Tournament: voices | Round: 2 | Opponent: quarry lane | Judge: paras kumar
Clinton is winning now, but it’s close
Huffington Post, 11-8-2016, "2016 General Election: Trump vs. Clinton," http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/2016-general-election-trump-vs-clinton
HuffPost Model Our model of the polls suggests Clinton is very likely leading. (In 99 of simulations, Clinton led Trump.) Choices Click a choice to show or hide it on the chart. Clinton48.3 Trump41.9 Undecided6.2 Other3.6

Public popularity supports nuclear energy despite the Fukushima disaster – best polls prove
Riffkin 15Gallup, Inc., 3-30-15, "U.S. Support for Nuclear Energy at 51," Gallup, http://www.gallup.com/poll/182180/support-nuclear-energy.aspx

Trump strongly supports nuke power. Causes a shift to the g.o.p. 

Follett 16 Andrew Follett, 2-20-2016, "Here’s Where The 2016 Candidates Stand On Nuclear Power," Daily Caller, http://dailycaller.com/2016/02/20/heres-where-the-2016-candidates-stand-on-nuclear-power/

Trump is horrible on issues of womens rights, turns case.
Nina Bahadur, 8-19-2015, "18 Real Things Donald Trump Has Actually Said About Women," Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/18-real-things-donald-trump-has-said-about-women_us_55d356a8e4b07addcb442023

Tournament: harvard westlake | Round: 2 | Opponent: Katy Taylor | Judge: Kathy Bond
Protests drive down endowments
Anemona Hartocollis, 8-4-2016, "College Students Protest, Alumni’s Fondness Fades and Checks Shrink," New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/05/us/college-protests-alumni-donations.html?_r=1
Scott MacConnell cherishes the memory of his years at Amherst College, where he discovered his future métier as a theatrical designer. But protests on campus over cultural and racial sensitivities last year soured his feelings. Now Mr. MacConnell, who graduated in 1960, is expressing his discontent through his wallet. In June, he cut the college out of his will. “As an alumnus of the college, I feel that I have been lied to, patronized and basically dismissed as an old, white bigot who is insensitive to the needs and feelings of the current college community,” Mr. MacConnell, 77, wrote in a letter to the college’s alumni fund in December, when he first warned that he was reducing his support to the college to a token $5. A backlash from alumni is an unexpected aftershock of the campus disruptions of the last academic year. Although fund-raisers are still gauging the extent of the effect on philanthropy, some colleges — particularly small, elite liberal arts institutions — have reported a decline in donations, accompanied by a laundry list of complaints. Alumni from a range of generations say they are baffled by today’s college culture. Among their laments: Students are too wrapped up in racial and identity politics. They are allowed to take too many frivolous courses. They have repudiated the heroes and traditions of the past by judging them by today’s standards rather than in the context of their times. Fraternities are being unfairly maligned, and men are being demonized by sexual assault investigations. And university administrations have been too meek in addressing protesters whose messages have seemed to fly in the face of free speech. Continue reading the main story RELATED COVERAGE Racial Tension and Protests on Campuses Across the Country NOV. 10, 2015 With Diversity Comes Intensity in Amherst Free Speech Debate NOV. 28, 2015 Yale Professor and Wife, Targets of Protests, Resign as College Heads MAY 26, 2016 At Princeton, Woodrow Wilson, a Heralded Alum, Is Recast as an Intolerant One NOV. 22, 2015 Fighting for Free Speech on America’s Campuses AUG. 1, 2016 RECENT COMMENTS Michael Green August 8, 2016 New lyrics to Amherst College songOh, the Trustees of Amherst told that soldier of the kingTo go back to across the sea.And to the Frenchies... globalnomad August 8, 2016 My first master's degree was a formal study of the intellectual development of college students. The key to intellectual advancement is... Clinton August 5, 2016 So incredibly privileged folks (many of whom have careers in the less than savory field of finance) are mad about college students doing... SEE ALL COMMENTS Scott C. Johnston, who graduated from Yale in 1982, said he was on campus last fall when activists tried to shut down a free speech conference, “because apparently they missed irony class that day.” He recalled the Yale student who was videotaped screaming at a professor, Nicholas Christakis, that he had failed “to create a place of comfort and home” for students in his capacity as the head of a residential college. “I don’t think anything has damaged Yale’s brand quite like that,” said Mr. Johnston, a founder of an internet start-up and a former hedge fund manager. “This is not your daddy’s liberalism.” “The worst part,” he continued, “is that campus administrators are wilting before the activists like flowers.” Yale College’s alumni fund was flat between this year and last, according to Karen Peart, a university spokeswoman. Among about 35 small, selective liberal arts colleges belonging to the fund-raising organization Staff, or Sharing the Annual Fund Fundamentals, that recently reported their initial annual fund results for the 2016 fiscal year, 29 percent were behind 2015 in dollars, and 64 percent were behind in donors, according to a steering committee member, Scott Kleinheksel of Claremont McKenna College in California. His school, which was also the site of protests, had a decline in donor participation but a rise in giving. At Amherst, the amount of money given by alumni dropped 6.5 percent for the fiscal year that ended June 30, and participation in the alumni fund dropped 1.9 percentage points, to 50.6 percent, the lowest participation rate since 1975, when the college began admitting women, according to the college. The amount raised from big donors decreased significantly. Some of the decline was because of a falloff after two large reunion gifts last year, according to Pete Mackey, a spokesman for Amherst. At Princeton, where protesters unsuccessfully demanded the removal of Woodrow Wilson’s name from university buildings and programs, undergraduate alumni donations dropped 6.6 percent from a record high the year before, and participation dropped 1.9 percentage points, according to the university’s website. A Princeton spokesman, John Cramer, said there was no evidence the drop was connected to campus protests. Carolyn A. Martin, Amherst’s president, said she was not surprised that student protests had contributed to the decline in fund-raising. “I think colleges are places where complicated society wide issues are always thrashed out, sometimes across generations,” Dr. Martin, known as Biddy, said in an interview. Dr. Martin defended Amherst as a place where free speech and high standards still held sway, and said she had pushed back against protesters when necessary. Much of the alumni unrest at Amherst crystallized around the college’s decision to renounce its unofficial mascot, Lord Jeffery Amherst, known as Lord Jeff, an 18th-century British commander in the French and Indian War who gave his name to the town and, by extension, the college. A new generation of students has criticized his attitude toward Native Americans; he endorsed the idea of spreading smallpox among enemy tribes by giving them infected blankets. “He hated the Indians, because any general in his position would have,” said Gordon Hall III, class of ’52, a commercial real estate investor. He and Don MacNaughton, class of ’65, a retired lawyer and a history buff, wrote a booklet concluding that Lord Jeff had been unfairly maligned. Mr. MacNaughton paid for his share of its publication and promotion online with thousands of dollars he would have otherwise given to the college. “I feel that money is going to the benefit of Amherst College, in any event,” Mr. MacNaughton said. The older generation remembers Lord Amherst not as a genocidal warmonger, but as the inspiration for a beloved college fight song, written by a member of the class of 1906. The song, which Mr. Hall, 86, can still sing by heart, winks knowingly at Lord Amherst’s misdeeds with the line, “To the Frenchman and the Indians, he didn’t do a thing.” Mr. Hall, whose grandfather, father, uncles and son went to Amherst, archly calls himself “a powerhouse of nepotism.” But he has endowed a scholarship and says he welcomes students whose backgrounds are different from his. “I get letters every year about the recipient of my scholarship fund,” he said. “The name will always be a name that is ethnically or racially — you can tell — not like Hall. And so be it. You’ve got to go with the flow to some degree.” But, he wonders, “where did this supercorrectness thing come from?” In the category of supercorrectness, some alumni note that in March, a new director of the Women’s and Gender Center asked to be addressed as “they,” rather than “he” or “she.” “This is not a joke,” Paul Ruxin, who identified himself as “Old Curmudgeon class of ’65,” wrote to his classmates shortly before he died in April. David Pennock, class of ’60, one of four generations of his family to have gone to Amherst, is so invested in the college that he bridles at incorrect pronunciations of the name. “Our Amherst is pronounced without the H,” he said. His Amherst was tough but paternalistic, he said. When he fell behind in classes, the admissions dean, Eugene Wilson, class of ’29 and his father’s fraternity roommate, took him trout fishing on the Deerfield River and warned that he was headed for the “underachiever program,” a forced leave of absence. As class agent, Mr. Pennock did not reduce his giving, but he is one of a group of alumni pushing for the return of a core curriculum. Robert Longsworth, class of ’99, the seventh in his family to have attended Amherst, has been the president of the New York City alumni association and a class agent. But he has withdrawn, he said, because of his sense that the college has become “so wrapped up in this politically charged mission rather than staying in its lane and being an institution of higher education.” Mr. Longsworth, 39, who works in the financial industry, said he thought erasing history only made people more vulnerable to racism. “When the administration and faculty and ultimately a lot of the student body spends a great deal of time on witch hunts, I think that a lot of that intellectual rigor is forgone,” he said. Mr. Longsworth said he had heard from “friends who went to Hamilton, Trinity, Williams, Bates, Middlebury, Hobart, who are not pleased at what’s happened on campus, and they’ve kind of stepped away.” For these alumni, he said, refusing to write a check “seems to be the only lever that can make a difference.”

Endowments are key to U.S. competitiveness and innovation
Steven R. Leigh, March 14 2014, "Endowments and the future of higher education," No Publication, http://www.colorado.edu/artsandsciences/news-events/message-dean/endowments-and-future-higher-education
Prominent universities rely heavily on endowments to support their many academic missions. Yale University, often cited as an exemplar in terms of success in endowments, operates with an endowment of approximately $20 billion, which probably produces enough annual income to pay tuition for every enrolled student. Income from Yale’s endowment funds a huge spectrum of academic pursuits, ranging from funding for women students in science, to professorships, to outreach programs for local teachers. A significant endowment makes the university better, allowing the institution to recruit top faculty and students, while funding research and outreach more generally. Endowments help reduce the costs of education in many ways. Most importantly, endowments allow universities to support professors, graduate students and undergraduate students in undertaking visionary, high-risk, high-reward research. Endowed professorships are reserved for only the most talented professors, and income from endowments helps the university support faculty, students and direct costs of research. Endowments also support student scholarships and programming. In general, endowments help universities offset educational costs while placing the university on the cutting edge of scholarly discovery, research and creative work. There is a new urgency in seeking better endowment funding across the United States. In 2013, student loan debt for current students and graduates topped $1.08 trillion (http://rt.com/usa/student-loan-debts-top-trillion-957/). This number has been driven by declines in state funding for universities and resultant increases in tuition across the United States since 2002. CU-Boulder’s story is among the most stark: Colorado decreased state funding from 2002 to 2012 by 48 percent, a larger percentage decline than any other state (http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=125542). Almost all public universities have raised tuition steadily in the last dozen years, and many premiere public institutions have reached the $18,000-$20,000 range in tuition per year for in-state students (CU’s in-state tuition remains relatively low, about $8,700 per year). The three main sources of tuition revenue are student wages, loans and family savings: All are hard-earned, requiring sacrifices and trade-offs. One of the most important and difficult trade-offs is time. Students who work, like many at CU-Boulder, must balance careful attention to school work with competing commitments to employers and businesses. These broad trends point directly to the need for CU-Boulder’s College of Arts and Sciences to increase endowment funding across the college. Endowments drive improvements in the quality of an institution and reflect alums, donors and supporters who recognize the importance of research universities in the 21st century. Endowed professorships are the first and most important component of increasing our academic quality. Named chairs recognize significant faculty achievements and help the university support faculty salary and research. CU-Boulder professors are among the most productive in the nation and are heavily recruited by competitors, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Cornell, Berkeley, Illinois, UC Irvine and many others. Often, these competitors offer our faculty endowed professorships, conferring prestige and research support. CU must provide its faculty with comparable support to be competitive. A second major area for endowments is student scholarships and, for graduate students, fellowships. A stable source of income that helps pay tuition is the most direct and effective way to offset the costs of education. Endowed scholarships are also effective recruiting tools for admitting the nation’s best to CU. Our dynamic programs, departments and majors are attracting more and more applicants, including the best in the nation. Like faculty support, endowed scholarships and fellowships confer prestige and, most importantly, allow students to focus entirely on academics without balancing jobs and worrying about future loan repayments. Finally, endowment funding for programs greatly enriches the institution, providing capabilities that are difficult to attain when tuition revenue provides the majority of funding. Institutions funded mainly by tuition must make sure that expenditures directly benefit students, which sometimes limits options for innovation and risk-taking. Programmatic funding enables faculty and students to take risks in their research and creative work. For example, in my own field, this might involve traveling to an unexplored region to prospect for human fossils or archaeological sites. Support for high-risk projects allows our faculty and students to develop new areas of knowledge, benefitting society by broadening the capacity of the institution to innovate. The future of higher education, including CU’s future, depends to a large degree on how successfully we can build major endowments. Ultimately, U.S. competitiveness and leadership in the global knowledge economy depends on this as well. For alums, donors and supporters, endowments indelibly affirm the importance of higher education and enduringly preserve its viability and vitality.
Innovation solves great power war

Taylor 4 – Professor of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Mark, “The Politics of Technological Change: International Relations versus Domestic Institutions,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 4/1/2004, http://www.scribd.com/doc/46554792/Taylor) RGP
I. Introduction Technological innovation is of central importance to the study of international relations (IR), affecting almost every aspect of the sub-field. First and foremost, a nation’s technological capability has a significant effect on its economic growth, industrial might, and military prowess; therefore relative national technological capabilities necessarily influence the balance of power between states, and hence have a role in calculations of war and alliance formation. Second, technology and innovative capacity also determine a nation’s trade profile, affecting which products it will import and export, as well as where multinational corporations will base their production facilities. Third, insofar as innovation-driven economic growth both attracts investment and produces surplus capital, a nation’s technological ability will also affect international financial flows and who has power over them. Thus, in broad theoretical terms, technological change is important to the study of IR because of its overall implications for both the relative and absolute power of states. And if theory alone does not convince, then history also tells us that nations on the technological ascent generally experience a corresponding and dramatic change in their global stature and influence, such as Britain during the first industrial revolution, the United States and Germany during the second industrial revolution, and Japan during the twentieth century. Conversely, great powers which fail to maintain their place at the technological frontier generally drift and fade from influence on international scene. This is not to suggest that technological innovation alone determines international politics, but rather that shifts in both relative and absolute technological capability have a major impact on international relations, and therefore need to be better understood by IR scholars. Indeed, the importance of technological innovation to international relations is seldom disputed by IR theorists. Technology is rarely the sole or overriding causal variable in any given IR theory, but a broad overview of the major theoretical debates reveals the ubiquity of technological causality. For example, from Waltz to Posen, almost all Realists have a place for technology in their explanations of international politics. At the very least, they describe it as an essential part of the distribution of material capabilities across nations, or an indirect source of military doctrine. And for some, like Gilpin quoted above, technology is the very cornerstone of great power domination, and its transfer the main vehicle by which war and change occur in world politics. Jervis tells us that the balance of offensive and defensive military technology affects the incentives for war. Walt agrees, arguing that technological change can alter a state’s aggregate power, and thereby affect both alliance formation and the international balance of threats. Liberals are less directly concerned with technological change, but they must admit that by raising or lowering the costs of using force, technological progress affects the rational attractiveness of international cooperation and regimes. Technology also lowers information and transactions costs and thus increases the applicability of international institutions, a cornerstone of Liberal IR theory. And in fostering flows of trade, finance, and information, technological change can lead to Keohane’s interdependence or Thomas Friedman et al’s globalization. Meanwhile, over at the “third debate”, Constructivists cover the causal spectrum on the issue, from Katzenstein’s “cultural norms” which shape security concerns and thereby affect technological innovation; to Wendt’s “stripped down technological determinism” in which technology inevitably drives nations to form a world state. However most Constructivists seem to favor Wendt, arguing that new technology changes people’s identities within society, and sometimes even creates new cross-national constituencies, thereby affecting international politics. Of course, Marxists tend to see technology as determining all social relations and the entire course of history, though they describe mankind’s major fault lines as running between economic classes rather than nation-states. Finally, Buzan and Little remind us that without advances in the technologies of transportation, communication, production, and war, international systems would not exist in the first place.

Tournament: harvard westlake | Round: 2 | Opponent: Katy Taylor | Judge: Kathy Bond
Cp text: Public colleges and universities in the United States ought not restrict constitutionally protected speech other than fraternity advertising, organization, and membership and the distribution of revenge porn.
To clarify, both the cp, and both prongs of it are unconditional.
Fraternities sites of rape, death, and serious injury
Flanagan 14 (Caitlin, the Atlantic, citing Douglas Fierberg, attorney specializing in fraternity-related litigation, “The Dark Power of Fraternities”, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/03/the-dark-power-of-fraternities/357580/)
“Until proven otherwise,” Fierberg told me in April of fraternities, “they all are very risky organizations for young people to be involved in.” He maintains that fraternities “are part of an industry that has tremendous risk and a tremendous history of rape, serious injury, and death, and the vast majority share common risk-management policies that are fundamentally flawed. Most of them are awash in alcohol. And most if not all of them are bereft of any meaningful adult supervision.” As for the risk-management policies themselves: “They are primarily designed to take the nationals’ fingerprints off the injury and deaths, and I don’t believe that they offer any meaningful provisions.” The fraternity system, he argues, is “the largest industry in this country directly involved in the provision of alcohol to underage people.” The crisis-management plans reveal that in “the foreseeable future” there may be “the death or serious injury” of a healthy young person at a fraternity function.
Ban on campus fraternities solves – even banning fraternity advertising alone is good
Ryan 14 (Julia, The Atlantic, “How Colleges Could Get Rid of Fraternities”, http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/how-colleges-could-get-rid-of-fraternities/284176/)
Perhaps the most obvious way to end fraternities is for universities to simply remove Greek life from their campuses. “It’s not even really a turf war anymore between universities and Greek groups because it’s as as if universities have given up,” Alexandra Robbins, author of Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities, said in an interview. “If higher education really wanted to get rid of Greek groups, they could. All universities would have to do is put their foot down, but they don’t.” Universities could say no Greek groups or events on campus and prohibit advertising for Greek life on campus. Elizabeth A. Armstrong, a sociologist at University of Michigan and co-author of Paying for the Party, suggested universities could quell the power of Greek life just by treating fraternities like other clubs: “One method would be to say okay you are not so special. You do not get the special attention of the dean. We are going to actually allow other student groups on campus equal power,” she said. “We are going to supervise you just as much as everybody else.”
Fraternities are protected by the First Amendment's right to free speech
Lukianoff 11 Greg Lukianoff (President and CEO, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), "To Survive, Fraternities Need to Stand for Something, Anything," Huffington Post, 8/1/2015 AZ
A lot of fraternities seem to know that their freedom of association is protected by the First Amendment. (While the freedom to join and form groups is not technically listed in the text of the First Amendment, it is understood to arise from the protections of freedom of speech and the right to assembly.) What fraternities often do not know, however, is that there are several different kinds of freedom of association protected by the First Amendment, and they are not all made equal. The strongest kind of freedom of association protected by the First Amendment is the right to “intimate” association, best represented by the family. Our government recognizes that the bonds of family are particularly important and that it should do its best to avoid actions that interfere with this bond. The second strongest kind of freedom of association is called “expressive” association. Sensibly, courts understand that the right to freedom of expression would not mean a great deal if we are forbidden from joining together with like-minded individuals to amplify the power of our voices and take collective action. This understanding forms the basis of our right to form groups around commonly held beliefs whether they are religious, secular, or ideological. Everything from Mothers Against Drunk Driving to NORML is a kind of expressive association. (This includes my nonprofit, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, as well.)

Second advantage to the cp is revenge porn
Callie Rennison 14 (associate professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver) and Lynn Addington (associate professor in the Department of Justice, Law and Criminology, School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, DC), "Violence Against College Women: A Review to Identify Limitations in Defining the Problem and Inform Future Research" Trauma, Violence, and Abuse. July 2014. Vol. 15, no. 3. Pgs. 159-169. http://tva.sagepub.com/content/15/3/159.full~~#sec-11~~
The current violence against college women literature has expanded knowledge about the prevalence and characteristics of sexual violence occurring on campus. These findings, in turn, have been translated into policies designed to reduce this form of violence and assist victims. Additional work has considered the prevalence and characteristics of dating violence and stalking against college women and also has informed specific programmatic development on campuses. Despite these advances, our review of the literature identifies three important gaps that limit defining violence against college women and arguably inhibit future development in this area. The most critical gap or limitation is the lack of any assessment of the literature to consider the current approaches of how violence is defined and operationalized. This assessment would help identify whether behaviors are missing that should be included as well as promote a current and comprehensive understanding violence against college women. The two other limitations are not as directly related to defining violence but would assist in conducting such a reassessment. The second limitation concerns the need to provide a context for the victimization experiences of college women, especially the importance of comparing these experiences with those of young adult women who are not students. A third, and related, limitation concerns a need to consider how ‘‘college student’’ is defined and measured. The first limitation concerns the failure to explicitly define violence as it is used in the area of violence against college women. As a result, researchers tend to implicitly define violence against college women as synonymous with sexual violence and to a lesser extent dating violence and stalking. No effort has been made to take stock of the scope of this definition and reassess how well the construct has been operationalized. In addition, no explicit discussion has occurred with regard to whether using a criminal justice perspective or a public health perspective would assist in defining violence in this area. As a result, the violence against college women area has evolved to incorporate aspects of both perspectives but also has failed to fully embrace aspects of either. For example, if a criminal justice perspective was accepted, this view would encourage inclusion of other forms of violent crime such as robbery and nonsexual assaults that are currently absent from the literature. Similarly if a public health perspective were utilized, this focus would expand the study to emerging forms of violence that may or may not be criminalized such as so-called revenge porn (or the posting of intimate and explicit photographs online) and other forms of online reputational harm as well as forms of criminal behavior that are committed by intimates such as cyberstalking or identity theft (which can generate significant emotional harm). The lack of a specific discussion and consistent definition is problematic for three reasons. First, the lack of a clearly defined construct that is shared in the field inhibits comparisons across studies and potential gains in knowledge that could be accomplished by pooling findings. Similarly, it can create unnecessary confusion and tension since specific disciplinary perspectives are not explicitly identified.
The distribution of revenge pornography is constitutionally protected speech
Goldberg 16 Erica Goldberg Columbia Law Review Volume 116, No. 3 April 2016 "FREE SPEECH CONSEQUENTIALISM"

The regulation of revenge porn presents thorny First Amendment issues, even though the speech is considered both highly injurious and of low value.300 Some argue that revenge porn can be regulated as obscenity,301 but, like much pornography, sexually explicit speech that does not rise to the level of obscenity is still protected speech.302 Criminal statutes and torts based on the invasion of privacy and emotional distress caused by revenge porn compromise the freedom to distribute protected speech lawfully obtained. Indeed, the Supreme Court has recognized a right for the media to publish even unlawfully obtained content, so long as the publisher was not involved in the illegal so long as the publisher was not involved in the illegal conduct that produced the content.303 And in United States v. Stevens , the Supreme Court held that individuals cannot be held criminally liable for distributing speech depicting illegal acts, so long as the individuals did not perpetrate the underlying act.304 Revenge porn, as defined here, is both legally obtained and depicts a legal act. In the ultimate articulation of free speech consequentialism, Mary Anne Franks argues for criminalization of revenge porn because "some expressions of free speech are just considered so socially harmful and don't contribute any benefits to society."305 Yet this does not separate revenge porn from any number of categories of protected speech that may cause others emotional distress and are considered by some to pos- sess little value; this is nothing more than a call for judges to make whole- sale and retail judgments about the value and harms that flow from particular forms of speech. If revenge porn can be regulated, legislators should not target the victim's emotional distress or the invasion of pri- vacy, as these focal points threaten to undermine strong free speech pro- tections exceptional to America's free speech regime.
Revenge porn causes a chilling effect for victims who are afraid to speak out and are silenced. Causes psychological and irreversible violence to victims.  
Citron 14 Danielle Keats Citron Mary Anne Franks 2014 "CRIMINALIZING REVENGE PORN" Wake Forest Law Review digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2424andcontext=fac_pubs
Victims struggle especially with anxiety, and some suffer panic attacks. Anorexia nervosa and depression are common ailments for individuals who are harassed online.33 Researchers have found that cyber harassment victims’ anxiety grows more severe over time.34 Victims have difficulty thinking positive thoughts and doing their work. According to a study conducted by the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, over 80 of revenge porn victims experience severe emotional distress and anxiety.35 Revenge porn is often a form of domestic violence. Frequently, the intimate images are themselves the result of an abuser’s coercion of a reluctant partner.36 In numerous cases, abusers have threatened to disclose intimate images of their partners when victims attempt to leave the relationship.37 Abusers use the threat of disclosure to keep their partners under their control, making good on the threat once their partners find the courage to leave. The professional costs of revenge porn are steep. Because Internet searches of victims’ names prominently display their naked images or videos, many lose their jobs. Schools have terminated teachers whose naked pictures appeared online. A government agency ended a woman’s employment after a coworker circulated her nude photograph to colleagues.38 Victims may be unable to find work at all. Most employers rely on candidates’ online reputations as an employment screen. According to a 2009 study commissioned by Microsoft, nearly 80 percent of employers consult search engines to collect intelligence on job applicants, and, about 70 of the time, they reject applicants due to their findings.39 Common reasons for not interviewing and hiring applicants include concerns about their “lifestyle,” “inappropriate” online comments, and “unsuitable” photographs, videos, and information about them.40 Recruiters do not contact victims to see if they posted the nude photos of themselves or if someone else did in violation of their trust. The “simple but regrettable truth is that after consulting search results, employers don’t call revenge porn victims to schedule” interviews or to extend offers. 41 Employers do not want to hire individuals whose search results might reflect poorly on the employer. 42 To avoid further abuse, targeted individuals withdraw from online activities, which can be costly in many respects. Closing down one’s blog can mean a loss of income and other career opportunities.43 In some fields, blogging is key to getting a job. According to technology blogger Robert Scoble, people who do not blog are “never going to be included in the technology industry.” 44 When victims shut down their profiles on social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, they are saddled with low social media influence scores that can impair their ability to obtain employment.45 Companies like Klout measure people’s online influence by looking at their number of social media followers, updates, likes, retweets, and shares. Not uncommonly, employers refuse to hire individuals with low social media influence scores. 46 Aside from these traditional harms, revenge porn can also amount to a degrading form of sexual harassment. It exposes victims’ sexuality in humiliating ways. Victims’ naked photos appear on slut-shaming47 sites, such as Cheaterville.com and MyEx.com. Once their naked images are exposed, anonymous strangers can send e-mail messages that threaten rape. Some have said: “First I will rape you, then I’ll kill you.” 48 Victims internalize these frightening and demeaning messages.49 Women would more likely suffer harm as a result of the posting of their naked images than their male counterparts.

Tournament: harvard westlake | Round: 2 | Opponent: Katy Taylor | Judge: Kathy Bond
Harassment cases persist because of a lack of clarity in requirements – a commitment to accountability is key. Saha 8/22

MADHUMITA SAHA The writer is an academic-turned journalist. She taught history at Drexel University and New York University before joining WION. Mon, 22 Aug 2016 http://www.dnaindia.com/world/column-academia-s-feet-of-clay-sexual-misconduct-and-gender-discrimination-in-schools-2247826

In the present context, Tyann Sorrell ’s recourse to legal action seems an obvious choice. But the legal history of sexual harassment shows that the road to public protest had been tough and long. Professor Carrie N. Baker shows in her book, The Women’s Movement against Sexual Harassment, how characterizations of sexual behaviour in workplaces have evolved from being considered a moral problem of a working woman, to a social problem of male lust and seduction, and eventually in the 1970s, such acts came to be interpreted as acts of violence against women and a violation of women’s civil rights.¶ In response to public awakening to the issue, the judges ruled in the William v. Saxbe federal court case of 1976 that sexual harassment is a form of illegal sex discrimination under Title VII. Before this verdict, the US courts were of the opinion that sexual harassment was merely disharmony in a personal relationship, the result of personal urges of individuals, and not part of company policy.¶ We trust in numbers: quantifying sexual harassment in the campus¶ ¶ American universities with the most reports of rape, 2014¶ University campuses are particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment of various types. Different sorts of authorities - formal, informal, achieved as well as ascribed- are exercised over students, assistant professors, and administrative assistants. According to the federal campus safety data, nearly 100 US colleges and universities had at least 10 reports of rape on their main campuses in 2014, with Brown University and the University of Connecticut tied for the highest annual total of 43 each.¶ Recently, Association of American Universities (AAU) conducted a Campus Climate Survey on Sexual Assault and Sexual Misconduct among 150,000 students at 27 schools, including most of the Ivy League. Of the female undergraduate student respondents, 23.1 per cent informed the surveyors that they have experienced sexual misconduct due to physical force, threats of physical force, or incapacitation.¶ 2¶ Per cent of college students reporting sexual assault, 2015¶ One of the most disturbing revelations of the survey indicates that overall rates of reporting to campus officials and law enforcement were rather low.¶ Depending on the specific type of sexual harassment, only five per cent to 28 per cent of respondents claim to have reported their experience of sexual harassment to the appropriate authorities. According to the AAU Climate Survey, the most common reason for not reporting incidents of sexual assault and sexual misconduct was that it was not considered serious enough. Among other reasons, students cited they were “embarrassed, ashamed or that it would be too emotionally difficult,” and because they “did not think anything would be done about it.”¶ Taking it from here to a safer future¶ There is nothing peculiar about sexual harassment and misconduct in the US educational institutions. Embedded in the similar kind of power structure, I am sure, such acts of sexual transgression is common enough occurrence in any university under the sun. So, let’s not point a finger and try to make a case of western sexual promiscuity out of it; we are all living in fragile glass houses.¶ On 14 December 2015, Smriti Irani, the former human resource and development minister of India reported, that as per University Grants Commission (UGC), there have been 295 cases of sexual harassment against women during 2014-15 in various institutes of higher learning in India.¶ As various scholars and activists working on sexual misconduct have already pointed out, we have to be aware that even when a sexual assault has not taken place, a person can experience sexual harassment; a hostile, offensive and intimidating atmosphere - created in academic spaces - does count as sex harassment too.¶ Women belonging to minority groups of different race, caste, and religion are more vulnerable. As are people belonging to the third gender.¶ While acknowledging that women are more vulnerable to sexual conduct, we also need to come up with regulations that look into the harassment suffered by other genders too. Recently, the UGC has taken the right step towards this direction when it introduced the first gender neutral regulation on sexual harassment in India. Under this regulation, both male students and students of the third gender in universities can lodge complaints against sexual harassment faced by them.¶ Tyann Sorrell 's case, and similar other cases reported from academic institutions, should be used to create greater awareness. Sexual harassment is indeed ubiquitous; such heinous crime is not solely committed by blacks, poor and the uneducated, as is widely perceived. Power is deeply entrenched in such actions and, thus, the perpetrators often come from the most privileged section of our societies.

Successful lawsuits force school accountability to fight harassment. Silbaugh 15

Silbaugh, Katharine Law Alumni Scholar¶ BA magna cum laude, Amherst College¶ JD with high honors and Order of the Coif, University of Chicago¶ . "Reactive to Proactive: Title IX's Unrealized Capacity to Prevent Campus Sexual Assault." BUL Rev. 95 (2015): 1049.

In March of 2013, President Obama signed a re-authorization of the¶ Violence Against Women Act.97 Within the re-authorization were amendments¶ to the Clery Act, which requires educational institutions to disclose statistics¶ about the number of sexual assaults on campus in an annual report that must be¶ distributed to students and prospective students, engaging market pressures to¶ press universities into addressing sexual assault.98 The amendments to the¶ Clery Act (entitled the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act, or SaVE¶ Act)99 strengthen reporting requirements and go beyond DOE’s¶ “recommendation” that colleges educate staff and students to require¶ educational institutions to educate staff and students about campus sexual assault, including statements that sexual assault is prohibited, definitions of¶ sexual assault and consent, bystander tools, and awareness programs for new¶ students.100 The Clery Act is enforced by the DOE primarily through fines, but¶ it is not a part of Title IX. While the focus of the Clery Act remains the¶ accurate reporting of crimes, it will serve as a limited and defined mechanism¶ for getting colleges to introduce education and prevention strategies to¶ students. However, the Clery Act, unlike Title IX, does not mandate equality in¶ the provision of education; a school can check off requirements under the new¶ Clery Amendments without evaluating their efficacy or revising them toward¶ the particular goal of equal educational opportunity. Title IX has a far greater¶ capacity to address sexual assault prevention because colleges could be¶ compelled to take whatever reasonable steps can be shown to reduce assaults,¶ or combination of steps as research about efficacy continues to develop. The¶ DOE has the ability to develop a far more comprehensive approach to assault¶ prevention under Title IX than the specific prescriptions the Clery¶ Amendments mandate.¶ Does the Gebser framework constrain Title IX from doing prevention work?¶ Not for the DOE. To the contrary, the DOE has effectively used Title IX to¶ change campus culture more broadly already. Consider Title IX as the rest of¶ the world has: as sports law. Title IX applied pressure on institutions to offer¶ equality in programming and in the educational experience. Differences in¶ interest in participation couldn’t be offered as an excuse for noncompliance¶ with Title IX: if there was not a culture of sports for girls and women, schools¶ needed to create that culture to ensure equality.101 While it was not smooth¶ sailing throughout, schools largely achieved that cultural shift. This may have¶ been possible because relative to other institutions, schools are good creators¶ of culture. When schools first tried to say that they simply found the world as¶ is, with girls not wanting to participate in sports at the rate boys did, the DOE¶ pushed back. In response, schools became creative at expanding and¶ cultivating interest in sports among girls and women. The social change around¶ girls in sports resulted in large part from a charge to schools to cultivate that¶ change, taking concrete steps that would have the effect of changing cultural¶ dynamics. The colleges faced cultural resistance to change and allegations that¶ they were going too far in redesigning athletic programs and opportunities,102 much as colleges do today as they deliberate over the right sexual assault¶ prevention measures.103 But they demonstrated a powerful ability to transform¶ the culture and expectations of equality in sports participation.¶ Title IX operates primarily as a spending clause regulation overseen by the¶ DOE. The DOE should not have felt constrained by the doctrine developed to¶ address the individual cause of action. If poor reaction in response to an actual,¶ individual sexual assault can give rise to an individual cause of action, why¶ can’t high rates of sexual assault in a school’s population amount to sex¶ discrimination for purposes of DOE enforcement? If higher rates of assault¶ overall result when a school fails to take evidence-based steps to reduce the¶ overall rate of sexual assault, why wouldn’t the DOE nudge schools to be¶ proactive? What if schools have concrete tools at their disposal to reduce the¶ overall rate of assault? Isn’t that within the DOE’s enforcement purview?¶ Consider, by comparison, the legislative approach to school bullying. In the¶ past decade, nearly every state has passed laws addressing the obligations of a¶ school system to address incidents of bullying and to prevent bullying.104¶ While those statutes are aimed at both prevention and post-incident¶ intervention, the most recent and best-regarded statutes focus substantial¶ energy on requiring schools to deliver evidence-based bullying prevention¶ programming in an effort to reduce the amount of bullying within each¶ school.105 Prevention and culture change are at the core of these legal¶ interventions.106 Ideally, they would be at the core of the DOE’s approach to¶ Title IX’s guarantee of equal access to education on college campuses. Perhaps we are seeing the beginning of this exact reform: the DOE is¶ investigating schools, and, in turn, schools have stepped up their evaluations of¶ their own processes. If so, I would hope the next step will be a DOE guidance¶ on prevention measures, because to date, they’ve drawn colleges far into the¶ weeds on responses without adequately directing them toward prevention.

AFF causes a snowball effect that makes first amendment defenses impossible to beat. Schauer 04
Schauer, Frederick David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law. "The boundaries of the First Amendment: A preliminary exploration of constitutional salience." Harvard Law Review (2004): 1765-1809.
In addition to the properties of First Amendment claims that may¶ make them less likely to appear legally frivolous, the First Amend-¶ ment's magnetism may assist in ensuring that those claims will not¶ arise in isolation. There will often be multiple lawyers, multiple liti-¶ gants, and multiple public actors who perceive the virtues of the same¶ opportunistic strategy at roughly the same time, or who even may be¶ in active coordination with each other - as with the multiple chal-¶ lenges to the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, the proliferation of First¶ Amendment rhetoric surrounding legal arguments regarding computer¶ source code, and the panoply of parallel claims about First Amend-¶ ment limitations on copyright. When this is the case, the multiplicity¶ of individually tenuous claims may produce a cascade effect160 such¶ that the claims no longer appear tenuous. The combination of, say,¶ four scarcely plausible but simultaneous court challenges and twenty¶ scarcely plausible public claims of a First Amendment problem could make all these individually implausible claims seem more credible¶ than they actually are.161 From the standpoint of an interest group¶ seeking to achieve change and to mobilize public support or the sup-¶ port of other interest groups,162 winning is better than losing publicly,¶ but losing publicly is perhaps still preferable to being ignored.¶ Once the claim or argument achieves a critical mass of plausibility,¶ the game may be over. Even if individual courts reject the claim, the¶ multiplicity of now-plausible claims may give the issue what is re-¶ ferred to in inside-the-Beltway political jargon as "traction" and in¶ newsroom jargon as "legs." Interestingly, this phenomenon sometimes¶ survives even authoritative rejection of the claim. With respect to the¶ argument that hostile-environment sexual harassment enforcement has¶ serious First Amendment implications, for example, neither the Su-¶ preme Court's rejection of this argument in dicta in R.A. V v. City of¶ St. Paul163 nor the Court's silent dismissal of the same claim in Harris¶ v. Forklift Systems, Inc.164 has slowed the momentum of those who¶ would wage serious First Amendment battle against hostile-¶ environment sexual harassment law.'65 Similarly, decades of judicial¶ rejection of the argument that copyright law must be substantially re-¶ stricted by the commands of the First Amendment have scarcely dis-¶ couraged those who urge otherwise; and in some respects the Supreme¶ Court's recent decision in Eldred v. Ashcroftl66 can be considered not a¶ defeat, but rather one further step toward the entry of copyright into¶ the domain of the First Amendment: the Supreme Court did grant cer-¶ tiorari, in part to determine "whether ... the extension of existing and¶ future copyrights violates the First Amendment;"'67 and the seven-¶ Justice majority, as well as Justice Breyer in dissent,'68 acknowledged¶ that the First Amendment was not totally irrelevant.

Tournament: Harvard Westlake | Round: 6 | Opponent: Harker AM | Judge: Daniel Park
The 1AC isn’t tied to the affirmative team—all art is autonomous of its creators—vote neg on presumption

Bryant 12 - Professor of Philosophy at Collin College (Levi R., Author of a number of articles on Deleuze, Badiou, Zizek, Lacan, and political theory, July 24th, 2012, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/07/24/radical-ethnography-or-situated-knowledge-a-response-to-a-friend/)
Your tone here sounds a bit irritated. I hope I didn’t provoke that as it wasn’t my intention. I don’t think I understood your point, but genuinely disagree with you. While I readily acknowledge that the cave painters were the cause of the paintings, I strongly disagree that the painters are a part of the being of the painting. Just as ones parents are the cause of one’s being while nonetheless the child is an autonomous being, the painting is an autonomous beings that have its own power that exceed any particular cultural or historical context. I don’t disagree that the question of what the paintings were for the cave painters is an interesting and important one, but in raising that question we’ve entered into a new machinic relation and are no longer talking about the paintings for themselves as autonomous entities that circulate throughout the world beyond their origins. What they were for a particular group is an important issue. My only point is that no work can ever be reduced– nor any entity, for that matter –can be reduced to what it is for another entity.

Tournament: Harvard Westlake | Round: 6 | Opponent: Harker AM | Judge: Daniel Park
The aff will be ruined by its own success—to have one’s status as exception legally sanctioned by the law is the equivalent of smelting one’s self new chains

Dolar 6 (Mladen, Jan Van Eyck Academie, A Voice and Nothing More, p. 177-180)HarvardBS
But in her role as artist she is also the capricious prima donna; there is the whole comedy of her claims for her rights. She wants to be exempt from work, she requires special privileges, work allegedly harms her voice, she wants due honor to be paid to her services, she wants to be granted a place apart. She "does not want mere admiration, she wants to be admired exactly in the way she prescribes" (p. 362). But the people, despite their general esteem for her, do not want to hear about any of this, they are cold in their judgment- they respect her, but want her to remain one of them. So there is the whole charade of the artist who is not appreciated as she deserves, she does not get the laurels that she thinks belong to her, she puts up a preposterous act of genius not understood by her contemporaries. Out of protest she announces that she will cut down on her coloratura—this will teach them a lesson—and maybe she does, only nobody notices. She keeps coming up with all sorts of whims, she lets herself be begged, and only reluctantly gives in. There is the comedy of hurt narcissism, megalomania, an inflated ego, the high mission of the artist's overblown vocation. So one day she indeed stops singing, firmly believing that there will be some huge scandal, but nobody gives a damn, everybody goes about their business as usual, without noticing a lack—that is, without noticing the lack of a lack, the absence of the gap. Curious, how mistaken she is in her calculations, the clever creature, so mistaken that one might fancy she has made no calculations at all but is only being driven on by her destiny, which in our world cannot be anything but a sad one. Of her own accord she abandons her singing, of her own accord she destroys the power she has gained over people's hearts. How could she ever have gained that power, since she knows so little about these hearts of ours? ... Josephine's road must go downhill. The time will soon come when her last notes sound and die into silence. She is a small episode in the eternal history of our people, and the people will get over the loss of her.... Perhaps we shall not miss so very much after all, while Josephine . . . will happily lose herself in the numberless throngs of the heroes of our people, and soon, since we are no historians, will rise to the heights of redemption and be forgotten like all her brothers. (p. 376) Despite her vanity and megalomania, people can easily do without her, she will be forgotten, no traces of her art will be left—this is not a people of archivists, and besides, there is no way one could store, collect, archivize her art, which consists purely in the gap. So this is the second strategy: the strategy of art, of art as the non-exceptional exception, which can arise anywhere, at any moment, and is made of anything—of ready-made objects—as long as it can provide them with a gap, make them make a break. It is the art of the minimal difference. Yet the moment it makes its appearance, this difference is bungled by the very gesture which brought it about, the moment this gesture and this difference become instituted, the moment art turns into an institution to which a certain place is allotted and certain limits are drawn. Its power is at the same time its powerlessness, the very status of art veils what is at stake. Hence the whole farce of the egocentric megalomania and misunderstood genius which occupies the major part of the story. Josephine wants the impossible: she wants a place beyond the law, beyond equality- and equality is the essential feature of the mouse-folk, equality in tininess, in their miniature size (hence her claims to greatness are all the more comical). But at the same time she wants her status as exception to be legally sanctioned, symbolically recognized, properly glorified. She wants to be, like the sovereign, both inside and outside the law. She wants her uniqueness to be recognized as a special social role, and the moment art does this, it is done for. The very break it has introduced is reduced to just another social function; the break becomes the institution of the break, its place is circumscribed, and as an exception it can fit very well into the rule—that is, into the rule of law. As an artist who wants veneration and recognition she will be forgotten, relegated to the gallery of memory, that is, of oblivion. Her voice, which opens a crack in the seamless continuity of the law, is betrayed and destroyed by the very status of art, which reinserts it and closes the gap. At best it can be a tiny recess: “Piping is our people’s daily speech, only many a one pipes his whole life long and does not know it, where here piping is set free from the fetters of daily life and it sets us free too for a little while" (p. 370). Just for a little while, but by setting us free, it only helps us to bear the rest all the better. The miniature size of the mouse is enough to open the gap, but once it is instituted and recognized, its importance shrinks to the size of the mouse, despite its delusions of grandeur. It is the voice tied to the mast, and the oarsmen, although they may hear it in the flash of a brief recess, will continue to be deaf Thus we do not end up with Kafka's version of Ulysses but are stuck with Ulysses tout court—or, rather, with the Adorno and Horkheimer version. Josephine's sublime voice will finally be den Miiusen gepfiffen, as the German expression has it (and this German phrase may well be at the origin of the whole story), that is, piped to the mice, piped in vain to someone who cannot understand or appreciate it—not because of some mass obtuseness, but because of the nature of art itself We could say: the art is her mousetrap. So the second strategy fails, it is ruined by its own success, and the transcendence that art promised turned out to be of such a nature that it could easily fit in as one part of the division of labor; the disruptive power of the gap turned out to accommodate the continuity all too well.

Tournament: Harvard Westlake | Round: 6 | Opponent: Harker AM | Judge: Daniel Park
The affirmative joins a growing liberal consensus that the state must be reformed to resist violence, but their mono-political approach recreates the conditions of ontological enframing

Joronen ‘13 (Mikko, Department of Geography and Geology, Geography Section, University of Turku, Finland, “Conceptualising New Modes of State Governmentality: Power, Violence and the Ontological Mono-politics of Neoliberalism” Geopolitics, 00:1–15, pp. 10-11)
As I have suggested,52 ontological monopolisations constitute violence through two reciprocally conditioning mechanisms. First, through the oblivion of the mechanism of ‘appropriation’ (Ereignis), which works by intrinsically concealing the openness of being and its reservoir of ungrounded possibilities; and second, through the violence intrinsic in particular historical modes of revealing, for instance, the ontological ordering of entities in neoliberal enframing. The first mechanism of violence apparently refers to the fundamental (im)possibility for the different forms of life to emerge. It is a question concerning particular appropriations of being, which take place by monopolising their own mode of revealing, thus refusing their intrinsic condition of possibility, the abyssal richness of open being. The second mechanism of violence, in turn, is related to the designated positions, such as the neoliberal enframing, which violently enframe human existence and the revealing of the real to particular modalities of ontology. At the level of the first mechanism, neoliberal fabrication of particular mode of existence takes advantage of what I have discussed, by following Heidegger, the ontological ambiguity of being, its happening as a concealing-revealing.53 Accordingly, while disclosing a peculiar mode of existence, the appropriation of being always conceals the open possibility for the other modes of revealing to come about. Such concealment is an intrinsic necessity for all revealing to take place: all modes of revealing conceal their originary source, the inexhaustible plenitude of open being. Neoliberal governmentality, however, follows the logic of violent mono-politics and complete grounding of the revealing of things to the point of abandoning the possibility for ontological change. It remains solely withdrawn to the optimised arrangement of ontic realities: it concentrates on the calculative ordering of things (beings), and as a result, hides the ontological question concerning its own mode of revealing (being). Neoliberalisation thus covers not only the ontological mechanism of concealing-revealing, but its own ontological finitude. By monopolising its own modality of revealing, neoliberal enframing veils its own finitude, its nature as a finite ‘Event of appropriation’ (das Ereignis), thus passing the originary openness of being into oblivion. The latter mechanism of ontological violence, in turn, refers to the inner logic of neoliberal enframing. Neoliberalisation operates, first, by reducing political capabilities of individuals to the internalised rule of the maximum economy, but also by moulding all things into reserves of profits. First of all, neoliberalisation violently enframes human existence into bare reserves of human capital, which are increasingly used by states in their tactics to succeed in global competition. The neoliberal state, governing its population by the means of encouraging economically calculating subjectivity, is not established out of the violent act of territorial inclusion and order, but above all, out of the violent fact of reducing human existence into usable capital. Second, as a drive to reveal things as profitable reserves, neoliberalisation violently divests natural entities from their abrupt happening and phenomenological richness of revealing. Altogether, such reductions constitute the post-political situation of neoliberal governmentality: they create a world of technical solutions and politics-free zones abrogating the politics of ontological revealing. The depoliticising conduct of the neoliberal state is an ultimate political act, which paradoxically establishes an anti-political abrogation of all political acts through the concealment of the politics of ontological possibility. Such ‘ontological mono-politics’ thus intertwines with the first mechanism of ontological violence: by fabricating the real, including human existence, for the use of economic calculations and profits, neoliberal governmentality monopolises a particular mode of revealing, and thus, fades the ontological openness of being and its finite Event (Ereignis) to the background.

Tournament: Harvard Westlake | Round: 6 | Opponent: Harker AM | Judge: Daniel Park
their affirmation may be all well and good, but tying it to a desire for recognition by an external social authority such as the judge produces a form of dependence on authority that turns the case

McGowan 13 (Todd, Prof @ U of Vermont, Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, p. 87-90)LA
When subjects enter into society, the social order confronts them with a demand. This demand for the sacrifice of enjoyment offers them social recognition in return. Recognition grounds the subjects' identities and allows them to experience themselves as valuable. The socially recognized subject has a worth that derives solely from recognition itself. Popular kids may believe that their sense of worth is tied to an activity-playing football, obtaining good grades, being a cheerleader -but in fact it depends on the recognition that an anonymous social authority accords those who engage in these activities. Though we might imagine the football player fully enjoying himself and his popular status, the recognition that comes with this status renders enjoyment impossible insofar as popularity adheres to the social authority's demand rather than its unarticulated desire.17 The demand that confronts the subject entering the social order is directly articulated at the level of the signifier. Social authority says to the subject, "Act in this way, and you will receive approval (or recognition)." But the demand conceals an unconscious desire that is not articulated on the level of the signifier. What the authority really wants from the subject is not equivalent to what it explicitly demands in signifiers. This desire of social authority or the Other engenders the subject's own desire: the subject's desire is a desire to figure out what the Other wants from it-to solve the enigma of the Other's desire and locate itself within that desire. The subject becomes a desiring subject by paying attention not to what the social authority says (the demand) but to what remains unsaid between the lines (the desire). The path of desire offers the subject the possibility of breaking from its dependence on social authority through the realization that its secret, the enigma of the Other's desire, does not exist - that the authority doesn't know what it wants. Such a realization is not easy to achieve, but adopting the attitude of desire at least makes it possible. For the subject who clings to the social authority's demand, dependence on this authority becomes irremediable and unrealizable. This is the limitation of pseudo-Hegelian political projects oriented around garnering recognition. They necessarily remain within the confines of the order that they challenge, and even success will never provide the satisfaction that the project promises. Full recognition would bring with it not the sense of finally penetrating into the secret enclave of the social authority but instead the disappointment of seeing that this secret does not exist. The widespread acceptance of gay marriage in the United States, for instance, ·would not provide a heretofore missing satisfaction, because the social authority that would provide the recognition is not a substantial entity fully consistent with itself. Even though institutional authority can grant a marriage certificate to gay couples and the majority of the population can recognize the validity of the marriage, there is no agency that can authorize such a marriage that is itself authorized. Social authority, in other words, is always unauthorized or groundless, and this is the ultimate reason why the pursuit of recognition leads to frustration. Those who seek social recognition structure their lives around the social authority's demand, and recognition is the reward that one receives for doing one's social duty. For instance, in order to gain popularity, one must adhere to the social rules that lead to popularity. This involves wearing the proper clothes, hanging out with the right people, playing the approved sports, and talking in the correct fashion. Too much deviation from the standard dissolves one's popularity. Even those who disdain popularity most often align themselves with some other source of recognition and thereby invest themselves in another form of it. The outsider who completely rejects the trappings of the popular crowd but slavishly obeys the demands of fellow outsiders remains within the orbit of social recognition. This devotion to social recognition is more apparent, though not more true, among the young; the adult universe employs strictures with a similar severity.18 Following the path of desire - going beyond the explicit demand of the social authority- has a cost in terms of social status. Those who restrict themselves to the authority's demand do not necessarily evince more obedience to actual laws than others do. In fact, the social authority’s demand often conflicts with laws because it demands love, not just obedience. Criminals who flaunt the law for the sake of accumulating vast amounts of money are among those most invested in this demand. There is no inherent radicality in criminal behavior, and most criminals tend to be politically conservative." The object of the demand is the subject's complete sacrifice for the sake of the social authority, not simply adherence to a set of laws. By imposing a demand that requires subjects to violate the law, the authority creates a bond of guilt among those who follow this demand. For instance, contemporary capitalist society demands the unrestricted accumulation of capital, even if this requires bypassing ethical or legal considerations at some point. Those who adhere to this demand to such an extent that they break the law or act against their own conscience find themselves all the more subjected to the social authority than if the demand didn't include the dimension of transgression. The guilt that the demand engenders in them seals their allegiance. This is the logic of the hazing ritual, which always necessitates a violation of the law or common morality. The demand aims to redirect subjects away from their own enjoyment and toward social productivity. This turn is unimaginable without guilt, which is the fundamental social emotion. Subjects who sacrifice enjoyment for the sake of recognition do so with the expectation that this sacrifice will pay off on the other side, that the rewards of recognition will surpass the enjoyment that they have given up. This wager seems to have all the empirical evidence on its side: every day, images of the most recognized subjects enjoying themselves bombard us. We see them driving in the nicest cars, eating in the finest restaurants, wearing the most fashionable clothes, and having sex with the most attractive people, among other things. On the other side, we rarely see the enjoyment of those who remain indifferent to the appeal of recognition. By definition, they enjoy in the shadows. What’s more the apparent misery of those who do not receive recognition is readily visible among the social outcasts we silently pass every day. To all appearances, the sacrifice of enjoyment for the sake of recognition is a bargain, as long as one ends up among the most recognized. The problem with this judgment sterns from its emphasis on visibility; it mistakes the display of enjoyment for the real thing. Someone who was authentically enjoying would not need to parade this enjoyment. The authentically enjoying subject does not perform its enjoyment for the Other but remains indifferent to the Other. As Joan Copjec notes, "Jouissance flourishes only there where it is not validated by the Other."20 Enjoyment consumes the subject and directs all of the subject's attention away from the Other's judgment, which is why one cannot perform it andwhy being a social outcast doesn't bother the enjoying subject. One immerses oneself completely in enjoyment, and the enjoyment suffices for the subject. In contrast, recognition, though it offers its own form of satisfaction, ultimately leaves the subject eager for something else. No matter what level of recognition subjects receive, they always find it insufficient and seek more. Unlike enjoyment, recognition is an infinite struggle. But no one can make a direct choice of enjoyment instead of recognition. The initial loss of enjoyment, the initial sacrifice, is inevitable. As I have insisted in earlier chapters, this enjoyment only exists insofar as it is lost: there is no way for the subject to avoid altogether the loss of enjoyment for the sake of recognition. But what the subject might avoid is the perpetuation of this abandonment of enjoyment through the embrace of recognition. One can't initially reject recognition, but one can subsequently revisit the original acceptance of the social demand and refuse it by becoming indifferent to recognition's appeal.

Tournament: college prep | Round: 1 | Opponent: Lynbrook NA | Judge: Karen Qi
The claim that free speech leads to democratic debate and social progress is a neoliberal myth – the AFF’s faith in the free exchange of ideas displaces a focus on direct action and re-entrenches multiple forms of oppression.
Tillett-Saks 13 Andrew Tillett-Saks (Labor organizer and critical activist author for Truth-Out and Counterpunch), Neoliberal Myths, Counterpunch, 11/7/13, http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/11/07/neoliberal-myths/ LADI
In the wake of the Brown University shout-down of Ray Kelly, champion of the NYPD’s racist stop-and-frisk policy and racial profiling in general, the debate has resurfaced. Rather than talking past the anti-protestors’ arguments, they need to be addressed directly. The prototypical argument in denouncing the protestors is not a defense of Ray Kelly’s racism. It is twofold: First, that a free-flowing discourse on the matter will allow all viewpoints to be weighed and justice to inevitably emerge victorious on its merits. Second, that stopping a bigot from speaking in the name of freedom is self-defeating as it devolves our democratic society into tyranny. The twofold argument against the protestors stems from two central myths of neoliberalism. The argument for free discourse as the enlightened path to justice ignores that direct action protest is primarily responsible for most of the achievements we would consider ‘progress’ historically (think civil rights, workers’ rights, suffrage, etc.), not the free exchange of ideas.  The claim that silencing speech in the name of freedom is self-defeating indulges in the myth of the pre-existence of a free society in which freedom of speech must be preciously safeguarded, while ignoring the woeful shortcomings of freedom of speech in our society which must be addressed before there is anything worth protecting. Critics of the protest repeatedly denounced direct action in favor of ideological debate as the path to social justice. “It would have been more effective to take part in a discussion rather than flat out refuse to have him speak,” declared one horrified student to the Brown Daily Herald. Similarly, Brown University President Christina Paxson labeled the protest a detrimental “affront to democratic civil society,” and instead advocated “intellectual rigor, careful analysis, and…respectful dialogue and discussion.” Yet the implication that masterful debate is the engine of social progress could not be more historically unfounded. Only in the fairy tale histories of those interested in discouraging social resistance does ‘respectful dialogue’ play a decisive role in struggles against injustice. The eight-hour workday is not a product of an incisive question-and-answer session with American robber barons. Rather, hundreds of thousands of workers conducted general strikes during the nineteenth century, marched in the face of military gunfire at Haymarket Square in 1886, and occupied scores of factories in the 1930’s before the eight-hour work day became American law. Jim Crow was not defeated with the moral suasion of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches. Rather, hundreds of thousands marched on Washington, suffered through imprisonment by racist Southern law enforcement, and repeatedly staged disruptive protests to win basic civil rights. On a more international scale, Colonialism, that somehow-oft-forgotten tyranny that plagued most of the globe for centuries, did not cease thanks to open academic dialogue. Bloody resistance, from Algeria to Vietnam to Panama to Cuba to Egypt to the Philippines to Cameroon and to many other countries, was the necessary tool that unlocked colonial shackles. Different specific tactics have worked in different contexts, but one aspect remains constant: The free flow of ideas and dialogue, by itself, has rarely been enough to generate social progress. It is not that ideas entirely lack social power, but they have never been sufficient in winning concessions from those in power to the oppressed. Herein lies neoliberal myth number one—that a liberal free-market society will inexorably and inherently march towards greater freedom. To the contrary, direct action has always proved necessary.
The AFF’s assumption of a property right to free speech assumes an overly idealistic notion of society that ignores economic barriers and is a product of the neoliberal myth that individuality should be protected at all costs.
Tillett-Saks 13 Andrew Tillett-Saks (Labor organizer and critical activist author for Truth-Out and Counterpunch), Neoliberal Myths, Counterpunch, 11/7/13, http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/11/07/neoliberal-myths/ LADI
Yet there are many critics of the protestors who do not claim Ray Kelly’s policies can be defeated with sharp debate. Instead, they argue that any protest in the name of freedom which blocks the speech of another is self-defeating, causing more damage to a free society by ‘silencing’ another than any potential positive effect of the protest. The protestors, the argument goes, tack society back to totalitarian days of censorship rather than forward to greater freedom. The protestors, however well intentioned, have pedantically thwarted our cherished liberal democracy by imposing their will on others. The premise of this argument is neoliberal myth number two—that we live in a society with ‘freedom of speech’ so great it must be protected at all costs. This premise stems from an extremely limited conception of ‘freedom of speech’. Free speech should not be considered the mere ability to speak freely and inconsequentially in a vacuum, but rather the ability to have one’s voice heard equally. Due to the nature of private media and campaign finance in American society, this ability is woefully lopsided as political and economic barriers abound. Those with money easily have their voices heard through media and politics, those without have no such freedom. There is a certain irony (and garish privilege) of upper-class Ivy Leaguers proclaiming the sanctity of a freedom of speech so contingent upon wealth and political power. There is an even greater irony that the fight for true freedom of speech, if history is any indicator, must entail more direct action against defenders of the status quo such as Ray Kelly. To denounce such action out of indulgence in the neoliberal myth of a sacrosanct, already existing, freedom of speech is to condemn the millions in this country with no meaningful voice to eternal silence. Every few years, an advocate of oppression is shouted down. Every few years, the protestors are denounced. They are asked to trust open, ‘civil’ dialogue to stop oppression, despite a historical record of struggle and progress that speaks overwhelmingly to the contrary. They are asked to restrain their protest for freedom so to protect American freedom of speech, despite the undeniable fact that our private media and post-Citizens United political system hear only dollars, not the voices of the masses. Some will claim that both sides have the same goal, freedom, but merely differ on tactics. Yet the historical record is too clear and the growing dysfunctions in our democracy too gross to take any such claims as sincere. In a few years, when protestors shout down another oppressive conservative, we will be forced to lucidly choose which side we are on: The oppressors or the protestors. The status quo or progress.
The AFF’s notion of the marketplace of ideas is neoliberal rhetoric designed to strengthen corporate power.
Whatler 13 Stuart Whatley, Speak for Yourself: A Meditation on the Marketplace of Ideas, Los Angeles Review of Books, 10/4/13, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/speak-for-yourself-a-meditation-on-the-marketplace-of-ideas/#! LADI
The very notion of a “marketplace of ideas” tracks exactly with neoliberalism’s rising star.  This can be seen through Nexis searches of the term, as well as through Google’s n-gram book search between 1800 and 2008. Since first breaking into common usage with a couple dozen mentions in the 1970s, its appearances have increased exponentially decade by decade in books, newspapers, journals, and similar forms of media to the point that it is now published hundreds of times every year. Though use of the phrase actually declined very slightly in books between 2000 and 2008 (not to any degree of significance), it increased in news media year by year over the same course of time — especially between 2008 and 2012. While public policy can be altered and reversed from one administration or congress to another, the fideistic embrace of market vocabulary across political divides indicates that it has become more deeply embedded — instead of being the subject of political debate, it designates the coordinates of what is debatable as politics. It did not take until the 1970s for the “marketplace of ideas” to develop, but it did take that long for it to really become prevalent. Before then it had mainly been the subject of legal opinions, notably in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 1919 Abrams v. United States dissent. The law scholar Ronald Collins points out that Holmes used the metaphor, if not the exact phrase, when he wrote, “The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas — that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” For his part, Holmes was influenced by John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which in turn drew from John Milton’s Areopagitica, which asked, “Who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?” With Holmes as the more direct line of inspiration, the actual words would come to form decades later in other free speech and free press court opinions, including United States v. Rumely (1953) and Lamont v. Postmaster General (1965). In the latter, Justice William Brennan opined that, “The dissemination of ideas can accomplish nothing if otherwise willing addressees are not free to receive and consider them. It would be a barren marketplace of ideas that had only sellers and no buyers.” Back to the early 1970s: big business was a beleaguered beast, feeling the need to counter the popular social movements of the previous decade, and found it prudent to press-gang the “marketplace of ideas” into its service. After a series of crises in capitalism — stagflation, the collapse of Bretton Woods, the 1973 Oil Shock — the solution eventually proffered was even more capitalism. Which is to say, the failure of postwar Keynesian fiscal and monetary policies to turn the economy around led in time to a loss of faith in their effectiveness and to the ouster of leftward-leaning leaders Jimmy Carter and James Callahan. When the recessionary waves did eventually subside, the timing allowed for Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to dance on their predecessors’ political graves, accredit their own success to market fundamentalism, and move forward full bore with its implementation through tax cuts and financial deregulation. As Reagan later declared on the New York Stock Exchange floor, “We’re going to turn the bull loose.” And so, the “marketplace of ideas” began to appear for the first time in the mainstream press — most notably in reports quoting corporate public relations professionals in defense of their respective industries. To take one early example, in a July 1975 U.S. News and World Report interview titled “Why Business Has a Black Eye,” Alexander B. Trowbridge, president of a corporate advocacy organization called the Conference Board, addressed questions about the lugubrious public favorability of big business: We businessmen have to get out individually into this marketplace of ideas. We have to be far more involved in our communities. We have to be in closer touch with the groups of people with whom we have close contact — our employees, out stockholders, the community leaders in places where we have our plants and offices, and our customers and suppliers. We need to do a better job not only in supporting them with better products, but in explaining the workings of our business system and what makes it all tick. A March 1976 Newsweek article by Michael Ruby and Gretchen Browne titled “Oil: The Mobil Manner” followed, reporting on a full-page advertisement taken out by Mobil in response to a critical NBC News documentary about gasoline prices. According to Mobil’s vice president of public affairs, Herbert Schmertz, “The ad was an effort to participate in the market-place of ideas” (Schmertz’s line would be quoted again two years later in a Harvard Business Review story by Louis Banks, titled “Taking on the Hostile Media”). Such participation, the reporters note, had become a trend of late. And it would only continue, to the point where even Jimmy Carter invoked the metaphor in an unwittingly ironic 1977 statement, declaring Voice of America independent from State Department propagandizing: The agency must not operate in a covert, manipulative or propagandistic way … Under this administration, Voice of America will be solely responsible for the content of its news broadcasts — for there is no more valued coin than candor in the international marketplace of ideas. While it’s unclear how much of this was a consciously cooperative effort on the part of business and pro-market advocates, it was, regardless, in keeping with the corporate PR strategy of the time — what sociologists David Miller and William Dinan have labeled the “third wave of corporate political activism.” That wave rode from the late 1960s through the 1970s, and saw vast and rapid expansion in corporate lobbying, the founding of numerous business-funded think tanks (including the Heritage Foundation, an early influence on the Reagan presidential platform), and increased media involvement on the part of businesses across the board. According to Miller and Dinan, a collective corporate strategy was effectively launched in a private August 1971 memo from corporate lawyer (and later Supreme Court justice) Lewis F. Powell Jr. to US Chamber of Commerce Education Committee chairman Eugene B. Sydnor Jr., in which Powell wrote: “It is time for American business — which has demonstrated the greatest capacity in all history to produce and to influence consumer decisions — to apply its great talents vigorously to the preservation of the system itself.”
Impact is extinction – neoliberalism destabilizes neurological functioning, dissolves ethical models and creates an endless cycle of environmental crisis creation
Bone 12 (John, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland, the Deregulation Ethic and the Conscience of Capitalism: How the Neoliberal ‘Free Market’ Model Undermines Rationality and Moral Conduct, Globalizations, October 2012, Vol. 9, No. 5, pp. 651–665)mm

First, as Durkheim observed, the ability to act with relative impunity is both individually as well as socially corrosive (Durkheim, 1925, 1960, 1965). Compounding this situation, the mutual social estrangement that occurs with increasing social polarisation diminishes the extent to which actors on both sides of the divide identify with each other as, raising the potential for stereotyping, distrust, prejudice and stigma (Aronson, 1995; Bone, 2010; Goffman, 1963). This process can evidently produce a situation where an exclusive elite begin to view the masses as ‘other’ which, in turn, leads to demonization and reduced empathy, legitimating a hardening of attitudes to the plight of those negatively affected by the actions of the powerful, a situation that has arguably been much at play during the neoliberal era. Once more, as has been identified throughout our history, psycho-social estrangement and the concomitant negative stereotyping and prejudice that it cultivates, further enhances the capacity for un-empathic and amoral conduct, with potentially fateful outcomes, particularly where this can occur with few constraints. It may even be the case, as has been argued, that social arrangements and values such as those prevalent in contemporary capitalism not only disinhibit anti-social behaviours but actually undermine an otherwise natural predisposition towards pro-social and empathic conduct (Olson, 2005). Conclusion As above, the much promulgated notion that deregulated economies promote freedom, wealth and the greater good can be regarded as a touchstone of late twentieth and early twenty-first century capitalist societies, as was the case a century before. Thus, the notion of competitive, rational and deregulated markets, operating by the rational laws and governed by the ‘invisible hand’, are once more presented as being the best vehicle providing economic efficiency and the wider public good, with any restraint merely operating to the detriment of the latter. From this standpoint, the brief intervening period of managed capitalism, or ‘embedded liberalism’, appears as a minor detour, as opposed to the sea change that it was once assumed to represent within major developed Western societies (Harvey, 2005; Ruggie, 1982). It has been extensively argued, however, that the return to the economics of the past has revived capitalism’s worst irrationalities and instabilities, culminating in the credit crisis, as well as its capacity to generate profound inequities (Krugman, 2009). This paper asserts that, in their contribution to the above, the deregulatory features of neoliberal capitalism imply more than mere structural adjustments to economic organisation, but might also be understood as impacting upon the aspects of individual neurological functioning that are correlated with inhibiting anti-social self gratifying behaviour. Thus, without a deeply neurologically ‘engrained’ set of formal and informal rules, together with a concomitant commitment to their adherence, the habituated emotional ‘stop’ signs that routinely inhibit socially and economically destructive conduct dissolve, as firm injunctions become pliable obstacles to be ‘negotiated’ or simply ignored. Overall, by undermining or even eradicating the regulatory walls that guide individual conscience—and, in turn, socially and economically rational and responsible conduct—licentiousness, self interest and short term expediency flourish, raising the potential for further ‘irrational’ destabilization of society and economy and the generation of continuing crises. In this way deregulation, of itself, compounds the deleterious effects of the value system that drives it. From this perspective, the ‘spirit’ of contemporary neoliberal capitalism and its organisational ‘form’ appears as almost the inverse of the rational, measured and moral credo that Weber once imagined (1930).
Thus the alternative is an ethic of social flesh. That foregrounds embodied interdependence, substituting an ecological view of relationships for the aff’s commodity thinking – only the alternative can produce ethical institutional decisionmaking
Beasley and Bacchi 7
(Chris, Prof. of Politics @ University of Adelaide, Carol, Prof. Emeritus @ University of Adelaide, “Envisaging a new politics for an ethical future: Beyond trust, care and generosity -- towards an ethic of `social flesh'”, Feminist Theory, 2007 8: 279)

The political vocabulary of social flesh has significant implications for democratic visions. Because it conceptualizes citizens as socially embodied – as interconnected mutually reliant flesh – in a more thoroughgoing sense than the languages of trust, care, responsibility and generosity, it resists accounts of political change as making transactions between the ‘less fortunate’ and ‘more privileged’, more trusting, more caring, more responsible or more generous. Social flesh is political metaphor in which fleshly sociality is profoundly levelling. As a result, it challenges meliorist reforms that aim to protect the ‘vulnerable’ from the worst effects of social inequality, including the current distribution of wealth. A political ethic of embodied intersubjectivity requires us to consider fleshly interconnection as the basis of a democratic sociality, demanding a rather more far-reaching reassessment of national and international institutional arrangements than political vocabularies that rest upon extending altruism. Relatedly, it provides a new basis for thinking about the sorts of institutional arrangements necessary to acknowledge social fleshly existence, opening up ‘the scope of what counts as relevant’ (Shildrick, 2001: 238). For example, it allows a challenge to current conceptualizations that construct attention to the ‘private sphere’ as compensatory rather than as necessary (Beasley and Bacchi, 2000: 350). We intend to pursue the relationship between social flesh and democratic governance in future papers. Conclusion In this paper we focus on various vocabularies of social interconnection intended to offer a challenge to the ethos of atomistic individualism associated with neo-liberalism and develop a new ethical ideal called ‘social flesh’. Despite significant differences in the several vocabularies canvassed in this paper, we note that most of the trust and care writers conceive the social reform of atomistic individualism they claim to address in terms of a presumed moral or ethical deficiency within the disposition of individuals. Hence, they reinstate the conception of the independent active self in certain ways. Moreover, there is a disturbing commonality within all these accounts: an ongoing conception of asymmetrical power relations between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’, ‘carers’ and ‘cared for’, ‘altruistic’ and ‘needy’. While widely used terms like trust and care clearly remain vocabularies around which social debate may be mobilized, and hence are not to be dismissed (see Pocock, 2006), we suggest that there are important reasons for questioning their limits and their claims to offer progressive alternative understandings of social life. In this setting, we offer the concept of social flesh as a way forward in rethinking the complex nature of the interaction between subjectivity, embodiment, intimacy, social institutions and social interconnection. Social flesh generalizes the insight that trusting/caring/ altruistic practices already take place on an ongoing basis to insist that the broad, complex sustenance of life that characterizes embodied subjectivity and intersubjective existence be acknowledged. As an ethico-political starting point, ‘social flesh’ highlights human embodied interdependence. By drawing attention to shared embodied reliance, mutual reliance, of people across the globe on social space, infrastructure and resources, it offers a decided challenge to neo-liberal conceptions of the autonomous self and removes the social distance and always already given distinction between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’. There is no sense here of ‘givers’ and ‘receivers’; rather we are all recognized as receivers of socially generated goods and services. Social flesh also marks our diversity, challenging the privileging of normative over ‘other’ bodies. Finally, because social flesh necessarily inhabits a specific geographical space, environmentalist efforts to preserve that space take on increased salience (Macken, 2004: 25). By these means, the grounds are created for defending a politics beyond assisting the ‘less fortunate’. Social flesh, therefore, refuses the residues of ‘noblesse oblige’ that still appear to linger in emphasis upon vulnerability and altruism within the apparently reformist ethical ideals of trust/respect, care, responsibility and even generosity. In so doing it puts into question the social privilege that produces inequitable vulnerability and the associated need for ‘altruism’. Vital debates about appropriate distribution of social goods, environmental politics, professional and institutional power and democratic processes are reopened.

Neolib-Framework
Role of the ballot is to foreground a particular political vocabulary – how society is framed and understand gives debaters’ skill development a particular trajectory and meaning – the alternative is crucial to inserting the pedagogical energy of the debate into a broader circuit of anti-neoliberal public spaces and commons
Giroux 13
(Henry Giroux, currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University, “Hope in the Age of Looming Authoritarianism,” 02 December 2013, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/20307-hope-in-the-age-of-looming-authoritarianism#_edn2)

We live at a time in which the crisis of politics is inextricably connected to the crisis of ideas, education and agency. What must be remembered is that any viable politics or political culture can emerge only out of a determined effort to provide the economic conditions, public spaces, pedagogical practices and social relations in which individuals have the time, motivation and knowledge to engage in acts of translation that reject the privatization of the public sphere, the lure of ethno-racial or religious purity, the emptying of democratic traditions, the crumbling of the language of commonality, and the decoupling of critical education from the unfinished demands of a global democracy.¶ Young people, artists, intellectuals, educators and workers in the United States and globally are increasingly addressing what it means politically and pedagogically to confront the impoverishment of public discourse, the collapse of democratic values and commitments, the erosion of its public spheres and the widely promoted modes of citizenship that have more to do with forgetting than with critical learning. Collectively, they provide varied suggestions for rescuing modes of critical agency and social grievances that have been abandoned or orphaned to the dictates of global neoliberalism, a punishing state and a systemic militarization of public life. In opposition to the attacks on democratic institutions, values and modes of governance, activists all over the globe are offering an incisive language of analysis, a renewed sense of political commitment, different democratic visions and a politics of possibility.¶ Political exhaustion and impoverished intellectual visions are fed by the widely popular assumption that there are no alternatives to the present state of affairs. Within the increasing corporatization of everyday life, market values trump ethical considerations enabling the economically privileged and financial elite to retreat into the safe, privatized enclaves of family, religion and consumption. Those without the luxury of such choices pay a terrible price in the form of material suffering and the emotional hardship and political disempowerment that are its constant companions. Even those who live in the relative comfort of the middle classes must struggle with a poverty of time in an era in which the majority must work more than they ever have to make ends meet. Moreover, in the face of the 2008 economic crisis caused by gangster financial service institutions such as J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Barclay and Merrill Lynch, among others, the middle class is dissolving into the jaws of a death-machine that has robbed them of their homes, health care, jobs and dignity.¶ The ruling elites have taken flight from any sense of social and ethical responsibility and their willing and active repression of conscience has opened the door to new forms of authoritarianism in which the arrogance of corporate power finds its underside in a hatred of all others that threaten its power. Some contemporary theorists suggest that politics as a site of contestation, critical exchange and engagement is in a state of terminal arrest or has simply come to an end. However, too little attention is paid to what it means to think through how the struggle over democracy is inextricably linked to creating and sustaining public spheres where individuals can be engaged as political agents equipped with the skills, capacities and knowledge they need not only as autonomous political agents but also to believe that such struggles are worth taking up. The growth of cynicism in American society may say less about the reputed apathy of the populace than about the bankruptcy of the old political languages and the need for a new language and vision for clarifying intellectual, ethical, economic and political projects, especially as they work to reframe questions of agency, ethics and meaning for a substantive democracy.¶ In opposition to the attacks on critical thought, engaged citizenship, the discourse of hope and the erosion of "the public character of spaces, relations, and institutions,"xx young people, workers, intellectuals, artists and environmentalists are once again taking seriously Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's insistence "to hang on to intellectual and real freedom" and to ensure that thinking does not become "immune to the suggestion of the status quo,"xxi thus losing its "secure hold on possibility."xxii Increasingly, young people and others concerned about a substantive democracy are taking political stands; they are becoming more willing to cross boundaries, join questions of understanding and power, and bring into being with passion and conscience new ways of engaging with the world. In doing so, this diverse group of activists, intellectuals and concerned global citizens is intervening in the world on several registers.¶ Such groups, while in their infancy, are determined to unmask society's most pernicious myths, restage power in productive ways, rescue the promise of social agency from those places where it has been denied, and further the ethical and political imperative to provide an accurate historical account of the racial state and racial power. More and more, youths and others marginalized by race and class are refusing the dominant scripts of official authority and the limitations they impose upon individual and social agency. Progressives and oppositional groups are rethinking what it would mean to engage spaces of neglect and human suffering such as schools, shelters, food banks, union halls and other sites of potential resistance as starting points from which to build unfamiliar, potential worlds of hope, learning and struggle. In the process of thinking seriously about structures of power, state formation, race, sexuality, technology, class and pedagogy, these new modes of resistance never substitute moral indignation for the hard work of contributing to critical education and enabling people to expand the horizons of their own sense of agency and collectively challenge structures of power.¶ From Québec and Athens to Paris and New York City, these emerging collective movements bristle with a deeply rooted refusal to serve up well-worn and obvious truths, reinforce existing relations of power or bid retreat to an official rendering of common sense that promotes "a corrosive and demoralizing silence."xxiii What emerges in these distinct but politically allied voices is a pedagogy of disruption, critique, recovery and possibility, one that recognizes that viable politics cannot exist without will and awareness, and that critical education motivates and provides a crucial foundation for understanding and intervening in the world. Freedom in this discourse means learning how to think critically and act courageously - refusing to substitute empowering forms of education for mind-deadening training and numbing methods of memorizing data and test taking.¶ Collectively these emerging movements of resistance are developing an understanding of politics that demands not only a new language but also necessitates a broader vision, sense of organization and robust strategies that are critical and visionary. This commitment translates into a pedagogy and politics capable of illuminating the anti-democratic forces and sites that threaten human life; at the same time, its visionary nature cracks open the present to reveal new horizons, different futures and the promise of a global democracy. And yet, under the reign of casino capitalism, racist xenophobic nationalisms and other anti-democratic forces, notions of citizenship are increasingly privatized, commodified or subject to various religious and ideological fundamentalisms that feed a sense of powerlessness and disengagement from democratic struggles, if not politics itself. The culture of cruelty is alive and well as casino capitalism presents misfortune as a weakness and the logic of the market instructs individuals to rely on their own wits if they fall on hard times, especially because the state has washed its hands of any responsibility for the fate of its citizens. Hope is in the air, but it is crucial to recognize that the creeping authoritarianism descending upon the United States will not give up power easily, if at all. Consequently, an impatient patience proceeds slowly and persistently offers the formative culture necessary for feeding a radical imagination waiting to manifest itself concretely in a new vision, social movement and fierce urgency of struggle.
this question of the ballot is an incalculable ethical directive - Every argument they make is dependent on this flawed symbolic order that precludes effective analysis because capitalism subsumes truth claims.
Zizek and Daly ‘4
(Slavoj Zizek, Senior Researcher, Institute for Social Studies, Ljubljana, and Glyn Daly, Lecturer and Instructor, Political Theory and Thought, Northampton University, 2004, Conversations With Zizek, p. 14-19)

This is not to endorse any retrograde return to economism. Zizek's point is rather that in rejecting economism we should not lose sight of the systemic power of capital in shaping the lives and destinies of humanity and our very sense of the possible. In particular, we should not overlook Marx's central insight that in order to create a universal global system the forces of capitalism seek to conceal the politico-discursive violence of its construction through a kind of gentrification of that system. What is persistently denied by neo-liberals such as Rorty (1989) and Fukuyama (1992) is that the gentrification of global liberal capitalism is one whose 'universalism' fundamentally reproduces and depends upon a disavowed violence that excludes vast sectors of the world's population. In this way, neo-liberal ideology attempts to naturalize capitalism by presenting its outcomes of winning and losing as if they were simply a matter of chance and sound judgement in a neutral marketplace. Capitalism does indeed create a space for a certain diversity, at least for the central capitalist regions, but it is neither neutral nor ideal and its price in terms of social exclusion is exorbitant. That is to say, the human cost in terms of inherent global poverty and degraded 'life-chances' cannot be calculated within the existing economic rationale and, in consequence, social exclusion remains mystified and nameless (viz. the patronizing reference to the developing world). And Zizek's point is that this mystification is magnified through capitalism's profound capacity to ingest its own excesses and negativity; to redirect (or misdirect) social antagonisms and to absorb them within a culture of differential affirmation. Instead of Bolshevism, the tendency of today is towards a kind of political boutiquism that is readily sustained by postmodern forms of consumerism and lifestyle. Against this Zizek argues for a new universalism whose primary ethical directive is to confront the fact that our forms of social existence are is founded on exclusion on a global scale. While it is perfectly true that universalism can never become Universal (it will always require a hegemonic-particular embodiment in order to have any meaning), what is novel about Zizek's universalism is that it would not attempt to conceal this fact or to reduce the status of the abject Other to that of a 'glitch' in an otherwise sound matrix. Risking the impossible / The response of the left to global capitalism cannot be one of retreat into the nation-state or into organicist forms of ‘community’ and popular identities that currently abound in Europe and elsewhere. For Zizek it is, rather, a question of working with the very excesses that, in a Lacanian sense, are in capitalism more than capitalism. It is a question, therefore, of transcending the provincial ‘universalism’ of capitalism. To illustrate the point, Zizek draws attention to the category of ‘intellectual property’ and the increasingly absurd attempts to establish restrictive dominion over technological advances – genetic codes, DNA structures, digital communications, pharmaceutical breakthroughs, computer programs and so on – that either affect us all and/or to which there is a sense of common human entitlement. Indeed, the modern conjuncture of capitalism is more and more characterized by a prohibitive culture: the widespread repression of those forms of research and development that have real emancipatory potential beyond exclusive profiteering; the restriction of information that has direct consequences for the future of humanity; the fundamental denial that social equality could be sustained by the abundance generated by capitalism. Capitalism typically endeavors to constrain the very dimensions of the universal that are enabled by it and simultaneously to resist all those developments that disclose its specificity-artificiality as merely one possible mode of being. / The left, therefore, must seek to subvert these ungovernable excesses in the direction of a political (and politicizing) universalism; or what Balibar would call egaliberte. This means that the left should demand more globalization not less. Where neo-liberals speak the language of freedom – either in terms of individual liberty or the free movement of goods and capital – the left should use this language to combat today’s racist obsessions with ‘economic refugees’, ‘immigrants’ and so on, and insist that freedoms are meaningless without the social resources to participate in those freedoms. Where there is talk of universal rights, the left must affirm a responsibility to the universal; one that emphasizes real human solidarity and does not lose sight of the abject within differential discourses. Reversing the well-known environmentalists’ slogan, we might say that the left has to involve itself in thinking locally and acting globally. That is to say, it should attend to the specificity of today’s political identities within the context of their global (capitalist) conditions of possibilities precisely in order to challenge those conditions. / Yet here I would venture that, despite clearly stated differences (Butler et al., 2000), the political perspective of Zizek is not necessarily opposed to that of Laclau and Mouffe and that a combined approach is fully possible. While Zizek is right to stress the susceptibility of today’s ‘alternative’ forms of hegemonic engagement to deradicalization within a postmodern-p.c. imaginary – a kind of hegemonization of the very terrain (the politico-cultural conditions of possibility) that produces and predisposes the contemporary logics of hegemony – it is equally true to say that the type of political challenge that Zizek has in mind is one that can only advance through the type of hegemonic subversion that Laclau and Mouffe have consistently stressed in their work. The very possibility of a political universalism is one that depends on a certain hegemonic breaking out of the existing conventions/grammar of hegemonic engagement. / It is along these lines that Zizek affirms the need for a more radical intervention in the political imagination. The modern (Machiavellian) view of politics is usually presented in terms of a basic tension between (potentially) unlimited demands/appetites and limited resources; a view which is implicit in the predominant ‘risk society’ perspective where the central (almost Habermasian) concern is with more and better scientific information. The political truth of today’s world, however, is rather the opposite of this view. That is to say, the demands of the official left (especially the various incarnations of the Third Way left) tend to articulate extremely modest demands in the face of a virtually unlimited capitalism that is more than capable of providing every person on this planet with a civilized standard of living. For Zizek, a confrontation with the obscenities of abundance capitalism also requires a transformation of the ethico-political imagination. It is no longer a question of developing ethical guidelines within the existing political framework (the various institutional and corporate ‘ethical committees’) but of developing a politicization of ethics; an ethics of the Real. The starting point here is an insistence on the unconditional autonomy of the subject; of accepting that as human beings we are ultimately responsible for our actions and being-in-the-world up to and including the construction of the capitalist system itself. Far from simple norm-making or refining/reinforcing existing social protocol, an ethics of the Real tends to emerge through norm-breaking and in finding new directions that, by definition, involve traumatic changes: i.e. the Real in genuine ethical challenge. An ethics of the Real does not simply defer to the impossible (or infinite Otherness) as an unsurpassable horizon that already marks every act as a failure, incomplete and so on. Rather, such an ethics is one that fully accepts contingency but which is nonetheless prepared to risk the impossible in the sense of breaking out of standardized positions. We might say that it is an ethics which is not only politically motivated but which also draws its strength from the political itself. / For Zizek an ethics of the Real (or Real ethics) means that we cannot rely on any form of symbolic Other that would endorse our (in)decisions and (in)actions: for example, the ‘neutral’ financial data of the stockmarkets; the expert knowledge of Beck’s ‘new modernity’ scientists; the economic and military councils of the New World Order; the various (formal and informal) tribunals of political correctness; or any of the mysterious laws of God, nature or the market. What Zizek affirms is a radical culture of ethical identification for the left in which the alternative forms of militancy must first of all be militant with themselves. That is to say, they must be militant in the fundamental ethical sense of not relying on any external/higher authority and in the development of a political imagination that, like Zizek’s own thought, exhorts us to risk the impossible.

Tournament: Harvard Westlake | Round: 6 | Opponent: Harker AM | Judge: Daniel Park
The world is a dark and hopeless place - the affirmative’s politics of optimism and affirmation cause us to ignore our own complicity in violence—negation resolves the aff better

Pozo 9 (ANTONIO GUTIÉRREZ, Filozofická fakulta, Sevilská univerzita, Sevilla, Španielsko POZO, A. G.: Utopia in Black: The Negative Aesthetics of Adorno and the Contemporary Black Art, FILOZOFIA 64, 2009, No 5, p. 481-6)--mm *We don’t endorse holocaust rhetoric.
The Materialistic Aesthetics of Black Art. Colours talk, mean; they are texts1. Als the black one. Adorno considers that the black colour tells the truth. This thesis can agglutinate the aesthetic theory of Adorno, that it has in the black colour, already risen to the category of maximum aesthetic/philosophical relevance, its ‘ideal’. Black is the colour of the negative aesthetics of Adorno. The paragraph that he dedicates to black colour in his Ästhetische Theorie (AT 65-7)2 summarizes the spirit of this work and in general the spirit of that the truest contemporary art says, a black art (schwarze Kunst). Adorno is a black thinker, a black writer, as the thinkers, writers and artists who exerted bigger and deeper attraction and influence on him were: Sade, Poe, Baudelaire, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kafka, Beckett or Ionesco (DA 139).3 An aesthetics can not be built with the help of pure intellect, and to the margin of the real experience of art. The negative aesthetics concretely tells what black art of its time says, an art that Adorno calls “radical art (radikale Kunst)” (AT 65), that is to say, an art that thinks, an art that tells the truth. Art thinks, it is a “complexion of the truth” (AT 152, 391). For Adorno, to affirm that art thinks or that tells the truth, means to affirm that it consists on “unconscious writing of the history (bewuβtlose Geschichtsschreibung)” (AT 286, 387). The contemporary radical is so by force of thinking the truth of his (our) times, and it is a black, ugly art, because the reality that thinks of is black, ugly, horrible. Black colour is the true of our time. Today, Adorno concludes, a radical art is equal to a dark, gloomy art, “an art whose fundamental colour is black colour” (AT 65). The thesis of Adorno about the work of art as writing of the history supposes a nonidealist understanding of art. Black colour tells the truth. But on what the eloquence of black colour is based?. The works of art are, in principle, appearances, manifestations, and in this sense Adorno compares them with fireworks and circus. As the former, theworks of art “are showed in the shine of an instant in their expressive manifestation”, they are “writing that shines during an instant and goes out (aufblitzende und vergehende Schrift)” (AT 125-6). It is certain that every work of art tries to plot with the circus, but it annuls its primary artistic stratum if it does not imitate circus, if it does not include the moment of the appearance, that it is as the frame of a picture that notices us that right there the real world is interrupted and that another one begins, a imaginary, new and hopeful universe. The same role plays the curtain of the theatre: “The instant in that the curtain rises is the expectation of the appearance” (AT 126). Even Beckett, an author that represents the maximum expression of the contemporary radical art for Adorno4, he is faithful to the circus when using the stage and when “raising the curtain full with promises”, and it is in spite that his intention is “to exorcize the multicoloured thing of the circus” (AT 127). The authors that suppress “the charm of the backstages”, the moment of hope of the appearance, are signing the surrender of art. The proposal of Adorno suggests that negative art can not abdicate of its artistic level if it intends to be negative, black. Only being art it will be able to be anti-art. But the works of art are not simple manifestations. For Adorno they are more than that: “The works of art become such when producing that more (Mehr), when creating its own transcendency” (AT 122). The works exceed the manifestation (Erscheinung) itself on which they consist; they are manifestations that are transcended by themselves (AT 123). Art is not only manifestation; it is also spirit. Basically it is a spiritual phenomenon: “The spirit (Geist) of the works of art is what converts them, as regards manifestations, in more than they really are” (AT 134). The spirituality is what makes them talk, say; it is what is in the base of the eloquence of colour. The works of art are language, and this – their linguistic character (Sprachcharakter)- is what it allows them to transcend their character of thing (AT 122, 249). The spirit is what transforms them into language. However, Adorno underlines, “the spirit is nothing in the works of art outside of their words” (AT 135). The spirit of the works of art is nothing spiritual: “In their fullness works of art are not anything spiritual” (AT 122). They are, rather, something historical-social. The spirit transforms the works of art into language, in writing of history, because the spirit itself is spiritualised history. The aesthetic spirit is not an in itself, but the deposited history that speaks in the works of art. The ‘more’ that is the spirit of the work of art is said by the context – by the history and by the society. In contrast to the radical spiritualization of the aesthetics, Adorno points out that “the spiritual moment of the art is not what idealism calls spirit, but rather the proscribed mimetic impulse (mimetische Impuls)” (AT 139). The aesthetic spirit is the mimesis that allows the work of art to be the language of the historical reality. Adorno affirm that “the linguistic moment (sprachliche Moment) of art is its mimetic moment (Mimetisches)” (AT 305). Everything that talks in the work of art is said by the historical-social context. The negative aesthetics of Adorno is then a materia- listic aesthetics: “Art is cell of materialism”, says (KKA 186). In contrast to the idealistic interpretation, Adorno sustains that neither the colours, nor the sounds, intervene in art as if they themselves already express something (AT 140). Adorno defends that colours and sounds and forms do not speak per se. What they tell, “its eloquence only comes from the context in which they appear” (AT 140). The colour is certainly a text, writing, but not in idealistic key: it is the historical-social reality the one who writes. What black colour says it does not say for itself, but because it tells about a blackened reality. Ideological Art and Critical Art. The radical contemporary art is black art because is writing of a blackened historical reality. Black colour’s truth is not in itself but in the historical reality whose writing is so. The totalitarian logic of dominion, and with it horror, injustice and desperation, seem to have been taken possession of the historical life. The situation is ugly, black. The disenchantment (Entzauberung) and/or the blackening of the historical world are very patent. The enlightened critical reason, far from liberating, has become dominance instrument, condemning the humanity, that supposedly would liberate, to black darkness. This is the “dialectics of enlightenment”: the process of necessary metamorphosis (Verwandlung) of the pure idea (freedom, justice …) in dominion (DA 239-40, 254-55). The dominion is practiced by means of the identification (annulment and forgetfulness) of the differences in the whole of the social system. The idealistic philosophy of Hegel, centred in the “thought of the identity (Identitätsdenken)” (JE 506), represents for Adorno the highest philosophical expression of the dominion. Auschwitz will be then the supreme realization of this metaphysics of the identity: the genocide is the most horrible form of the individual’s homogeneity (ND 355). The homogeneity of the individuals in the society of the total dominion, the administered world (verwaltete Welt), that is to say, the identity a priori imposed between reality and reason, it is what Adorno calls the “system of the horror (System des Grauens)” (MM 126), the world in which the individuals are annulled, des-individualized. In fact, the pain, the individual thing, is the negative thing, the different thing, what can not be said or integrated by the system, the inexpressible thing, the incomprehensible thing. “The whole, Adorno writes down, is the no-real thing (Das Ganze ist das Umwahre)” (MM 55). The concrete, suffering and bloody of the historical reality escapes to the concept; it is black, opaque. The concept can not say that because it tends to sense, to identify it to itself, while the reality is black, illogical. Idealism ‘has told’ pain, but “the suffering (Leiden), Adorno has writen down, when becomes concept, remains silent and sterile” (AT 35). To say it or to understand it in idealistic terms is equal to identify it, to project a sense to it, and that is to deny it, to forget it, to conceal it. The pain is silenced, it fades; it is translated (masked) in sense. For Adorno, to translate it into concept, to rationalize it, that it is precisely what the Hegelian positive dialectics and the current social system intend, is in fact an injustice: “The sensibility is not less able to see a talkativeness in every statement of the positive of the existence, an injustice (Unrecht) towards the victims, and it has to rebel against the extraction of a sense, as abstract as it can be, of that tragic destiny” (ND 354). The price of the sense is the forgetfulness of the innocents’ pain. But the wounds continue open, and pain persists in silence: “Each philosophical term is the toughened scar of an unsolved problem” (PhT II, 10-1). When translating pain into concept, an injustice is not only committed with the victims, but also we reconcile with reality. This is the ideological function of the search for sense, of the translation of pain to concept. To extract sense of what seems negative, illogical, to understand the horror of the real thing, it is to legitimate it, to glorify the world just as it is. But Auschwitz, an open wound specially bleeding and suffering, radically goes further from the concept evidencing the philosophy and the society of the identity. In opinion of Adorno the essential danger resides in that the social system identifies everything with itself, homogenizes everything and integrates it in itself, repressing all that denies it, keeping the pain silent. To dominate is to silence, to remove the word to the negative thing. To the integration through the silence. The system of horror does not want to be recognized as such and it wants to hide the proofs. The critic’s key element is art, because art, Adorno writes down, is “the world for second time” (AT 208). Art is then a place of transgressions, is another thing regarding the bourgeois modern world. Therefore, “there is nothing in art, even being the most sublime one, that does not come from the world; not even anything that has not been transfigured” (AT 208). This ‘second world’ of art presents a negative –critical- tendency against the first one. The definitive feature of the aesthetics according to Adorno is criticism, the resistance and the protest against what it is. “The works of art are negative a priori” (AT 201). To understand art it is necessary to see it in negative relationship with the reality.5 The authentic work of art is a revolution (Revolte) in itself, so that “a conservative work of art is a contradiction in terms in itself” (AT 13, 264, 303, 339). The polemic character a priori of art is due do its own artistic nature. Its (critic) social function resides then in maintaining its aesthetic autonomy, its immanent difference with the real6: “The comforting of the big works of art is less in what they say (aussprechen) that in the fact that they were able to be pulled up of the existence” (MM 253). But not the whole current art is critic, resistance. Only the radical art is so. Adorno points out that there is also an art that “in a infantile way is happy with the colours” (Matisse?), a colourist and happy art (heitere Kunst) (AT 65-6), an art that adopts the attitude of comfort and narcotic before the blackened empiric reality by means of the false beautification of the world. Following the precept that ‘mundus vult decipi’ (AT 34, 350), it intends to improve the appearance of the horrible real world from its colourist world, but only a naïve person, Adorno adds, can believe possible that the discoloured and disenchanted world recovers its colours from art (AT 66). There is also an art that – like the idealistic concept-serves to the dominion, a art entkünstet, that has lost its artistic character, its critical capacity (AT 32-4), and that serves to the same end: to silence and to sterilize the pain. The ideological character of this art reaches its maximum expression with the cultural industry (Kulturindustrie) that is not but the reproduction to great scale of that colourist art, transforming it in a gigantic dominion machinery: while we console ourselves of the black historical reality with the false colourist beauty of this art, we conceal the reality of the existent thing, we legitimate it and we leave it just as it is. The conversion of art in consumption object by the cultural industry coincides with its reduction to pure diversion, what supposes the suspension of its critical and utopian power (DA 152). It promises ‘di-version’, that is, escape, evasion, but this promise is the mask of its ideological character as instrument of the dominion. Really, Adorno writes down, “escape art, escape movies are abhorrent not because they turn their back to a discoloured existence but because they do not do that with enough energy”, so that, “the escape is all a message. The message seems just the opposite, what wants to escape to escape from the flight (Flucht)” (MM 228). Diversion (Vergnügen) is flight, but not of the negative reality but of the “last resistance thought” that becomes agitated against that situation (DA 167). The diversion, far from escaping from this disenchanted world, it affirms it; it is what is most committed with the exploitation and the dominion. The message that the flight carries with itself really means ‘to be in agreement’: diversion is to collaborate, to forget the suffering, to abandon criticism (DA 167, 181). As Pascal7, Adorno conceives diversion like a mask, like turning one’s back before reality not to face the real problems face to face, in sum, as a closing in false of the wounds, what impedes to man the possibility to solve them in a more appropriate way: utopia. The diversion is the opposite side to the suffering conscience, the conscience that is nurtured of blood that flows from a wounded reality; the message of diversion is the suppression of the conscience of pain, the only way to salvation. This is the aesthetic hedonism that Adorno condemns. This cheerful and charming art that forgets and conceals horrors, is an injustice against “the deads and the accumulated pain and without word (akkumulierten und sprachlosen Schmerz)” (AT 66). Adorno assumes those verses of Brecht in which it is prohibited for our time an art that does not want to realize of horror: “What kind of times are they, where / a talk about trees is almost a crime / because it implies silence about so many horrors!” (AT 66). The poetry that has become impossible after Auschwitz, for being barbarian (KG 30), is the colourist poetry. For this reason Adorno has written that “maybe it has been false to say that after Auschwitz it can no longer be possible to write poems” (ND 355). They can be written, whenever they are black poems!. In this sombre time, an art that has lost all evidence (Selbstverständlichkeit) and legitimacy (AT 9-10), is art as embellishment, the ideological art that conceals and justifies the current reality. The Expressive Mimesis as Instrument of Criticism. The other art, the contemporary radical art, the black and critical art of Kafka and Beckett, as long as it gives word to pain, is the only hope. In contrast to art understood as false embellishment or reconcilable enchantment, an art able to transform deceptively the negative into positive, the irreconcilable in reconciliation, the chaotic in order, Adorno affirms that “today the mission of art is to introduce chaos in the order (Ordnung)” (MM 251). That mission is carried out by black art giving the word to pain. What Adorno tries with black art is to return to art its right to exist after Auschwitz, in a discoloured world. In opinion of Adorno, amid the more extreme (Äuβersten) and gloomy or dark (Finstersten) of reality, that is, amid the terrifying current reality, art can only subsist by becoming equal (sich gleichmachen) to that (black) reality (AT 65). Only the spiritual principle of the mimesis is guarantee of aestheticity. Only black art is art. And it is so because black art, in spite of becoming equal to the empiric reality, is not simple reflection, but essentially criticism, negation, utopia and hope. How is it possible that an art is critical being equal to the reality that denounces? In the current state of things, Adorno writes that art “is only able to be opposition by means of the identification with that against it rebels” (AT 201). Only being black – only becoming equal to the empiric reality- it can be critical and utopian. In a blackened world, black is the colour of criticism, of resistance, of negation and of utopia. This is the paradox of the contemporary radical art. If dominion is silence and integration, concealment of what suffers, criticism and utopia can only be scream, failure of (identifier) tendency that silences and conceals. The scream represents the statement of the difference faced with the horror of des-individualization. If the dominion system heals the wounds in false, resistance and hope depend onthat the wounds bleed again. Black art represents for Adorno the maximum exit to pain, the absurdity and the ugliness of the current reality (AT 171). Then black colour expresses the experience of the no-identical, what does not allow itself to be dissolved in the concept; it is the highest expression in the aesthetic phenomenon, understood as opening of the conscience to the other thing, what is not reducible to sense. This transcendency toward the other thing, on which radical black art consists, also constitutes the essence of the artistic mimesis. The mimetic logos of art consists then on alienation, in becoming equal to pain, in giving the word to that silences the society of dominion. This mimesis, last refuge of criticism, should be understood in a deeper sense than the usual: not as ‘representation’ but as ‘expression’ (Ausdruck). There is not aesthetic mimesis without expression (AT 171-5). Black art has become equal to the absurd, black and ugly reality, becoming absurd, black and ugly; becoming “social wound (gesellschaftliche Wundmal)” (AT 353). In this sense black art is for Adorno “language of suffering (Sprache des Leidens)” (AT 35). Beckett’s and Kafka’s art embodies the oppressed by the totalitarian society, what does not allow itself to be led, nor to be identified, nor to be integrated: the other thing. It tears the conciliatory facade that recovers the “lack of moderation of pain (Unmaβ des Leidens)” (AT 348; KG 262). Black art does not speak ‘of’ but rather ‘is’. Becoming equal, it is made ‘thing itself’. Instead of imposing to the object, art becomes its instrument, in the language of the thing itself, expression of its total negativity: to express the pain, to be the wound itself. The “central criterion” of the works of art, of its aesthetic and critical character, is the “force of its expression, thanks to which tension the works of art become eloquent with an gesture without words” (AT 353). The opposition to the society that art represents is not said, because to say is to understand, to rationalize, to find sense and to legitimate; it can not be made in the content but in the form, ‘becoming itself’ just that against what protests. The commitment of the works of art is not manifested by means of harangue, thesis or doctrines; it is rather executed in the form. More than to say it, it is expressed. The works tell by means of the form, not by means of the content. But what the work says is always a historical-social truth. And this is what Adorno finds fulfilled in an exemplary way in Picasso’s Guernica, that “achieves in its inhuman construction that expression that transforms it into a sharp social protest beyond any contemplative misunderstanding” (AT 353). In this way art tells, that is how it gives the world to pain and becomes language of the suffering. In the Kafkian style, and not so much in what it says, it is where Adorno finds Kafka’s criticism to the dehumanised society (AT 342). The aesthetic identification with that that it denies is expressive, that is to say, it has to load on itself all the blackness and the pain of that denied reality, and to express it, to show it, not to represent it or to say it. The black radical art is identified to the world by giving it the word, making the world be expressed through the works.

Tournament: Harvard Westlake | Round: 6 | Opponent: Harker AM | Judge: Daniel Park
There’s no meaningful relationship between debate about the character of the law and social change—get out of the argument room
Schlag ‘3 (Pierre, Distinguished Prof. @ U. of Colorado and Byron R. White Professor @ Colorado Law School, 57 U. Miami L. Rev. 1029)
The presumption is that the words of the judge (if they are well crafted) will effectively produce a social reality that corresponds roughly with the words uttered. But what reason is there to believe this? False Empowerment (No. 2) The endlessly repeated question in first year, "What should the court do?" leads law students to believe that courts respond to the force of the better argument. This would be tolerable if one added two provisos:1. The better argument often means little more than the one the courts are predisposed to believe; and 2. In the phrase "force of better argument" it's important to attend not just to the "better" part, but to the other term as well. False Empowerment (No. 3) Law students first learn of many complex social and economic realities through the medium of case law. What they learn is thus the law's vision of these economic and social realities. Not surprisingly, there is an almost magical correspondence between legal categories and social or economic practices. This magical fit leads law students (later to become law professors) to have an extremely confident view of the efficacy of law. Many law students are cured of this belief-structure by a stay in the legal clinic or by law practice. n4 There is one group of people, however, who are generally not cured of this belief-structure at all, but whose faith is actually intensified. These are the people who hold prestigious judicial clerkships where an emotional proximity to and identification with their judge ("my judge") leads to an even greater confidence in the efficacy of law. These people are frequently chosen to teach in law schools. False empowerment can be disempowering. It can also lead to pessimism and despair. Many people react to a loss of faith in law or legal studies with despair or pessimism. But this is the despair and pessimism that comes from giving up a naieve or a romantic vision of law and/or legal studies. The onslaught of this despair and pessimism is a good thing. It is like the thirty-something who realizes that he is mortal and that life is brief. Generally, this is not welcome news. At the same time, it may help prevent a life spent in Heideggerian dread, tanning salons, or the interstices of footnote 357.When the academic loses faith in law or legal studies, typically that person is most troubled because she has lost the framework that makes her academic project possible. But so what? Isn't the demand that law conform to an academic project arguably a selfish one? The Con, The Joke, and The Ironic Truth The Con: In the courtroom, the appellate judge is typically seated behind an elevated bench. On the classroom blackboard the appellate judge is chalked in above the plaintiff and the defendant. This is both a reflection and a reinforcement of the belief that the appellate judge is an intellectually and politically privileged legal actor. The Joke: In actuality, the appellate judge is a person who operates in conditions of severe information deficits and whose outlook is thoroughly manipulated by professional rhetoricians. Very often he has little or no understanding of the configurations of the social field to which his rulings will apply. What's more, this is a person who is prohibited from talking about the social field, except with a highly restricted number of people. The Ironic Truth: On the other hand, because we believe the appellate judge is a particularly privileged intellectual and political actor, we contribute to making him so. Legal intellectuals like to believe that law is an intelligent enterprise. They like to believe that the law offers an interesting vocabulary, grammar, and rhetoric through which to think about the world and law itself. This is naive. The political demand that law be efficacious means that law must track, must indeed incorporate popular beliefs about social and economic identities, causation, linguistic meaning, and so forth. (Those beliefs are often intellectually bereft.)The Argument Room The argument room is a place where academic advocates go to argue passionately about law and politics. (Apologies to Monty Python.) Within the room, arguments are won and lost; triumphs and defeats are had. But generally, no one outside the room pays much attention to what goes on inside the room. Sometimes there is seepage and fragments of the conversations are heard outside the room. Participants most often spend their time arguing about what should happen outside the room. This they call “knowledge” or "understanding" or "jurisprudence" or “scholarship” or “politics.” The one thing that generally cannot be talked about inside the room is the construction of the room itself. Politics (No. 1) For progressive legal thinkers, politics is a "theoretical unmentionable": The concept "politics" does a great deal of theoretical work and yet its identity remains generally immune from scrutiny. The categories (right, left) and the fundamental grammar of politics (progress, reaction, and so forth) generally go unquestioned. Oddly, while everything else seems to be contingent, conditional, contextual, and so on, the categories of politics seem to be oddly stable, nearly transcendent. Strangely, this occurs at a time when the categories, left and right (and even politics itself), seem increasingly fragile and non-referential.Still, this is an intensely political time - political not in the sense of significant social contestation (not much of that) nor in the sense of ideological struggle (not happening much either). Rather, political in the sense of very significant reorganizations and reallocations of power, wealth, and so on. Capital (for lack of a better term) is in a period of rapid self-reorganization in which it increasingly regiments precincts of life previously offering some resistance to its grammar - to wit: time, family, media, public space, wilderness, and so forth. The point is not that these precincts were immune to capital before, but rather that capital is advancing at such an intense rate to bring about a significant disruption and a qualitative change in these precincts. This change is manifest not only in the colonization of new precincts, but in the self-organization of capital *1034 (new financial vehicles) and, of course, in new literary and intellectual forms (postmodernism as both symptom and diagnosis). Meanwhile, the old categories, the old grammar, the old answers, seem to have lost some of their hold. The right is intellectually stagnant. And the left is, as a social presence, ontologically challenged. Indeed, in the United States, we seem at present to have several right wings and no left wing. This does not mean that "politics" as a social category is necessarily dead. It might mean simply that we (and others) have not understood, have not grasped, have not articulated its new configurations.What would be required on the intellectual level is a re-evaluation not only of the conventionally articulated categories, but of the social and economic ontology. At its best, postmodernism (and there has been a lot of bad reactionary and nostalgic postmodernism) is an attempt to trigger such a re-evaluation. Progressives, understandably, strive to protect their categories, grammar, and self-image from these challenges. But this is not without cost. To argue in favor of political positions is sometimes political. But it is not always political. Sometimes taking up a political argument is political and sometimes it has no consequences whatsoever. One cannot know beforehand. But it is a serious mistake to suppose that arguing in favor of a political position is in and of itself political. Very often in the legal academy, to argue for a political (or normative) position is not political at all. It simply triggers a scholastic, highly stereotyped meta-discourse about whether the arguments advanced are sound, accurate, should be adopted, or the like. Traditionally, the left has defended the victims of capitalism, imperialism, and racism. Indeed, this is an important part of what it means to be "on the left." Meanwhile, in the university, scholarly attention depends upon the production of new exciting ideas and research agendas. This poses a problem for the left: the victims of capitalism, imperialism, and racism remain the same. The political-intellectual defenses advanced on behalf of victims remain the same. This leads to a certain sense of weariness and deja vu - stereotyped arguments, standard rhetorical moves. A tendency to fight the same old fights. Machines. This is a problem. A Problem for Progressive Legal Thinkers As the author of Laying Down the Law, it just isn't clear to me that law is the sort of thing that is endlessly perfectible. At times it seems to me that law is a lot like military strategy. You can try making military strategy the best it can be (maybe you should). But when you get done it's still going to be military strategy. In that context it would be a good thing to have a few people (I volunteer) to be less than completely enthralled by military strategy. The same would go for law. It could be that law is objectionable in important respects because, well ... it's law.  From this standpoint it seems odd that someone should feel authorized to say: "You should do X." Legal Thought as Arrogance The belief is that the future of the free world, the maintenance of the rule of law, the welfare of the republic, the liberation of oppressed peoples, the direction of the Court, the legitimacy of the Florida election, hangs on a law professor's next article. This is the esprit serieux gone nuts. The most significant effect of this belief is to arrest thought and end the play of ideas necessary for creativity.Yes, legal interpretation sometimes takes place in a field of pain and death. n9 But that hardly means that legal studies takes place in a field of pain and death. It is a residual objectivism that enables legal academics to believe that when they write about law - what it is or what it should be - they are somehow engaged in the same enterprise as judges. They're not. It is not that legal scholarship is without consequence. It's just that the institutional and rhetorical contexts are sufficiently different that the consequences are different as well.There is an important, indeed foundational, category mistake that sustains American legal thought - it is the supposition that because academics and judges deploy the same vocabulary and the same grammar, they are involved in largely the same enterprise. I just don't think that's true. My own view is that legal academics are but one social group (among many) competing for the articulation of what law is. Judges are another. Social movements, corporations, public interest groups, administrative officials, criminals, etc., are some of the others. For most of the history of the American law school, academics have anointed judges as privileged speakers of law. In turn, legal academics have adopted the habits, forms of thought, and rhetoric of judges - thereby accruing to themselves the authority to say what the law is.Legal academics legitimate their claim to say what the law is by fashioning law as an academic discipline requiring expertise. Legal academics then hold themselves out as possessing this expertise. Among those critical theorists who seek to contest this expertise, one can distinguish two approaches. One approach is to try to reveal the emptiness of the claims to expertise among the legal intelligentsia and to reveal how these claims nonetheless gain power. Another approach is to try to relocate the authority to say what the law is among those who have been excluded.I do not see these approaches as antithetical, but rather as complementary. Furthermore, both approaches will in fact reinscribe, will performatively reinforce, precisely the sort of rhetorics and hierarchies they contest. No way around that.I think critical thinkers all do this - though in different ways. And it's certainly worthwhile pointing out how it is being done. At the same time, no one is safe or immune from this sort of criticism.To learn to laugh at what is taken seriously, but is not serious, is a serious thing to do. To take seriously what is not, is a drag. A Problem for Progressives
 Progressives wish to pursue a politics that is efficacious. This means keeping track both of the social context in which progressivism articulates itself (on the side of the subject), and the social context in *1038 which progressivism seeks to register its results (on the side of the object). But this work of reconnaissance - a work that is necessary - may bring unwelcome news: namely that progressivism unmodified is no longer a terribly cogent project. Choices will have to be made: to defend progressive thought against this unwelcome news or to put the identity of progressive projects at risk by encountering this unwelcome news. Formalism is virtually an inexorable condition of legal scholarship in the following sense: a legal academic generally writes scholarship outside the social pressures of what a lawyer would call real stakes, real clients, or real consequences. The failure of an argument in the pages of the Stanford Law Review is generally very different from the failure of an argument in a brief or an opinion. The difference in context changes the character and consequences of the acts - even if the authors use exactly the same words.Binary and Not (Insider/Outsider, Immanent/Transcendent, Mind/Body etc. etc. etc.)It's one thing to deploy oppositional binarism to describe the broad structures of a text. It's quite another to adopt binarism as an intellectual lifestyle choice. Oppositional binarism has a special hold/appeal in American law precisely because: 1) law is often identified with what appellate courts say it is; and 2) by the time a case gets to an appellate court, the reductionism of litigation and the binary structure of the adversarial orientation has reduced the dispute to an either/or (e.g., liberty vs. equality or formal equality vs. substantive equality, and so on).But ... .Oppositional binarism flounders because law does not have fixed, uncontroversial grids. Hence, for instance, the notion that a person is an insider or an outsider just doesn't track with much of anything (except perhaps the author's own formalism).If one thinks about it, a person is an insider in this respect (he's white) but an outsider in that respect (he's working class) and then an insider with respect to his pedigree (he went to Columbia) but really an outsider within his insider Columbia status because he was profoundly *1039 alienated from the Columbia social scene and blah blah blah. After a while (very soon, actually) the insider/outsider distinction loses its hold. The point is, unless you happen to have a well-formed, non-overlapping fixed grid (and this would be a very strange thing for a critical theorist to have!), oppositional binarism (like everything else) ultimately collapses.Interestingly, there was a moment of slippage in the history of critical legal studies (or perhaps the fem-crits) when binary oppositionalism slid from a heuristic into (of all things) a metaphysic!The Machines In Keith Aoki's comic strip, the agents of R.E.A.S.O.N. and P.I.E.R.R.E. fight each other in a comically cliched fashion. It is Nick Fury jurisprudence. And there is something strikingly right about that (however humbling it may be for me and others).One of the things that happens in the Nick Fury comic strips (as in Keith Aoki's contribution) is that the antagonists deploy machines against each other. In legal thought, we have a lot of machines in operation. n13 By this I mean that a great deal of so-called legal thought is not really thought at all - but the deployment of a series of rhetorical operations over and over again to perform actions (usually destructive in character) on other peoples' texts or persons. Every argument tends to become a machine. Over time, legal academics tend to become their own arguments. Then, of course, they become their own machines. At that point, it's time to move on.

Tournament: Harvard Westlake | Round: 6 | Opponent: Harker AM | Judge: Daniel Park
Policies of restraint towards competing powers is zero sum.
Machiavelli, Renaissance man (historian, politician, diplomat, philosopher, humanist, and writer), 1532
Niccolò, The Prince, Chapter III: Concerning Mixed Principalities, GW  *We do not endorsed gendered language*
Again, the prince who holds a country differing in the above respects ought to make himself the head and defender of his powerful neighbours, and to weaken the more powerful amongst them, taking care that no foreigner as powerful as himself shall, by any accident, get a footing there; for it will always happen that such a one will be introduced by those who are discontented, either through excess of ambition or through fear, as one has seen already. The Romans were brought into Greece by the Aetolians; and in every other country where they obtained a footing they were brought in by the inhabitants. And the usual course of affairs is that, as soon as a powerful foreigner enters a country, all the subject states are drawn to him, moved by the hatred which they feel against the ruling power. So that in respect to these subject states he has not to take any trouble to gain them over to himself, for the whole of them quickly rally to the state which he has acquired there. He has only to take care that they do not get hold of too much power and too much authority, and then with his own forces, and with their goodwill, he can easily keep down the more powerful of them, so as to remain entirely master in the country. And he who does not properly manage this business will soon lose what he has acquired, and whilst he does hold it he will have endless difficulties and troubles. The Romans, in the countries which they annexed, observed closely these measures; they sent colonies and maintained friendly relations with the minor powers, without increasing their strength; they kept down the greater, and did not allow any strong foreign powers to gain authority. Greece appears to me sufficient for an example. The Achaeans and Aetolians were kept friendly by them, the kingdom of Macedonia was humbled, Antiochus was driven out; yet the merits of the Achaeans and Aetolians never secured for them permission to increase their power, nor did the persuasions of Philip ever induce the Romans to be his friends without first humbling him, nor did the influence of Antiochus make them agree that he should retain any lordship over the country. Because the Romans did in these instances what all prudent princes ought to do, who have to regard not only present troubles, but also future ones, for which they must prepare with every energy, because, when foreseen, it is easy to remedy them; but if you wait until they approach, the medicine is no longer in time because the malady has become incurable; for it happens in this, as the physicians say it happens in hectic fever, that in the beginning of the malady it is easy to cure but difficult to detect, but in the course of time, not having been either detected or treated in the beginning, it becomes easy to detect but difficult to cure. Thus it happens in affairs of state, for when the evils that arise have been foreseen (which it is only given to a wise man to see), they can be quickly redressed, but when, through not having been foreseen, they have been permitted to grow in a way that every one can see them. there is no longer a remedy. Therefore, the Romans, foreseeing troubles, dealt with them at once, and, even to avoid a war, would not let them come to a head, for they knew that war is not to be avoided, but is only put off to the advantage of others; moreover they wished to fight with Philip and Antiochus in Greece so as not to have to do it in Italy; they could have avoided both, but this they did not wish; nor did that ever please them which is for ever in the mouths of the wise ones of our time:— Let us enjoy the benefits of the time — but rather the benefits of their own valour and prudence, for time drives everything before it, and is able to bring with it good as well as evil, and evil as well as good.

cp:The United States federal government should develop and deploy Prompt Global Strike systems

The PGS system’s speed increases rapid deployment capabilities and trades off with nukes. It’s going to be fantastic for heg and fighting terror
Grossman 6 (Elaine, reporter with Global Security Newswire, July 1, http://www.globalsecuritynewswire.org/gsn/nw_20090701_5635.php AD: 6/28/10)JM
Under the conventional
postures to work."

US leadership prevents great power war and existential governance crises
Brooks et al 13 (Brooks, Ikenberry, and Wohlforth ’13) (Stephen, Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, John Ikenberry is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University in the Department of Politics and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, William C. Wohlforth is the Daniel Webster Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College “Don’t Come Home America: The Case Against Retrenchment,” International Security, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Winter 2012/13), pp. 7–51)

A core premise of deep engagement is that it prevents the emergence of a far more dangerous global security environment. For one thing, as noted above, the United States’ overseas presence gives it the leverage to restrain partners from taking provocative action. Perhaps more important, its core alliance commitments also deter states with aspirations to regional hegemony from contemplating expansion and make its partners more secure, reducing their incentive to adopt solutions to their security problems that threaten others and thus stoke security dilemmas. The contention that engaged U.S. power dampens the baleful effects of anarchy is consistent with influential variants of realist theory. Indeed, arguably the scariest portrayal of the war-prone world that would emerge absent the “American Pacifier” is provided in the works of John Mearsheimer, who forecasts dangerous multipolar regions replete with security competition, arms races, nuclear proliferation and associated preventive war temptations, regional rivalries, and even runs at regional hegemony and full-scale great power war. 72 How do retrenchment advocates, the bulk of whom are realists, discount this benefit? Their arguments are complicated, but two capture most of the variation: (1) U.S. security guarantees are not necessary to prevent dangerous rivalries and conflict in Eurasia; or (2) prevention of rivalry and conflict in Eurasia is not a U.S. interest. Each response is connected to a different theory or set of theories, which makes sense given that the whole debate hinges on a complex future counterfactual (what would happen to Eurasia’s security setting if the United States truly disengaged?). Although a certain answer is impossible, each of these responses is nonetheless a weaker argument for retrenchment than advocates acknowledge. The first response flows from defensive realism as well as other international relations theories that discount the conflict-generating potential of anarchy under contemporary conditions. 73 Defensive realists maintain that the high expected costs of territorial conquest, defense dominance, and an array of policies and practices that can be used credibly to signal benign intent, mean that Eurasia’s major states could manage regional multipolarity peacefully without the American pacifier. Retrenchment would be a bet on this scholarship, particularly in regions where the kinds of stabilizers that nonrealist theories point to—such as democratic governance or dense institutional linkages—are either absent or weakly present. There are three other major bodies of scholarship, however, that might give decisionmakers pause before making this bet. First is regional expertise. Needless to say, there is no consensus on the net security effects of U.S. withdrawal. Regarding each region, there are optimists and pessimists. Few experts expect a return of intense great power competition in a post-American Europe, but many doubt European governments will pay the political costs of increased EU defense cooperation and the budgetary costs of increasing military outlays. 74 The result might be a Europe that is incapable of securing itself from various threats that could be destabilizing within the region and beyond (e.g., a regional conflict akin to the 1990s Balkan wars), lacks capacity for global security missions in which U.S. leaders might want European participation, and is vulnerable to the influence of outside rising powers. What about the other parts of Eurasia where the United States has a substantial military presence? Regarding the Middle East, the balance begins to swing toward pessimists concerned that states currently backed by Washington— notably Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia—might take actions upon U.S. retrenchment that would intensify security dilemmas. And concerning East Asia, pessimism regarding the region’s prospects without the American pacifier is pronounced. Arguably the principal concern expressed by area experts is that Japan and South Korea are likely to obtain a nuclear capacity and increase their military commitments, which could stoke a destabilizing reaction from China. It is notable that during the Cold War, both South Korea and Taiwan moved to obtain a nuclear weapons capacity and were only constrained from doing so by a still-engaged United States. 75 The second body of scholarship casting doubt on the bet on defensive realism’s sanguine portrayal is all of the research that undermines its conception of state preferences. Defensive realism’s optimism about what would happen if the United States retrenched is very much dependent on its particular—and highly restrictive—assumption about state preferences; once we relax this assumption, then much of its basis for optimism vanishes. Specifically, the prediction of post-American tranquility throughout Eurasia rests on the assumption that security is the only relevant state preference, with security defined narrowly in terms of protection from violent external attacks on the homeland. Under that assumption, the security problem is largely solved as soon as offense and defense are clearly distinguishable, and offense is extremely expensive relative to defense. Burgeoning research across the social and other sciences, however, undermines that core assumption: states have preferences not only for security but also for prestige, status, and other aims, and they engage in trade-offs among the various objectives. 76 In addition, they define security not just in terms of territorial protection but in view of many and varied milieu goals. It follows that even states that are relatively secure may nevertheless engage in highly competitive behavior. Empirical studies show that this is indeed sometimes the case. 77 In sum, a bet on a benign postretrenchment Eurasia is a bet that leaders of major countries will never allow these nonsecurity preferences to influence their strategic choices. To the degree that these bodies of scholarly knowledge have predictive leverage, U.S. retrenchment would result in a significant deterioration in the security environment in at least some of the world’s key regions. We have already mentioned the third, even more alarming body of scholarship. Offensive realism predicts that the withdrawal of the American pacifier will yield either a competitive regional multipolarity complete with associated insecurity, arms racing, crisis instability, nuclear proliferation, and the like, or bids for regional hegemony, which may be beyond the capacity of local great powers to contain (and which in any case would generate intensely competitive behavior, possibly including regional great power war). Hence it is unsurprising that retrenchment advocates are prone to focus on the second argument noted above: that avoiding wars and security dilemmas in the world’s core regions is not a U.S. national interest. Few doubt that the United States could survive the return of insecurity and conflict among Eurasian powers, but at what cost? Much of the work in this area has focused on the economic externalities of a renewed threat of insecurity and war, which we discuss below. Focusing on the pure security ramifications, there are two main reasons why decisionmakers may be rationally reluctant to run the retrenchment experiment. First, overall higher levels of conflict make the world a more dangerous place. Were Eurasia to return to higher levels of interstate military competition, one would see overall higher levels of military spending and innovation and a higher likelihood of competitive regional proxy wars and arming of client states—all of which would be concerning, in part because it would promote a faster diffusion of military power away from the United States. Greater regional insecurity could well feed proliferation cascades, as states such as Egypt, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Saudi Arabia all might choose to create nuclear forces. 78 It is unlikely that proliferation decisions by any of these actors would be the end of the game: they would likely generate pressure locally for more proliferation. Following Kenneth Waltz, many retrenchment advocates are proliferation optimists, assuming that nuclear deterrence solves the security problem. 79 Usually carried out in dyadic terms, the debate over the stability of proliferation changes as the numbers go up. Proliferation optimism rests on assumptions of rationality and narrow security preferences. In social science, however, such assumptions are inevitably probabilistic. Optimists assume that most states are led by rational leaders, most will overcome organizational problems and resist the temptation to preempt before feared neighbors nuclearize, and most pursue only security and are risk averse. Confidence in such probabilistic assumptions declines if the world were to move from nine to twenty, thirty, or forty nuclear states. In addition, many of the other dangers noted by analysts who are concerned about the destabilizing effects of nuclear proliferation—including the risk of accidents and the prospects that some new nuclear powers will not have truly survivable forces—seem prone to go up as the number of nuclear powers grows. 80 Moreover, the risk of “unforeseen crisis dynamics” that could spin out of control is also higher as the number of nuclear powers increases. Finally, add to these concerns the enhanced danger of nuclear leakage, and a world with overall higher levels of security competition becomes yet more worrisome. The argument that maintaining Eurasian peace is not a U.S. interest faces a second problem. On widely accepted realist assumptions, acknowledging that U.S. engagement preserves peace dramatically narrows the difference between retrenchment and deep engagement. For many supporters of retrenchment, the optimal strategy for a power such as the United States, which has attained regional hegemony and is separated from other great powers by oceans, is offshore balancing: stay over the horizon and “pass the buck” to local powers to do the dangerous work of counterbalancing any local rising power. The United States should commit to onshore balancing only when local balancing is likely to fail and a great power appears to be a credible contender for regional hegemony, as in the cases of Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union in the midtwentieth century. The problem is that China’s rise puts the possibility of its attaining regional hegemony on the table, at least in the medium to long term. As Mearsheimer notes, “The United States will have to play a key role in countering China, because its Asian neighbors are not strong enough to do it by themselves.” 81 Therefore, unless China’s rise stalls, “the United States is likely to act toward China similar to the way it behaved toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War.” 82 It follows that the United States should take no action that would compromise its capacity to move to onshore balancing in the future. It will need to maintain key alliance relationships in Asia as well as the formidably expensive military capacity to intervene there. The implication is to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, reduce the presence in Europe, and pivot to Asia— just what the United States is doing. 83 In sum, the argument that U.S. security commitments are unnecessary for peace is countered by a lot of scholarship, including highly influential realist scholarship. In addition, the argument that Eurasian peace is unnecessary for U.S. security is weakened by the potential for a large number of nasty security consequences as well as the need to retain a latent onshore balancing capacity that dramatically reduces the savings retrenchment might bring. Moreover, switching between offshore and onshore balancing could well be difficult. Bringing together the thrust of many of the arguments discussed so far underlines the degree to which the case for retrenchment misses the underlying logic of the deep engagement strategy. By supplying reassurance, deterrence, and active management, the United States lowers security competition in the world’s key regions, thereby preventing the emergence of a hothouse atmosphere for growing new military capabilities. Alliance ties dissuade partners from ramping up and also provide leverage to prevent military transfers to potential rivals. On top of all this, the United States’ formidable military machine may deter entry by potential rivals. Current great power military expenditures as a percentage of GDP are at historical lows, and thus far other major powers have shied away from seeking to match top-end U.S. military capabilities. In addition, they have so far been careful to avoid attracting the “focused enmity” of the United States. 84 All of the world’s most modern militaries are U.S. allies (America’s alliance system of more than sixty countries now accounts for some 80 percent of global military spending), and the gap between the U.S. military capability and that of potential rivals is by many measures growing rather than shrinking. 85
Heg solves terrorism
Walt, international affairs professor at Harvard, 2002
(Stephen, “American primacy: its prospects and pitfalls - prominence of United States in economic, international affairs”, Naval War College Review, Spring, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0JIW/is_2_55/ai_88174226/pg_2/, ldg)

Perhaps the most obvious reason why states seek primacy--and why the United States benefits from its current position--is that international politics is a dangerous business. Being wealthier and stronger than other states does not guarantee that a state will survive, of course, and it cannot insulate a state from all outside pressures. But the strongest state is more likely to escape serious harm than weaker ones are, and it will be better equipped to resist the pressures that arise. Because the United States is so powerful, and because its society is so wealthy, it has ample resources to devote to whatever problems it may face in the future. At the beginning of the Cold War, for example, its power enabled the United States to help rebuild Europe and Japan, to assist them in developing stable democratic orders, and to subsidize the emergence of an open international economic order. (7) The United States was also able to deploy powerful armed forces in Europe and Asia as effective deterrents to Soviet expansion. When the strategic importance of the Persian Gulf increased in the late 1970s, the United States created its Rapid Deployment Force in order to deter threats to the West's oil supplies; in 1990-91 it used these capabilities to liberate Kuwait. Also, when the United States was attacked by the Al-Qaeda terrorist network in September 2001, it had the wherewithal to oust the network's Taliban hosts and to compel broad international support for its campaign to eradicate Al-Qaeda itself. It would have been much harder to do any of these things if the United States had been weaker. Today, U.S. primacy helps deter potential challenges to American interests in virtually every part of the world. Few countries or nonstate groups want to invite the "focused enmity" of the United States (to use William Wohlforth's apt phrase), and countries and groups that have done so (such as Libya, Iraq, Serbia, or the Taliban) have paid a considerable price. As discussed below, U.S. dominance does provoke opposition in a number of places, but anti-American elements are forced to rely on covert or indirect strategies (such as terrorist bombings) that do not seriously threaten America's dominant position. Were American power to decline significantly, however, groups opposed to U.S. interests would probably be emboldened and overt challenges would be more likely. 

Hegemony decline causes prolif.
Rosen, professor of National Security and Military Affairs at Harvard University, 2003
(Stephen, “An Empire, If you Can Keep It”, National Interest, Spring, lexis, ldg)

Rather than wrestle with such difficult and unpleasant problems,  the United States could give up the imperial mission, or pretensions to it, now. This would essentially mean the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from the Middle East, Europe and mainland Asia. It may be that all other peoples, without significant exception, will then turn to their own affairs and leave the United States alone. But those who are hostile to us might remain hostile, and be much less afraid of the United States after such a withdrawal. Current friends would feel less secure and, in the most probable post-imperial world, would revert to the logic of self-help in which all states do what they must to protect themselves. This would imply the relatively rapid acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Iran, Iraq and perhaps Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Indonesia and others. Constraints on the acquisition of biological weapons would be even weaker than they are today. Major regional arms races would also be very likely throughout Asia and the Middle East. This would not be a pleasant world for Americans, or anyone else. It is difficult to guess what the costs of such a world would be to the United States. They would probably not put the end of the United States in prospect, but they would not be small. If the logic of American empire is unappealing, it is not at all clear that the alternatives are that much more attractive. 

Proliferation guarantees massive nuclear escalation and war
Utgoff, Institute for Defense Analyses deputy director, 02
Victor A., former National Security Council staff, “Proliferation, Missile Defence and American Ambitions,” Survival, vol. 44, p85-102

Once a conflict reaches the point where nuclear weapons are employed, the stresses felt by the leaderships would rise enormously. These stresses can be expected to further degrade their decision-making. The pressure to force the enemy to stop fighting or to surrender could argue for more forceful and decisive military action, which might be the right thing to do in the circumstances, but maybe not. And the horrors of the carnage already suffered may be seen as justification for visiting the most devastating punishment possible on the enemy.7 Again, history demonstrates how intense conflict can lead the combatants to escalate violence to the maximum possible levels. In the Second World War, early promises not to bomb cities soon gave way to essentially indiscriminate bombing of civilians. The war between Iran and Iraq during the 1980s led to the use of chemical weapons on both sides and exchanges of missiles against each other's cities. And more recently, violence in the Middle East escalated in a few months from rocks and small arms to heavy weapons on one side, and from police actions to air strikes and armoured attacks on the other.
Escalation of violence is also basic human nature. Once the violence starts, retaliatory exchanges of violent acts can escalate to levels unimagined by the participants beforehand.8 Intense and blinding anger is a common response to fear or humiliation or abuse. And such anger can lead us to impose on our opponents whatever levels of violence are readily accessible. In sum, widespread proliferation is likely to lead to an occasional shoot-out with nuclear weapons, and that such shoot-outs will have a substantial probability of escalating to the maximum destruction possible with the weapons at hand. Unless nuclear proliferation is stopped, we are headed toward a world that will mirror the American Wild West of the late 1800s. With most, if not all, nations wearing nuclear 'six-shooters' on their hips, the world may even be a more polite place than it is today, but every once in a while we will all gather on a hill to bury the bodies of dead cities or even whole nations.

Tournament: harvard westlake | Round: 3 | Opponent: lynbrook hh | Judge: john scoggin
Interpretation: Bare plurals-The phrase public colleges and universities in the resolution is a generic bare plural.
Nebel 14, Jake, AB in philosophy at Princeton and the BPhil at Oxford, NYU,20 14, http://vbriefly.com/2014/12/19/jake-nebel-on-specifying-just-governments/
I believe that debaters shouldn’t specify a government on the living wage topic. The standard argument for this is simple: “just governments” is a plural noun phrase, so it refers to more than one just government. Most debaters will stop there. But there is much more to say. (Some seem not to care about the plural construction. I plan to address this view in a later article about the parametric conception of topicality.) Some noun phrases include articles like “the,” demonstratives like “these,” possessives like “my,” or quantifiers like “some” or “all.” These words are called determiners. Bare plurals, including “just governments,” lack determiners. There’s no article, demonstrative, possessive, or quantifier in front of the noun to tell you how many or which governments are being discussed. We use bare plurals for two main purposes. Consider some examples: Debaters are here. Debaters are smart. In (1), “debaters” seems equivalent to “some debaters.” It is true just in case there is more than one debater around. If I enter a restaurant and utter (1), I speak truly if there are a couple of debaters at a table. This is an existential use of the bare plural, because it just says that there exist things of the relevant class (debaters) that meet the relevant description (being here). In (2), though, “debaters” seems to refer to debaters in general. This use of the bare plural is generic. Some say that generics refer to kinds of things, rather than particular members of their kinds, or that they refer to typical cases. There is a large literature on understanding generics. Here my aim is not to figure out the truth conditions for the generic reading of the resolution; I shall simply work with our pre-theoretical grip on the contrast between sentences like (1) and (2). This distinction bears importantly on the resolution. If “just governments” is a generic bare plural, then the debate is about whether just governments in general ought to require that employers pay a living wage. If it is an existential bare plural, then the debate is about whether some just governments—i.e., more than one—ought to require that employers pay a living wage. Only the second interpretation allows one to affirm by specifying a few governments.
‘In’ means throughout 

Words and Phrases, 1959
(p. 546 (PDNS3566))

In the Act of 1861 providing that justices of the peace shall have jurisdiction “in” their respective counties to hear and determine all complaints, the word “in” should be construed to mean “throughout” such counties. Reynolds v. Larkin, 14, p. 114, 117, 10 Colo. 126.

Second, The United States includes all the territories and land over which it has jurisdiction

Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms 5
(Dictionary of Military, http://www.thefreedictionary.com/United+States, 2005)

Includes the land area, internal waters, territorial sea, and airspace of the United States, including the following: a. US territories, possessions, and commonwealths; and b. Other areas over which the US Government has complete jurisdiction and control or has exclusive authority or defense responsibility.

Standard: Limits
Multiple impacts to loss of limits

1. Competitive equity. There’s no way for the neg to prepare against the thousands of universities that exist which means that the aff will always win the case debate. Gives a significant research advantage to the aff because they have had weeks to prep for their specific case whereas the neg only has a few minutes of pre round prep.
   2. Absolutism. The aff explodes research burdens forcing neg debaters to resort to either extreme K’s or disads that don’t really link which is terrible for our education because it teaches us to look solely into nihilistic and extremist literature as opposed to generating clash about the affirmative. . Also creates a substantive side bias because the aff will have an easier time beating generic arguments.
   3. Grammar. The affirmative does not affirm the resolution as it is which means you can probably vote negative on presumption.
   4. Topic education. the affirmative model of debate is bad because it results in dogmatism as the negative can’t make objections to the case debate itself which results in a lack of truth testing which is the key educational impact of debate.
   Prefer competing interpretations over reasonability. Reasonability leads to a race to the bottom, justifies judge intervention, and produces hella arbitrary brightlines.
   Competing interps coopts reasonability because reasonability begs the question of how we determine what is reasonable which is through the competing interps debate. If I win that the interpretation creates a better model of debate, then theirs should be considered unreasonable.
   Default to potential abuse, it’s not a question of what the aff does, but rather what the aff’s model of debate justifies.

Tournament: presentation | Round: 5 | Opponent: palo alto | Judge: arjun tambe
Disclosure theory
affirmatives should disclose the full tags and citiations to their affirmatives and all off case positions read.
Standards:
competitive equity. Allowing one debater to not disclose skews the game against all of the other debaters.
Research. Disclosure allows more in depth debates when people are given some amount of time to prepare for the debate.
Academic integrity: disclosure disincentivises miscutting evidence since other people can see your evidence.

Tournament: harvard westlake | Round: 2 | Opponent: Katy Taylor | Judge: Kathy Bond
Interpretation - The AFF may only garner offense from hypothetical enactment of the resolution 

This does not require the use of any particular style, type of evidence, or assumption about the role of the judge — only that the topic should determine the debate’s subject matter.  Solves their method good offense – they can read  as a framework argument to justify a topical plan, there’s no reason voting off it is key.

Resolved reflects policy passage before a legislative body.  Parcher 01
(Jeff, Fmr. Debate Coach at Georgetown University, February, http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200102/0790.html)

(1) Pardon me if I turn to a source besides Bill. American Heritage Dictionary: Resolve: 1. To make a firm decision about. 2. To decide or express by formal vote. 3. To separate something into constituent parts See Syns at *analyze* (emphasis in orginal) 4. Find a solution to. See Syns at *Solve* (emphasis in original) 5. To dispel: resolve a doubt. - n 1. Frimness of purpose; resolution. 2. A determination or decision.  (2) The very nature of the word "resolution" makes it a question. American Heritage: A course of action determined or decided on. A formal statemnt of a deciion, as by a legislature. (3) The resolution is obviously a question. Any other conclusion is utterly inconcievable. Why? Context. The debate community empowers a topic committee to write a topic for ALTERNATE side debating. The committee is not a random group of people coming together to "reserve" themselves about some issue. There is context - they are empowered by a community to do something. In their deliberations, the topic community attempts to craft a resolution which can be ANSWERED in either direction. They focus on issues like ground and fairness because they know the resolution will serve as the basis for debate which will be resolved by determining the policy desireablility of that resolution. That's not only what they do, but it's what we REQUIRE them to do. We don't just send the topic committee somewhere to adopt their own group resolution. It's not the end point of a resolution adopted by a body - it's the prelimanary wording of a resolution sent to others to be answered or decided upon. (4) Further context: the word resolved is used to emphasis the fact that it's policy debate. Resolved comes from the adoption of resolutions by legislative bodies. A resolution is either adopted or it is not. It's a question before a legislative body. Should this statement be adopted or not. (5) The very terms 'affirmative' and 'negative' support my view. One affirms a resolution. Affirmative and negative are the equivalents of 'yes' or 'no' - which, of course, are answers to a question.
OED defines ought as "Used to indicate a desirable or expected state", so the aff must defend a desirable state of affairs, not just an obligation
(Oxford English Dictionary, "ought")

Violation: 

They defend  which isn’t the topic.  
He might try to make sketchy “I meets” that he meets the resolution, but our interp is explicit, he can’t derive offense from the speech act. 

Standards:  

1. Engagement – there are infinite non topical AFFs - a precise and predictable point of difference is key to effective dialogue.  
   2. Outweighs:
   3. A. Even if their method is good, it isn’t valuable if it’s not procedurally debatable – they don’t get access to any of their offense
   4. B.  Debate is about process not content – we inevitably switch sides, even if it’s arguing against one method with another.  The individual ideas we learn, like , aren’t as valuable as learning how to effectively apply those ideas outside of round by engaging in precise discussions instead of just asserting opinions.
   5. C.  They force the NEG to extremist generics – this is why cap and anthro are such common responses to their position  - which causes more evasion than if we had a substantive debate about  in the topic.
   6.
   7.
   8. 2.  Procedural Fairness  - Non topical advocacies mean they can defend anything outside the resolution which is unpredictable, and also defend uncontestable offense like _.  This kills NEG ground and thus equal access to the ballot.
   9.
   10. This is an independent voting issue which outweighs:
   1. 
      12. A.  Evaluation – even if their arguments seem true, that’s only because they already had an advantage – fairness is a meta constraint on your ability to determine who best meets their ROB.
      13. B.  Fairness is key to effective dialogue.  Galloway 07
      14.
      15. Ryan, “DINNER AND CONVERSATION AT THE ARGUMENTATIVE TABLE: RECONCEPTUALIZING DEBATE AS AN ARGUMENTATIVE DIALOGUE”, Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28 (2007)
      16.
      17. Debate as a dialogue sets an argumentative table, where all parties receive a relatively fair opportunity to voice their position. Anything that fails to allow participants to have their position articulated denies one side of the argumentative table a fair hearing. The affirmative side is set by the topic and fairness requirements. While affirmative teams have recently resisted affirming the topic, in fact, the topic selection process is rigorous, taking the relative ground of each topic as its central point of departure. Setting the affirmative reciprocally sets the negative. The negative crafts approaches to the topic consistent with affirmative demands. The negative crafts disadvantages, counter-plans, and critical arguments premised on the arguments that the topic allows for the affirmative team. According to fairness norms, each side sits at a relatively balanced argumentative table. When one side takes more than its share, competitive equity suffers. However, it also undermines the respect due to the other involved in the dialogue. When one side excludes the other, it fundamentally denies the personhood of the other participant (Ehninger, 1970, p. 110). A pedagogy of debate as dialogue takes this respect as a fundamental component. A desire to be fair is a fundamental condition of a dialogue that takes the form of a demand for equality of voice. Far from being a banal request for links to a disadvantage, fairness is a demand for respect, a demand to be heard, a demand that a voice backed by literally months upon months of preparation, research, and critical thinking not be silenced. Affirmative cases that suspend basic fairness norms operate to exclude particular negative strategies. Unprepared, one side comes to the argumentative table unable to meaningfully participate in a dialogue. They are unable to “understand what ‘went on…’” and are left to the whims of time and power (Farrell, 1985, p. 114). Hugh Duncan furthers this line of reasoning: Opponents not only tolerate but honor and respect each other because in doing so they enhance their own chances of thinking better and reaching sound decisions. Opposition is necessary because it sharpens thought in action. We assume that argument, discussion, and talk, among free an informed people who subordinate decisions of any kind, because it is only through such discussion that we reach agreement which binds us to a common cause…If we are to be equal…relationships among equals must find expression in many formal and informal institutions (Duncan, 1993, p. 196-197). Debate compensates for the exigencies of the world by offering a framework that maintains equality for the sake of the conversation (Farrell, 1985, p. 114). For example, an affirmative case on the 2007-2008 college topic might defend neither state nor international action in the Middle East, and yet claim to be germane to the topic in some way. The case essentially denies the arguments that state action is oppressive or that actions in the international arena are philosophically or pragmatically suspect. Instead of allowing for the dialogue to be modified by the interchange of the affirmative case and the negative response, the affirmative subverts any meaningful role to the negative team, preventing them from offering effective “counter-word” and undermining the value of a meaningful exchange of speech acts. Germaneness and other substitutes for topical action do not accrue the dialogical benefits of topical advocacy.