic-services monies, they likely gave no informed consent. Their choice was not voluntary, but coerced by their poverty. Massive Japanese-nuclear-industry PR and media ads also have thwarted risk-disclosure, thus consent, by minimizing nuclear risks.17,53,60–62 Scientists say neither industry nor government disclosed its failure to (1) test reactor-safety equipment; (2) thwart many natural-event disasters; (3) withstand seismic events worse than those that already had occurred; (4) withstand Fukushima-type disasters; (5) admit that new passive-safety reactors require electricity to cool cores and avoid catastrophe; or (6) base reactorsafety on anything but cost-benefit tests.17,53,60–62 Thus, because prima facie evidence suggests Fukushima poor people never consented to FD siting, they are EI victims whose reactor proximity caused them also to become DREI victims. Nuclear power construction and mining emits carbon dioxide, poisoning the environment. Sovacool, 07 Benjamin; Senior Research Fellow for the Virginia Center for Coal and Energy Research and professor of Government and International Affairs at Virginia Tech; “What's Really Wrong With Nuclear Power?”; 11/30; http://scitizen.com/stories/Future-Energies/2007/11/What-s-Really-Wrong-With-Nuclear-Power/; JLB (8/8/2016) Third and finally, nuclear power plants are not carbon neutral. The Oxford Research Group concludes that the nuclear fuel cycle is responsible for emitting 84 to 122 grams of carbon dioxide per every kWh, mostly from uranium mining, plant construction, and plant decommissioning. The report also notes that these emissions are around half of that as natural gas plants (so we are talking about some serious carbon). In addition, the International Atomic Energy Agency notes that uranium is getting harder to mine, meaning that the carbon emissions related to nuclear will get worse as more uranium gets depleted, not better. This is because mining uranium ores of relatively low grades and greater depth is much more energy intensive. If world nuclear generating share remains what it is today, the Oxford Research Group concludes that by 2050 nuclear power would generate as much carbion dioxide per kWh as a comparable gas-fired power station. This results in climate change which disproportionately hurts marginalized groups. Cuomo ‘11 (Chris Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies, and an affiliate faculty member of the Environmental Ethics Certificate Program and the Institute for African-American Studies. The author and editor of many articles and several books in feminist, postcolonial, and environmental philosophy, Cuomo served as Director of the Institute for Women's Studies from 2006-2009. Her book, The Philosopher Queen, a reflection on post-9/11 anti-war feminist politics, was nominated for a Lambda Award and an APA book award, and her work in ecofeminist philosophy and creative interdiciplinary practice has been influential among those seeking to bring together social justice and environmental concerns, as well as theory and practice. She has been a recipient of research grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Ms. Foundation, the National Council for Research on Women, and the Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy, and she has been a visiting faculty member at Cornell University, Amherst College, and Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, “Climate Change, Vulnerability, and Responsibility,” Hypatia 26 no4 Fall 2011 p. 690-714, AM) The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina made it plain that structural inequalities produced by racism can determine who is most affected by severe weather events, and in turn disasters can greatly intensify social and political inequalities. In addition, within nearly any society the poorest and most vulnerable includes disproportionate numbers of females, people of color, and children. Research shows that large-scale disasters are especially devastating for those who lack economic and decision-making power, and that “economic insecurity is a key factor increasing the impact of disasters on women as caregivers, producers, and community actors” (Enarson 2000, viii). But economic security is not the only factor influencing female vulnerabilities. Existing social roles and divisions of labor can also set the stage for increased susceptibility to harm. The tsunami that struck Asia in late 2004 resulted in a much greater loss of life among women and girls in many locations, because women “stayed behind to look for their children and other relatives; men more often than women can swim; men more often than women can climb trees,” and at the time the waves struck, many men and boys were working in small boats or doing errands away from home (Oxfam 2005; see also American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists 2006). Extreme droughts, already occurring due to climate change, exacerbate gender inequalities in places where it is women’s and girls’ responsibility to gather daily water, for when water becomes more scarce, “many poor people, but particularly women and girls, will have to spend more time and energy fetching water from further away” (Stern 2009, 70). Physical hardship for women and girls is multiplied, but there are also auxiliary effects, such as decreased opportunities for girls to attend school and increased risk of assault (American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists 2006; Stern 2009; UN News Centre 2009). And wealthier high emitters with running water are not immune to such ecological pressures. In southeast Australia previously prosperous farmers are suffering due to reduced water availability and accompanying distribution policies. Women married to men in farming families report that their burden is greatly increased, because drought reduces farm income, and when wages are needed women find more opportunities for off-farm work. Some must travel far or temporarily relocate for employment, although their caretaking responsibilities remain. Male partners respond to the compounding impacts of loss of financial security, livelihood, and identity with increased incidences of depression and domestic violence (Alston 2008). Not surprisingly, their vulnerabilities are also shaped by norms of sex and gender. That outweighs—addressing the structural harms of climate change requires no longer thinking of it as a one-time event. Nixon ‘11 (Rob, Rachel Carson Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, pgs. 2-3) Three primary concerns animate this book, chief among them my conviction that we urgently need to rethink-politically, imaginatively, and theoretically-what I call "slow violence." By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence. Climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable representational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively. The long dyings-the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological that result from war's toxic aftermaths or climate change-are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory. Had Summers advocated invading Africa with weapons of mass destruction, his proposal would have fallen under conventional definitions of violence and been perceived as a military or even an imperial invasion. Advocating invading countries with mass forms of slow-motion toxicity, however, requires rethinking our accepted assumptions of violence to include slow violence. Such a rethinking requires that we complicate conventional assumptions about violence as a highly visible act that is newsworthy because it is event focused, time bound, and body bound. We need to account for how the temporal dispersion of slow violence affects the way we perceive and respond to a variety of social afflictions-from domestic abuse to posttraumatic stress and, in particular, environmental calamities. A major challenge is representational: how to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects. Crucially, slow violence is often not just attritional but also exponential, operating as a major threat multiplier; it can fuel long-term, proliferating conflicts in situations where the conditions for sustaining life become increasingly but gradually degraded. Nuclear energy contaminates surrounding water. Maintenance workers are exposed to severe radiation levels as corrosive nuclear waste is released into the coolant system. Caldicott, ‘6 Helen, Founder, President -- Nuclear Policy Research Institute, “Nuclear Power is not the answer,” p. 58-9 Radioactive corrosion or activation products that are not the result of uranium fission are also produced, as neutrons bombard the metal piping and the reactor containment. These elements, which are powerfully radioactive, include cobalt 60, iron 55, nickel 63, radioactive manganese, niobium, zinc, and chromium. These materials slough off from the pipes into the primary coolant. Officially called CRUD, it is so intensely radioactive that it poses a severe hazard to maintenance workers and inspectors in certain areas of the reactor. 36 ¶ According to David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists, during shutdowns of reactors, the utilities not uncommonly flush out pipes, heat exchangers, etc., to remove highly radioactive CRUD build-up. Some of the CRUD is sent to radioactive waste dumps while some is released to the river, lake, or sea nearest the reactor. 37 ¶ Although the nuclear industry claims it is "emission" free, in fact it is collectively releasing millions of curies annually. Reports documenting gaseous and liquid radioactive releases vary enormously depending upon accidental and larger-than-normal routine releases. The Millstone One reactor in Connecticut alone released a remarkable 2.97 million curies of noble gases in 1975, whereas Nine Mile Point One released 1.3 million curies in 1975. In 1974, the total release from all reactors in the United States was 6.48 million curies, and in 1993 it ranged between 96,600 curies to 214,000 curies Releases vary according to equipment failure, which is variable and fickle. By contrast, coal plants release some uranium and uranium daughter products in their smoke but very little radiation compared to atomic plants, and certainly no fission products. ¶ The utilities also admit that about 12 gallons of intensely radioactive primary coolant leaks daily into the secondary coolant via the steam generator through breaks in the pipes. Some of these emissions, which occur when the steam is released to the air, are not even monitored? Likewise, about 4,000 gallons of primary coolant water are intentionally released to the environment on a daily basis, while some just leaks out unplanned. Many other emissions are simply not monitored. And a meta-review of the literature indicates that PTSD and mental stress rates increased as a result of the Fukushima disaster Harada et al 15 Nahoko Harada, Division of Nursing, School of Medicine, National Defense Medical College, “Mental health and psychological impacts from the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake Disaster: a systematic literature review,” Disaster and Military MedicineThe Journal of Prehospital, Trauma and Emergency Care, 2015 Our review compiled a wide array of mental health consequence following the Great East Japan Earthquake, an unprecedented compound disaster with a combination of earthquakes, tsunamis, and a series of nuclear accidents. A considerable proportion of the study population was mentally affected to a substantial degree, and mental health responses ranged from approximately one-tenth to nearly half of the respondents 12, 27. Mental health outcomes included, but were not limited to, PTSD, depression, and anxiety. Physical health changes, such as sleep and eating disturbances, were also reported. Although every disaster is different, disasters are large-scale, stressful, and distressing events that affect a significant number of people. Those who experience higher exposure to traumatic events are likely to show higher mental health responses (i.e., dose–response relationship) 60. For the most people, these acute responses are normal and gradually decrease over time, but a small proportion of the affected individuals will suffer long-term mental health issues. In a review of 160 disaster mental health studies, proportions of subjects with severe impairment were 21.6 for natural disasters and 18.5 for technological disaster samples 6. The articles in this review had relatively higher mental health rates than in previous studies. This trend might be related to the high impact of this disaster as well as the GEJE study timing, because most of the studies were conducted among the direct victims within 2 years after the disaster. Long-term, longitudinal studies are evolving, and they will potentially be useful to understand the trajectories of mental health consequences among these people. In the region affected by the Fukushima nuclear disaster, invisible and imperceptible nature of radioactive materials has been challenged among the affected people. The residents’ responses were diverse and complex; along with high proportions of mental health distress among the Fukushima residents 46, concerns for radiation effect were a prominent concern especially among pregnant women and mothers of young children 43, 49, 61. Safety issues in food and outdoor activities, along with economic issues and distrust in information disclosure were also reported 43, 49. Public psychosocial responses such as discrimination and stigmatization were also reported 48, 56. These findings are in accordance with a series of Chernobyl studies where a complex relationship between radiation exposure and physical/mental health effect has been an ongoing debate. Physical outcome studies tend to be controversial, although firm evidence can be found only on the deaths of first responders due to acute radiation exposures and high prevalence of thyroid cancer among the exposed children 8. Still, psychosocial and economic disruptions to the affected people were significant, and the International Atomic Energy Agency regarded mental health as the major public health sequelae of the Chernobyl accident 62. Mothers of young children and plant clean-up workers were among the two groups of particular concern 63, 64, 65. Psychosocial issues included not only mental health disorders but also stigmatization and discrimination of the affected people 8, suggesting the importance of integrity and accuracy of information as well as risk communication strategies. Two Fukushima studies reported distress among internally displaced people 38, 41. Mandatory evacuation measures have been in place for the area surrounding the nuclear plant, and the evacuees potentially have uncertain and ambiguous perspectives on whether or not they will be able to return home 66. This trend was also compatible with Chernobyl studies reporting challenges in evacuation and resettlement 8. Future studies will be essential to clarify the effect of evacuation following nuclear disasters. Fukushima and Chernobyl studies suggest that substantial public health efforts are crucial to establish a system capable of such exposures. Integrity and accuracy of information will be a critical issue for the public to assess their health status. These studies also have implications for other “tangible” disasters, such as emergencies related to bio-chemical weapons and infectious diseases 67. Long-term studies will be important to increase the psychosocial impact among Fukushima residents, with special focus on children, mothers, and nuclear plant workers. A number of studies assessed a considerable degree of mental distress among disaster workers. This is likely to be owing to work-related exposures of these workers. In the case of GEJE, many of the workers were also local disaster victims, and had struggles as survivors along with their work-related exposures. This effect was prominent in several studies 51, 56, 57. Two worker studies identified experiences of being discriminated against and handling residents’ complaints as risk factors for their adverse mental health 56, 57. In the former study, the Fukushima nuclear plant workers became targets of public criticism because their company was blamed for their post-disaster mismanagement. In the latter, Miyagi Prefecture workers received direct complaints from their residents in a chaotic situation. These results might give hypotheses that mental health of disaster workers is susceptible to their stakeholder’s criticisms. Past literatures identified mortuary work as predictors of PTSD or physical symptoms among disaster workers 68, 69, but in our review, there has yet be an evidence that mortuary work was associated with adverse mental health 50, 51. Further studies will be needed to elucidate the relationship between dead body exposure and mental health outcomes among this population. Previous studies highlighted vulnerable populations for post-disaster mental health, such as children, evacuees, the bereaved, and individuals with preexisting physical/mental health conditions 5, 6. Our compilation overall shows a similar trend, although studies are relatively few, especially in the context of grief. Mentally ill face social stigma in Japan Ando et al 13 Shuntaro Ando, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science, Tokyo, Japan, “Review of mental-health-related stigma in Japan,” Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, September 30, 2013 In Japan, the general public's knowledge of mental illness was found to be relatively poor. Weakness of personality was most often seen as the cause for mental illness, rather than biological factors, such as heritability. A substantial number of Japanese people do not recognize that people with mental illness can recover. In addition, many people have negative attitudes towards people with mental illness, considering them dangerous and unpredictable. Not surprisingly, the majority of the general public in Japan keeps greater social distance from individuals with mental illness in close relationships. Schizophrenia is more stigmatized than depression, and the severity of the illness increases the stigmatizing attitude toward it. In terms of professionals' stigmatization, mental health staff who regularly and directly have contact with individuals with mental illness have less negative attitudes. This may be associated with their accumulation of contact with people who have recovered from mental illness. Compared to Taiwan and Australia, the stigma of mental illness was stronger in Japan, which might be due to institutionalism, the lack of implementation of national campaigns, and society's value of conformity. Although some education programs appeared to be effective in reducing mental-health-related stigma, we found key implications for future interventions. For example, both the general public and professionals need to: eliminate the misunderstanding that mental illness is caused by personal faults; (ii) focus on the adverse effects of institutionalism; (iii) stress the importance of community care; and (iv) offer direct social contact with people with mental illness.
Part two is the advocacy The national government of Japan should ban the production of nuclear power. CCNE 13 Citizens’ Commission on Nuclear Energy, Organization Aiming at Fundamental Reform of Nuclear Energy Policy, “Our path to a nuclear-free Japan: an interim report Executive Summary,” October 2013 Given the Fukushima Nuclear Accident and the many shortcomings found in Japanese civil nuclear policies, Japan – under national consensus - should make it a national virtue to ban the use of atomic energy for power generation and to achieve a society free of nuclear power. A “society free of nuclear power” here means a status where decisions have been taken to decommission all existing nuclear reactors and the process of decommissioning has begun. In order to achieve a shift towards a sustainable energy system, a Fundamental Law on Energy Shift should be enacted. Further, administrative and financial reform should be carried out with the aim to overcome all the past problems associated with energy policies. Part three is solvency Japan hasn’t learned its lesson—the only nuclear power without suffering is no nuclear power at all. Ripley 3/11 Will; award-winning correspondent for CNN, based at the network's Tokyo bureau.; CNN; Fukushima: Five years after Japan's worst nuclear disaster; http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/08/asia/fukushima-five-year-anniversary/; JLB (9/10/16) The moratorium lasted until August 2015, when a reactor was restarted in Sendai, sparking protests outside the plant and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's residence in Tokyo.¶ After the plant resumed operation, Abe said that it, and others in the process of being restarted, had passed "the world's toughest safety screening."¶ Public opinion is still firmly against nuclear and many Japanese politicians and commentators have criticized the government's decision to restart the reactors.¶ Prior to the disaster, around 70 of people supported nuclear energy, according to an official poll. That level dropped to below 36 after the Fukushima meltdown, with opposition to nuclear energy growing to up to 50 or even 70, according to polls by Japanese media.¶ Former Prime Minister Naoto Kan, in office during the crisis, is one of the highest-profile voices to come out against nuclear power, calling repeatedly on the government to change its course.¶ "The safest nuclear policy is not to have any plants at all," he told a parliamentary panel in 2012.¶ While the move back towards nuclear power has been justified on the grounds of the huge cost of importing fossil fuel energy, campaigners expressed disappointment that alternative options weren't explored.¶ "Renewable energy sources such as solar, wind and thermal have so much potential here," said Ai Kashiwagi, of Greenpeace Japan, after the Sendai plant was restarted.¶ Outside of the National Diet, opposition to nuclear power remains high. A February poll by broadcaster NHK found that only 20 thought the reactors should be restarted. Before the disaster, a majority of the country supported the nuclear industry.¶ Greenpeace's Vande Putte said that Japan hasn't "learned the lesson of Fukushima." He pointed to the reactors built in seismic zones, as well as the Sendai plant, which lies 30 kilometers from an active volcano.¶ "In Japan, there's no safe place for nuclear reactors. What we have seen at Fukushima Daiichi can happen at another reactor."¶ "The government should shut down all the nuclear reactors," said Fukushima survivor Toshiki Aso.¶ "I don't want anyone else to have to go through the same suffering we did." 19 reactors will be operational in Japan by 2018 by standard predictions. WNN 7/28 World Nuclear News, “Japanese institute sees 19 reactor restarts by March 2018,” July 28 2016, http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NP-Japanese-institute-sees-19-reactor-restarts-by-March-2018-2807164.html Seven Japanese nuclear power reactors are likely to be in operation by the end of next March and 12 more one year later, according to an estimate by the Institute of Energy Economics, Japan (IEEJ). Judicial rulings and local consents will influence the rate of restart, it notes. In its Economic and Energy Outlook of Japan Through 2017, the IEEJ has considered the economic and environmental impacts in financial years 2016 and 2017 (ending March 2017 and 2018, respectively) of various scenarios for the restart of reactors in Japan. The organization estimates that if restarts take place according to the current schedule - the "reference scenario" - seven reactors could restart by the end of FY2016 (ending March 2017). By the end of FY2017, 19 units could be restarted, generating some 119.8 TWh of electricity annually, comfchecpared with total nuclear output of 288.2 TWh in FY2010, the year prior to the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Under this scenario, compared with FY2010, total spending on fossil fuel imports in FY2017 decreases by JPY4.7 trillion ($45 billion), while the electricity cost - including fuel costs, feed-in tariffs and grid stabilization costs - increases by about JPY100/MWh. Relative to the same period, energy-related carbon dioxide emissions to 1094 million tonnes CO2. According to the IEEJ, energy-related emissions reached a historical high of 1235 million tonnes CO2 in FY2013. The IEEJ's high-case scenario assumes a total of 25 units are restarted by the end of FY2017, generating 151.2 TWh annually, with total fossil fuel imports spending decreasing by JPY0.7 trillion relative to the low-case scenario where only 12 reactors are assumed to restart, producing 39.1 TWh. In the high-case scenario, the average electricity unit cost is lowered by about JPY600/MWh and energy-related emissions decrease by 52 million tonnes CO2. Japan is meeting emissions requirements—shifting from coal towards renewables. Levit 6/17 Donald; strategist; Economic Calendar; 6/17/16; “Japan Burning Record Amount of Coal Instead of Relying on Nuclear Power”; http://www.economiccalendar.com/2016/06/17/japan-burning-record-amount-of-coal-instead-of-relying-on-nuclear-power/; JLB (8/17/16) The concern about Japan’s hefty use of coal is that if international agreements to curb the use of coal come with hefty fines and fees to coal users, than Japan’s high use of coal could have a major economic impact on the country over the longer-term. Some of Japan’s powerful trading houses are cutting or freezing coal investments over concerns about the environmental and economic fallout. Japan recently gave environmental approval to three more coal-fired power plants out of 45 planned. This agreement came even after the country agreed at last year’s UN climate conference to cut carbon emissions by 26 by 2030 from its 2013 levels. Even though the country has increased coal use, it has promised that it will make its thermal power stations more efficient to meet its global emissions commitments. The country is also increasing its use of renewable energy; Japan is now the third largest solar power user in the world.
Japan’s business lobby is pushing for renewables—no long term shift to coal, heavily relies on imports. Brown 6/22 Lincoln; former News and Program Director for KVEL radio; Oil Price; 6/22/16; “Japan’s Business Lobby Calls For A Shift From Nuclear Power To Renewables”; http://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Japans-Business-Lobby-Calls-For-A-Shift-From-Nuclear-Power-To-Renewables.html; JLB (8/17/16) Japan must look toward renewable energy instead of nuclear power for its power needs, Teruo Asada, vice chairman of the Japan Association of Corporate Executives, has said, since the chances are slim that Japan will be able to return to the levels of nuclear power that existed before the Fukushima accident in 2011. The Abe administration has the goal of using nuclear energy for a fifth of the country’s power needs by 2030. So far, only 42 operable reactors have started operation. Asada stated: "We have a sense of crisis that Japan will become a laughing stock if we do not encourage renewable power." Asada also commented that for the long term, Japan needs to lower its dependence on nuclear power, predicting that it might not comprise 10 percent of the country’s energy supply. He said that the association is calling for measures to encourage private investment in renewable energy and public funding for the necessary infrastructure. Asada’s comments come as legal challenges and public opinion haunt efforts to restart the nuclear plant. Japan’s government and business sector had supported nuclear energy as an alternative to fossil fuels, which must be imported. Renewable energy accounted for 14.3 percent of the country’s power up to March of this year. Nuclear power can’t solve warming – it would require one reactor a week for 52 years Caldicott 6 Helen; Founder and President of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute; “Nuclear Power is not the answer”; JLB (8/8/2016) Setting aside the energetic costs of the whole fuel cycle, and looking just at the Nuclear Industry's claim that what transpires in the nuclear plants is "clean and green," the following conditions would have to be met for nuclear power actually to make the substantial contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions that the industry claims is possible (this analysis assumes 2 or more growth in global electricity demand): •All present-day nuclear power plants-441-would have to be replaced by new ones. •Half the electricity growth would have to be provided by nuclear power. •Half of all the world's coal fired plants would have to be replaced by nuclear power plants.28 This would mean the construction over the next fifty years of some 2,000 to 3,000 nuclear reactors of 1,000 megawatt size-one per week for fifty years! Considering the eight to ten years it takes to construct a new reactor and the finite supply of uranium fuel, such an enterprise is simply not viable.
Part four is framework The standard is mitigating structural violence. 1 Structural violence is based in moral exclusion, it pervades our cognitive processes and encourages us to ignore differences in identity. Winter and Leighton 99 Deborah DuNann Winter and Dana C. Leighton. Winter|Psychologist that specializes in Social Psych, Counseling Psych, Historical and Contemporary Issues, Peace Psychology. Leighton: PhD graduate student in the Psychology Department at the University of Arkansas. Knowledgable in the fields of social psychology, peace psychology, and justice and intergroup responses to transgressions of justice “Peace, conflict, and violence: Peace psychology in the 21st century.” Pg 4-5 She argues that our normal perceptual cognitive processes divide people into in-groups and out-groups. Those outside our group lie outside our scope of justice. Injustice that would be instantaneously confronted if it occurred to someone we love or know is barely noticed if it occurs to strangers or those who are invisible or irrelevant. We do not seem to be able to open our minds and our hearts to everyone, so we draw conceptual lines between those who are in and out of our moral circle. Those who fall outside are morally excluded, and become either invisible, or demeaned in some way so that we do not have to acknowledge the injustice they suffer. Moral exclusion is a human failing, but Opotow argues convincingly that it is an outcome of everyday social cognition. To reduce its nefarious effects, we must be vigilant in noticing and listening to oppressed, invisible, outsiders. Inclusionary thinking can be fostered by relationships, communication, and appreciation of diversity. Like Opotow, all the authors in this section point out that structural violence is not inevitable if we become aware of its operation, and build systematic ways to mitigate its effects. Learning about structural violence may be discouraging, overwhelming, or maddening, but these papers encourage us to step beyond guilt and anger, and begin to think about how to reduce structural violence. All the authors in this section note that the same structures (such as global communication and normal social cognition) which feed structural violence, can also be used to empower citizens to reduce it. In the long run, reducing structural violence by reclaiming neighborhoods, demanding social justice and living wages, providing prenatal care, alleviating sexism, and celebrating local cultures, will be our most surefooted path to building lasting peace. 2 Debate should surround material consequences—ideal theories ignore the concrete nature of the world and legitimize oppression. Curry 14 Dr. Tommy J; “The Cost of a Thing: A Kingian Reformulation of a Living Wage Argument in the 21st Century”, Victory Briefs, 2014 Despite the pronouncement of debate as an activity and intellectual exercise pointing to the real world consequences of dialogue, thinking, and (personal) politics when addressing issues of racism, sexism, economic disparity, global conflicts, and death, many of the discussions concerning these ongoing challenges to humanity are fixed to a paradigm which sees the adjudication of material disparities and sociological realities as the conquest of one ideal theory over the other. In “Ideal Theory as Ideology,” Charles Mills outlines the problem contemporary theoretical-performance styles in policy debate and value-weighing in Lincoln-Douglass are confronted with in their attempts to get at the concrete problems in our societies. At the outset, Mills concedes that “ideal theory applies to moral theory as a whole (at least to normative ethics as against metaethics); since ethics deals by definition with normative/prescriptive/evaluative issues, it is set against factual/descriptive issues.” At the most general level, the conceptual chasm between what emerges as actual problems in the world (e.g.: racism, sexism, poverty, disease, etc.) and how we frame such problems theoretically—the assumptions and shared ideologies we depend upon for our problems to be heard and accepted as a worthy “problem” by an audience—is the most obvious call for an anti-ethical paradigm, since such a paradigm insists on the actual as the basis of what can be considered normatively. Mills, however, describes this chasm as a problem of an ideal-as-descriptive model which argues that for any actual-empirical-observable social phenomenon (P), an ideal of (P) is necessarily a representation of that phenomenon. In the idealization of a social phenomenon (P), one “necessarily has to abstract away from certain features” of (P) that is observed before abstraction occurs. ¶ This gap between what is actual (in the world), and what is represented by theories and politics of debaters proposed in rounds threatens any real discussions about the concrete nature of oppression and the racist economic structures which necessitate tangible policies and reorienting changes in our value orientations. 3 Global justice requires a reduction in inequality and a focus on material rights. Okereke 07 Chukwumerije Okereke (Senior Research Associate at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia). Global Justice and Neoliberal Environmental Governance. Routledge 2007 Notwithstanding these drawbacks, these scholars provide very compelling arguments against mainstream conceptions of justice. In this approach, the obli- gation of justice is derived from the moral equality of human beings irrespective of their race, creed and nationality (O'Neill 1991; Brown 1992: 169; Beitz 1979; Sen 1999). The emphasis is on the positive rights of citizens - that is the kinds of rights that require state authorities to do something in order to provide citizens with the opportunities and abilities to act to fulfil their own potential - as opposed to negative rights/liberty, which refers to freedom from coercion and non-interfer- ence. The notion of justice as meeting needs, as seen in Chapter 2, figures very prominently in quite a number of the influencing materials that form the starting point for the discourse on global sustainable development. It has been suggested, in general, that this idea of justice is 'in-------------creasingly influential on non-governmen- tal organizations and the community of international policy makers' (Brighouse 2004: 67). In general, proponents of justice as need criticize liberal ideas of justice for concentrating on political equality (equal right to speech, vote, etc.) without addressing the problem of material equality - especially in the form of equal access to resources. They also claim that the ability to own property as well as the ability to exercise political rights (say the right to vote) depends first and foremost on the ability of citizens to function effectively. When the basic human needs of citizens, for example food, are not being met, other rights become merely 'hypothetical and empty' (Sen 1999: 75). Following on from this basic reasoning, the rights approach to justice is rejected and, in its place, human basic need is seen as the correct basis of political morality and the right benchmark for the determination of political judgment (Plant 1991: 185). In previous sections we saw that libertarian notions of justice sanction unlimited material inequality between citizens, provided that each person has obtained their possessions through legitimate means. All that matters is that the state should ensure fair rules of transitions and equality before the law. We saw also that liberal accounts of justice, especially Rawls' liberal egalitarianism, reject this formula- tion of justice because it does not secure the welfare of the less able in society. On the contrary, Rawls recommends that political institutions should be structured in ways that protect the interests of the least advantaged individuals in society. Accordingly, he sanctions societal inequities provided that such inequities work to the advantage of the least well-off. On closer reading, however, it turns out that Rawls difference principle (that inequities should work in favour of the least well- off) does not contain any explicit demand relating to the basic needs of the poor. As such, it is possible for Rawls' proviso to be met even when the least well-off in the society are denied their basic needs. For example, a distribution that changes from 20:10:2 to 100:30:4 satisfies Rawls difference principle but tells us noth- ing about the actual well-being of the least well-off. So, whereas some (mainly libertarians) criticize Rawls for not specifying the extent to which other people's liberty can be sacrificed for the sake of the least well-off, others (proponents of justice as meeting need) criticize Rawls for leaving the fate of the least well-off unprotected. Many scholars in the latter group sometimes argue along Marxian lines that as long as the means of production remain in the hands of the 'haves' there is no guarantee that inequities will benefit the least well-off. Maslow (1968), Bradshaw (1972) and Forder (1974) have all consequently argued that only the theory of need provides, as Maslow (1968: 4) puts it, 'the ultimate appeal for the determination of the good, bad, right and wrong' in a po- litical community. Without the theory of need, they say, it would be impossible to justify the welfare state in capitalist Western democracies. On the other hand, the co-existence of welfare and capitalism confirms the place of need as the criterion of moral political judgment. O'Neill (1991), Sen (1999) and Nussbaum (2000) have all extended versions of this argument to the international domain. O'Neill (1980, 1991) argues that adherence to the Kantian categorical imperative entails that the global community must act to remove the aching poverty and famine that threaten the existence of millions of people in developing countries. Sen (1999), for his part, calls for the strengthening of international institutions to make them able to assist the least well in the global society to achieve the measure of actual living that is required for the basic function and well-being of citizens. For Sen, as for O'Neill, all forms of liberty and rights are meaningful only when people have the substantive 'freedom to achieve actual living' (Sen 1999: 73; cf. O'Neill 1989: 288; 1986). Thomas Pogge also places emphasis on human basic need and starts his well-known book World Poverty and Human Rights with the rhetorical ques- tion: 'How can severe poverty of half of humankind continue despite enormous economic and technological progress and despite the enlightened moral norms and values of our heavily dominant Western civilization?' (Pogge 2002: 3).
4 No act omission distinction for states. Sunstein Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule. The University of Chicago Law School. “Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? The Relevance of Life‐Life Tradeoffs.” JOHN M. OLIN LAW and ECONOMICS WORKING PAPER NO. 239. The Chicago Working Paper Series. March 2005 In our view, both the argument from causation and the argument from intention go wrong by overlooking the distinctive features of government as a moral agent. Whatever the general status of the act-omission distinction as a matter of moral philosophy,38 the distinction is least impressive when applied to government.39 The most fundamental point is that unlike individuals, governments always and necessarily face a choice between or among possible policies for regulating third parties. The distinction between acts and omissions may not be intelligible in this context, and even if it is, the distinction does not make a morally relevant difference. Most generally, government is in the business of creating permissions and prohibitions. When it explicitly or implicitly authorizes private action, it is not omitting to do anything, or refusing to act.40 Moreover, the distinction between authorized and unauthorized private action—for example, private killing—becomes obscure when the government formally forbids private action, but chooses a set of policy instruments that do not adequately or fully discourage it. Part 5: Underview
Prefer reasonable aff interps and drop the argument on T. The judge should use reasonability with a bright line of the presence of link and impact turn ground for the negative. Since he has equal access to offense, there’s no abuse because structural access to the ballot is the same.
Social injustice is the root of mass-scale violence – it primes society for external violence. Scheper-Hughes 04 (Scheper-Hughes 4 (Prof of Anthropology @ Cal-Berkely; Prof of Anthropology @ UPenn) (Nancy and Philippe, Introduction: Making Sense of Violence, in Violence in War and Peace, pg. 19-22) This large and at first sight “messy” Part VII is central to this anthology’s thesis. It encompasses everything from the routinized, bureaucratized, and utterly banal violence of children dying of hunger and maternal despair in Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33) to elderly African Americans dying of heat stroke in Mayor Daly’s version of US apartheid in Chicago’s South Side (Klinenberg, Chapter 38) to the racialized class hatred expressed by British Victorians in their olfactory disgust of the “smelly” working classes (Orwell, Chapter 36). In these readings violence is located in the symbolic and social structures that overdetermine and allow the criminalized drug addictions, interpersonal bloodshed, and racially patterned incarcerations that characterize the US “inner city” to be normalized (Bourgois, Chapter 37 and Wacquant, Chapter 39). Violence also takes the form of class, racial, political self-hatred and adolescent self-destruction (Quesada, Chapter 35), as well as of useless (i.e. preventable), rawly embodied physical suffering, and death (Farmer, Chapter 34). Absolutely central to our approach is a blurring of categories and distinctions between wartime and peacetime violence. Close attention to the “little” violences produced in the structures, habituses, and mentalites of everyday life shifts our attention to pathologies of class, race, and gender inequalities. More important, it interrupts the voyeuristic tendencies of “violence studies” that risk publicly humiliating the powerless who are often forced into complicity with social and individual pathologies of power because suffering is often a solvent of human integrity and dignity. Thus, in this anthology we are positing a violence continuum comprised of a multitude of “small wars and invisible genocides” (see also Scheper- Hughes 1996; 1997; 2000b) conducted in the normative social spaces of public schools, clinics, emergency rooms, hospital wards, nursing homes, courtrooms, public registry offices, prisons, detention centers, and public morgues. The violence continuum also refers to the ease with which humans are capable of reducing the socially vulnerable into expendable nonpersons and assuming the license - even the duty - to kill, maim, or soul-murder. We realize that in referring to a violence and a genocide continuum we are flying in the face of a tradition of genocide studies that argues for the absolute uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust and for vigilance with respect to restricted purist use of the term genocide itself (see Kuper 1985; Chaulk 1999; Fein 1990; Chorbajian 1999). But we hold an opposing and alternative view that, to the contrary, it is absolutely necessary to make just such existential leaps in purposefully linking violent acts in normal times to those of abnormal times. Hence the title of our volume: Violence in War and in Peace. If (as we concede) there is a moral risk in overextending the concept of “genocide” into spaces and corners of everyday life where we might not ordinarily think to find it (and there is), an even greater risk lies in failing to sensitize ourselves, in misrecognizing protogenocidal practices and sentiments daily enacted as normative behavior by “ordinary” good-enough citizens. Peacetime crimes, such as prison construction sold as economic development to impoverished communities in the mountains and deserts of California, or the evolution of the criminal industrial complex into the latest peculiar institution for managing race relations in the United States (Waquant, Chapter 39), constitute the “small wars and invisible genocides” to which we refer. This applies to African American and Latino youth mortality statistics in Oakland, California, Baltimore, Washington DC, and New York City. These are “invisible” genocides not because they are secreted away or hidden from view, but quite the opposite. As Wittgenstein observed, the things that are hardest to perceive are those which are right before our eyes and therefore taken for granted. In this regard, Bourdieu’s partial and unfinished theory of violence (see Chapters 32 and 42) as well as his concept of misrecognition is crucial to our task. By including the normative everyday forms of violence hidden in the minutiae of “normal” social practices - in the architecture of homes, in gender relations, in communal work, in the exchange of gifts, and so forth - Bourdieu forces us to reconsider the broader meanings and status of violence, especially the links between the violence of everyday life and explicit political terror and state repression, Similarly, Basaglia’s notion of “peacetime crimes” - crimini di pace - imagines a direct relationship between wartime and peacetime violence. Peacetime crimes suggests the possibility that war crimes are merely ordinary, everyday crimes of public consent applied systematically and dramatically in the extreme context of war. Consider the parallel uses of rape during peacetime and wartime, or the family resemblances between the legalized violence of US immigration and naturalization border raids on “illegal aliens” versus the US government- engineered genocide in 1938, known as the Cherokee “Trail of Tears.” Peacetime crimes suggests that everyday forms of state violence make a certain kind of domestic peace possible. Internal “stability” is purchased with the currency of peacetime crimes, many of which take the form of professionally applied “strangle-holds.” Everyday forms of state violence during peacetime make a certain kind of domestic “peace” possible. It is an easy-to-identify peacetime crime that is usually maintained as a public secret by the government and by a scared or apathetic populace. Most subtly, but no less politically or structurally, the phenomenal growth in the United States of a new military, postindustrial prison industrial complex has taken place in the absence of broad-based opposition, let alone collective acts of civil disobedience. The public consensus is based primarily on a new mobilization of an old fear of the mob, the mugger, the rapist, the Black man, theundeserving poor. How many public executions of mentally deficient prisoners in the United States are needed to make life feel more secure for the affluent? What can it possibly mean when incarceration becomes the “normative” socializing experience for ethnic minority youth in a society, i.e., over 33 percent of young African American men (Prison Watch 2002). In the end it is essential that we recognize the existence of a genocidal capacity among otherwise good-enough humans and that we need to exercise a defensive hypervigilance to the less dramatic, permitted, and even rewarded everyday acts of violence that render participation in genocidal acts and policies possible (under adverse political or economic conditions), perhaps more easily than we would like to recognize. Under the violence continuum we include, therefore, all expressions of radical social exclusion, dehumanization, depersonalization, pseudospeciation, and reification which normalize atrocious behavior and violence toward others.
A constant self-mobilization for alarm, a state of constant hyperarousal is, perhaps, a reasonable response to Benjamin’s view of late modern history as a chronic “state of emergency” (Taussig, Chapter 31). We are trying to recover here the classic anagogic thinking that enabled Erving Goffman, Jules Henry, C. Wright Mills, and Franco Basaglia among other mid-twentieth-century radically critical thinkers, to perceive the symbolic and structural relations, i.e., between inmates and patients, between concentration camps, prisons, mental hospitals, nursing homes, and other “total institutions.” Making that decisive move to recognize the continuum of violence allows us to see the capacity and the willingness - if not enthusiasm - of ordinary people, the practical technicians of the social consensus, to enforce genocidal-like crimes against categories of rubbish people. There is no primary impulse out of which mass violence and genocide areborn, it is ingrained in the common sense of everyday social life. The mad, the differently abled, the mentally vulnerable have often fallen into this category of the unworthy living, as have the very old and infirm, the sick-poor, and, of course, the despised racial, religious, sexual, and ethnic groups of the moment. Erik Erikson referred to “pseudo- speciation” as the human tendency to classify some individuals or social groups as less than fully human a prerequisite to genocide and one that is carefully honed during the unremarkable peacetimes that precede the sudden, “seemingly unintelligible” outbreaks of mass violence. Collective denial and misrecognition are prerequisites for mass violence and genocide. But so are formal bureaucratic structures and professional roles. The practical technicians of everyday violence in the backlands of Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33), for example, include the clinic doctors who prescribe powerful tranquilizers to fretful and frightfully hungry babies, the Catholic priests who celebrate the death of “angel-babies,” and the municipal bureaucrats who dispense free baby coffins but no food to hungry families. Everyday violence encompasses the implicit, legitimate, and routinized forms of violence inherent in particular social, economic, and political formations. It is close to what Bourdieu (1977, 1996) means by “symbolic violence,” the violence that is often “nus-recognized” for something else, usually something good. Everyday violence is similar to what Taussig (1989) calls “terror as usual.” All these terms are meant to reveal a public secret - the hidden links between violence in war and violence in peace, and between war crimes and “peace-time crimes.” Bourdieu (1977) finds domination and violence in the least likely places - in courtship and marriage, in the exchange of gifts, in systems of classification, in style, art, and culinary taste- the various uses of culture. Violence, Bourdieu insists, is everywhere in social practice. It is misrecognized because its very everydayness and its familiarity render it invisible. Lacan identifies “rneconnaissance” as the prerequisite of the social. The exploitation of bachelor sons, robbing them of autonomy, independence, and progeny, within the structures of family farming in the European countryside that Bourdieu escaped is a case in point (Bourdieu, Chapter 42; see also Scheper-Hughes, 2000b; Favret-Saada, 1989). Following Gramsci, Foucault, Sartre, Arendt, and other modern theorists of power-vio- lence, Bourdieu treats direct aggression and physical violence as a crude, uneconomical mode of domination; it is less efficient and, according to Arendt (1969), it is certainly less legitimate. While power and symbolic domination are not to be equated with violence - and Arendt argues persuasively that violence is to be understood as a failure of power - violence, as we are presenting it here, is more than simply the expression of illegitimate physical force against a person or group of persons. Rather, we need to understand violence as encompassing all forms of “controlling processes” (Nader 1997b) that assault basic human freedoms and individual or collective survival. Our task is to recognize these gray zones of violence which are, by definition, not obvious. Once again, the point of bringing into the discourses on genocide everyday, normative experiences of reification, depersonalization, institutional confinement, and acceptable death is to help answer the question: What makes mass violence and genocide possible? In this volume we are suggesting that mass violence is part of a continuum, and that it is socially incremental and often experienced by perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders - and even by victims themselves - as expected, routine, even justified. The preparations for mass killing can be found in social sentiments and institutions from the family, to schools, churches, hospitals, and the military. They harbor the early “warning signs” (Charney 1991), the “priming” (as Hinton, ed., 2002 calls it), or the “genocidal continuum” (as we call it) that push social consensus toward devaluing certain forms of human life and lifeways from the refusal of social support and humane care to vulnerable “social parasites” (the nursing home elderly, “welfare queens,” undocumented immigrants, drug addicts) to the militarization of everyday life (super-maximum-security prisons, capital punishment; the technologies of heightened personal security, including the house gun and gated communities; and reversed feelings of victimization). No great power war---deterrence, economic interdependence, political and business elites and social changes Aziz 14 John, former economics and business editor at TheWeek.com, Don't worry: World War III will almost certainly never happen, March 6, http://theweek.com/article/index/257517/dont-worry-world-war-iii-will-almost-certainly-never-happen Next year will be the seventieth anniversary of the end of the last global conflict. There have been points on that timeline — such as the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, and a Soviet computer malfunction in 1983 that erroneously suggested that the U.S. had attacked, and perhaps even the Kosovo War in 1999 — when a global conflict was a real possibility. Yet today — in the shadow of a flare up which some are calling a new Cold War between Russia and the U.S. — I believe the threat of World War III has almost faded into nothingness. That is, the probability of a world war is the lowest it has been in decades, and perhaps the lowest it has ever been since the dawn of modernity.¶ This is certainly a view that current data supports. Steven Pinker's studies into the decline of violence reveal that deaths from war have fallen and fallen since World War II. But we should not just assume that the past is an accurate guide to the future. Instead, we must look at the factors which have led to the reduction in war and try to conclude whether the decrease in war is sustainable.¶ So what's changed? Well, the first big change after the last world war was the arrival of mutually assured destruction. It's no coincidence that the end of the last global war coincided with the invention of atomic weapons. The possibility of complete annihilation provided a huge disincentive to launching and expanding total wars. Instead, the great powers now fight proxy wars like Vietnam and Afghanistan (the 1980 version, that is), rather than letting their rivalries expand into full-on, globe-spanning struggles against each other. Sure, accidents could happen, but the possibility is incredibly remote. More importantly, nobody in power wants to be the cause of Armageddon.¶ But what about a non-nuclear global war? Other changes — economic and social in nature — have made that highly unlikely too.¶ The world has become much more economically interconnected since the last global war. Economic cooperation treaties and free trade agreements have intertwined the economies of countries around the world. This has meant there has been a huge rise in the volume of global trade since World War II, and especially since the 1980s.¶ Today consumer goods like smartphones, laptops, cars, jewelery, food, cosmetics, and medicine are produced on a global level, with supply-chains criss-crossing the planet. An example: The laptop I am typing this on is the cumulative culmination of thousands of hours of work, as well as resources and manufacturing processes across the globe. It incorporates metals like tellurium, indium, cobalt, gallium, and manganese mined in Africa. Neodymium mined in China. Plastics forged out of oil, perhaps from Saudi Arabia, or Russia, or Venezuela. Aluminum from bauxite, perhaps mined in Brazil. Iron, perhaps mined in Australia. These raw materials are turned into components — memory manufactured in Korea, semiconductors forged in Germany, glass made in the United States. And it takes gallons and gallons of oil to ship all the resources and components back and forth around the world, until they are finally assembled in China, and shipped once again around the world to the consumer.¶ In a global war, global trade becomes a nightmare. Shipping becomes more expensive due to higher insurance costs, and riskier because it's subject to seizures, blockades, ship sinkings. Many goods, intermediate components or resources — including energy supplies like coal and oil, components for military hardware, etc, may become temporarily unavailable in certain areas. Sometimes — such as occurred in the Siege of Leningrad during World War II — the supply of food can be cut off. This is why countries hold strategic reserves of things like helium, pork, rare earth metals and oil, coal, and gas. These kinds of breakdowns were troublesome enough in the economic landscape of the early and mid-20th century, when the last global wars occurred. But in today's ultra-globalized and ultra-specialized economy? The level of economic adaptation — even for large countries like Russia and the United States with lots of land and natural resources — required to adapt to a world war would be crushing, and huge numbers of business and livelihoods would be wiped out.¶ In other words, global trade interdependency has become, to borrow a phrase from finance, too big to fail.¶ It is easy to complain about the reality of big business influencing or controlling politicians. But big business has just about the most to lose from breakdowns in global trade. A practical example: If Russian oligarchs make their money from selling gas and natural resources to Western Europe, and send their children to schools in Britain and Germany, and lend and borrow money from the West's financial centers, are they going to be willing to tolerate Vladimir Putin starting a regional war in Eastern Europe (let alone a world war)? Would the Chinese financial industry be happy to see their multi-trillion dollar investments in dollars and U.S. treasury debt go up in smoke? Of course, world wars have been waged despite international business interests, but the world today is far more globalized than ever before and well-connected domestic interests are more dependent on access to global markets, components and resources, or the repayment of foreign debts. These are huge disincentives to global war.
Abstract questioning is useless - debate should seek to design concrete alternatives. Bryant 12 (EDITED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE – the author said “she” and it was replaced with the word “to” – Levi Bryant is currently a Professor of Philosophy at Collin College. In addition to working as a professor, Bryant has also served as a Lacanian psychoanalyst. He received his Ph.D. from Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois, where he originally studied 'disclosedness' with the Heidegger scholar Thomas Sheehan. Bryant later changed his dissertation topic to the transcendental empiricism of Gilles Deleuze, “Critique of the Academic Left”, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/underpants-gnomes-a-critique-of-the-academic-left/) I must be in a mood today– half irritated, half amused –because I find myself ranting. Of course, that’s not entirely unusual. So this afternoon I came across a post by a friend quoting something discussing the environmental movement that pushed all the right button. As the post read,¶ For mainstream environmentalism– conservationism, green consumerism, and resource management –humans are conceptually separated out of nature and mythically placed in privileged positions of authority and control over ecological communities and their nonhuman constituents. What emerges is the fiction of a marketplace of ‘raw materials’ and ‘resources’ through which human-centered wants, constructed as needs, might be satisfied. The mainstream narratives are replete with such metaphors carbon trading!. Natural complexity mutuality, and diversity are rendered virtually meaningless given discursive parameters that reduce nature to discrete units of exchange measuring extractive capacities. Jeff Shantz, “Green Syndicalism”¶ While finding elements this description perplexing– I can’t say that I see many environmentalists treating nature and culture as distinct or suggesting that we’re sovereigns of nature –I do agree that we conceive much of our relationship to the natural world in economic terms (not a surprise that capitalism is today a universal). This, however, is not what bothers me about this passage.¶ What I wonder is just what we’re supposed to do even if all of this is true? What, given existing conditions, are we to do if all of this is right? At least green consumerism, conservation, resource management, and things like carbon trading are engaging in activities that are making real differences. From this passage– and maybe the entire text would disabuse me of this conclusion –it sounds like we are to reject all of these interventions because they remain tied to a capitalist model of production that the author (and myself) find abhorrent. The idea seems to be that if we endorse these things we are tainting our hands and would therefore do well to reject them altogether. The problem as I see it is that this is the worst sort of abstraction (in the Marxist sense) and wishful thinking. Within a Marxo-Hegelian context, a thought is abstract when it ignores all of the mediations in which a thing is embedded. For example, I understand a robust tree abstractly when I attribute its robustness, say, to its genetics alone, ignoring the complex relations to its soil, the air, sunshine, rainfall, etc., that also allowed it to grow robustly in this way. This is the sort of critique we’re always leveling against the neoliberals. They are abstract thinkers. In their doxa that individuals are entirely responsible for themselves and that they completely make themselves by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, neoliberals ignore all the mediations belonging to the social and material context in which human beings develop that play a role in determining the vectors of their life. They ignore, for example, that George W. Bush grew up in a family that was highly connected to the world of business and government and that this gave him opportunities that someone living in a remote region of Alaska in a very different material infrastructure and set of family relations does not have. To think concretely is to engage in a cartography of these mediations, a mapping of these networks, from circumstance to circumstance (what I call an “onto-cartography”). It is to map assemblages, networks, or ecologies in the constitution of entities.¶ Unfortunately, the academic left falls prey to its own form of abstraction. It’s good at carrying out critiques that denounce various social formations, yet very poor at proposing any sort of realistic constructions of alternatives. This because it thinks abstractly in its own way, ignoring how networks, assemblages, structures, or regimes of attraction would have to be remade to create a workable alternative. Here I’m reminded by the “underpants gnomes” depicted in South Park:¶ The underpants gnomes have a plan for achieving profit that goes like this: Phase 1: Collect Underpants Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Profit! They even have a catchy song to go with their work:¶ Well this is sadly how it often is with the academic left. Our plan seems to be as follows: Phase 1: Ultra-Radical Critique Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Revolution and complete social transformation! Our problem is that we seem perpetually stuck at phase 1 without ever explaining what is to be done at phase 2. Often the critiques articulated at phase 1 are right, but there are nonetheless all sorts of problems with those critiques nonetheless. In order to reach phase 3, we have to produce new collectives
. In order for new collectives to be produced, people need to be able to hear and understand the critiques developed at phase 1. Yet this is where everything begins to fall apart. Even though these critiques are often right, we express them in ways that only an academic with a PhD in critical theory and post-structural theory can understand. How exactly is Adorno to produce an effect in the world if only PhD’s in the humanities can understand him? Who are these things for? We seem to always ignore these things and then look down our noses with disdain at the Naomi Kleins and David Graebers of the world. To make matters worse, we publish our work in expensive academic journals that only universities can afford, with presses that don’t have a wide distribution, and give our talks at expensive hotels at academic conferences attended only by other academics. Again, who are these things for? Is it an accident that so many activists look away from these things with contempt, thinking their more about an academic industry and tenure, than producing change in the world? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound! Seriously dudes and dudettes, what are you doing?¶ But finally, and worst of all, us Marxists and anarchists all too often act like assholes. We denounce others, we condemn them, we berate them for not engaging with the questions we want to engage with, and we vilify them when they don’t embrace every bit of the doxa that we endorse. We are every bit as off-putting and unpleasant as the fundamentalist minister or the priest of the inquisition (have people yet understood that Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus was a critique of the French communist party system and the Stalinist party system, and the horrific passions that arise out of parties and identifications in general?). This type of “revolutionary” is the greatest friend of the reactionary and capitalist because they do more to drive people into the embrace of reigning ideology than to undermine reigning ideology. These are the people that keep Rush Limbaugh in business. Well done!¶ But this isn’t where our most serious shortcomings lie. Our most serious shortcomings are to be found at phase 2. We almost never make concrete proposals for how things ought to be restructured, for what new material infrastructures and semiotic fields need to be produced, and when we do, our critique-intoxicated cynics and skeptics immediately jump in with an analysis of all the ways in which these things contain dirty secrets, ugly motives, and are doomed to fail.
Tournament: St Marks | Round: Octas | Opponent: Apple Valley JB | Judge: Panel 1AC For more than two decades, the global nuclear industry has attempted to frame the debate on nuclear power within the context of climate change: nuclear power is better than any of the alternatives. So the argument went. Ambitious nuclear expansion plans in the United States and Japan, two of the largest existing markets, and the growth of nuclear power in China appeared to show—superficially at least—that the technology had a future. At least in terms of political rhetoric and media perception, it appeared to be a winning argument. Then came March 11, 2011. Those most determined to promote nuclear power even cited the Fukushima Daiichi accident as a reason for expanding nuclear power: impacts were low, no one died, radiation levels are not a risk. So claimed a handful of commentators in the international (particularly English-language) media.
However, from the start of the accident at Fukushima Daiichi on March 11 2011, the harsh reality of nuclear power was exposed to billions of people across the planet, and in particular to the population of Japan, including the more than 160,000 people displaced by the disaster, many of whom are still unable to return to their homes, and scores of millions more threatened had worst case scenarios occurred. One authoritative voice that has been central to exposing the myth-making of the nuclear industry and its supporters has been that of Kan Naoto, Prime Minister in 2011. His conversion from promoter to stern critic may be simple to understand, but it is no less commendable for its bravery. When the survival of half the society you are elected to serve and protect is threatened by a technology that is essentially an expensive way to boil water, then something is clearly wrong. Japan avoided societal destruction thanks in large part to the dedication of workers at the crippled nuclear plant, but also to the intervention of Kan and his staff, and to luck. Had it not been for a leaking pipe into the cooling pool of Unit 4 that maintained sufficient water levels, the highly irradiated spent fuel in the pool, including the entire core only recently removed from the reactor core, would have been exposed, releasing an amount of radioactivity far in excess of that released from the other three reactors. The cascade of subsequent events would have meant total loss of control of the other reactors, including their spent fuel pools and requiring massive evacuation extending throughout metropolitan Tokyo, as Prime Minister Kan feared. That three former Prime Ministers of Japan are not just opposed to nuclear power but actively campaigning against it is unprecedented in global politics and is evidence of the scale of the threat that Fukushima posed to tens of millions of Japanese.
The reality is that in terms of electricity share and relative to renewable energy, nuclear power has been in decline globally for two decades. Since the Fukushima Daiichi accident, this decline has only increased in pace. The nuclear industry knew full well that nuclear power could not be scaled up to the level required to make a serious impact on global emissions. But that was never the point. The industry adopted the climate-change argument as a survival strategy: to ensure extending the life of existing aging reactors and make possible the addition of some new nuclear capacity in the coming decades—sufficient at least to allow a core nuclear industrial infrastructure to survive to mid-century. The dream was to survive to mid-century, when limitless energy would be realized by the deployment of commercial plutonium fast-breeder reactors and other generation IV designs. It was always a myth, but it had a commercial and strategic rationale for the power companies, nuclear suppliers and their political allies.
The basis for the Fukushima Daiichi accident began long before March 11th 2011, when decisions were made to build and operate reactors in a nation almost uniquely vulnerable to major seismic events. More than five years on, the accident continues with a legacy that will stretch over the decades. Preventing the next catastrophic accident in Japan is now a passion of the former Prime Minister, joining as he has the majority of the people of Japan determined to transition to a society based on renewable energy. He is surely correct that the end of nuclear power in Japan is possible. The utilities remain in crisis, with only three reactors operating, and legal challenges have been launched across the nation. No matter what policy the government chooses, the basis for Japan’s entire nuclear fuel cycle policy, which is based on plutonium separation at Rokkasho-mura and its use in the Monju reactor and its fantasy successor reactors, is in a worse state than ever before. But as Kan Naoto knows better than most, this is an industry entrenched within the establishment and still wields enormous influence. Its end is not guaranteed. Determination and dedication will be needed to defeat it. Fortunately, the Japanese people have these in abundance. SB Shaun Burnie; senior nuclear specialist with Greenpeace Germany; “The Fukushima Disaster and the Future of Nuclear Power in Japan”; http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-fukushima-disaster-and-the-future-of-nuclear-power-in-japan-an-interview-with-former-prime-minister-kan-naoto/5547438; JLB (10/9/16) That was Shaun Burnie on October 9th. Nuclear power construction and mining emits carbon dioxide, poisoning the environment. Sovacool, 07 Benjamin; Senior Research Fellow for the Virginia Center for Coal and Energy Research and professor of Government and International Affairs at Virginia Tech; “What's Really Wrong With Nuclear Power?”; 11/30; http://scitizen.com/stories/Future-Energies/2007/11/What-s-Really-Wrong-With-Nuclear-Power/; JLB (8/8/2016) Third and finally, nuclear power plants are not carbon neutral. The Oxford Research Group concludes that the nuclear fuel cycle is responsible for emitting 84 to 122 grams of carbon dioxide per every kWh, mostly from uranium mining, plant construction, and plant decommissioning. The report also notes that these emissions are around half of that as natural gas plants (so we are talking about some serious carbon). In addition, the International Atomic Energy Agency notes that uranium is getting harder to mine, meaning that the carbon emissions related to nuclear will get worse as more uranium gets depleted, not better. This is because mining uranium ores of relatively low grades and greater depth is much more energy intensive. If world nuclear generating share remains what it is today, the Oxford Research Group concludes that by 2050 nuclear power would generate as much carbion dioxide per kWh as a comparable gas-fired power station. Nuclear energy contaminates surrounding water. Maintenance workers are exposed to severe radiation levels as corrosive nuclear waste is released into the coolant system. Caldicott, ‘6 Helen, Founder, President -- Nuclear Policy Research Institute, “Nuclear Power is not the answer,” p. 58-9 Radioactive corrosion or activation products that are not the result of uranium fission are also produced, as neutrons bombard the metal piping and the reactor containment. These elements, which are powerfully radioactive, include cobalt 60, iron 55, nickel 63, radioactive manganese, niobium, zinc, and chromium. These materials slough off from the pipes into the primary coolant. Officially called CRUD, it is so intensely radioactive that it poses a severe hazard to maintenance workers and inspectors in certain areas of the reactor. 36 ¶ According to David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists, during shutdowns of reactors, the utilities not uncommonly flush out pipes, heat exchangers, etc., to remove highly radioactive CRUD build-up. Some of the CRUD is sent to radioactive waste dumps while some is released to the river, lake, or sea nearest the reactor. 37 ¶ Although the nuclear industry claims it is "emission" free, in fact it is collectively releasing millions of curies annually. Reports documenting gaseous and liquid radioactive releases vary enormously depending upon accidental and larger-than-normal routine releases. The Millstone One reactor in Connecticut alone released a remarkable 2.97 million curies of noble gases in 1975, whereas Nine Mile Point One released 1.3 million curies in 1975. In 1974, the total release from all reactors in the United States was 6.48 million curies, and in 1993 it ranged between 96,600 curies to 214,000 curies Releases vary according to equipment failure, which is variable and fickle. By contrast, coal plants release some uranium and uranium daughter products in their smoke but very little radiation compared to atomic plants, and certainly no fission products. ¶ The utilities also admit that about 12 gallons of intensely radioactive primary coolant leaks daily into the secondary coolant via the steam generator through breaks in the pipes. Some of these emissions, which occur when the steam is released to the air, are not even monitored? Likewise, about 4,000 gallons of primary coolant water are intentionally released to the environment on a daily basis, while some just leaks out unplanned. Many other emissions are simply not monitored. And a meta-review of the literature indicates that PTSD and mental stress rates increased as a result of the Fukushima disaster Harada et al 15 Nahoko Harada, Division of Nursing, School of Medicine, National Defense Medical College, “Mental health and psychological impacts from the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake Disaster: a systematic literature review,” Disaster and Military MedicineThe Journal of Prehospital, Trauma and Emergency Care, 2015 Our review compiled a wide array of mental health consequence following the Great East Japan Earthquake, an unprecedented compound disaster with a combination of earthquakes, tsunamis, and a series of nuclear accidents. A considerable proportion of the study population was mentally affected to a substantial degree, and mental health responses ranged from approximately one-tenth to nearly half of the respondents 12, 27. Mental health outcomes included, but were not limited to, PTSD, depression, and anxiety. Physical health changes, such as sleep and eating disturbances, were also reported. Although every disaster is different, disasters are large-scale, stressful, and distressing events that affect a significant number of people. Those who experience higher exposure to traumatic events are likely to show higher mental health responses (i.e., dose–response relationship) 60. For the most people, these acute responses are normal and gradually decrease over time, but a small proportion of the affected individuals will suffer long-term mental health issues. In a review of 160 disaster mental health studies, proportions of subjects with severe impairment were 21.6 for natural disasters and 18.5 for technological disaster samples 6. The articles in this review had relatively higher mental health rates than in previous studies. This trend might be related to the high impact of this disaster as well as the GEJE study timing, because most of the studies were conducted among the direct victims within 2 years after the disaster. Long-term, longitudinal studies are evolving, and they will potentially be useful to understand the trajectories of mental health consequences among these people. In the region affected by the Fukushima nuclear disaster, invisible and imperceptible nature of radioactive materials has been challenged among the affected people. The residents’ responses were diverse and complex; along with high proportions of mental health distress among the Fukushima residents 46, concerns for radiation effect were a prominent concern especially among pregnant women and mothers of young children 43, 49, 61. Mentally ill face social stigma in Japan Ando et al 13 Shuntaro Ando, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science, Tokyo, Japan, “Review of mental-health-related stigma in Japan,” Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, September 30, 2013 In Japan, the general public's knowledge of mental illness was found to be relatively poor. Weakness of personality was most often seen as the cause for mental illness, rather than biological factors, such as heritability. A substantial number of Japanese people do not recognize that people with mental illness can recover. In addition, many people have negative attitudes towards people with mental illness, considering them dangerous and unpredictable. Not surprisingly, the majority of the general public in Japan keeps greater social distance from individuals with mental illness in close relationships. Schizophrenia is more stigmatized than depression, and the severity of the illness increases the stigmatizing attitude toward it. In terms of professionals' stigmatization, mental health staff who regularly and directly have contact with individuals with mental illness have less negative attitudes. This may be associated with their accumulation of contact with people who have recovered from mental illness. Compared to Taiwan and Australia, the stigma of mental illness was stronger in Japan, which might be due to institutionalism, the lack of implementation of national campaigns, and society's value of conformity. Although some education programs appeared to be effective in reducing mental-health-related stigma, we found key implications for future interventions. For example, both the general public and professionals need to: eliminate the misunderstanding that mental illness is caused by personal faults; (ii) focus on the adverse effects of institutionalism; (iii) stress the importance of community care; and (iv) offer direct social contact with people with mental illness.
Part two is the advocacy Text: The Government of Japan should ban the production of nuclear power. CCNE 13 Citizens’ Commission on Nuclear Energy, Organization Aiming at Fundamental Reform of Nuclear Energy Policy, “Our path to a nuclear-free Japan: an interim report Executive Summary,” October 2013 Given the Fukushima Nuclear Accident and the many shortcomings found in Japanese civil nuclear policies, Japan – under national consensus - should make it a national virtue to ban the use of atomic energy for power generation and to achieve a society free of nuclear power. A “society free of nuclear power” here means a status where decisions have been taken to decommission all existing nuclear reactors and the process of decommissioning has begun. In order to achieve a shift towards a sustainable energy system, a Fundamental Law on Energy Shift should be enacted. Further, administrative and financial reform should be carried out with the aim to overcome all the past problems associated with energy policies. Part three is solvency 19 reactors will be operational in Japan by 2018 by standard predictions. WNN 7/28 World Nuclear News, “Japanese institute sees 19 reactor restarts by March 2018,” July 28 2016, http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NP-Japanese-institute-sees-19-reactor-restarts-by-March-2018-2807164.html Seven Japanese nuclear power reactors are likely to be in operation by the end of next March and 12 more one year later, according to an estimate by the Institute of Energy Economics, Japan (IEEJ). Judicial rulings and local consents will influence the rate of restart, it notes. In its Economic and Energy Outlook of Japan Through 2017, the IEEJ has considered the economic and environmental impacts in financial years 2016 and 2017 (ending March 2017 and 2018, respectively) of various scenarios for the restart of reactors in Japan. The organization estimates that if restarts take place according to the current schedule - the "reference scenario" - seven reactors could restart by the end of FY2016 (ending March 2017). By the end of FY2017, 19 units could be restarted, generating some 119.8 TWh of electricity annually, comfchecpared with total nuclear output of 288.2 TWh in FY2010, the year prior to the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Under this scenario, compared with FY2010, total spending on fossil fuel imports in FY2017 decreases by JPY4.7 trillion ($45 billion), while the electricity cost - including fuel costs, feed-in tariffs and grid stabilization costs - increases by about JPY100/MWh. Relative to the same period, energy-related carbon dioxide emissions to 1094 million tonnes CO2. According to the IEEJ, energy-related emissions reached a historical high of 1235 million tonnes CO2 in FY2013. The IEEJ's high-case scenario assumes a total of 25 units are restarted by the end of FY2017, generating 151.2 TWh annually, with total fossil fuel imports spending decreasing by JPY0.7 trillion relative to the low-case scenario where only 12 reactors are assumed to restart, producing 39.1 TWh. In the high-case scenario, the average electricity unit cost is lowered by about JPY600/MWh and energy-related emissions decrease by 52 million tonnes CO2. Japan is meeting emissions requirements—shifting from coal towards renewables. Levit 6/17 Donald; strategist; Economic Calendar; 6/17/16; “Japan Burning Record Amount of Coal Instead of Relying on Nuclear Power”; http://www.economiccalendar.com/2016/06/17/japan-burning-record-amount-of-coal-instead-of-relying-on-nuclear-power/; JLB (8/17/16) The concern about Japan’s hefty use of coal is that if international agreements to curb the use of coal come with hefty fines and fees to coal users, than Japan’s high use of coal could have a major economic impact on the country over the longer-term. Some of Japan’s powerful trading houses are cutting or freezing coal investments over concerns about the environmental and economic fallout. Japan recently gave environmental approval to three more coal-fired power plants out of 45 planned. This agreement came even after the country agreed at last year’s UN climate conference to cut carbon emissions by 26 by 2030 from its 2013 levels. Even though the country has increased coal use, it has promised that it will make its thermal power stations more efficient to meet its global emissions commitments. The country is also increasing its use of renewable energy; Japan is now the third largest solar power user in the world.
Japan’s business lobby is pushing for renewables—no long term shift to coal, heavily relies on imports. Brown 6/22 Lincoln; former News and Program Director for KVEL radio; Oil Price; 6/22/16; “Japan’s Business Lobby Calls For A Shift From Nuclear Power To Renewables”; http://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Japans-Business-Lobby-Calls-For-A-Shift-From-Nuclear-Power-To-Renewables.html; JLB (8/17/16) Japan must look toward renewable energy instead of nuclear power for its power needs, Teruo Asada, vice chairman of the Japan Association of Corporate Executives, has said, since the chances are slim that Japan will be able to return to the levels of nuclear power that existed before the Fukushima accident in 2011. The Abe administration has the goal of using nuclear energy for a fifth of the country’s power needs by 2030. So far, only 42 operable reactors have started operation. Asada stated: "We have a sense of crisis that Japan will become a laughing stock if we do not encourage renewable power." Asada also commented that for the long term, Japan needs to lower its dependence on nuclear power, predicting that it might not comprise 10 percent of the country’s energy supply. He said that the association is calling for measures to encourage private investment in renewable energy and public funding for the necessary infrastructure. Asada’s comments come as legal challenges and public opinion haunt efforts to restart the nuclear plant. Japan’s government and business sector had supported nuclear energy as an alternative to fossil fuels, which must be imported. Renewable energy accounted for 14.3 percent of the country’s power up to March of this year. Nuclear power can’t solve warming – it would require one reactor a week for 52 years Caldicott 6 Helen; Founder and President of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute; “Nuclear Power is not the answer”; JLB (8/8/2016) Setting aside the energetic costs of the whole fuel cycle, and look¬ing just at the Nuclear Industry's claim that what transpires in the nuclear plants is "clean and green," the following conditions would have to be met for nuclear power actually to make the substantial contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions that the indus¬try claims is possible (this analysis assumes 2 or more growth in global electricity demand): •All present-day nuclear power plants-441-would have to be replaced by new ones. •Half the electricity growth would have to be provided by nuclear power. •Half of all the world's coal fired plants would have to be re¬placed by nuclear power plants.28 This would mean the construction over the next fifty years of some 2,000 to 3,000 nuclear reactors of 1,000 megawatt size-one per week for fifty years! Considering the eight to ten years it takes to construct a new reactor and the finite supply of uranium fuel, such an enterprise is simply not viable.
Part four is framework The standard is mitigating structural violence. 1 Structural violence is based in moral exclusion, it pervades our cognitive processes and encourages us to ignore differences in identity. Winter and Leighton 99 Deborah DuNann Winter and Dana C. Leighton. Winter|Psychologist that specializes in Social Psych, Counseling Psych, Historical and Contemporary Issues, Peace Psychology. Leighton: PhD graduate student in the Psychology Department at the University of Arkansas. Knowledgable in the fields of social psychology, peace psychology, and justice and intergroup responses to transgressions of justice “Peace, conflict, and violence: Peace psychology in the 21st century.” Pg 4-5 She argues that our normal perceptual cognitive processes divide people into in-groups and out-groups. Those outside our group lie outside our scope of justice. Injustice that would be instantaneously confronted if it occurred to someone we love or know is barely noticed if it occurs to strangers or those who are invisible or irrelevant. We do not seem to be able to open our minds and our hearts to everyone, so we draw conceptual lines between those who are in and out of our moral circle. Those who fall outside are morally excluded, and become either invisible, or demeaned in some way so that we do not have to acknowledge the injustice they suffer. Moral exclusion is a human failing, but Opotow argues convincingly that it is an outcome of everyday social cognition. To reduce its nefarious effects, we must be vigilant in noticing and listening to oppressed, invisible, outsiders. Inclusionary thinking can be fostered by relationships, communication, and appreciation of diversity. Like Opotow, all the authors in this section point out that structural violence is not inevitable if we become aware of its operation, and build systematic ways to mitigate its effects. Learning about structural violence may be discouraging, overwhelming, or maddening, but these papers encourage us to step beyond guilt and anger, and begin to think about how to reduce structural violence. All the authors in this section note that the same structures (such as global communication and normal social cognition) which feed structural violence, can also be used to empower citizens to reduce it. In the long run, reducing structural violence by reclaiming neighborhoods, demanding social justice and living wages, providing prenatal care, alleviating sexism, and celebrating local cultures, will be our most surefooted path to building lasting peace. 2 Global justice requires a reduction in inequality and a focus on material rights. Okereke 07 Chukwumerije Okereke (Senior Research Associate at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia). Global Justice and Neoliberal Environmental Governance. Routledge 2007 Notwithstanding these drawbacks, these scholars provide very compelling arguments against mainstream conceptions of justice. In this approach, the obli- gation of justice is derived from the moral equality of human beings irrespective of their race, creed and nationality (O'Neill 1991; Brown 1992: 169; Beitz 1979; Sen 1999). The emphasis is on the positive rights of citizens - that is the kinds of rights that require state authorities to do something in order to provide citizens with the opportunities and abilities to act to fulfil their own potential - as opposed to negative rights/liberty, which refers to freedom from coercion and non-interfer- ence. The notion of justice as meeting needs, as seen in Chapter 2, figures very prominently in quite a number of the influencing materials that form the starting point for the discourse on global sustainable development. It has been suggested, in general, that this idea of justice is 'in-------------creasingly influential on non-governmen- tal organizations and the community of international policy makers' (Brighouse 2004: 67). In general, proponents of justice as need criticize liberal ideas of justice for concentrating on political equality (equal right to speech, vote, etc.) without addressing the problem of material equality - especially in the form of equal access to resources. They also claim that the ability to own property as well as the ability to exercise political rights (say the right to vote) depends first and foremost on the ability of citizens to function effectively. When the basic human needs of citizens, for example food, are not being met, other rights become merely 'hypothetical and empty' (Sen 1999: 75). Following on from this basic reasoning, the rights approach to justice is rejected and, in its place, human basic need is seen as the correct basis of political morality and the right benchmark for the determination of political judgment (Plant 1991: 185). In previous sections we saw that libertarian notions of justice sanction unlimited material inequality between citizens, provided that each person has obtained their possessions through legitimate means. All that matters is that the state should ensure fair rules of transitions and equality before the law. We saw also that liberal accounts of justice, especially Rawls' liberal egalitarianism, reject this formula- tion of justice because it does not secure the welfare of the less able in society. On the contrary, Rawls recommends that political institutions should be structured in ways that protect the interests of the least advantaged individuals in society. Accordingly, he sanctions societal inequities provided that such inequities work to the advantage of the least well-off. On closer reading, however, it turns out that Rawls difference principle (that inequities should work in favour of the least well- off) does not contain any explicit demand relating to the basic needs of the poor. As such, it is possible for Rawls' proviso to be met even when the least well-off in the society are denied their basic needs. For example, a distribution that changes from 20:10:2 to 100:30:4 satisfies Rawls difference principle but tells us noth- ing about the actual well-being of the least well-off. So, whereas some (mainly libertarians) criticize Rawls for not specifying the extent to which other people's liberty can be sacrificed for the sake of the least well-off, others (proponents of justice as meeting need) criticize Rawls for leaving the fate of the least well-off unprotected. Many scholars in the latter group sometimes argue along Marxian lines that as long as the means of production remain in the hands of the 'haves' there is no guarantee that inequities will benefit the least well-off. Maslow (1968), Bradshaw (1972) and Forder (1974) have all consequently argued that only the theory of need provides, as Maslow (1968: 4) puts it, 'the ultimate appeal for the determination of the good, bad, right and wrong' in a po- litical community. Without the theory of need, they say, it would be impossible to justify the welfare state in capitalist Western democracies. On the other hand, the co-existence of welfare and capitalism confirms the place of need as the criterion of moral political judgment. O'Neill (1991), Sen (1999) and Nussbaum (2000) have all extended versions of this argument to the international domain. O'Neill (1980, 1991) argues that adherence to the Kantian categorical imperative entails that the global community must act to remove the aching poverty and famine that threaten the existence of millions of people in developing countries. Sen (1999), for his part, calls for the strengthening of international institutions to make them able to assist the least well in the global society to achieve the measure of actual living that is required for the basic function and well-being of citizens. For Sen, as for O'Neill, all forms of liberty and rights are meaningful only when people have the substantive 'freedom to achieve actual living' (Sen 1999: 73; cf. O'Neill 1989: 288; 1986). Thomas Pogge also places emphasis on human basic need and starts his well-known book World Poverty and Human Rights with the rhetorical ques- tion: 'How can severe poverty of half of humankind continue despite enormous economic and technological progress and despite the enlightened moral norms and values of our heavily dominant Western civilization?' (Pogge 2002: 3). Part 5: Underview
Prefer reasonable aff interps and drop the argument on T. The judge should use reasonability with a bright line of the presence of link and impact turn ground for the negative. Since he has equal access to offense, there’s no abuse because structural access to the ballot is the same.
AFF RVIs: the 2AR doesn’t have enough time to cover both theory and substance since the 2NR is twice as long so I have half the offense at the end of the debate – I should be able to collapse to the highest layer.
Default to complexity theory for evaluating risk—scenario planning always fails Kavalski 7 Emilian, professor of IR – University of Western Sydney, PhD international politics – Loughborough University, “The fifth debate and the emergence of complex international relations theory: notes on the application of complexity theory to the study of international life,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs Volume 20, Issue 3, p. 435-454 As Beaumont (1994, 145) has quipped, there is something paradoxical about concluding an article on complexity, since the sequential unfolding of uncertainties, dilemmas and paradoxes works against focusing analysis and drawing neat conclusions. Yet, the perception of complexity does not automatically imply a ‘“defeatist” attitude’ (LaPorte 1975, 328). Therefore, this overview of the application of CT to world politics calls us to start thinking about the study of international life from a complex systems perspective. The proponents of CIR theory maintain that complexity cannot be regulated (and, thereby, structured through methodological tools), but that it is experienced. Such an assertion confronts the conventional wisdom of IR with the patterns of complexity: the former is premised on the separation of the ‘objects of knowledge from their contexts’ and the latter, while distinguishing between the objects, ‘interconnects’ them (Browaeys and Baets 2003, 335). The emergent attempts at comprehending the complexity of international life, therefore, have initiated the fifth debate in IR. The claim here is that this development has important emancipatory (and, thereby, policy) implications. Such a prospect has been made possible through the ontological innovation of CIR theory—the envisioning of social science imagination as a ‘system of interference’ that makes particular forms of the social real while foreclosing others (Law and Urry 2004, 397). On the one hand, CIR theory insists that complex systems thinking ‘should compel the strongest states to act in ways that reduce the vulnerability of the weakest’ (Snyder and Jervis 1993, 20). Rosenau (2003, 330), for instance, argues that the complexity (or what he calls ‘fragmegration’) of international life has made it possible for a wide range of individual and collective actors to put pressure on ‘rights-insensitive states’ across all the dimensions of state capabilities that have previously been impervious to demands on behalf of human rights. This acknowledges that activism generates its own countervailing forces that assume a continuing expansion of the analytical skills that enable people to alter their priorities across whole systems and subsystems (that is, alter habit-driven behaviour) as they discover that ‘the former cannot provide satisfying solutions to major problems and that the latter cannot contain low-intensity conflicts and maintain a satisfying degree of public order’ (Rosenau 1990, 457). Thus, in contrast to the reactionary stance of mainstream IR, CIR theory advocates an emancipatory agenda for a ‘new vision of politics that emphasises responsibility’ (Barnett 2005, 115) made possible by the promise of ‘immanent self-ordering’ (Parfitt 2006, 424). On the other hand, several CIR theoreticians have pointed out that the recognition of the complexity of international life diminishes the likelihood of recourse to force in world affairs—the suggestion is that the acknowledgement of the unpredictability and contradictions of international interactions as well as policies informed by CT should make foreign-policy-making more peaceful (Puente 2006; Suedfeld and Tetlock 1977). For instance, some have argued that policy-makers who recognize the unintended consequences of complexity indicate preferences for diplomacy over military confrontation (Raphael 1982; Wallace and Suedfeld 1988). For instance, the case of the 2003 invasion of Iraq points to the problem of reductionist decision-making—that is, even if the ‘rules of the game’ are completely known and understood at the local level, it might be impossible to predict regional/global outcomes; furthermore, the quandary of policy formulation based on parsimonious (simplifying) analysis is inherent rather than situational, because ‘planning based on predictions is not merely impractical; it is also logically impossible’ (Mathews et al 1999, 450). Such discussion of the emancipatory aspects of CIR theory is not intended as a distraction from some of its shortcomings. Instead, the suggestion is that these flaws necessitate further exploration of the CIR framework as it is alone in taking the discontinuities of international life seriously. This article contends that the application of the complexity paradigm to the study of international life would refocus the study of global affairs. Returning to the words of Herbert Wells in the epigraph of this article, the promise of CIR theory is that it can help lift ‘the darkest shadow’ from the totalizing discourses of terrorism and fear that seem to pervade current world politics by volunteering ‘imaginative thinking’ on the complexity of human societies and their interactions. Speaking from an abstract, “zero-point” perspective is one rooted in Western philosophies that attempt to conceal and hide ethnic, racial, gendered, and sexual epistemic locations through a universalizing knowledge that leads to domination and hierarchy Grosfoguel 11 (Ramon, Associate Professor Ethnic Studies Department, Chicano/Latino Studies) "Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality." TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1, no. 1, 4-6 The first point achieving a universal consciousness, and to dismiss non-Western knowledge as particularistic and, thus, unable to achieve universality to discuss is the contribution of racial/ethnic and feminist subaltern perspectives to epistemological questions. The hegemonic Eurocentric paradigms that have informed western philosophy and sciences in the “modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system” (Grosfoguel 2005; 2006b) for the last 500 hundred years assume a universalistic, neutral, objective point of view. Chicana and black feminist scholars (Moraga and Anzaldúa 1983; Collins 1990) as well as Third World scholars inside and outside the United States (Dussel 1977) reminded us that we always speak from a particular location in the power structures. Nobody escapes the class, sexual, gender, spiritual, linguistic, geographical, and racial hierarchies of the “modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system“. As feminist scholar Donna Haraway (1988) states, our knowledges are always situated. Black feminist scholars called this perspective “afro-centric epistemology” (Collins 1990) (which is not equivalent to the afrocentrist perspective) while Latin American Philosopher of Liberation Enrique Dussel called it “geopolitics of knowledge” (Dussel 1977) and, following Fanon (1967) and Anzaldúa (1987), I will use the term “body politics of knowledge.” This is not only a question about social values in knowledge production or the fact that our knowledge is always partial. The main point here is the locus of enunciation, that is, the geo-political and body-political location of the subject that speaks. In Western philosophy and sciences the subject that speaks is always hidden, concealed, erased from the analysis. The “ego-politics of knowledge” of Western philosophy has always privilege the myth of a non-situated “Ego”. Ethnic/racial/gender/sexual epistemic location and the subject that speaks are always decoupled. By delinking ethnic/racial/gender/sexual epistemic location from the subject that speaks, Western philosophy and sciences are able to produce a myth about a Truthful universal knowledge that covers up, that is, conceals who is speaking as well as the geo-political and body-political epistemic location in the structures of colonial power/knowledge from which the subject speaks. It is important here to distinguish the “epistemic location” from the “social location.” The fact that one is socially located in the oppressed side of power relations does not automatically mean that he/she is epistemically thinking from a subaltern epistemic location. Precisely, the success of the modern/colonial worldsystem consists in making subjects that are socially located in the oppressed side of the colonial difference, to think epistemically like the ones on the dominant positions. Subaltern epistemic perspectives are knowledge coming from below that produces a critical perspective of hegemonic knowledge in the power relations involved. I am not claiming an epistemic populism where knowledge produced from below is automatically an epistemic subaltern knowledge. What I am claiming is that all knowledges are epistemically located in the dominant or the subaltern side of the power relations and that this is related to the geo- and body-politics of knowledge. The disembodied and unlocated neutrality and objectivity of the ego-politics of knowledge is a Western myth. René Descartes, the founder of Modern Western Philosophy, inaugurates a new moment in the history of Western thought. He replaces God, as the foundation of knowledge in the Theo-politics of knowledge of the European Middle Ages, with (Western) Man as the foundation of knowledge in European Modern times. All the attributes of God are now extrapolated to (Western) Man. Universal Truth beyond time and space privileges access to the laws of the Universe, and the capacity to produce scientific knowledge and theory is now placed in the mind of Western Man. The Cartesian “Cogito ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am“) is the foundation of modern Western sciences. By producing a dualism between mind and body and between mind and nature, Descartes was able to claim non-situated, universal, Godeyed view knowledge. This is what the Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro- Gómez called the “point zero” perspective of Eurocentric philosophies (Castro-Gómez 2003). The “point zero” is the point of view that hides and conceals itself as being beyond a particular point of view, that is, the point of view that represents itself as being without a point of view. It is this “god-eye view” that always hides its local and particular perspective under an abstract universalism. Western philosophy privileges “ego politics of knowledge” over the “geopolitics of knowledge” and the “body-politics of knowledge.” Historically, this has allowed Western man (the gendered term is intentionally used here) to represent his knowledge as the only one capable of achieving a universal consciousness, and to dismiss non-Western knowledge as particularistic and, thus, unable to achieve universality. This epistemic strategy has been crucial for Western global designs. By hiding the location of the subject of enunciation, European/Euro-American colonial expansion and domination was able to construct a hierarchy of superior and inferior knowledge and, thus, of superior and inferior people around the world. We went from the sixteenth century characterization of “people without writing” to the eighteenth and nineteenth-century characterization of “people without history,” to the twentieth-century characterization of “people without development” and more recently, to the early twenty-first-century of “people without democracy”. We went from the sixteenth-century “rights of people” (Sepúlveda versus de las Casas debate in the University of Salamanca in the mid-sixteenth century), to the eighteenth-century “rights of man” (Enlightenment philosophers), and to the late twentieth-century “human rights.” All of these are part of global designs articulated to the simultaneous production and reproduction of an international division of labor of core/periphery that overlaps with the global racial/ethnic hierarchy of Europeans/non-Europeans. However, as Enrique Dussel (1994) has reminded us, the Cartesian “Cogito ergo sum” was preceded by 150 years (since the beginnings of the European colonial expansion in 1492) of the European “ego conquistus” (“I conquer, therefore I am”). The social, economic, political and historical conditions of possibility for a subject to assume the arrogance of becoming God-like and put himself as the foundation of all Truthful knowledge was the Imperial Being, that is, the subjectivity of those who are at the center of the world because they have already conquered it. What are the decolonial implications of this epistemological critique to our knowledge production and to our concept of world-system?
Abstract questioning is useless - debate should seek to design concrete alternatives. Bryant 12 (EDITED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE – the author said “she” and it was replaced with the word “to” – Levi Bryant is currently a Professor of Philosophy at Collin College. In addition to working as a professor, Bryant has also served as a Lacanian psychoanalyst. He received his Ph.D. from Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois, where he originally studied 'disclosedness' with the Heidegger scholar Thomas Sheehan. Bryant later changed his dissertation topic to the transcendental empiricism of Gilles Deleuze, “Critique of the Academic Left”, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/underpants-gnomes-a-critique-of-the-academic-left/) I must be in a mood today– half irritated, half amused –because I find myself ranting. Of course, that’s not entirely unusual. So this afternoon I came across a post by a friend quoting something discussing the environmental movement that pushed all the right button. As the post read,¶ For mainstream environmentalism– conservationism, green consumerism, and resource management –humans are conceptually separated out of nature and mythically placed in privileged positions of authority and control over ecological communities and their nonhuman constituents. What emerges is the fiction of a marketplace of ‘raw materials’ and ‘resources’ through which human-centered wants, constructed as needs, might be satisfied. The mainstream narratives are replete with such metaphors carbon trading!. Natural complexity mutuality, and diversity are rendered virtually meaningless given discursive parameters that reduce nature to discrete units of exchange measuring extractive capacities. Jeff Shantz, “Green Syndicalism”¶ While finding elements this description perplexing– I can’t say that I see many environmentalists treating nature and culture as distinct or suggesting that we’re sovereigns of nature –I do agree that we conceive much of our relationship to the natural world in economic terms (not a surprise that capitalism is today a universal). This, however, is not what bothers me about this passage.¶ What I wonder is just what we’re supposed to do even if all of this is true? What, given existing conditions, are we to do if all of this is right? At least green consumerism, conservation, resource management, and things like carbon trading are engaging in activities that are making real differences. From this passage– and maybe the entire text would disabuse me of this conclusion –it sounds like we are to reject all of these interventions because they remain tied to a capitalist model of production that the author (and myself) find abhorrent. The idea seems to be that if we endorse these things we are tainting our hands and would therefore do well to reject them altogether. The problem as I see it is that this is the worst sort of abstraction (in the Marxist sense) and wishful thinking. Within a Marxo-Hegelian context, a thought is abstract when it ignores all of the mediations in which a thing is embedded. For example, I understand a robust tree abstractly when I attribute its robustness, say, to its genetics alone, ignoring the complex relations to its soil, the air, sunshine, rainfall, etc., that also allowed it to grow robustly in this way. This is the sort of critique we’re always leveling against the neoliberals. They are abstract thinkers. In their doxa that individuals are entirely responsible for themselves and that they completely make themselves by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, neoliberals ignore all the mediations belonging to the social and material context in which human beings develop that play a role in determining the vectors of their life. They ignore, for example, that George W. Bush grew up in a family that was highly connected to the world of business and government and that this gave him opportunities that someone living in a remote region of Alaska in a very different material infrastructure and set of family relations does not have. To think concretely is to engage in a cartography of these mediations, a mapping of these networks, from circumstance to circumstance (what I call an “onto-cartography”). It is to map assemblages, networks, or ecologies in the constitution of entities.¶ Unfortunately, the academic left falls prey to its own form of abstraction. It’s good at carrying out critiques that denounce various social formations, yet very poor at proposing any sort of realistic constructions of alternatives. This because it thinks abstractly in its own way, ignoring how networks, assemblages, structures, or regimes of attraction would have to be remade to create a workable alternative. Here I’m reminded by the “underpants gnomes” depicted in South Park:¶ The underpants gnomes have a plan for achieving profit that goes like this: Phase 1: Collect Underpants Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Profit! They even have a catchy song to go with their work:¶ Well this is sadly how it often is with the academic left. Our plan seems to be as follows: Phase 1: Ultra-Radical Critique Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Revolution and complete social transformation! Our problem is that we seem perpetually stuck at phase 1 without ever explaining what is to be done at phase 2. Often the critiques articulated at phase 1 are right, but there are nonetheless all sorts of problems with those critiques nonetheless. In order to reach phase 3, we have to produce new collectives. In order for new collectives to be produced, people need to be able to hear and understand the critiques developed at phase 1. Yet this is where everything begins to fall apart. Even though these critiques are often right, we express them in ways that only an academic with a PhD in critical theory and post-structural theory can understand. How exactly is Adorno to produce an effect in the world if only PhD’s in the humanities can understand him? Who are these things for? We seem to always ignore these things and then look down our noses with disdain at the Naomi Kleins and David Graebers of the world. To make matters worse, we publish our work in expensive academic journals that only universities can afford, with presses that don’t have a wide distribution, and give our talks at expensive hotels at academic conferences attended only by other academics. Again, who are these things for? Is it an accident that so many activists look away from these things with contempt, thinking their more about an academic industry and tenure, than producing change in the world? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound! Seriously dudes and dudettes, what are you doing?¶ But finally, and worst of all, us Marxists and anarchists all too often act like assholes. We denounce others, we condemn them, we berate them for not engaging with the questions we want to engage with, and we vilify them when they don’t embrace every bit of the doxa that we endorse. We are every bit as off-putting and unpleasant as the fundamentalist minister or the priest of the inquisition (have people yet understood that Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus was a critique of the French communist party system and the Stalinist party system, and the horrific passions that arise out of parties and identifications in general?). This type of “revolutionary” is the greatest friend of the reactionary and capitalist because they do more to drive people into the embrace of reigning ideology than to undermine reigning ideology. These are the people that keep Rush Limbaugh in business. Well done!¶ But this isn’t where our most serious shortcomings lie. Our most serious shortcomings are to be found at phase 2. We almost never make concrete proposals for how things ought to be restructured, for what new material infrastructures and semiotic fields need to be produced, and when we do, our critique-intoxicated cynics and skeptics immediately jump in with an analysis of all the ways in which these things contain dirty secrets, ugly motives, and are doomed to fail.
eliminate the misunderstanding that mental illness is caused by personal faults; (ii) focus on the adverse effects of institutionalism; (iii) stress the importance of community care; and (iv) offer direct social contact with people with mental illness.