Tournament: Blue Key | Round: 1 | Opponent: Starrs Mill CW | Judge: Michael Ortega
Framework
Morality must start from the non-ideal circumstances we have inherited. We can never achieve the ideal consequences that ethical theories aspire for without a focus on social reality
Mills 05 Charles W. Mills, “Ideal Theory” as Ideology, 2005
I suggest that this spontaneous reaction, far from being philosophically naïve or jejune, is in fact the correct one. If we start from what is presumably the uncontroversial premise that the ultimate point of ethics is to guide our actions and make ourselves better people and the world a better place, then the framework above will not only be unhelpful, but will in certain respects be deeply antithetical to the proper goal of theoretical ethics as an enterprise. In modeling humans, human capacities, human interaction, human institutions, and human society on ideal-as-idealized-models, in never exploring how deeply different this is from ideal-as-descriptive-models, we are abstracting away from realities crucial to our comprehension of the actual workings of injustice in human interactions and social institutions, and thereby guaranteeing that the ideal-as-idealized-model will never be achieved.
This approach to ethics justifies focus on resolving material conditions of violence. Morality isn’t just something that we strive for in a vaccum, rather, we resolve it based on the empirical world. Pappas 16
Gregory Fernando Pappas Texas AandM University “The Pragmatists’ Approach to Injustice”, The Pluralist Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 2016,
In Experience and Nature, Dewey names the empirical way of doing philosophy the “denotative method” (LW 1:371).18 What Dewey means by “denotation” is simply the phase of an empirical inquiry where we are con- cerned with designating, as free from theoretical presuppositions as possible, the concrete problem (subject matter) for which we can provide different and even competing descriptions and theories. Thus an empirical inquiry about an injustice must begin with a rough and tentative designation of where the injustices from within the broader context of our everyday life and activities are. Once we designate the subject matter, we then engage in the inquiry itself, including diagnosis, possibly even constructing theories and developing concepts. Of course, that is not the end of the inquiry. We must then take the results of that inquiry “as a path pointing and leading back to something in primary experience” (LW 1:17). This looping back is essential, and it neverends as long as there are new experiences of injustice that may require a revi- sion of our theories.¶ Injustices are events suffered by concrete people at a particular time and in a situation. We need to start by pointing out and describing these proble-matic experiences instead of starting with a theoretical account or diagnosis of them. Dewey is concerned with the consequences of not following the methodological advice to distinguish designation from diagnosis. Definitions, theoretical criteria, and diagnosis can be useful; they have their proper place and function once inquiry is on its way, but if stressed too much at the start of inquiry, they can blind us to aspects of concrete problems that escape our theoretical lenses. We must attempt to pretheoretically designate the subject matter, that is, to “point” in a certain direction, even with a vague or crude description of the problem. But, for philosophers, this task is not easy because, for instance, we are often too prone to interpret the particular problem in a way that verifies our most cherished theories of injustice. One must be careful to designate the subject matter in such a way as not to slant the question in favor of one’s theory or theoretical preconceptions. A philosopher must make an honest effort to designate the injustices based on what is experienced as such because a concrete social problem (e.g., injustice) is independent and neutral with respect to the different possible competing diagnoses or theories about its causes. Otherwise, there is no way to test or adjudicate between competing accounts.¶ That designation precedes diagnosis is true of any inquiry that claims to be empirical. To start with the diagnosis is to not start with the problem. The problem is pretheoretical or preinquiry, not in any mysterious sense but in that it is first suffered by someone in a particular context. Otherwise, the diagnosis about the causes of the problem has nothing to be about, and the inquiry cannot even be initiated. In his Logic, Dewey lays out the pattern of all empirical inquiries (LW 12). All inquiries start with what he calls an “indeterminate situation,” prior even to a “problematic situation.” Here is a sketch of the process:¶ Indeterminate situation → problematic situation → diagnosis: What is the problem? What is the solution? (operations of analysis, ideas, observations, clarification, formulating and testing hypothesis, reasoning, etc.) → final judgment (resolution: determinate situation)¶ To make more clear or vivid the difference of the starting point between Anderson and Dewey, we can use the example (or analogy) of medical prac- tice, one that they both use to make their points.19 The doctor’s startingpoint is the experience of a particular illness of a particular patient, that is, the concrete and unique embodied patient experiencing a disruption or prob- lematic change in his life. “The patient having something the matter with him is antecedent; but being ill (having the experience of illness) is not the same as being an object of knowledge.”20 The problem becomes an object of knowledge once the doctor engages in a certain interaction with the patient, analysis, and testing that leads to a diagnosis. For Dewey, “diagnosis” occurs when the doctor is already engaged in operations of experimental observation in which he is already narrowing the field of relevant evidence, concerned with the correlation between the nature of the problem and possible solu- tions. Dewey explains the process: “A physician . . . is called by a patient. His original material of experience is thereby provided. This experienced object sets the problem of inquiry. . . . He calls upon his store of knowledge to sug- gest ideas that may aid him in reaching a judgment as to the nature of the trouble and its proper treatment.”21¶ Just as with the doctor, empirical inquirers about injustice must return to the concrete problem for testing, and should never forget that their con- ceptual abstractions and general knowledge are just means to ameliorate what is particular, context-bound, and unique. In reaching a diagnosis, the doc- tor, of course, relies on all of his background knowledge about diseases and evidence, but a good doctor never forgets the individuality of the particular problem (patient and illness).¶ The physician in diagnosing a case of disease deals with something in- dividualized. He draws upon a store of general principles of physiology, etc., already at his command. Without this store of conceptual material he is helpless. But he does not attempt to reduce the case to an exact specimen of certain laws of physiology and pathology, or do away with its unique individuality. Rather he uses general statements as aids to direct his observation of the particular case, so as to discover what it is like. They function as intellectual tools or instrumentalities. (LW 4:166)¶ Dewey uses the example of the doctor to emphasize the radical contex- tualism and particularism of his view. The good doctor never forgets that this patient and “this ill is just the specific ill that it is. It never is an exact duplicate of anything else.”22 Similarly, the empirical philosopher in her in- quiry about an injustice brings forth general knowledge or expertise to an inquiry into the causes of an injustice. She relies on sociology and history as well as knowledge of different forms of injustice, but it is all in the service of inquiry about the singularity of each injustice suffered in a situation.¶ The correction or refinement that I am making to Anderson’s character- ization of the pragmatists’ approach is not a minor terminological or scholarly point; it has methodological and practical consequences in how we approach an injustice. The distinction between the diagnosis and the problem (the ill- ness, the injustice) is an important functional distinction that must be kept in inquiry because it keeps us alert to the provisional and hypothetical aspect of any diagnosis. To rectify or improve any diagnosis, we must return to the concrete problem; as with the patient, this may require attending as much as possible to the uniqueness of the problem. This is in the same spirit as Aon’s preference for an empirical inquiry that tries to “capture all of the expressive harms” in situations of injustice. But this requires that we begin with and return to concrete experiences of injustice and not by starting with a diagnosis of the causes of injustice provided by studies in the social sciences, as in (5) above. For instance, a diagnosis of causes that are due to systematic, structural features of society or the world disregards aspects of the concrete experiences of injustice that are not systematic and structural.¶ Making problematic situations of injustice our explicit methodological commitment as a starting point rather than a diagnosis of the problem is an important and useful imperative for nonideal theories. It functions as a directive to inquirers toward the problem, to locate it, and designate it before venturing into descriptions, diagnosis, analysis, clarifications, hypotheses, and reasoning about the problem. These operations are instrumental to its ame- lioration and must ultimately return (be tested) by the problem that sparked the inquiry. The directive can make inquirers more attentive to the complex ways in which such differences as race, culture, class, or gender intersect in a problem of injustice. Sensitivity to complexity and difference in matters of injustice is not easy; it is a very demanding methodological prescription because it means that no matter how confident we may feel about applying solutions designed to ameliorate systematic evil, our cures should try to address as much as possible the unique circumstances of each injustice. The analogy with medical inquiry and practice is useful in making this point, since the hope is that someday we will improve our tools of inquiry to prac- tice a much more personalized medicine than we do today, that is, provide a diagnosis and a solution specific to each patient.
Thus, the standard is resolving material conditions of violence. Prefer additionally:
First, recognizing and combatting the structures of racism is a pre-condition to making ethical action possible- even if your ethic is true in the abstract, we need the AC framework first. Memmi 2K
Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ U of Paris, Naiteire, Racism, Translated by Steve Martinot, p. 163-165 2000
The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably never achieved. Yet, for this very reason, it is a struggle to be undertaken without surcease and without concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward racism; one must not even let the monster in the house, especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial part in us and in other people, which is to diminish what is human. To accept the racist universe to the slightest degree is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark history in which we still largely live. it is to agree that the outsider will always be a possible victim (and which man is not himself an outsider relative to someone else?. Racism illustrates, in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated that is, it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition. The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate passage from animosity to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge. However, it remains true that one’s moral conduit only emerges from a choice: one has to want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order, for which racism is the very negation. This is almost a redundancy. One cannot found a moral order, let alone a legislative order, on racism, because racism signifies the exclusion of the other, and his or her subjection to violence and domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious language, racism is ‘the truly capital sin. It is not an accident that almost all of humanity’s spiritual traditions counsels respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity in the safeguarding of the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders violence and death. Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others is permissible. Bur no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest. One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed. All unjust society contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat you with respect. “Recall.” says the Bible, “that you were once a stranger in Egypt,” which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger yourself and that you risk becoming one again someday. It is an ethical and a practical appeal—indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In short, the refusal of racism is the condition for all theoretical and practical morality because, in the end, the ethical choice commands the political choice, a just society must be a society accepted by all. If this contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict, violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can hope someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are irresistible.
Second, the standard outweighs on actor specificity. Government must be practical and cannot concern itself with metaphysical questions – its only role is to protect citizens’ interests
Rhonheimer 05 (Martin, Prof Of Philosophy at The Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome). “THE POLITICAL ETHOS OF CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY AND THE PLACE OF NATURAL LAW IN PUBLIC REASON: RAWLS’S “POLITICAL LIBERALISM” REVISITED” The American Journal of Jurisprudence vol. 50 (2005), pp. 1-70 It is a fundamental feature of political philosophy to be part of practical philosophy. Political philosophy belongs to ethics, which is practical, for it both reflects on practical  knowledge and aims at action. Therefore, it is not only normative, but must consider the concrete conditions of realization. The rationale of political institutions and action must be understood as embedded in concrete cultural and, therefore, historical contexts and as meeting with problems that only in these contexts are understandable. A normative political philosophy which would abstract from the conditions of  realizability would be  trying to establish norms for realizing the “idea of the good” or of “the just” (as Plato, in  fact, tried to do in his Republic). Such a purely metaphysical view, however, is doomed to failure. As a theory of political praxis, political philosophy must include in its reflection the concrete historical context, historical experiences and the corresponding knowledge of the proper logic of the political. 14 Briefly: political philosophy is not metaphysics, which contemplates the necessary order of being, but practical philosophy, which  deals with partly contingent matters and aims at action.  Moreover, unlike moral norms in general—natural law included,—which rule the  actions of a person—“my acting” and pursuing the good—, the logic of the political is characterized by acts like framing institutions and establishing legal rules by which not only personal actions but the actions of a multitude of persons are regulated by the coercive force of state power, and by which a part of citizens exercises power over others.  Political actions are, thus, both actions of the whole of the body politic and referring to  the whole of the community of citizens. 15 Unless we wish to espouse a platonic view according to which some persons are by  nature rulers while others are by nature subjects, we will stick to the Aristotelian differentiation between the “domestic” and the “political” kind of rule 16 : unlike domestic rule,  which is over people with a common interest and harmoniously striving after the same good despotism and, therefore, according to Aristotle is essentially “despotic,” political rule is exercised over free persons who represent a plurality of interests and pursue, in the common context of the polis, different goods. The exercise of such political rule, therefore, needs justification and is continuously in search of  consent among those who are  ruled, but who potentially at the same time are also the rulers.
Plan Resolved: The United States should limit the qualified immunity of police officers using the following parameters. Bernick 15 Evan Bernick, https://fee.org/articles/to-hold-police-accountable-dont-give-them-immunity/  Simply put, qualified immunity has to go. It should be replaced with a rule of strict liability for bona fide constitutional violations. There are a variety of possible rules. First, police officers could be held personally liable for any rights violations. They’d need to carry personal malpractice insurance, just like lawyers, doctors, and other professionals. Insurance companies are qualified and motivated judges of risk, and they would provide another reasonable level of scrutiny on police conduct, policies, and training. Second, police departments could be held liable for any rights violations by officers and punitive damages could be assessed against individual officers for particularly outrageous conduct. Third, police departments could be required to insure officers up to a certain amount — officers would have to purchase insurance to cover any costs in excess of that amount. As ambitious as these reforms might seem, never underestimate the power of widespread public outrage. In the case of Kelo, the Court’s cavalier treatment of property rights led to a number of laws protecting citizens from eminent domain abuse in states across the country. Here, too, the public can force legislators to respond. The question of how to ensure that officers exercise the authority delegated to them with the proper vigor, while also keeping them within the limits of that authority, should be left in the first instance to elected officials — subject to constitutional limits and the requirements of valid federal laws (like Section 1983). Qualified immunity enables officers to flout those limits and those laws. We must replace the judicially-invented impunity that police officers currently enjoy with a realistic avenue for the vindication of constitutional rights. Advantage Qualified immunity destroys accountability for police officers-limitations are key. Bernick 15 Evan Bernick, https://fee.org/articles/to-hold-police-accountable-dont-give-them-immunity/
The sad fact is that it is often effectively impossible to hold police officers accountable for unconstitutional acts. That fact is attributable in large part to a potent well of unchecked power that many Americans have never heard of. You will not find it in the Constitution. You will not find it in any federal law. It is a judge-made doctrine, invented by the Supreme Court. It is called qualified immunity. And if those charged with enforcing the law are to be kept within the bounds of their rightful authority, it must be abolished. Section 1983, the federal law that allows citizens to sue for constitutional violations, is broad, unequivocal, and unambiguous. It says that “every person” who is acting “under color of” law who causes a “deprivation of any rights… secured by the Constitution and laws” “shall be liable to the party injured.” Section 1983 embodies a foundational principle of justice that resonates with Americans who have never heard of Marbury v. Madison: where there is a right, there is a remedy.But for decades, we have had rights without remedies. In the 1967 case of Pierson v. Ray, the Supreme Court held that police officers sued for constitutional violations can raise “qualified immunity” as a defense, and thereby escape paying out of their own pockets, even if they violated a person’s constitutional rights. This decision was unabashedly policy-oriented: it was thought that government officials would not vigorously fulfill their obligations if they could be held accountable for actions taken in good faith. Under current law, the general rule is that victims of rights violations pay the costs of their own injuries. In practice, qualified immunity provides a near-absolute defense to all but the most outrageous conduct. The Ninth Circuit has held that throwing a flash-bang grenade “blindly” into a house, injuring a toddler, isn’t outrageous enough. Just last year, in Plumhoff v. Rickard, the Supreme Court decided that firing 15 bullets at a motorist is a reasonable method to end the driver’s flight from the police. So much for “every person” “shall be liable.” Qualified immunity shields police misconduct not only from liability but also from meaningful judicial scrutiny. Private lawsuits are an essential tool in uncovering the truth about police misconduct. The discovery process can yield information that makes broader policy changes within police departments possible. At trial, judicial engagement — an impartial, evidence-based determination of the constitutionality of the officer’s actions — can take place. And, the link to impacts is massive- hundreds of deaths occur yearly yet almost 98 percent of police do not face consequences for their actions. Wong 15 Kathleen Wong, 2015, 10 Police Brutality Statistics that are Absolutely Shocking, https://mic.com/articles/129981/10-police-brutality-statistics-that-are-absolutely-shocking#.779kZJJJC
6. The Guardian's The Counted project, which crowdsources and reports on police deaths, analyzed the first half of 2015 to find that an average of three people were killed daily during that time.  7. Mapping Police Violence found that black people living in Oklahoma were six times more likely to be killed by police than in Georgia. 8. It also found 98 of these events did not end with an officer being charged with a crime. 
Allowing police violence perpetuates systems of racism in the squo. Hadden et al 16 (Bernadette R. Hadden, MSW, PHD, is Assistant professor in the MSW program at Hunter College School of Social Work New York. Willie Tolliver, PhD. Associate Professor at Silberman School of Social Work.  Fabienne Snowden PHD. Professor at Hunter College School of Social Work. and Robyn Brown Manning, PHD. Professor at Hunter College School of Social "An authentic discourse: Recentering race and racism as factors that contribute to police violence against unarmed Black or African American men, Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment" http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10911359.2015.1129252#abstract) Police shootings of unarmed Black or African American men are occurring at alarming rates (Wihbey, 2014) and are indicative of a national trend of excessive force used by law enforcement agents on the bodies of people of color (American Civil Liberties Union ACLU, 2014). These incidents are happening inside and outside of Black and Hispanic neighborhoods (Carroll and Gonzalez, 2014), to low-income and middle-class Blacks or African Americans (Jones-Brown, 2009), and are frequently the result of routine encounters (ACLU, 2014). One of several challenges in obtaining an accurate count of the number of the police shootings of unarmed Black or African American men in the United States is that there are no nationally consistent measures of collecting these data (Department of Justice, 2015). This lack of standardized reporting, accompanied by public outrage, civil unrest, and community activism, calls for investigations into, and law enforcement reporting of, fatal police shootings of unarmed Black or African American men. Suggestions of racial profiling in police shootings have been presented as an explanation of the phenomenon of the disproportionate shooting of unarmed Black or African American men by law enforcement agents (Amajor, Sandars, and Pitts, 1999). In 2007 researchers found that in 10 of the United States’s largest cities, Blacks or African Americans were overly represented among victims of police shootings (Lowerstein, 2007). These findings were most visible in New York City, Las Vegas, and San Diego (Lowerstein, 2007). At a 2010 hearing calling for the investigation of police-involved shootings in Oakland, California, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) reported that from 2004 and 2008, 37 of the 45 police shootings in that city were at Black or African American suspects (Bulwa, 2010). A report from the New York City Police Department (NYCPD) illustrates that between 2000 and 2013, 97 Blacks or African Americans, 41 Hispanics, and 21 Whites were killed by NYPD police officers (NYCPD, 2014). In other words, from 2000 to 2013, more Blacks or African Americans were killed by NYCPD weapon discharges than Latinos and Whites combined. These reports identify and document the phenomenon of Black or African American men being shot and/ or killed by police officers, despite the limitations in data tracking police shootings (Graham, 2015). However, they do not inform us of the incidence or prevalence of this phenomenon Qualified immunity is structurally violent- it forces deliberation to occur through the interpretation of the oppressor, as opposed to allowing contestation of these views in court. Senkel 99  ( Tara. Attorney in New York. Civilians Often Need Protection From the Police: Let's Handcuff Police Brutality 15 N.Y.L. Sch. J. Hum. Rts. 385 (1998-1999). http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?public=falseandhandle=hein.journals/nylshr15andpage=385andcollection=journals#)
While victims of police brutality can bring an action under section 1983217 against the police officer and the municipality, the police officer and municipality are each subject to liability under two different theories.218 Police officers are found liable iUnder the statute if, "while acting under color of state law, their actions violate a person's constitutional rights. 219 Municipalities are not liable under the theory of respondeat superior, but may be found liable if the police officer's conduct follows an official policy or practice of the municipality.220 There are differences between an action brought against a police officer and an action brought against a municipality, such as the defenses that can be asserted.2 Once a victim brings an excessive force claim against a police officer under section 1983, the officer may assert a defense of qualified immunity.222 In Graham, the Supreme Court did not address the issue of qualified immunity in Fourth Amendment excessive force claims. 223 However, the Court did discuss the qualified immunity defense in Harlow v. Fitzgerald. 224 In Harlow, A. Ernest Fitzgerald sued Bryce Harlow and Alexander Butterfield, Richard Nixon's White House aides, alleging they had been involved in a conspiracy to violate his constitutional and statutory rights.225 The Court held that the aides were protected by a qualified immunity. 226 The Court stated that: Bare allegations of malice should not suffice to subject governmental officials either to the costs of trial or to the burdens of broad-reaching discovery. We therefore hold that government officials performing discretionary functions, generally are shielded from liability for civil damages insofar as their conduct does not clearly violate, established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known. 227 The Court went on to state that by defining the limits of the qualified immunity doctrine in objective terms, it was not authorizing lawless conduct.228 Rather, the objective reasonableness of an official's acts protects the public interest by discouraging unlawful conduct and compensating victims. 229 If an official could be expected to know that an act would violate statutory or constitutional rights, the officer should not perform the act, and if a person was injured by the act, that person should have a cause of action. 230 However, if the official's duties require action be taken in which clearly established rights are not involved, "the public interest may be better served by action taken 'with independence and without fear of consequences.' 231 The objective reasonableness standard was also used in Anderson v. Creighton.232 In Anderson, FBI agent Russell Anderson was working with other law enforcement officers involved in a warrantless search of Robert Creighton's home.233 The search was performed because the FBI agent believed that a bank robbery suspect might be in the house.2 34 Creighton brought an action in state court against Anderson, asserting a Fourth Amendment violation.235 Anderson removed the suit to federal court and then filed a motion for summary judgment, contending the claim was barred by his qualified immunity.236 However, the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit denied Anderson's motion, finding that Creighton demonstrated that Anderson violated Creighton's right to be protected from warrantless searches of his home. An exception from this constitutional right, the court noted, was if officers have probable cause or in situations where there are exigent circumstances.237 The U.S. Supreme Court reversed, stating that it was concerned about the test of "clearly established law"238 because if the test were applied to cases at this level of generality, it would not have any relationship to the "objective legal reasonableness., 239 The Court also stated that plaintiffs would be able to change the rule of qualified immunity "into a rule of virtually unqualified liability of government agents by alleging a violation of extremely abstract rights." 240 The right must be clear enough that a reasonable governmental official would know that his conduct violates that right. 241 The question that must be asked is an objective, albeit fact specific one, whether a reasonable officer would violate others rights or could find that Anderson's search was lawful, "in light of clearly established law and the information the searching officers possessed.' '242 The court found that Anderson's "subjective belief about the search were irrelevant." 243 Furthermore,. in Owens v. City of Independence,244 the Court held that a municipality cannot allege a qualified immunity defense. The Court stated that "many victims of municipal malfeasance would be left remediless if the city were also allowed to assert a good-faith defense." 245 Therefore, a municipality can only escape liability if it claims that a constitutional violation did not occur or that the police officer was not acting in good faith "pursuant to a policy, practice, or custom of the municipality. 246 Thus, if a police brutality victim brings an action against the police officer and municipality under section 1983, the Court will examine the claim under the Fourth Amendment and its reasonable standard to determine whether the police officer's conduct was excessive or unreasonable. Although police officers may assert a qualified immunity defense to the claim, municipalities are not afforded this defense. Reform is possible and can lead to actual change- this is proven empirically. Bernick 15 Evan Bernick, https://fee.org/articles/to-hold-police-accountable-dont-give-them-immunity/ As ambitious as these reforms might seem, never underestimate the power of widespread public outrage. In the case of Kelo, the Court’s cavalier treatment of property rights led to a number of laws protecting citizens from eminent domain abuse in states across the country. Here, too, the public can force legislators to respond.
Limiting qualified immunity creates a good form of recourse in the law- also means CP’s don’t solve the aff if their policies cannot specifically allow these voices to be heard. Wright 15
 (Journalist and PHD in Law. "Want to Fight Police Misconduct? Reform Qualified Immunity." http://abovethelaw.com/2015/11/want-to-fight-police-misconduct-reform-qualified-immunity/)  In order to truly hold police accountable for bad acts, civilians must be able to bring, and win, civil rights suits themselves — not rely on the Department of Justice, or special prosecutors, or civilian review boards to hold officers accountable. And in order to both bring and win civil rights suits, civilians need a level playing field in court. Right now, they don’t have one. Instead, police officers have recourse to the broad protections of the judicially established doctrine of qualified immunity. Under this doctrine, state actors are protected from suit even if they’ve violated the law by, say, using excessive force, or performing an unwarranted body cavity search — as long as their violation was not one of “clearly established law, of which a reasonable officer would be aware.” In other words, if there’s not already a case where a court has held that an officer’s identical or near-identical conduct rose to the level of a constitutional violation there’s a good chance that even an obviously malfeasant officer will avoid liability — will avoid accountability. To bring about true accountability and change police behavior, this needs to change. And change should begin with an act of Congress rolling back qualified immunity. Removing the “clearly established” element of qualified immunity would be a good start — after all, shouldn’t it be enough to deviate from a basic standard of care, to engage in conduct that a reasonable officer would know is illegal, without having to show that that conduct’s illegality has already been clearly established in the courts? That’s just a start. There are plenty of other reforms that could open up civil rights lawsuits and help ensure police accountability for bad conduct. Two posts (one, two) at Balkinization by City University of New York professor Lynda Dodd provide a good overview. Campaign Zero should consider adding civil rights litigation reform to its platform, our policymakers should consider making civil rights litigation more robust, and, if we want to see justice done, we should push to make it happen.
Police are increasingly militarized in the squo- safety turns have no uniqueness and are empirically denied. ACLU 14
 (American Civil Liberties Union. "War Comes Home The Excessive Militarization of American Policing." https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/assets/jus14-warcomeshome-report-web-rel1.pdf)  American policing has become unnecessarily and dangerously militarized.10 For decades, the federal government has equipped state and local law enforcement agencies with military weapons and vehicles, as well as military tactical training, for the (often explicit) purpose of waging the War on Drugs. Not all communities are equally impacted by this phenomenon; the disproportionate impact of the War on Drugs in communities of color has been well documented.11 Police militarization can result in tragedy for both civilians and police officers, escalate the risks of needless violence, cause the destruction of personal property, and undermine civil liberties. The plan is a good middle ground. The answer to any violence is not to remove police officers, but to better regulate them. U.S.D.J 03 ("Principles of Good Policing: Avoiding Violence Between Police and Citizens" Community Relations Service https://www.justice.gov/archive/crs/pubs/principlesofgoodpolicingfinal092003.pdf) The best way to ensure that police officers conduct themselves properly in the performance of their duties is to set reasonable policies and then establish effective procedures for internal review and sanctions. But, as indicated above, the system for handling citizen complaints must be one in which all citizens have confidence. Nor can the principle be ignored that the police department is a public service agency which ultimately must be accountable to the citizens. An increasing number of cities in which citizens have lost confidence in the internal review process have tried various configurations of civilian oversight mechanisms or civilian overview boards with mixed results.  Impact Framing C – 1:40 for Impact/Method Framing High magnitude focus precludes debate’s potential to discuss meaningful systematic issues - Assume DA’s have a 1 risk before I answer them, low risk is no risk.  Cohn 13 Nate, staff writer for The New Republic , Improving the Norms and Practices of Policy Debate, 2013, http://www.cedadebate.org/forum/index.php/topic
So let me offer another possibility: the problem isn’t the topic, but modern policy debate. The unrealistic scenarios, exclusive focus on policy scholarship, and inability to engage systemic impacts and philosophical questions. And so long as these problems characterize modern policy debate, teams will feel compelled to avoid it. It might be tempting to assign the blame to “USFG should.” But these are bugs, not features of plan-focused, USFG-based, active voice topics. These bugs result from practices and norms that were initially and independently reasonable, but ultimately and collectively problematic. I also believe that these norms can and should be contested. I believe it would be possible for me to have a realistic, accessible, and inclusive discussion about the merits of a federal policy with, say, Amber Kelsie. Or put differently, I’m not sure I agree with Jonah that changing the topic is the only way to avoid being “a bunch of white folks talking about nuke war.” The fact that policy debate is wildly out of touch—the fact that we are “a bunch of white folks talking about nuclear war”—is a damning indictment of nearly every coach in this activity. It’s a serious indictment of the successful policy debate coaches, who have been content to continue a pedagogically unsound game, so long as they keep winning. It’s a serious indictment of policy debate’s discontents who chose to disengage. That’s not to say there hasn’t been any effort to challenge modern policy debate on its own terms—just that they’ve mainly come from the middle of the bracket and weren’t very successful, focusing on morality arguments and various “predictions bad” claims to outweigh. Judges were receptive to the sentiment that disads were unrealistic, but negative claims to specificity always triumphed over generic epistemological questions or arguments about why “predictions fail.” The affirmative rarely introduced substantive responses to the disadvantage, rarely read impact defense. All considered, the negative generally won a significant risk that the plan resulted in nuclear war. Once that was true, it was basically impossible to win that some moral obligation outweighed the (dare I say?) obligation to avoid a meaningful risk of extinction. There were other problems. Many of the small affirmatives were unstrategic—teams rarely had solvency deficits to generic counterplans. It was already basically impossible to win that some morality argument outweighed extinction; it was totally untenable to win that a moral obligation outweighed a meaningful risk of extinction; it made even less sense if the counterplan solved most of the morality argument. The combined effect was devastating: As these debates are currently argued and judged, I suspect that the negative would win my ballot more than 95 percent of the time in a debate between two teams of equal ability.But even if a “soft left” team did better—especially by making solvency deficits and responding to the specifics of the disadvantage—I still think they would struggle. They could compete at the highest levels, but, in most debates, judges would still assess a small, but meaningful risk of a large scale conflict, including nuclear war and extinction. The risk would be small, but the “magnitude” of the impact would often be enough to outweigh a higher probability, smaller impact. Or put differently: policy debate still wouldn’t be doesn’t replicateing areal world policy assessment, teams reading small affirmatives would still be at a real disadvantage with respect to reality. Why? Oddly, this is the unreasonable result of a reasonable part of debate: the burden of refutation or rejoinder, the responsibility of debaters to “beat” arguments. If I introduce an argument, it starts out at 100 percent—you then have to disprove it. That sounds like a pretty good idea in principle, right? Well, I think so too. But it’s really tough to refute something down to “zero” percent—a team would need to completely and totally refute an argument. That’s obviously tough to do, especially since the other team is usually going to have some decent arguments and pretty good cards defending each component of their disadvantage—even the ridiculous parts. So one of the most fundamental assumptions about debate all but ensures a meaningful risk of nearly any argument—even extremely low-probability, high magnitude impacts, sufficient to outweigh systemic impacts. There’s another even more subtle element of debate practice at play. Traditionally, the 2AC might introduce 8 or 9 cards against a disadvantage, like “non-unique, no-link, no-impact,” and then go for one and two. Yet in reality, disadvantages are underpinned by dozens or perhaps hundreds of discrete assumptions each of which could be contested. By the end of the 2AR, only a handful are under scrutiny; the majority of the disadvantage is conceded, and it’s tough to bring the one or two scrutinized components down to “zero.” And then there’s a bad understanding of probability. If the affirmative questions four or five elements of the disadvantage, but the negative was still “clearly ahead” on all five elements, most judges would assess that the negative was “clearly ahead” on the disadvantage. In reality, the risk of the disadvantage has been reduced considerably. If there was, say, an 80 percent chance that immigration reform would pass, an 80 percent chance that political capital was key, an 80 percent chance that the plan drained a sufficient amount of capital, an 80 percent chance that immigration reform was necessary to prevent another recession, and an 80 percent chance that another recession would cause a nuclear war (lol), then there’s a 32 percent chance that the disadvantage caused nuclear war. I think these issues can be overcome. First, I think teams can deal with the “burden of refutation” by focusing on the “burden of proof,” which allows a team to mitigate an argument before directly contradicting its content. Here’s how I’d look at it: modern policy debate has assumed that arguments start out at “100 percent” until directly refuted. But few, if any, arguments are supported by evidence consistent with “100 percent.” Most cards don’t make definitive claims. Even when they do, they’re not supported by definitive evidence—and any reasonable person should assume there’s at least some uncertainty on matters other than few true facts, like 2+2=4. Take Georgetown’s immigration uniqueness evidence from Harvard. It says there “may be a window” for immigration. So, based on the negative’s evidence, what are the odds that immigration reform will pass? are Far less than 50 percent, if you ask me. That’s not always true for every card in the 1NC, but sometimes it’s even worse—like the impact card, which is usually a long string of “coulds.” If you apply this very basic level of analysis to each element of a disadvantage, and correctly explain math results in (.4*.4*.4*.4*.4=.01024), the risk of the disadvantage starts at a very low level, even before the affirmative offers a direct responses. Debaters should also argue that the negative hasn’t introduced any evidence at all to defend a long list of unmentioned elements in the “internal link chain.” The absence of evidence to defend the argument that, say, “recession causes depression,” may not eliminate the disadvantage, but it does raise uncertainty—and it doesn’t take much more too many additional sources of uncertainty to reduce the probability of the disadvantage to effectively zero—sort of the static, background noise of prediction.
To say that the “aff is a bad idea” because it causes white people to backlash and vote for Trump deflects blame and locks us into the status quo. Politics scenarios just re-entrench anti-blackness and inhibit the struggle for freedom. King 63 (Martin Luther King Jr. "Letter from a Birmingham Jail King, Jr." April 1963 AFRICAN STUDIES CENTER - UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA) I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the  Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward of freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection. "I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured." "In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn't this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn't this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn't this like condemning Jesus because his unique God consciousness and never ceasing devotion to God's will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber. I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning of time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: stating "All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth." Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability;; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity."Method Framing The state is inevitable- policymaking is the only way to create change. Coverstone 05 Alan Coverstone (masters in communication from Wake Forest, longtime debate coach) “Acting on Activism: Realizing the Vision of Debate with Pro-social Impact” Paper presented at the National Communication Association Annual Conference November 17th 2005 Powerful personal narratives unconnected to political power are regularly co-opted by those who do learn the language of power. One need look no further than the annual state of the Union Address where personal story after personal story is used to support the political agenda of those in power. The so-called role-playing that public policy contest debates encourage promotes active learning of the vocabulary and levers of power in America. Imagining the ability to use our own arguments to influence government action is one of the great virtues of academic debate. Gerald Graff (2003) analyzed the decline of argumentation in academic discourse and found a source of student antipathy to public argument in an interesting place. I’m up against…their aversion to the role of public spokesperson that formal writing presupposes. It’s as if such students can’t imagine any rewards for being a public actor or even imagining themselves in such a role. This lack of interest in the public sphere may in turn reflect a loss of confidence in the possibility that the arguments we make in public will have an effect on the world. Today’s students’ lack of faith in the power of persuasion reflects the waning of the ideal of civic participation that led educators for centuries to place rhetorical and argumentative training at the center of the school and college curriculum. (Graff, 2003, p. 57) The power to imagine public advocacy that actually makes a difference is one of the great virtues of the traditional notion of fiat that critics deride as mere simulation. Simulation of success in the public realm is far more empowering to students than completely abandoning all notions of personal power in the face of governmental hegemony by teaching students that “nothing they can do in a contest debate can ever make any difference in public policy.” Contest debating is well suited to rewarding public activism if it stops accepting as an article of faith that personal agency is somehow undermined by the so-called role playing in debate. Debate is role-playing whether we imagine government action or imagine individual action. Imagining myself starting a socialist revolution in America is no less of a fantasy than imagining myself making a difference on Capitol Hill. Furthermore, both fantasies influenced my personal and political development virtually ensuring a life of active, pro-social, political participation. Neither fantasy reduced the likelihood that I would spend my life trying to make the difference I imagined. One fantasy actually does make a greater difference: the one that speaks the language of political power. The other fantasy disables action by making one a laughingstock to those who wield the language of power. Fantasy motivates and role-playing trains through visualization. Until we can imagine it, we cannot really do it. Role-playing without question teaches students to be comfortable with the language of power, and that language paves the way for genuine and effective political activism. Debates over the relative efficacy of political strategies for pro-social change must confront governmental power at some point.
Abstract questioning is useless - debate should seek to design concrete alternatives. Bryant 12 (EDITED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE – the author said “she” and it was replaced with the word “to” – Levi Bryant is currently a Professor of Philosophy at Collin College. In addition to working as a professor, Bryant has also served as a Lacanian psychoanalyst. He received his Ph.D. from Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois, where he originally studied 'disclosedness' with the Heidegger scholar Thomas Sheehan. Bryant later changed his dissertation topic to the transcendental empiricism of Gilles Deleuze,  “Critique of the Academic Left”, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/underpants-gnomes-a-critique-of-the-academic-left/) The problem as I see it is that this is the worst sort of abstraction (in the Marxist sense) and wishful thinking. Within a Marxo-Hegelian context, a thought is abstract when it ignores all of the mediations in which a thing is embedded. For example, I understand a robust tree abstractly when I attribute its robustness, say, to its genetics alone, ignoring the complex relations to its soil, the air, sunshine, rainfall, etc., that also allowed it to grow robustly in this way. This is the sort of critique we’re always leveling against the neoliberals. They are abstract thinkers. In their doxa that individuals are entirely responsible for themselves and that they completely make themselves by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, neoliberals ignore all the mediations belonging to the social and material context in which human beings develop that play a role in determining the vectors of their life. They ignore, for example, that George W. Bush grew up in a family that was highly connected to the world of business and government and that this gave him opportunities that someone living in a remote region of Alaska in a very different material infrastructure and set of family relations does not have. To think concretely is to engage in a cartography of these mediations, a mapping of these networks, from circumstance to circumstance (what I call an “onto-cartography”). It is to map assemblages, networks, or ecologies in the constitution of entities.¶ Unfortunately, the academic left falls prey to its own form of abstraction. It’s good at carrying out critiques that denounce various social formations, yet very poor at proposing any sort of realistic constructions of alternatives. This because it thinks abstractly in its own way, ignoring how networks, assemblages, structures, or regimes of attraction would have to be remade to create a workable alternative. Here I’m reminded by the “underpants gnomes” depicted in South Park:¶ The underpants gnomes have a plan for achieving profit that goes like this:¶ Phase 1: Collect Underpants¶ Phase 2: ?¶ Phase 3: Profit!¶ They even have a catchy song to go with their work:¶ Well this is sadly how it often is with the academic left. Our plan seems to be as follows:¶ Phase 1: Ultra-Radical Critique¶ Phase 2: ?¶ Phase 3: Revolution and complete social transformation!¶ Our problem is that we seem perpetually stuck at phase 1 without ever explaining what is to be done at phase 2. Often the critiques articulated at phase 1 are right, but there are nonetheless all sorts of problems with those critiques nonetheless. In order to reach phase 3, we have to produce new collectives. In order for new collectives to be produced, people need to be able to hear and understand the critiques developed at phase 1. Yet this is where everything begins to fall apart. Even though these critiques are often right, we express them in ways that only an academic with a PhD in critical theory and post-structural theory can understand. How exactly is Adorno to produce an effect in the world if only PhD’s in the humanities can understand him? Who are these things for? We seem to always ignore these things and then look down our noses with disdain at the Naomi Kleins and David Graebers of the world. To make matters worse, we publish our work in expensive academic journals that only universities can afford, with presses that don’t have a wide distribution, and give our talks at expensive hotels at academic conferences attended only by other academics. Again, who are these things for? Is it an accident that so many activists look away from these things with contempt, thinking their more about an academic industry and tenure, than producing change in the world? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound! Seriously dudes and dudettes, what are you doing?¶ But finally, and worst of all, us Marxists and anarchists all too often act like assholes. We denounce others, we condemn them, we berate them for not engaging with the questions we want to engage with, and we vilify them when they don’t embrace every bit of the doxa that we endorse. We are every bit as off-putting and unpleasant as the fundamentalist minister or the priest of the inquisition (have people yet understood that Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus was a critique of the French communist party system and the Stalinist party system, and the horrific passions that arise out of parties and identifications in general?). This type of “revolutionary” is the greatest friend of the reactionary and capitalist because they do more to drive people into the embrace of reigning ideology than to undermine reigning ideology. These are the people that keep Rush Limbaugh in business. Well done!¶ But this isn’t where our most serious shortcomings lie. Our most serious shortcomings are to be found at phase 2. We almost never make concrete proposals for how things ought to be restructured, for what new material infrastructures and semiotic fields need to be produced, and when we do, our critique-intoxicated cynics and skeptics immediately jump in with an analysis of all the ways in which these things contain dirty secrets, ugly motives, and are doomed to fail. How, I wonder, are we to do anything at all when we have no concrete proposals? We live on a planet of 6 billion people. These 6 billion people are dependent on a certain network of production and distribution to meet the needs of their consumption. That network of production and distribution does involve the extraction of resources, the production of food, the maintenance of paths of transit and communication, the disposal of waste, the building of shelters, the distribution of medicines, etc., etc., etc.¶ What are your proposals? How will you meet these problems? How will you navigate the existing mediations or semiotic and material features of infrastructure? Marx and Lenin had proposals. Do you? Have you even explored the cartography of the problem? Today we are so intellectually bankrupt on these points that we even have theorists speaking of events and acts and talking about a return to the old socialist party systems, ignoring the horror they generated, their failures, and not even proposing ways of avoiding the repetition of these horrors in a new system of organization. Who among our critical theorists is thinking seriously about how to build a distribution and production system that is responsive to the needs of global consumption, avoiding the problems of planned economy, ie., who is doing this in a way that gets notice in our circles? Who is addressing the problems of micro-fascism that arise with party systems (there’s a reason that it was the Negri and Hardt contingent, not the Badiou contingent that has been the heart of the occupy movement). At least the ecologists are thinking about these things in these terms because, well, they think ecologically. Sadly we need something more, a melding of the ecologists, the Marxists, and the anarchists. We’re not getting it yet though, as far as I can tell. Indeed, folks seem attracted to yet another critical paradigm, Laruelle.¶ I would love, just for a moment, to hear a radical environmentalist talk about his ideal high school that would be academically sound. How would he provide for the energy needs of that school? How would he meet building codes in an environmentally sound way? How would she provide food for the students? What would be her plan for waste disposal? And most importantly, how would she navigate the school board, the state legislature, the federal government, and all the families of these students? What is your plan? What is your alternative? I think there are alternatives. I saw one that approached an alternative in Rotterdam. If you want to make a truly revolutionary contribution, this is where you should start. Why should anyone even bother listening to you if you aren’t proposing real plans? But we haven’t even gotten to that point. Instead we’re like underpants gnomes, saying “revolution is the answer!” without addressing any of the infrastructural questions of just how revolution is to be produced, what alternatives it would offer, and how we would concretely go about building those alternatives. Masturbation.¶ “Underpants gnome” deserves to be a category in critical theory; a sort of synonym for self-congratulatory masturbation. We need less critique not because critique isn’t important or necessary– it is –but because we know the critiques, we know the problems. We’re intoxicated with critique because it’s easy and safe. We best every opponent with critique. We occupy a position of moral superiority with critique.  But do we really do anything with critique? What we need today, more than ever, is composition or carpentry. Everyone knows something is wrong. Everyone knows this system is destructive and stacked against them. Even the Tea Party knows something is wrong with the economic system, despite having the wrong economic theory. None of us, however, are proposing alternatives. Instead we prefer to shout and denounce. Good luck with that. Racial progress has occurred though legal change --- pessimism ignores specific reforms that achieved lasting reductions in racial inequality
Omi and Winant 13 Michael Omi (Sociologist at UC Berkeley, focusing on antiracism scholarship and Asian American studies) and Howard Winant (Professor of Sociology affiliated with the Black Studies and Chicana/o Studies departments of UC Santa Barbara), Resistance is futile?: a response to Feagin and Elias, Ethnic and Racial Studies Volume 36, Issue 6, p. 961-973, Special Issue: Symposium - Rethinking Racial Formation Theory. 2013.
In Feagin and Elias's account, white racist rule in the USA appears unalterable and permanent. There is little sense that the ‘white racial frame’ evoked by systemic racism theory changes in significant ways over historical time. They to dismiss important rearrangements and reforms as merely ‘a distraction from more ingrained structural oppressions and deep lying inequalities that continue to define US society’ (Feagin and Elias 2012, p. 21). Feagin and Elias use a concept they call ‘surface flexibility’ to argue that white elites frame racial realities in ways that suggest change, but are merely engineered to reinforce the underlying structure of racial oppression. Feagin and Elias say the phrase ‘racial democracy’ is an oxymoron – a word defined in the dictionary as a figure of speech that combines contradictory terms. If they mean the USA is a contradictory and incomplete democracy in respect to race and racism issues, we agree. If they mean that people of colour have no democratic rights or political power in the USA, we disagree. The USA is a racially despotic country in many ways, but in our view it is also in many respects a racial democracy, capable of being influenced towards more or less inclusive and redistributive economic policies, social policies, or for that matter, imperial policies. What is distinctive about our own epoch in the USA (post-Second World War to the present) with respect to race and racism? Over the past decades there has been a steady drumbeat of efforts to contain and neutralize civil rights, to restrict racial democracy, and to maintain or even increase racial inequality. Racial disparities in different institutional sites – employment, health, education – persist and in many cases have increased. Indeed, the post-2008 period has seen a dramatic increase in racial inequality. The subprime home mortgage crisis, for example, was a major racial event. Black and brown people were disproportionately affected by predatory lending practices; many lost their homes as a result; race-based wealth disparities widened tremendously. It would be easy to conclude, as Feagin and Elias do, that white racial dominance has been continuous and unchanging throughout US history. But such a perspective misses the dramatic twists and turns in racial politics that have occurred since the Second World War and the civil rights era. Feagin and Elias claim that we overly inflate the significance of the changes wrought by the civil rights movement, and that we ‘overlook the serious reversals of racial justice and persistence of huge racial inequalities’ (Feagin and Elias 2012, p. 21) that followed in its wake. We do not. In Racial Formation we wrote about ‘racial reaction’ in a chapter of that name, and elsewhere in the book as well. Feagin and Elias devote little attention to our arguments there; perhaps because they are in substantial agreement with us. While we argue that the right wing was able to ‘rearticulate’ race and racism issues to roll back some of the gains of the civil rights movement, we also believe that there are limits to what the right could achieve in the post-civil rights political landscape. So we agree that the present prospects for racial justice are demoralizing at best. But we do not think that is the whole story. US racial conditions have changed over the post-Second World War period, in ways that Feagin and Elias tend to downplay or neglect. Some of the major reforms of the 1960s have proved irreversible; they have set powerful democratic forces in motion. These racial (trans)formations were the results of unprecedented political mobilizations, led by the black movement, but not confined to blacks alone. Consider the desegregation of the armed forces, as well as key civil rights movement victories of the 1960s: the Voting Rights Act, the Immigration and Naturalization Act (Hart- Celler), as well as important court decisions like Loving v. Virginia that declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional. While we have the greatest respect for the late Derrick Bell, we do not believe that his ‘interest convergence hypothesis’ effectively explains all these developments. How does Lyndon Johnson's famous (and possibly apocryphal) lament upon signing the Civil Rights Act on 2 July 1964 – ‘We have lost the South for a generation’ – count as ‘convergence’? The US racial regime has been transformed in significant ways. As Antonio Gramsci argues, hegemony proceeds through the incorporation of opposition (Gramsci 1971, p. 182). The civil rights reforms can be seen as a classic example of this process; here the US racial regime – under movement pressure – was exercising its hegemony. But Gramsci insists that such reforms – which he calls ‘passive revolutions’ – cannot be merely symbolic if they are to be effective: oppositions must win real gains in the process. Once again, we are in the realm of politics, not absolute rule. So yes, we think there were important if partial victories that shifted the racial state and transformed the significance of race in everyday life. And yes, we think that further victories can take place both on the broad terrain of the state and on the more immediate level of social interaction: in daily interaction, in the human psyche and across civil society. Indeed we have argued that in many ways the most important accomplishment of the anti-racist movement of the 1960s in the USA was the politicization of the social. In the USA and indeed around the globe, race-based movements demanded not only the inclusion of racially defined ‘others’ and the democratization of structurally racist societies, but also the recognition and validation by both the state and civil society of racially-defined experience and identity. These demands broadened and deepened democracy itself. They facilitated not only the democratic gains made in the USA by the black movement and its allies, but also the political advances towards equality, social justice and inclusion accomplished by other ‘new social movements’: second-wave feminism, gay liberation, and the environmental list and anti-war movements, among others.

Tournament: UH Cougar Classic | Round: Doubles | Opponent: EarWar NO | Judge: Victor Fu, Rebecca Gelfer, Edward Metelista
1AC
Framework
The standard is rejecting structural oppression.
We have a moral obligation to reject forms of structural oppression—it prevents voices from being heard and comes first under any framework.
WINTER AND LEIGHTON – D. D. Winter and Dana Leighton. “STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE SECTION INTRODUCTION”. 6/1/99 http://sites.saumag.edu/danaleighton/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2015/09/SVintro-2.pdf
“Finally, to recognize the operation of structural violence forces us to ask questions about how and why we tolerate it, questions which often have painful answers for the privileged elite who unconsciously support it. A final question of this section is how and why we allow ourselves to be so oblivious to structural violence. Susan Opotow offers an intriguing set of answers, in her article Social Injustice. She argues that our normal perceptual/cognitive processes divide people into in-groups and out-groups. Those outside our group lie outside our scope of justice. Injustice that would be instantaneously confronted if it occurred to someone we love or know is barely noticed if it occurs to strangers or those who are invisible or irrelevant. We do not seem to be able to open our minds and our hearts to everyone, so we draw conceptual lines between those who are in and out of our moral circle. Those who fall outside are morally excluded, and become either invisible, or demeaned in some way so that we do not have to acknowledge the injustice they suffer. Moral exclusion is a human failing, but Opotow argues convincingly that it is an outcome of everyday social cognition. To reduce its nefarious effects, we must be vigilant in noticing and listening to oppressed, invisible, outsiders. Inclusionary thinking can be fostered by relationships, communication, and appreciation of diversity. Like Opotow, all the authors in this section point out that structural violence is not inevitable if we become aware of its operation, and build systematic ways to mitigate its effects. Learning about structural violence may be discouraging, overwhelming, or maddening, but these papers encourage us to step beyond guilt and anger, and begin to think about how to reduce structural violence. “
Prefer this because ethics can’t be grounded in ideal theory. Dreaming of a nonexistent perfect world does nothing to actually create change, it just leaves content with the flawed status quo.
Charles Mills 05. “Ideal Theory” as Ideology. 2005. http://www.douglasficek.com/teaching/phi-102/mills.pdf RC
“I suggest that this spontaneous reaction, far from being philosophically naïve or jejune, is in fact the correct one. If we start from what is presumably the uncontroversial premise that the ultimate point of ethics is to guide our actions and make ourselves better people and the world a better place, then ideal theory the framework above will not only be unhelpful, but will in certain respects be deeply antithetical to the proper goal of theoretical ethics as an enterprise. In modeling humans, human capacities, human interaction, human institutions, and human society on ideal-as-idealized-models, in never exploring how deeply different this is from ideal-as-descriptive-models, we are abstracting away from realities crucial to our comprehension of the actual workings of injustice in human interactions and social institutions, and thereby guaranteeing that the ideal-as-idealized-model will never be achieved. It is no accident that historically subordinated groups have always been deeply skeptical of ideal theory, generally see its glittering ideals as remote and unhelpful, and are attracted to nonideal theory, or what significantly overlaps it, “naturalized” theory. In the same essay cited above, Jaggar identifies a “unity of feminist ethics in at least one dimension,” a naturalism “characteristic, though not definitive, of it” (Jaggar 2000, 453). Marxism no longer has the appeal it once did as a theory of oppression, but it was famous for emphasizing, as in The German Ideology, the importance of descending from the idealizing abstractions of the Young Hegelians to a focus on “real, active men,” not “men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived,” but “as they actually are,” in (class) relations of domination (Marx and Engels 1976, 35–36). And certainly black Americans, and others of the racially oppressed, have always operated on the assumption that the natural and most illuminating starting point is the actual conditions of nonwhites, and the discrepancy between them and the vaunted American ideals. Thus Frederick Douglass’s classic 1852 speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” points out the obvious, that the inspiring principles of freedom and independence associated with the celebration are not equally extended to black slaves: “I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. . . . The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. . . . This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn” (1996, 116, emphasis in original). So given this convergence in gender, class, and race theory on the need to make theoretically central the existence and functioning of the actual non-ideal structures that obstruct the realization of the ideal, what defensible arguments for abstracting away from these realities could there be?”
We need to embrace the state as a heuristic—our argument is not that the state is good but that learning the levers of power is key to confronting it. Zanotti 14
Dr. Laura Zanotti is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech.  Her research and teaching include critical political theory as well as international organizations, UN peacekeeping, democratization and the role of NGOs in post-conflict governance.“Governmentality, Ontology, Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the Global World” – Alternatives: Global, Local, Political – vol 38(4):p. 288-304,. A little unclear if this is late 2013 or early 2014 – The Stated “Version of Record” is Feb 20, 2014, but was originally published online on December 30th, 2013. Obtained via Sage Database.
By questioning substantialist representations of power and subjects, inquiries on the possibilities of political agency are reframed in a way that focuses on power and subjects’ relational character and the contingent processes of their (trans)formation in the context of agonic relations. Options for resistance to governmental scripts are not limited to ‘‘rejection,’’ ‘‘revolution,’’ or ‘‘dispossession’’ to regain a pristine ‘‘freedom from all constraints’’ or an immanent ideal social order. It is found instead in multifarious and contingent struggles that are constituted within the scripts of governmental rationalities and at the same time exceed and transform them. This approach questions oversimplifications of the complexities of liberal political rationalities and of their interactions with non-liberal political players and nurtures a radical skepticism about identifying universally good or bad actors or abstract solutions to political problems. International power interacts in complex ways with diverse political spaces and within these spaces it is appropriated, hybridized, redescribed, hijacked, and tinkered with. Governmentality as a heuristic focuses on performing complex diagnostics of events. It invites historically situated explorations and careful differentiations rather than overarching demonizations of ‘‘power,’’ romanticizations of the ‘‘rebel’’ or the ‘‘the local.’’ More broadly, theoretical formulations that conceive the subject in non-substantialist terms and focus on processes of subjectification, on the ambiguity of power discourses, and on hybridization as the terrain for political transformation, open ways for reconsidering political agency beyond the dichotomy of oppression/rebellion. These alternative formulations also foster an ethics of political engagement, to be continuously taken up through plural and uncertain practices, that demand continuous attention to ‘‘what happens’’ instead of fixations on ‘‘what ought to be.’’83 Such ethics of engagement would not await the revolution to come or hope for a pristine ‘‘freedom’’ to be regained. Instead, it would constantly attempt to twist the working of power by playing with whatever cards are available and would require intense processes of reflexivity on the consequences of political choices. To conclude with a famous phrase by Michel Foucault ‘‘my point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to hyper- and pessimistic activism.’’84
The aff deploys the state to learn scenario planning- even if politics is bad, scenario analysis of politics is pedagogically valuable- it enhances creativity, deconstructs biases and teaches advocacy skills
Barma et al 16 – (May 2016, Advance Publication Online on 11/6/15, Naazneen Barma, PhD in Political Science from UC-Berkeley, Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, Brent Durbin, PhD in Political Science from UC-Berkeley, Professor of Government at Smith College, Eric Lorber, JD from UPenn and PhD in Political Science from Duke, Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, Rachel Whitlark, PhD in Political Science from GWU, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Project on Managing the Atom and International Security Program within the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, “‘Imagine a World in Which’: Using Scenarios in Political Science,” International Studies Perspectives 17 (2), pp. 1-19, http://www.naazneenbarma.com/uploads/2/9/6/9/29695681/using_scenarios_in_political_science_isp_2015.pdf)
What Are Scenarios and Why Use Them in Political Science? Scenario analysis is perceived most commonly as a technique for examining the robustness of strategy. It can immerse decision makers in future states that go beyond conventional extrapolations of current trends, preparing them to take advantage of unexpected opportunities and to protect themselves from adverse exogenous shocks. The global petroleum company Shell, a pioneer of the technique, characterizes scenario analysis as the art of considering “what if” questions about possible future worlds. Scenario analysis is thus typically seen as serving the purposes of corporate planning or as a policy tool to be used in combination with simulations of decision making. Yet scenario analysis is not inherently limited to these uses. This section provides a brief overview of the practice of scenario analysis and the motivations underpinning its uses. It then makes a case for the utility of the technique for political science scholarship and describes how the scenarios deployed at NEFPC were created. The Art of Scenario Analysis We characterize scenario analysis as the art of juxtaposing current trends in unexpected combinations in order to articulate surprising and yet plausible futures, often referred to as “alternative worlds.” Scenarios are thus explicitly not forecasts or projections based on linear extrapolations of contemporary patterns, and they are not hypothesis-based expert predictions. Nor should they be equated with simulations, which are best characterized as functional representations of real institutions or decision-making processes (Asal 2005). Instead, they are depictions of possible future states of the world, offered together with a narrative of the driving causal forces and potential exogenous shocks that could lead to those futures. Good scenarios thus rely on explicit causal propositions that, independent of one another, are plausible—yet, when combined, suggest surprising and sometimes controversial future worlds. For example, few predicted the dramatic fall in oil prices toward the end of 2014. Yet independent driving forces, such as the shale gas revolution in the United States, China’s slowing economic growth, and declining conflict in major Middle Eastern oil producers such as Libya, were all recognized secular trends that—combined with OPEC’s decision not to take concerted action as prices began to decline—came together in an unexpected way. While scenario analysis played a role in war gaming and strategic planning during the Cold War, the real antecedents of the contemporary practice are found in corporate futures studies of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Raskin et al. 2005). Scenario analysis was essentially initiated at Royal Dutch Shell in 1965, with the realization that the usual forecasting techniques and models were not capturing the rapidly changing environment in which the company operated (Wack 1985; Schwartz 1991). In particular, it had become evident that straight-line extrapolations of past global trends were inadequate for anticipating the evolving business environment. Shell-style scenario planning “helped break the habit, ingrained in most corporate planning, of assuming that the future will look much like the present” (Wilkinson and Kupers 2013, 4). Using scenario thinking, Shell anticipated the possibility of two Arab-induced oil shocks in the 1970s and hence was able to position itself for major disruptions in the global petroleum sector. Building on its corporate roots, scenario analysis has become a standard policymaking tool. For example, the Project on Forward Engagement advocates linking systematic foresight, which it defines as the disciplined analysis of alternative futures, to planning and feedback loops to better equip the United States to meet contemporary governance challenges (Fuerth 2011). Another prominent application of scenario thinking is found in the National Intelligence Council’s series of Global Trends reports, issued every four years to aid policymakers in anticipating and planning for future challenges. These reports present a handful of “alternative worlds” approximately twenty years into the future, carefully constructed on the basis of emerging global trends, risks, and opportunities, and intended to stimulate thinking about geopolitical change and its effects.4 As with corporate scenario analysis, the technique can be used in foreign policymaking for long-range general planning purposes as well as for anticipating and coping with more narrow and immediate challenges. An example of the latter is the German Marshall Fund’s EuroFutures project, which uses four scenarios to map the potential consequences of the Euro-area financial crisis (German Marshall Fund 2013). Several features make scenario analysis particularly useful for policymaking.5 Long-term global trends across a number of different realms—social, technological, environmental, economic, and political—combine in often-unexpected ways to produce unforeseen challenges. Yet the ability of decision makers to imagine, let alone prepare for, discontinuities in the policy realm is constrained by their existing mental models and maps. This limitation is exacerbated by well-known cognitive bias tendencies such as groupthink and confirmation bias (Jervis 1976; Janis 1982; Tetlock 2005). The power of scenarios lies in their ability to help individuals break out of conventional modes of thinking and analysis by introducing unusual combinations of trends and deliberate discontinuities in narratives about the future. Imagining alternative future worlds through a structured analytical process enables policymakers to envision and thereby adapt to something altogether different from the known present. Designing Scenarios for Political Science Inquiry The characteristics of scenario analysis that commend its use to policymakers also make it well suited to helping political scientists generate and develop policy-relevant research programs. Scenarios are essentially textured, plausible, and relevant stories that help us imagine how the future political-economic world could be different from the past in a manner that highlights policy challenges and opportunities. For example, terrorist organizations are a known threat that have captured the attention of the policy community, yet our responses to them tend to be linear and reactive. Scenarios that explore how seemingly unrelated vectors of change—the rise of a new peer competitor in the East that diverts strategic attention, volatile commodity prices that empower and disempower various state and nonstate actors in surprising ways, and the destabilizing effects of climate change or infectious disease pandemics—can be useful for illuminating the nature and limits of the terrorist threat in ways that may be missed by a narrower focus on recognized states and groups. By illuminating the potential strategic significance of specific and yet poorly understood opportunities and threats, scenario analysis helps to identify crucial gaps in our collective understanding of global politicaleconomic trends and dynamics. The notion of “exogeneity”—so prevalent in social science scholarship—applies to models of reality, not to reality itself. Very simply, scenario analysis can throw into sharp relief often-overlooked yet pressing questions in international affairs that demand focused investigation. Scenarios thus offer, in principle, an innovative tool for developing a political science research agenda. In practice, achieving this objective requires careful tailoring of the approach. The specific scenario analysis technique we outline below was designed and refined to provide a structured experiential process for generating problem-based research questions with contemporary international policy relevance.6 The first step in the process of creating the scenario set described here was to identify important causal forces in contemporary global affairs. Consensus was not the goal; on the contrary, some of these causal statements represented competing theories about global change (e.g., a resurgence of the nation-state vs. border-evading globalizing forces). A major principle underpinning the transformation of these causal drivers into possible future worlds was to “simplify, then exaggerate” them, before fleshing out the emerging story with more details.7 Thus, the contours of the future world were drawn first in the scenario, with details about the possible pathways to that point filled in second. It is entirely possible, indeed probable, that some of the causal claims that turned into parts of scenarios were exaggerated so much as to be implausible, and that an unavoidable degree of bias or our own form of groupthink went into construction of the scenarios. One of the great strengths of scenario analysis, however, is that the scenario discussions themselves, as described below, lay bare these especially implausible claims and systematic biases.8 An explicit methodological approach underlies the written scenarios themselves as well as the analytical process around them—that of case-centered, structured, focused comparison, intended especially to shed light on new causal mechanisms (George and Bennett 2005). The use of scenarios is similar to counterfactual analysis in that it modifies certain variables in a given situation in order to analyze the resulting effects (Fearon 1991). Whereas counterfactuals are traditionally retrospective in nature and explore events that did not actually occur in the context of known history, our scenarios are deliberately forward-looking and are designed to explore potential futures that could unfold. As such, counterfactual analysis is especially well suited to identifying how individual events might expand or shift the “funnel of choices” available to political actors and thus lead to different historical outcomes (Nye 2005, 68–69), while forward-looking scenario analysis can better illuminate surprising intersections and sociopolitical dynamics without the perceptual constraints imposed by fine-grained historical knowledge. We see scenarios as a complementary resource for exploring these dynamics in international affairs, rather than as a replacement for counterfactual analysis, historical case studies, or other methodological tools. In the scenario process developed for NEFPC, three distinct scenarios are employed, acting as cases for analytical comparison. Each scenario, as detailed below, includes a set of explicit “driving forces” which represent hypotheses about causal mechanisms worth investigating in evolving international affairs. The scenario analysis process itself employs templates (discussed further below) to serve as a graphical representation of a structured, focused investigation and thereby as the research tool for conducting case-centered comparative analysis (George and Bennett 2005). In essence, these templates articulate key observable implications within the alternative worlds of the scenarios and serve as a framework for capturing the data that emerge (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994). Finally, this structured, focused comparison serves as the basis for the cross-case session emerging from the scenario analysis that leads directly to the articulation of new research agendas. The scenario process described here has thus been carefully designed to offer some guidance to policy-oriented graduate students who are otherwise left to the relatively unstructured norms by which political science dissertation ideas are typically developed. The initial articulation of a dissertation project is generally an idiosyncratic and personal undertaking (Useem 1997; Rothman 2008), whereby students might choose topics based on their coursework, their own previous policy exposure, or the topics studied by their advisors. Research agendas are thus typically developed by looking for “puzzles” in existing research programs (Kuhn 1996). Doctoral students also, understandably, often choose topics that are particularly amenable to garnering research funding. Conventional grant programs typically base their funding priorities on extrapolations from what has been important in the recent past—leading to, for example, the prevalence of Japan and Soviet studies in the mid-1980s or terrorism studies in the 2000s—in the absence of any alternative method for identifying questions of likely future significance. The scenario approach to generating research ideas is grounded in the belief that these traditional approaches can be complemented by identifying questions likely to be of great empirical importance in the real world, even if these do not appear as puzzles in existing research programs or as clear extrapolations from past events. The scenarios analyzed at NEFPC envision alternative worlds that could develop in the medium (five to seven year) term and are designed to tease out issues scholars and policymakers may encounter in the relatively near future so that they can begin thinking critically about them now. This timeframe offers a period distant enough from the present as to avoid falling into current events analysis, but not so far into the future as to seem like science fiction. In imagining the worlds in which these scenarios might come to pass, participants learn strategies for avoiding failures of creativity and for overturning the assumptions that prevent scholars and analysts from anticipating and understanding the pivotal junctures that arise in international affairs.
Particularism is good—root cause claims ignore specific uses—even if the state is bad generally, look to the specifics. Pappas 16
Cbccc                                         Gregory Fernando Pappas Texas AandM University “The Pragmatists’ Approach to Injustice”, The Pluralist Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 2016.
The pragmatists’ approach should be distinguished from nonideal theories whose starting point seems to be the injustices of society at large that have a history and persist through time, where the task of political philosophy is to detect and diagnose the presence of these historical injustices in particular situations of injustice. For example, critical theory today has inherited an approach to social philosophy characteristic of the European tradition that goes back to Rousseau, Marx, Weber, Freud, Marcuse, and others. Accord- ing to Roberto Frega, this tradition takes society to be “intrinsically sick” with a malaise that requires adopting a critical historical stance in order to understand how the systematic sickness affects present social situations. In other words, this approach assumes that¶ a philosophical critique of specific social situations can be accomplished only under the assumption of a broader and full blown critique of soci- ety in its entirety: as a critique of capitalism, of modernity, of western civilization, of rationality itself. The idea of social pathology becomes intelligible only against the background of a philosophy of history or of an anthropology of decline, according to which the distortions of actual social life are but the inevitable consequence of longstanding historical processes. (“Between Pragmatism and Critical Theory” 63)¶ However, this particular approach to injustice is not limited to critical theory. It is present in those Latin American and African American political philosophies that have used and transformed the critical intellectual tools of ¶ critical theory to deal with the problems of injustice in the Americas. For instance, Charles W. Mills claims that the starting point and alternative to the abstractions of ideal theory that masked injustices is to diagnose and rectify a history of an illness—the legacy of white supremacy in our actual society.11 The critical task of revealing this illness is achieved by adopting a historical perspective where the injustices of today are part of a larger historical narrative about the development of modern societies that goes back to how Europeans have progressively dehumanized or subordinated others. Similary, radical feminists as well as Third World scholars, as reaction to the hege- monic Eurocentric paradigms that disguise injustices under the assumption of a universal or objective point of view, have stressed how our knowledge is always situated. This may seem congenial with pragmatism except the locus of the knower and of injustices is often described as power structures located in “global hierarchies” and a “world-system” and not situations.12¶ Pragmatism only questions that we live in History or a “World-System” (as a totality or abstract context) but not that we are in history (lowercase): in a present situation continuous with others where the past weighs heavily in our memories, bodies, habits, structures, and communities. It also does not deny the importance of power structures and seeing the connections be- tween injustices through time, but there is a difference between (a) inquiring into present situations of injustice in order to detect, diagnose, and cure an injustice (a social pathology) across history, and (b) inquiring into the his- tory of a systematic injustice in order to facilitate inquiry into the present unique, context-bound injustice. To capture the legacy of the past on present injustices, we must study history but also seek present evidence of the weight of the past on the present injustice.¶ If injustice is an illness, then the pragmatists’ approach takes as its main focus diagnosing and treating the particular present illness, that is, the particular situation-bound injustice and not a global “social pathology” or some single transhistorical source of injustice. The diagnosis of a particular injustice is not always dependent on adopting a broader critical standpoint of society in its entirety, but even when it is, we must be careful to not forget that such standpoints are useful only for understanding the present evil. The concepts and categories “white supremacy” and “colonialism” can be great tools that can be of planetary significance. One could even argue that they pick out much larger areas of people’s lives and injustices than the categories of class and gender, but in spite of their reach and explanatory theoretical value, they are nothing more than tools to make reference to and ameliorate particular injustices experienced (suffered) in the midst of a particular and unique re- lationship in a situation. No doubt many, but not all, problems of injustice are a consequence of being a member of a group in history, but even in these cases, we cannot a priori assume that injustices are homogeneously equal for all members of that group. Why is this important? The possible pluralism and therefore complexity of a problem of injustice does not always stop at the level of being a member of a historical group or even a member of many groups, as insisted on by intersectional analysis. There may be unique cir- cumstances to particular countries, towns, neighborhoods, institutions, and ultimately situations that we must be open to in a context-sensitive inquiry. If an empirical inquiry is committed to capturing and ameliorating all of the harms in situations of injustice in their raw pretheoretical complexity, then this requires that we try to begin with and return to the concrete, particular, and unique experiences of injustice.¶ Pragmatism agrees with Sally Haslanger’s concern about Charles Mills’s view. She writes: “The goal is not just a theory that is historical (v. ahistori- cal), but is sensitive to historical particularity, i.e., that resists grand causal narratives purporting to give an account of how domination has come about and is perpetuated everywhere and at all times” (1). For “the forces that cause and sustain domination vary tremendously context by context, and there isn’t necessarily a single causal explanation; a theoretical framework that is useful as a basis for political intervention must be highly sensitive to the details of the particular social context” (1).13¶ Although each situation is unique, there are commonalities among the cases that permit inquiry about common causes. We can “formulate tentative general principles from investigation of similar individual cases, and then . . . check the generalizations by applying them to still further cases” (Dewey, Lectures in China 53). But Dewey insists that the focus should be on the indi- vidual case, and was critical of how so many sociopolitical theories are prone to starting and remaining at the level of “sweeping generalizations.” He states that they “fail to focus on the concrete problems which arise in experience, allowing such problems to be buried under their sweeping generalizations” (Lectures in China 53).¶ The lesson pragmatism provides for nonideal theory today is that it must be careful to not reify any injustice as some single historical force for which particular injustice problems are its manifestation or evidence for its exis- tence. Pragmatism welcomes the wisdom and resources of nonideal theories that are historically grounded on actual injustices, but it issues a warning about how they should be understood and implemented. It is, for example, sympathetic to the critical resources found in critical race theory, but with an important qualification. It understands Derrick Bell’s valuable criticism as context-specific to patterns in the practice of American law. Through his inquiry into particular cases and civil rights policies at a particular time and place, Bell learned and proposed certain general principles such as the one of “interest convergence,” that is, “whites will promote racial advantages for blacks only when they also promote white self-interest.”14 But, for pragma- tism, these principles are nothing more than historically grounded tools to use in present problematic situations that call for our analysis, such as deliberation in establishing public policies or making sense of some concrete injustice. The principles are falsifiable and open to revision as we face situation-specific injustices. In testing their adequacy, we need to consider their function in making us see aspects of injustices we would not otherwise appreciate.15

Advantage 1: Dissent
The idea that the authority figures become the arbiter of acceptable speech causes a crack down on dissent and kills minority views from even being heard in the first place.
Anthony L. Fisher 17 (associate editor at Reason.com, where his beats include criminal justice, civil liberties, free speech, and foreign affairs. He is also a sports and culture columnist at The Week.). “The free speech problem on campus is real. It will ultimately hurt dissidents”. Vox, Jan 2, 2017. http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/12/13/13931524/free-speech-pen-america-campus-censorship RC
It’s already happening. Just ask the Palestinian activists whose boycott campaigns against Israel have has been deemed hate speech by a number of public universities, and whose future political activities could be endangered by an act of Congress. Just this month, the Senate unanimously passed the "Anti-Semitism Awareness Act,” which directs the Department of Education to use the bill's contents as a guideline when adjudicating complaints of anti-Semitism on campus. Among the speech-chilling components of the bill, the political (and subjective) act of judging Israel by an "unfair double standard" could be considered hate speech. To cite other examples of unintended consequences of the crackdown on “offensive” speech, a black student at the University of Michigan was punished for calling another student “white trash,” and conservative law students at Georgetown claimed they were “traumatized” when an email critical of deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia landed in their inboxes. The PEN America report also notes the Foundation for Individual Rights’ analysis of hundreds of campuses with “severely restrictive” speech codes. While a number of these campuses don't aggressively enforce their speech codes, the rules remain on the books; more than a dozen such codes have been overturned in the courts. What’s even more concerning is the increasingly popular notion that some ideas, such as opposition to abortion, should simply be “non-platformed" — that is, deemed unworthy of even being heard on campus. Although the trend of denying contentious speakers such as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice or refugee turned Dutch politician and critic of Islam Ayaan Hirsi Ali public platforms by "disinviting" them from campus is disconcerting, it is not censorship. However, a pro-choice group physically blocking the display of a pro-life group on the campus of the University of Georgia is a form of censorship. As is the case of University of California Santa Barbara professor Mireille Miller-Young, who assaulted a young woman holding a pro-life placard including graphic imagery in a "free speech" zone on campus and stole her sign. When the young woman objected to the theft of her property, Miller-Young replied, "I may be a thief, but you're a terrorist." Like it or not, almost half of all Americans consider themselves pro-life. Banning their perspective from campus won't win over converts, and it’s both immoral and counterproductive to declare completely legitimate political perspectives beyond the pale. Think of antiwar protests or demonstrations in support of integration when both causes were broadly unpopular, and then try to consider a majority on campus declaring their school a "safe space" from such "offensive" expressions of free speech.
Communication between individuals is necessary—deeming some words as unworthy undermines certain backgrounds and identities which hinders students’ ability to create meaningful dialogue.
Anthony L. Fisher 2 (associate editor at Reason.com, where his beats include criminal justice, civil liberties, free speech, and foreign affairs. He is also a sports and culture columnist at The Week.). “The free speech problem on campus is real. It will ultimately hurt dissidents”. Vox, Jan 2, 2017. http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/12/13/13931524/free-speech-pen-america-campus-censorship RC
The authors express the need — “in an increasingly multicultural nation” — to foster a campus atmosphere suitable for allowing students to “communicatione across vast divides in experience and world view,” noting that this can’t happen if respect for civil discourse manifests itself as "ratification of an unequal status quo.” But nor can it happen when “calling out offensive behavior shades into an oppressive atmosphere of political correctness and even censorship.” You can practically see the authors tiptoeing through a minefield, always aware of the very legitimate social concerns that are too often cavalierly dismissed as political correctness run amok. Yet the authors never waver from their essential principle, which is a rock-ribbed defense of both the moral and practical need to defend free speech is as both the most vital tool available for the disenfranchised — and essential for the preservation of honest intellectual inquiry and debate. That conclusion may seem uncontroversial, even obvious, to some — but in today’s campus climate, it’s an important intervention.
And, words only have as much power as you give you them. Negating just causes impact replication and people will just create new forms of hate speech.
Kurtz and Oscarson ’03 - Members of National Council of Teachers of English Conference on College Composition and Communication 2k3 (Anna, Christopher, “BookTalk: Revising the Discourse of Hate,” ProQuest)
However, Butler also argues that the daily, repeated use of words opens a space for another, more empowering kind of performance. This alternative performance, Butler insists, can be "the occasion for something we might still call agency, the repetition of an original subordination for another purpose, one whose future is partially open" (p. 38). To think of words as having an "open" future is to recognize that their authority lies less in their historical than in their present uses; it is to acknowledge that people can revise the meaning of words even as we repeat them; it is to embrace the notion that the instability of words opens the possibility that we can use them to (re)construct a more humane future for ourselves and others. Because words can be revised, Butler contends that it would be counterproductive simply to stop using terms that we would deem injurious or oppressive. For when we choose not to use offensive words under any circumstance, we preserve their existing meanings as well as their power to injure. If as teachers, for instance, we were simply to forbid the use of speech that is hurtful to LGBT students we would be effectively denying the fact that such language still exists. To ignore words in this way, Butler insists, won't make them go away. Butler thus suggests that we actually use these words in thoughtful conversation in which we work through the injuries they cause (p. 1.02). Indeed, Butler insists that if we are to reclaim the power that oppressive speech robs from us, we must use, confront, and interrogate terms like "queer." We must ask how such terms affect both the speaker and the subject, what the purpose of their use is, and how their meaning can be altered to empower those whom they name. Thus, as Butler helps us see, language is violence, but only if we allow it to be. She encourages us to believe that words can take on new meanings-ones which forbid stasis, challenge our habits, and open the possibility that teachers and students might be able to create spaces for learning in which everyone feels safe.
Even if free speech might not be the perfect solution, it is comparatively better to any other alternative—restrictions just make the problem worse.
Kenan Malik 12 (Indian-born English writer, lecturer and broadcaster, trained in neurobiology and the history of science.). “Why Hate Speech Should Not Be Banned”. Pandemonium, 2012. https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/why-hate-speech-should-not-be-banned/
And in practice, you cannot reduce or eliminate bigotry simply by banning it. You simply lets the sentiments fester underground. As Milton once put it, to keep out ‘evil doctrine’ by licensing is ‘like the exploit of that gallant man who thought to pound up the crows by shutting his Park-gate’. Take Britain. In 1965, Britain prohibited incitement to racial hatred as part of its Race Relations Act. The following decade was probably the most racist in British history. It was the decade of ‘Paki-bashing’, when racist thugs would seek out Asians to beat up. It was a decade of firebombings, stabbings, and murders. In the early 1980s, I was organizing street patrols in East London to protect Asian families from racist attacks. Nor were thugs the only problem. Racism was woven into the fabric of public institutions. The police, immigration officials – all were openly racist. In the twenty years between 1969 and 1989, no fewer than thirty-seven blacks and Asians were killed in police custody – almost one every six months. The same number again died in prisons or in hospital custody. When in 1982, cadets at the national police academy were asked to write essays about immigrants, one wrote, ‘Wogs, nignogs and Pakis come into Britain take up our homes, our jobs and our resources and contribute relatively less to our once glorious country. They are, by nature, unintelligent. And can’t at all be educated sufficiently to live in a civilised society of the Western world’. Another wrote that ‘all blacks are pains and should be ejected from society’. So much for incitement laws helping create a more tolerant society. Today, Britain is a very different place. Racism has not disappeared, nor have racist attacks, but the open, vicious, visceral bigotry that disfigured the Britain when I was growing up has largely ebbed away. It has done so not because of laws banning racial hatred but because of broader social changes and because minorities themselves stood up to the bigotry and fought back.
Advantage 2: The Liberal Bubble
Silencing bigots only re-entrenches their position and galvanizes their opposition to social justice movements
Levinovitz 16 Alan Levinovitz, assistant professor of religion at James Madison University, “How Trigger Warnings Silence Religious Students,” The Atlantic, August 30, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/silencing-religious-students-on-campus/497951/
 There is no doubt that in America, the perspective of white, heterosexual Christian males has enjoyed disproportionate emphasis, particularly in higher education. Trigger warnings, safe spaces, diversity initiatives, and attention to social justice: all of these are essential for pushing back against this lopsided power dynamic. But there is a very real danger that these efforts will become overzealous and render opposing opinions taboo. Instead of dialogues in which everyone is fairly represented, campus conversations about race, gender, and religion will devolve into monologues about the virtues of tolerance and diversity. I have seen it happen, not only at the University of Chicago, my alma mater, but also at the school where I currently teach, James Madison University, where the majority of students are white and Christian. The problem, I’d wager, is fairly widespread, at least at secular universities. Silencing these voices is not a good thing for anyone, especially the advocates of marginalized groups who hope to sway public opinion. Take for example the idea that God opposes homosexuality, a belief that some students still hold. On an ideal campus, these students would feel free to voice their belief. They would then be confronted by opposing arguments, spoken, perhaps, by the very people whose sexual orientation they have asserted is sinful. At least in this kind of environment, these students would have an opportunity to see the weaknesses in their position and potentially change their minds. But if students do not feel free to voice their opinions, they will remain silent, retreating from the classroom to discuss their position on homosexuality with family, friends, and other like-minded individuals. They will believe, correctly in some cases, that advocates of gay rights see them as hateful, intolerant bigots who deserve to be silenced, and which may persuade them to cling with even greater intensity to their convictions. A more charitable interpretation of the University of Chicago letter is that it is meant to inoculate students against allergy to argument. Modern, secular, liberal education is supposed to combine a Socratic ideal of the examined life with a Millian marketplace of ideas. It is boot camp, not a hotel. In theory, this will produce individuals who have cultivated their intellect and embraced new ideas via communal debate—the kind of individuals who make good neighbors and citizens. The communal aspect of the debate is important. It demands patience, open-mindedness, empathy, the courage to question others and be questioned, and above all, attempting to see things as others do. But even though academic debate takes place in a community, it is also combat. Combat can hurt. It is literally offensive. Without offense there is no antagonistic dialogue, no competitive marketplace, and no chance to change your mind. Impious, disrespectful Socrates was executed in Athens for having the temerity to challenge people’s most deeply held beliefs. It would be a shame to execute him again.
Allowing for freedom of discussion solves better for issues of hate speech.
ACLU Hate Speech On Campus, https://www.aclu.org/other/hate-speech-campus
Where racist, sexist and homophobic speech is concerned, the ACLU believes that more speech -- not less -- is the best revenge. This is particularly true at universities, whose mission is to facilitate learning through open debate and study, and to enlighten. Speech codes are not the way to go on campuses, where all views are entitled to be heard, explored, supported or refuted. Besides, when hate is out in the open, people can see the problem. Then they can organize effectively to counter bad attitudes, possibly change them, and forge solidarity against the forces of intolerance. 
Censorship is deconstructive and regressive and turns any criticism – blocking the freedom of speech will only guarantee the domination of current prevailing discursive practices.
Ward 90 ( David V.  Ph.D. Professor of Philosophy at Widener University in Pennsylvania.    “Library Trends” Philosophical Issues in Censorship and Intellectual Freedom, Volume 39, Nos 1 and 2. Summer/Fall 1990. Pages 86-87) Second, even if the opinion some wish to censor is largely false, it may contain some portion of truth, a portion denied us if we suppress the speech which contains it. The third reason for allowing free expression is that any opinion “however true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, ... will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth” (Mill, 1951, p. 126). Merely believing the truth is not enough, Mill points out, for even a true opinion held without full and rich understanding of its justification is “a prejudice, a belief independent of, and proof against, argument-this is not the way in which truth ought to be held by a rational being. This is not knowing the truth. Truth, thus held, is but one superstition the more, accidentally clinging to the words which enunciate a truth” (p. 127). Fourth, the meaning of a doctrine held without the understanding which arises in the vigorous debate of its truth, “will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience” (p. 149). Censorship, then, is undesirable according to Mill because, whether the ideas censored are true or not, the consequences of suppression are bad. Censorship is wrong because it makes it less likely that truth will be discovered or preserved, and it is wrong because it has destructive consequences for the intellectual character of those who live under it. Deontological arguments in favor of freedom of expression, and of intellectual freedom in general, are based on claims that people are entitled to freely express their thoughts, and to receive the expressions made by others, quite independently of whether the effects of that speech are desirable or not. These entitlements take the form of rights, rights to both free expression and access to the expressions of others.
Advantage 3: Unions
Public sector unions are rooted in the ICC, which allows states to suppress labor movement in public universities.
Shaun Richman 16 (former organizing director for the American Federation of Teachers). “How ‘Friedrichs’ Could Actually Unleash Unions from Decades of Free Speech Restrictions”. In These Times, Jan. 22, 2016. http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/18796/friedrichs-v-california-teachers-association-free-speech-strikes RC
As the spring semester starts up at the City University of New York, union activists continue the painstaking work of preparing for a strike authorization vote. Faculty and staff at CUNY have been working without a contract for over five years. While Governor Cuomo disinvests in the primary college system for working class New Yorkers, management proposes salary increases that amount to decreases after inflation. The parallels between the struggle to save CUNY and the struggle over the future of Chicago Public Schools are obvious, with one major exception: it is totally illegal for teachers to strike in New York. The last major union to violate the draconian Taylor Law, TWU Local 100, was fined $2.5 million for waging a 60-hour strike that shut down the city’s subway and bus system in 2005. On top of that, the union’s ability to collect dues money was suspended for a year, its president was jailed for 10 days and each individual striker was fined two days pay for each one day on strike. But in an interesting twist, the anti-union Friedrichs v. CTA case currently under consideration by the Supreme Court could actually lay the ground work for making public employee strikes in New York and elsewhere constitutionally protected free speech. A long history of carving unions out of the 1st Amendment: One could understandably be confused about how a collective protest that involves refusing to work could even be illegal in a country that prides itself on its supposed pursuit of life, liberty and whatnot. How is a strike and picket line not a constitutionally protected exercise of free speech and free assembly? And how is prohibiting workers from striking not a violation of the 13th Amendment’s protection from involuntary servitude? Early on in our nation’s history, conservative courts treated unions as criminal conspiracies and strikes as interfering with employers’ property and contract rights and with Congress’ responsibility to regulate interstate commerce. Rooted in imported English common law and beginning as early as 1806, these instances of what early unionists derided as “judge-made law,” should be regarded as a betrayal of the American Revolution. As detailed in William Forbath’s Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement, unions’ legislative agenda during the 19th and early 20th century was basically to get the government and courts out of labor disputes. Unions sought to have labor legally defined as “not a commodity” and to restrain judges from issuing injunctions against pickets and boycotts, with mixed results. By the time the National Labor Relations Act was passed to encourage and regulate collective bargaining, its framers recognized that if they rooted the Act’s authority in the 1st Amendment, it would not be found constitutional by the conservative Supreme Court. And so labor rights in this country are rooted in the Interstate Commerce Clause, which is why they’re so wonky. Public sector unions, whose ability to function is immediately at stake in the Friedrichs case, are not covered by the federal labor act. Instead, many states passed laws that are modeled on the NLRA. But with a crucial difference: when bosses get to pass laws that apply to their employees (which, if you think about it, is exactly what public sector labor law represents), they’re guaranteed to make it even more unfavorable than private sector rules. Unsurprisingly, many states make strikes by public sector employees like the CUNY faculty and staff totally illegal, or else severely restrict them. Many states also make many union demands illegal, either by statute or by judicial decisions. The Friedrichs case, by inserting public employees’ 1st Amendment rights into collective bargaining could give unions a very useful tool for reversing many anti-union measures that are on the books.
Even if you are skeptical of unions in general, in this instance, they are key; the government is their employer and also passes laws with regard to labor laws, so unions are the teachers’ only avenue to create collective change.
Every interaction a public teacher has with the university is political, especially unions.
Shaun Richman 2 (former organizing director for the American Federation of Teachers). “How ‘Friedrichs’ Could Actually Unleash Unions from Decades of Free Speech Restrictions”. In These Times, Jan. 22, 2016. http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/18796/friedrichs-v-california-teachers-association-free-speech-strikes RC
So, in order to overturn this long-settled precedent the parties behind Friedrichs—egged on by Justice Alito—are lodging a wildly expansive argument that every interaction that a union has with its government employer is inherently political. Bargaining demands, grievances, labor-management committees, job actions: all of it, goes the Friedrichs argument, is political, thereby making the collection of agency fees compelled political speech. Let’s think about some of the implications of this argument. For starters, the Taylor law that tells CUNY faculty and staff that they will be fined and their leaders imprisoned if they strike seems clearly to be a coercive restriction on their chosen method of political speech. If the Professional Staff Congress is hit with any penalties for either planning or going through with a job action, one hopes they can time their appeals to reach higher level courts after the Friedrichs decision comes down in June. Across the river in New Jersey, another state with strong unions and shitty labor law, the scope of items that unions are even allowed to raise at the table is restricted by statute and a number of horrible court decisions. One area of restriction is a strong prohibition on pattern bargaining (i.e. one bargaining unit aligning its demands with another bargaining unit’s settlement). The most farcical example of this is Rutgers University, where management habitually creates new job titles that they argue fall outside the bounds of the existing faculty bargaining unit. When the union organizes these new groups (adjuncts, post-docs, summer and winter instructors), management threatens legal hellfire and judicial damnation when the union seeks the same rights and benefits for all their members. The union could, however, propose one contract, comprehensive of all of the job titles it represents, in the next round of bargaining and tell the state university to go ahead and take them to court when they stick to their guns. More galling: teachers unions in NJ are prohibited from even raising demands around class size and staffing levels. I can think of few issues that teachers have more of a burning desire to talk about! But they can’t, at least at the bargaining table. However, once those bargaining sessions between unions reps and their government employers are redefined by the Supreme Court to be political speech, any law restricting what can be said, what items can be raised, seems to be a restriction by the government on those union members’ free speech rights. Perhaps the New Jerseya Education Association and American Federation of Teachers New Jersey locals should celebrate their new rights with a coordinated campaign to lower class sizes across the state? Perhaps most deliciously, the right-wing Friedrichs effort is in direct opposition to Gov. Scott Walker’s offensive agenda in Wisconsin. Walker’s anti-union Act 10 did a lot of nasty things to public employees, some of which will continue to stand. It took away payroll deduction and forced unions to annually recertify as the collective bargaining agents for their members. But what mostly caused union membership to plummet in the state was that certified unions were prohibited from bargaining over anything of substance; not just raises that exceed inflation, but duties, hours and work schedules and every other everyday issue that workers want to have a voice at work about. If Justice Alito gets his way, then Scott Walker is suddenly massively violating the free speech rights of Wisconsin public employees. I humbly suggest that every union still certified demand to bargain the day after the decision. They could throw their old contracts on the table and sue every school board and state agency that refuses to discuss those items. I’d also suggest that they begin drawing up some new picket signs.

Members of the LGBTQ+ community already face discrimination on campuses with conservative alum and donors. Allowing the prohibition of certain speech opens up the door for campuses to appease their donors by banning LGBTQ+ clubs. Erik 11
Eckholm, Erik. "Even on Religious Campuses, Students Fight for Gay Identity." The New York Times. The New York Times, 18 Apr. 2011. Web. 26 Dec. 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/19/us/19gays.html.
WACO, Tex. — Battles for acceptance by gay and lesbian students have erupted in the places that expect it the least: the scores of Bible colleges and evangelical Christian universities that, in their founding beliefs, see homosexuality as a sin.
Decades after the gay rights movement swept the country’s secular schools, more gays and lesbians at Christian colleges are starting to come out of the closet, demanding a right to proclaim their identities and form campus clubs, and rejecting suggestions to seek help in suppressing homosexual desires.
Many of the newly assertive students grew up as Christians and developed a sense of their sexual identities only after starting college, and after years of inner torment. They spring from a new generation of evangelical youths that, over all, holds far less harsh views of homosexuality than its elders.
But in their efforts to assert themselves, whether in campus clubs or more publicly on Facebook, gay students are running up against administrators who defend what they describe as God’s law on sexual morality, and who must also answer to conservative trustees and alumni.
Facing vague prohibitions against “homosexual behavior,” many students worry about what steps — holding hands with a partner, say, or posting a photograph on a gay Web site — could jeopardize scholarships or risk expulsion.

1AR

1. Understanding the intricacies of politics and the state is a prerequisite to addressing state violence – link turns the K if he reads Wilderson.
   Bryant 12, Levi, professor of Philosophy at Collin College and Chair of the Critical Philosophy program at the New Centre for Research and Practice, “War Machines and Military Logistics: Some Cards on the Table, https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/09/15/war-machines-and-military-logistics-some-cards-on-the-table/).  
   We need answers to these questions to intervene effectively. We can call them questions of “military logistics”. We are, after all, constructing war machines to combat these intolerable conditions. Military logistics asks two questions: first, it asks what things the opposing force, the opposing war machine captured by the state apparatus, relies on in order to deploy its war machine: supply lines, communications networks, people willing to fight, propaganda or ideology, people believing in the cause, etc. Military logistics maps all of these things. Second, military logistics asks how to best deploy its own resources in fighting that state war machine. In what way should we deploy our war machine to defeat war machines like racism, sexism, capitalism, neoliberalism, etc? What are the things upon which these state based war machines are based, what are the privileged nodes within these state based war machines that allows them to function? These nodes are the things upon which we want our nomadic war machines to intervene. If we are to be effective in producing change we better know what the supply lines are so that we might make them our target. What I’ve heard in these discussions is a complete indifference to military logistics. It’s as if people like to wave their hands and say “this is horrible and unjust!” and believe that hand waving is a politically efficacious act. Yeah, you’re right, it is horrible but saying so doesn’t go very far and changing it. It’s also as if people are horrified when anyone discusses anything besides how horribly unjust everything is. Confronted with an analysis why the social functions in the horrible way, the next response is to say “you’re justifying that system and saying it’s a-okay!” This misses the point that the entire point is to map the “supply lines” of the opposing war machine so you can strategically intervene in them to destroy them and create alternative forms of life. You see, we already took for granted your analysis of how horrible things are. You’re preaching to the choir. We wanted to get to work determining how to change that and believed for that we needed good maps of the opposing state based war machine so we can decide how to intervene. We then look at your actual practices and see that your sole strategy seems to be ideological critique or debunking. Your idea seems to be that if you just prove that other people’s beliefs are incoherent, they’ll change and things will be different. But we’ve noticed a couple things about your strategy: 1) there have been a number of bang-on critiques of state based war machines, without things changing too much, and 2) we’ve noticed that we might even persuade others that labor under these ideologies that their position is incoherent, yet they still adhere to it as if the grounds of their ideology didn’t matter much. This leads us to suspect that there are other causal factors that undergird these social assemblages and cause them to endure is they do. We thought to ourselves, there are two reasons that an ideological critique can be successful and still fail to produce change: a) the problem can be one of “distribution”. The critique is right but fails to reach the people who need to hear it and even if they did receive the message they couldn’t receive it because it’s expressed in the foreign language of “academese” which they’ve never been substantially exposed to (academics seem to enjoy only speaking to other academics even as they say their aim is to change the world). Or b) there are other causal factors involved in why social worlds take the form they do that are not of the discursive, propositional, or semiotic order. My view is that it is a combination of both. I don’t deny that ideology is one component of why societies take the form they do and why people tolerate intolerable conditions. I merely deny that this is the only causal factor. I don’t reject your political aims, but merely wonder how to get there. Meanwhile, you guys behave like a war machine that believes it’s sufficient to drop pamphlets out of an airplane debunking the ideological reasons that persuade the opposing force’s soldiers to fight this war on behalf of the state apparatus, forgetting supply lines, that there are other soldiers behind them with guns to their back, that they have obligations to their fellows, that they have families to feed or debt to pay off, etc. When I point out these other things it’s not to reject your political aims, but to say that perhaps these are also good things to intervene in if we wish to change the world. In other words, I’m objecting to your tendency to use a hammer to solve all problems and to see all things as a nail (discursive problems), ignoring the role that material nonhuman entities play in the form that social assemblages take. This is the basic idea behind what I’ve called “terraism”. Terraism has three components: 1) “Cartography” or the mapping of assemblages to understand why they take the form they take and why they endure. This includes the mapping of both semiotic and material components of social assemblages. 2) “Deconstruction” Deconstruction is a practice. It includes both traditional modes of discursive deconstruction (Derridean deconstruction, post-structuralist feminist critique, Foucaultian genealogy, Cultural Marxist critique, etc), but also far more literal deconstruction in the sense of intervening in material or thingly orders upon which social assemblages are reliant. It is not simply beliefs, signs, and ideologies that cause oppressive social orders to endure or persist, but also material arrangements upon which people depend to live as they do. Part of changing a social order thus necessarily involves intervening in those material networks to undermine their ability to maintain their relations or feedback mechanisms that allow them to perpetuate certain dependencies for people. Finally, 3) there is “Terraformation”. Terraformation is the hardest thing of all, as it requires the activist to be something more than a critic, something more than someone who simply denounces how bad things are, someone more than someone who simply sneers, producing instead other material and semiotic arrangements rendering new forms of life and social relation possible. Terraformation consists in building alternative forms of life. None of this, however, is possible without good mapping of the terrain so as to know what to deconstruct and what resources are available for building new worlds. Sure, I care about ontology for political reasons because I believe this world sucks and is profoundly unjust. But rather than waving my hands and cursing because of how unjust and horrible it is so as to feel superior to all those about me who don’t agree, rather than playing the part of the beautiful soul who refuses to get his hands dirty, I think we need good maps so we can blow up the right bridges, power lines, and communications networks, and so we can engage in effective terraformation.
   2. Perm: embrace the alternative in every instance but the affirmative. A) Tests alt solvency—if the alt is good, it should be able to resolve the residual links of the aff and if it isn’t a good idea, we find out through the perm. Means the perm is key to testing solvency of the K. B) None of the links prove the plan uniquely is anti black, just the SQUO.  If I win any risk the plan specifically is good, perm pass the plan do the alt in all other circumstances. The AFF is a pre requisite to the alt – we solve material violence that makes revolution impossible.  If the alt solves all the structures of the squo it definitely can overcome the tiny change of the AFF
   3 Wilderson ignores historical reality. The best statistical evidence empirically shows that we are progressing
   Feldscher 13, Karen,  (Senior Writer/Project Manager at Harvard School of Public Health), “Progress, but challenges in reducing racial disparities,” Harvard School of Public Health, 9 September 2013. http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/progress-but-challenges-in-reducing-racial-disparities/
   September 19, 2013 — Disparities between blacks and whites in the U.S. remain pronounced—and health is no exception. A panel of experts at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) discussed these disparities—what they are, why they persist, and what to do about them—at a September 12, 2013 event titled “Dialogue on Race, Justice, and Public Health.” The event was held in Kresge G-1 and featured panelists Lisa Coleman, Harvard University’s chief diversity officer; David Williams, Florence Sprague Norman and Laura Smart Norman Professor of Public Health in the HSPH Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences; Chandra Jackson, Yerby Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the HSPH Department of Nutrition; and Zinzi Bailey, a fifth-year doctoral student in the HSPH Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences. Robert Blendon, Richard L. Menschel Professor of Public Health and Professor of Health Policy and Political Analysis at HSPH, moderated the discussion. Gains, but pains Health care disparities are troubling, Coleman said. One study found that doctors recommended coronary revascularization—bypass surgery that replaces blocked blood vessels with new ones—among white patients with heart disease 50 of the time, but just 23 of the time for blacks. Black women are less likely to be given a bone marrow density test than white women, even when it’s known they’ve had prior fractures. And the black infant mortality rate is 2.3 times higher than that of non-Hispanic whites. Each speaker acknowledged that racial minorities have made significant gains over the past half-century, but said there is much more work still to do. They cited statistics providing stark evidence of continuing disparities in health, wealth, education, income, arrest and incarceration rates, foreclosure rates, and poverty. Coleman called the data “disconcerting; in some cases, alarming.” Schools are desegregated, she said, but not integrated; median income is $50,000 per year for whites but $31,000 a year for blacks and $37,000 a year for Hispanics; since the 1960s, the unemployment rate among blacks has been two to two-and-a-half times higher than for whites; and one in three black men can expect to spend time in prison during their lifetimes. Blendon shared results from surveys that accentuate sharp differences of opinion about how well blacks are faring in the U.S. For instance, in a survey that asked participants if they thought that the lives of black Americans had changed dramatically over the past 50 years, 54 of whites said yes but only 29 of blacks did. Another survey asked whether or not people approved of the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial; 51 of whites approved but only 9 of blacks did. Reducing disparities through research, education Jackson talked about growing up in a segregated neighborhood in Atlanta and attending a school with 99 black students and inadequate resources. She became the first in her family to attend college. Now, through her research, she hopes to expose and reduce racial health disparities. In a recent study in the American Journal of Epidemiology, Jackson and colleagues reported that blacks—particularly black professionals—get less sleep than whites, which can have potentially negative impacts on health. Bailey discussed what’s known as the “school-to-prison pipeline”—a trajectory in which black teens do poorly in school, get held back a grade, drop out, commit a crime, then end up in jail. On the flip side, she said, there are “diversity pipelines” to recruit minority students into higher education. “Often these programs target students who have already avoided the school-to-prison pipeline,” Bailey said, noting that she would like to see higher education institutions connect with black students at earlier ages to steer them toward positive choices.
   Empirics over analytics on the ontology debate- it’s the most verifiable way to approach the truth of the world- random authors in academia don’t prove a point without actual studies.
   4. Wilderson’s psychoanalysis args expose violence’s contingent nature – contradictions in the libidinal economy mean it’s malleable.  
   Johnson 05 – (2005, Adrian, PhD from SUNY-Stony Brook, Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque and a faculty member at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute in Atlanta, “Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive,” p. 340-1).  
   Despite the apparent bleakness and antiutopianism of an assessment of human nature as being perturbed by an irreducible inner antagonism, there is, surprisingly, what might be described as a liberating aspect to this splitting of the drives. Since drives are essentially dysfunctional, subjects are able to act otherwise than as would be dictated by instinctually compelled pursuits of gratification, satisfaction, and pleasure. In fact, subjects are forced to be free, since, for such beings, the mandate of nature is forever missing. Severed from a strictly biological master-program and saddled with a conflict-ridden, heterogeneous jumble of contradictory impulses—impulses mediated by an inconsistent, unstable web of multiple representations, indicated by Lacan's “barring” of the Symbolic Other—the parlêtre has no choice but to bump up against the unnatural void of its autonomy. The confrontation with this void is frequently avoided. The true extent of one's autonomy is, due to its sometimes-frightening implications, just as often relegated to the shadows of the unconscious as those heteronomous factors secretly shaping conscious thought and behavior. The contradictions arising from the conflicts internal to the libidinal economy mark the precise places where a freedom transcending mundane materiality has a chance briefly to flash into effective existence; such points of breakdown in the deterministic nexus of the drives clear the space for the sudden emergence of something other than the smooth continuation of the default physical and sociopsychical “run of things.” Moreover, if the drives were fully functional—and, hence, would not prompt a mobilization of a series of defensive distancing mechanisms struggling to transcend this threatening corpo-Real—humans would be animalistic automatons, namely, creatures of nature. The pain of a malfunctioning, internally conflicted libidinal economy is a discomfort signaling a capacity to be an autonomous subject. This is a pain even more essential to human autonomy than what Kant identifies as the guilt-inducing burden of duty and its corresponding pangs of anxious, awe-inspiring respect. Whereas Kant treats the discomfort associated with duty as a symptom-effect of a transcendental freedom inherent to rational beings, the reverse might (also) be the case: Such freedom is the symptom-effect of a discomfort inherent to libidinal beings. Completely “curing” individuals of this discomfort, even if it were possible, would be tantamount to divesting them, whether they realize it or not, of an essential feature of their dignity as subjects. As Lacan might phrase it, the split Trieb is the sinthome of subjectivity proper, the source of a suffering that, were it to be entirely eliminated, would entail the utter dissolution of subjectivity itself. Humanity is free precisely insofar as its pleasures are far from perfection, insofar as its enjoyment is never absolute.

Tournament: UH Cougar Classic | Round: 1 | Opponent: Mongtgo Kg | Judge: Kevin Si
Habermas aff
AC
Framework 1. Cultural identities are manifestation of individuals who share similar aspects of their own personal identities. Societal oppression occurs when individuals are prevented from finding their own identities Pierce 1: , Andrew J. "Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews." Collective Identity, Oppression, and the Right to Self-Ascription. Notre Dame, 16 Sept. 2002. Web. 17 Dec. 2016. http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/33399-collective-identity-oppression-and-the-right-to-self-ascription/.
Task 1: Kymlicka conceives of group identity in terms of cultural identity. Cultural identity, on his account, is a manifestation of collective intentionality; it is a product of the uncoerced, voluntary choice of group members. Cultures are presumed to be complete in the sense that they govern all aspects of their members' lives. They also are regarded as self-sufficient and generally self-contained, coming into conflict with other cultures only accidentally. The protection of group rights for Kymlicka is thus a matter of protecting the individuals right of group members to exercise free choice in structuring their collective identity. Kymlicka distinguishes between two main sorts of groups whose claim to specifiable group rights must be assessed. National minorities, such as indigenous populations, deserve a robust set of special rights and protections. These include political autonomy and exemption from at least some of the laws of the dominant culture, since they have involuntarily fallen under the purview of that culture and the political authority that facilitates it. Ethnic groups, voluntary immigrants who do not initially subscribe to the dominant culture, seek more or less to assimilate politically. Because they freely acquiesce to the political authority of the dominant culture, the group rights of ethnic groups should aim primarily at facilitating their eventual political integration. Neither categorization provides a fitting model for how oppressed groups have acquired their collective identity, Pierce argues. In contrast to national minorities, oppressed groups are formed non-intentionally. They are established and maintained by external, coercive forces. They are the creation not of free choice among their members but by the limitation of free choice. So conflict is constitutive of their identity formation. In contrast to ethnic minorities, the identity of oppressed groups is predicated on not being permitted to integrate politically. Their very existence reflects their effective political marginalization. So whereas Kymlicka takes voluntary association to be the paradigmatic means of group constitution, the concept of oppression connotes that said constitution is non-intentional. It conveys that collective identity is not just unchosen but that it is freedom limiting. Oppressed groups are immobilized and disempowered precisely in virtue of their group membership. Oppression is structural in nature in that the experience of it is "related to one's position in a complex web of social arrangements" (29). So oppression is, by definition, a group harm that cannot be reduced to the individual harms experienced by group members. If oppression is to be abolished, certain rights must be regarded as possessed by groups simpliciter rather than by individual group members. Specifically, the group-based right not to be oppressed or, put positively, the group-based right to self-ascription must be protected by the state. Groups as groups must be free to determine the meaning and extent of their affiliation. This is a necessary condition for group members to freely develop their collective identity. 2. All moral and legal theory is based on communicative subjectivity, meaning the aff’s conception of ethics controls the internal link to all other policies and frameworks. The ability for self-ascription to a cultural identity relies on the ability for individuals to communicate Pierce 2: Task 2: Pierce's defense of the group-based right to self-ascription is rather complex, and he moves quickly in developing it. I will do my best to disentangle its main features. In order to provide a sense of the contours of this right, Pierce relies most strongly on Jürgen Habermas's discourse ethics. According to Habermas, moral and legal theory is based on what Pierce calls "communicative intersubjectivity." Inescapable, counterfactual presuppositions of communication govern how participants in discourse aimed at mutual understanding must engage with one another.
These presuppositions -- namely, that no participant who is able to make a relevant contribution is excluded, that each participant has an equal voice, that each participant is free to speak sincerely, and that discourse proceeds without coercion -- delineate how discourse must proceed if the force of the better argument is to prevail. Although they rarely if ever fully govern actual discourse (they are counterfactual after all), acting in accordance with the presuppositions expresses a sense of affinity with and empathy for fellow participants in discourse. To the extent that Habermas holds that the validity of moral and legal principles is a function of the agreement expressed in discourse among all affected parties, there can be no justice without solidarity, as it were. Solidarity, states Habermas, is the "reverse side" of justice.
While Habermas thus holds that the concept of positive law entails that individuals are bearers of rights, Pierce asserts that the means by which any moral and legal principle is justified "points to a prior communicative intersubjectivity" (4). This is not simply a matter of participants in discourse displaying communicative competence. It is instead "the concrete intersubjectivity of collective identity" (ibid). Cashed out in terms of rights, any conception of individual rights presupposes a group right, specifically to self-ascription. The right to self-ascription, to not be oppressed, makes possible the discursive justification of individual rights. Indeed, the right to self-ascription is a precondition for discursive justification as such, since discursive justification is based on an intersubjective process of communicative vindication. And intersubjective communication is premised on the presuppositions of communication. 3. All oppression stems from preventing individuals from communicating. Limiting free speech increases oppression in two ways: a) prevents individuals from finding their own identities. b) prevents individuals from subscribing to a larger cultural identity Pierce 3:
Oppression is-- the violation of the presuppositions of communication – it renders discursive justification impossible, and it undercuts political integration. It disrupts the material basis for solidarity by perpetuating economic inequality. It impedes the affective basis for solidarity by destroying the trust and mutual respect necessary for political equality. With solidarity undermined, it is impossible to establish just social and political conditions. No solidarity, no justice.
4. Only the aff’s conception of ethics can only contextualize why individuals act through the analysis of their self-ascription. The right to self-ascription allots mutual recognition which ensures confidence, respect, and self-esteem Pierce 4: Pierce argues that there are nevertheless limits to his reliance on a Habermasian discursive conception of rights. Since the right to self-ascription is a precondition for discursive justification, it cannot itself be justified procedurally. For this reason, Pierce turns to Axel Honneth and Martha Nussbaum to justify his employment of this right to specify the normative bases of collective identity. In accordance with Honneth's considerations the normative force of the right to self-ascription derives from an underlying structure of mutual recognition. Mutual recognition, which applies to all associational relations on Honneth's account and supports the development of self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem, is necessary for intersubjective communication aimed at mutual understanding. From Nussbaum, Pierce appropriates the view that collective identity formation should aim at "intersubjective human flourishing" that does not reduce to the flourishing of individual subjects. 5. Self-ascription key to policy and legislation within states while avoiding the problems that arise from identity politics Pierce 5: Task 3: Developing this account of the group-based right to self-ascription is meant to provide a firm basis for Pierce's articulation of a "discursive-democratic" conception of identity politics. This conception specifies the proper relationship between groups and the state while avoiding some of the more problematic aspects of identity politics: namely, the fetishization of identity as such and the inclination to claim that any and all identity groups deserve equal recognition. Identity politics, on Pierce's account, aims to demonstrate that the kinds of group identification that are justifiable are those that operate largely in accordance with the presuppositions of communication. Groups thus "must be open and inclusive (to a certain degree), provide equal opportunity for the growth and development of all members, and be adopted sincerely and without coercion" (6). Ultimately, then, Pierce develops an account of the social construction of identity that is both descriptive and normative. It is descriptive in that it lays out the ideal, non-oppressive, conditions for identity construction. It is normative because it identifies the criteria according to which groups should shape their collective identities, including racial identities. Insofar as collective identities are discursively constructed, they must be governed internally by the presuppositions of communication. Implications:  a) Our conception of identity controls the internal link to both descriptive and normative interpretations of identity formation, meaning the only way to access a conception of identity is through the aff’s framework I affirm Resolved:  Public colleges and universities in the United States ought not restrict any constitutionally protected speech.  Advantage 1 – Temporal Language Injurious speech is specifically conditioned by a history of social normalization. Strategies that account for the damage of the utterance in the moment cannot solve for the violence that precedes and follows the moment.  BUTLER: “Excitable Speech: A Politics of Performativity” by Judith Butler 1997 UH-DD “Any delimitation of the total speech act in such illocutionary cases would doubtless include an understanding of how certain conventions are invoked at the moment of utterance, whether the person who invokes them is authorized, whether the circumstances of the invocation are right. But how does one go about delimiting the kind of "convention" that illocutionary utterances presume? Such utterances do
what they say on the occasion of the saying; they are not only conventional, but in Austin's words, "ritual or ceremonial:' As utterances, they work to the extent that they are given in the form of a ritual, that is, repeated in time, and, hence, maintain a sphere of operation that is not restricted to the moment of the utterance itself. The illocutionary speech act performs its deed at the moment of the utterance, and yet to the extent that the moment is ritualized, it is never merely a single moment. The "moment" in ritual is a condensed historicity: it exceeds itself in past and future directions, an effect of prior and future invocations that constitute and escape the instance of utterance.” (Pg. 3) Implications- 

1. Linguistic Reversibility- injurious speech subjugates agents but paradoxically marks them as socially recognizable within language. This presents a site of linguistic reversibility. Since language is temporal, we can reverse the norms that make injurious speech possible.
   BUTLER 2 : “Excitable Speech: A Politics of Performativity” by Judith Butler 1997 UH-DD “One is not simply fixed by the name that one is called. In being called an injurious name, one is derogated and demeaned. But the name holds out another possibility as well: by being called a named, one is also, paradoxically, given a certain possibility for social existence, initiated into a temporal life of language that exceeds the prior purposes that animate that call. Thus the injurious address may appear to fix or paralyze the one it hails, but it may also produce an unexpected and enabling response. If to be addressed is to be interpellated, then the offensive call runs the risk of inaugurating a subject in speech who comes to use language to counter the offensive call. When the address is injurious, it works its force upon the one it injures. What is this force, and how might we come to understand its faultlines?” (Pg. 2
   2. Censorship is guaranteed failure-- It prevents survival strategies and it requires using injurious speech in its own critique. This ensures recirculation. BUTLER 3: “Excitable Speech: A Politics of Performativity” by Judith Butler 1997 UH-DD “Neither view can account for the restaging and resignifying of offensive utterance, deployments of linguistic power that seek at once to expose and counter the offensive exercise of speech. I will consider these at greater length in the chapters to come, but consider for a moment how often such terms are subject to resignification. Such a redoubling of injurious speech takes place not only in rap music and in various forms of political parody and satire, but in the political and social critique of such speech, where "mentioning" those very terms is crucial to the arguments at hand, and even in the legal arguments that make the call for censorship, in which the rhetoric that is deplored is invariably proliferated within the context of legal speech. Paradoxically, the explicit legal and political arguments that seek to tie such speech to certain contexts fail to note that even in their own discourse, such speech has become citational, breaking with the prior contexts of its utterance and acquiring new contexts for which it was not intended. The critical and legal discourse on hate speech is itself a restaging of the performance of hate speech. The present discourse breaks with the prior ones, but not in any absolute sense. On the contrary, the present context and its apparent "break" with the past are themselves legible only in terms of the past from which it breaks. The present context does, however, elaborate a new context for such speech, a future context, not yet delineable and, hence, not yet precisely a context.” (Pg. 13-14) Impacts:
   A. Censorship destroy legitimate forms of resistance and survival methods by closing off the ability to appropriate. So, censorship’s net benefit is non-unique.  B. Censorship can’t solve for its own impacts. Using the rhetoric becomes necessary in criticism against the speech. This is particularly true in a legal context that proliferates the utterance in policy.  C. This outweighs- directly kills any solvency censorship could have and it turns the link on a long-term basis. The recirculation of speech ensures its survival in language. This is specifically true in the context of censorship critique since it requires deploying the speech in its context. Instead we should appropriate.  Advantage 2 – Epistemic representation Ethics arise through shared discourse – having free dialogue comes sequentially prior to formulating moral obligations and is key to have a proper metaphysical understanding of the world and the self. Haste 98 Helen Haste, Ph.D., 1998 Communitarianism and the Social Construction of Morality, http://tigger.uic.edu/~lnucci/MoralEd/articles/haste.html
   Communitarian thinkers start from a very different psychological tradition. They emphasise the primacy of language and social interaction in the generation of meaning. Taylor argues that human life is 'fundamentally dialogic .... We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence defining an identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.' (1991 p 32). This aligns the communitarian ontological position with social constructionists like John Shotter (1993) and Rom HarrŽ (HarrŽ and Gillett, 1994) who argue that the primary human reality is face-to-face conversation. If social interaction is the crucible of meaning, then the child learns about morality through discourse and through social practices, both explicit and implicit. The 'meaning' of something - including the meaning of our own identity and our morality - depends on what is comprehensible and recognized within our social community. Social beings create their identity through shared discourse and language (Shotter, 1993). Communities are multiple; we are members of many communities which each offer us identity, and personal meaning, and within each different elements and skills are salient. Cultural narratives, stories and traditions feed directly into our identity, signalling valued attributes and behaviours, and giving an explanation for our past and present. Crucially, we also recognise that these are shared by those whom we thus define as members of our community. A moral obligation can only have meaning within a social context. Richard Shweder describes taboos and practices found amongst rural Hindus in India which are quite morally meaningless to Americans, because they are associated with beliefs about pollution which are not shared (Shweder et al, 1987). However practices may be widely condemned, but for different reasons - believing that rape is wrong because it defiles the victim's purity, is very different from seeing it as wrong because treats her as an object rather than a person.
   This means censorship is never justifiable since censorship relies on the assumption that some viewpoint is not legitimate enough to be voiced.
   Pohlhaus and Wright. Using Wittgenstein Critically: A Political Approach to Philosophy Author(s): Gaile Pohlhaus and John R. Wright
    Insofar as a plurality of positions can be accommodated within the 'we' through which individuals can lay claim to an intelligible voice, the 'we' and the language games we play are affirmed in their legitimacy. On the other hand, insofar as what 'we say' forecloses in advance the acknowledgment of certain individuals as competent speakers of our language, then 'we' put into question our intelligibility to ourselves. This situation parallels the claim to a private language insofar as our answerability to others would be artificially delimited and our intelligibility to ourselves would be made to seem, in this regard, effortless. Like the individual entertaining the idea of a private language, 'we' ignore the grounds of our collective intelligibility to others and to ourselves when we deny our dependence, in raising any sort of claim, on an open-ended public language. We will call this the 'extended private language argument'. Taking the skeptical 'threat' serioously, by this argument, is part of maintaining a commitment to a genuinely open-ended 'we' as a ground to mutual intelligibility, because not doing so would be to set limits, in advance, on who we will regard as a competent speaker. For example, say a group's use of 'justice' involves claiming without irony that "justice was served" in situations involving racial minorities whenever they have been punished more harshly than nonminorities would be for an equivalent crime. Confronted with this group, one might want to say to these people that they are twisting the term to suit their purposes of maintaining a racist social order; yet perhaps when this is pointed out, they persist in claiming that they really are 'doing justice'. If we claim, then, that "they evidently don't know what justice means," one possible response open to them is simply to say, "perhaps you don't know what it means, but this is what we say . . . " Any demands put to the racist group to use the term consistently can easily be deflected by an obstinate appeal to the 'real meaning' of the term. As invoked in this situation, those who object that "that's not what justice means" can be branded as incompetent speakers with a shrug from a member of the racist group. We are then at a stalemate, at least about our language. The force of the extended private language argument is to show us that in refusing answerability, both non-racists and the racist group are alienated from their intelligibility to themselves through the language in which they try to express themselves. In other words, by saying that they do not have to answer m While the liberal ideology seems safe, speech codes restrict everyone’s rights and inhibit discourse that is important to foster discussions and learning. ACLU 16 ACLU 16. American Civil Liberties Union. For almost 100 years, the ACLU has worked to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States., “Hate Speech on Campus”, ACLU, 2016. https:www.aclu.org/other/hate-speech-campus Many universities, under pressure to respond to the concerns of those who are the objects of hate, have adopted codes or policies prohibiting speech that offends any group based on race, gender, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation. That's the wrong response, well-meaning or not. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution protects speech no matter how offensive its content. Speech codes adopted by government-financed state colleges and universities amount to government censorship, in violation of the Constitution. And the ACLU believes that all campuses should adhere to First Amendment principles because academic freedom is a bedrock of education in a free society. How much we value the right of free speech is put to its severest test when the speaker is someone we disagree with most. Speech that deeply offends our morality or is hostile to our way of life warrants the same constitutional protection as other speech because the right of free speech is indivisible: When one of us is denied this right, all of us are denied. Since its founding in 1920, the ACLU has fought for the free expression of all ideas, popular or unpopular. That's the constitutional mandate. Where racist, sexist and homophobic speech is concerned, the ACLU believes that more speech -- not less -- is the best revenge. This is particularly true at universities, whose mission is to facilitate learning through open debate and study, and to enlighten. Speech codes are not the way to go on campuses, where all views are entitled to be heard, explored, supported or refuted. Besides, when hate is out in the open, people can see the problem. Then they can organize effectively to counter bad attitudes, possibly change them, and forge solidarity against the forces of intolerance. College administrators may find speech codes attractive as a quick fix, but as one critic put it: "Verbal purity is not social change." Codes that punish bigoted speech treat only the symptom: The problem itself is bigotry. The ACLU believes that instead of opting for gestures that only appear to cure the disease, universities have to do the hard work of recruitment to increase faculty and student diversity; counseling to raise awareness about bigotry and its history, and changing curricula to institutionalize more inclusive approaches to all subject matter.  ideas. words only have as much power as you give you them. Negating just causes impact replication and people will just create new forms of hate speech.  Kurtz and Oscarson ’03 - Members of National Council of Teachers of English Conference on College Composition and Communication 2k3 (Anna, Christopher, “BookTalk: Revising the Discourse of Hate,” ProQuest) However, Butler also argues that the daily, repeated use of words opens a space for another, more empowering kind of performance. This alternative performance, Butler insists, can be "the occasion for something we might still call agency, the repetition of an original subordination for another purpose, one whose future is partially open" (p. 38). To think of words as having an "open" future is to recognize that their authority lies less in their historical than in their present uses; it is to acknowledge that people can revise the meaning of words even as we repeat them; it is to embrace the notion that the instability of words opens the possibility that we can use them to (re)construct a more humane future for ourselves and others. Because words can be revised, Butler contends that it would be counterproductive simply to stop using terms that we would deem injurious or oppressive. For when we choose not to use offensive words under any circumstance, we preserve their existing meanings as well as their power to injure. If as teachers, for instance, we were simply to forbid the use of speech that is hurtful to LGBT students we would be effectively denying the fact that such language still exists. To ignore words in this way, Butler insists, won't make them go away. Butler thus suggests that we actually use these words in thoughtful conversation in which we work through the injuries they cause (p. 1.02). Indeed, Butler insists that if we are to reclaim the power that oppressive speech robs from us, we must use, confront, and interrogate terms like "queer." We must ask how such terms affect both the speaker and the subject, what the purpose of their use is, and how their meaning can be altered to empower those whom they name. Thus, as Butler helps us see, language is violence, but only if we allow it to be. She encourages us to believe that words can take on new meanings-ones which forbid stasis, challenge our habits, and open the possibility that teachers and students might be able to create spaces for learning in which everyone feels safe. Members of the LGBTQ+ community already face discrimination on campuses with conservative alum and donors. Allowing the prohibition of certain speech opens up the door for campuses to appease their donors by banning LGBTQ+ clubs. Erik 11 Eckholm, Erik. "Even on Religious Campuses, Students Fight for Gay Identity." The New York Times. The New York Times, 18 Apr. 2011. Web. 26 Dec. 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/19/us/19gays.html.
   WACO, Tex. — Battles for acceptance by gay and lesbian students have erupted in the places that expect it the least: the scores of Bible colleges and evangelical Christian universities that, in their founding beliefs, see homosexuality as a sin.
   Decades after the gay rights movement swept the country’s secular schools, more gays and lesbians at Christian colleges are starting to come out of the closet, demanding a right to proclaim their identities and form campus clubs, and rejecting suggestions to seek help in suppressing homosexual desires. Many of the newly assertive students grew up as Christians and developed a sense of their sexual identities only after starting college, and after years of inner torment. They spring from a new generation of evangelical youths that, over all, holds far less harsh views of homosexuality than its elders. But in their efforts to assert themselves, whether in campus clubs or more publicly on Facebook, gay students are running up against administrators who defend what they describe as God’s law on sexual morality, and who must also answer to conservative trustees and alumni. Facing vague prohibitions against “homosexual behavior,” many students worry about what steps — holding hands with a partner, say, or posting a photograph on a gay Web site — could jeopardize scholarships or risk expulsion. Underview 1. The affirmative may defend the threats aspect of hate speech are unconstitutional .US Law Justia 16
   Justia. "Threats of Violence Against Individuals." Justia Law. Justia, 2016. Web. 29 Dec. 2016. http://law.justia.com/constitution/us/amendment-01/43-threats-of-violence.html. Threats of Violence Against Individuals.—The Supreme Court has cited three “reasons why threats of violence are outside the First Amendment”: “protecting individuals from the fear of violence, from the disruption that fear engenders, and from the possibility that the threatened violence will occur.”980 In Watts v. United States, however, the Court held that only “true” threats are outside the First Amendment.981 The defendant in Watts, at a public rally at which he was expressing his opposition to the military draft, said, “If they ever make me carry a rifle, the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J.”982 He was convicted of violating a federal statute that prohibited “any threat to take the life of or to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States.” The Supreme Court reversed. Interpreting the statute “with the commands of the First Amendment clearly in mind,”983 it found that the defendant had not made a “true ‘threat,”’ but had indulged in mere “political hyperbole.”984In NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co., white merchants in Claiborne County, Mississippi, sued the NAACP to recover losses caused by a boycott by black citizens of their businesses, and to enjoin future boycott activity.985 During the course of the boycott, NAACP Field Secretary Charles Evers had told an audience of “black people that any ‘uncle toms’ who broke the boycott would ‘have their necks broken’ by their own people.”986 The Court acknowledged that this language “might have been understood as inviting an unlawful form of discipline or, at least, as intending to create a fear of violence ....”987 Yet, no violence had followed directly from Evers’ speeches, and the Court found that Evers’ “emotionally charged rhetoric . . . did not transcend the bounds of protected speech set forth in Brandenburg… An advocate must be free to stimulate his audience with spontaneous and emotional appeals for unity and action in a common cause. When such appeals do not incite lawless action, they must be regarded as protected speech.”988 While holding that, under Bradenburg, Evers’ speech did not constitute unprotected incitement of lawless action,989 the Court also cited Watts, thereby implying that Evers’ speech also did not constitute a “true threat.”990 980 R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, 505 U.S. 377, 388 (1992). 981 394 U.S. 705, 708 (1969) (per curiam). 982 394 U.S. at 706. 983 394 U.S. at 707. 984 394 U.S. at 708. 985 458 U.S. 886 (1982). Claiborne is also discussed below under “Public Issue Picketing and Parading.” 986 458 U.S. at 900, n.29. See id. at 902 for a similar remark by Evers. 987 458 U.S. at 927. 988 458 U.S. at 928. 989 Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969). Brandenburg is discussed above under “Is There a Present Test?” 990 Claiborne, 458 U.S. at 928 n.71. In Planned Parenthood v. American Coalition of Life Activists, the en banc Ninth Circuit, by a 6-to-5 vote, upheld a damage award in favor of four physicians and two health clinics that provide medical services, including abortions, to women.991 The plaintiffs had sued under a federal statute that gives aggrieved persons a right of action against whoever by “threat of force . . . intentionally . . . intimidates any person because the person is or has been . . . providing reproductive health services.” The defendants had published “WANTED,” “unWANTED,” and “GUILTY” posters with the names, photographs, addresses, and other personal information about abortion doctors, three of whom were subsequently murdered by abortion opponents. The defendants also operated a “Nuremberg Files” website that listed approximately 200 people under the label “ABORTIONIST,” with the legend: “Black font (working); Greyed-out Name (wounded); Strikethrough (fatality).”992 The posters and the website contained no language that literally constituted a threat, but, the court found, “they connote something they do not literally say,” namely “You're Wanted or You're Guilty; You'll be shot or killed,”993and the defendants knew that the posters caused abortion doctors to “quit out of fear for their lives.”994 The Ninth Circuit concluded that a “true threat” is “a statement which, in the entire context and under all the circumstances, a reasonable person would foresee would be interpreted by those to whom the statement is communicated as a serious expression of intent to inflict bodily harm upon that person.”995 “It is not necessary that the defendant intend to, or be able to carry out his threat; the only intent requirement for a true threat is that the defendant intentionally or knowingly communicate the threat.”996 2. 1AR theory is legitimate and no neg RVI
   a) it would be impossible to check NC abuse since the 6 min NR could go all in on theory, disincentivizing 1AR theory.
   b) I solve reciprocity – neg has exclusive access to T so if they also got rvi’s there could never be reciprocity.  3. Aff theory is a reason to drop the debater  a) the time crunched 1ar is insufficient to win both theory and substance, so aff has no ability to check abuse leading to infinite harm b) the 2nr can collapse on aff theory making it impossible for the aff to cover all of the arguments in the three minute 2ar if they split their time with substance and theory 4. I am willing to clarify to attempt to meet all T interps in CX, means unless they read word for word what the interpretation on the T shell is during Cx, disregard their shell. This is key- multiple legitimate interpretations of the topic means that the neg can always pick whichever one I violate such as plans good/bad, so give me a chance to comply. 5. Prefer reasonable aff interps and drop the argument on T. The judge should use reasonability with a bright line of the presence of link and impact turn ground for the negative. Since they have equal access to offense, there’s no abuse because structural access to the ballot is the same.  a) deters frivolous theory b) allows us to go back to substance. Reasonability with this specific bright line allows us to better collapse to substance

Tournament: Harvard | Round: 2 | Opponent: Byram Hills AG | Judge: Jen Melin
AC
Framework

Censorship will always cause structural oppression because it relies on telling someone else their voice is not worthy of being heard:

1. Cultural identities are manifestation of individuals who share similar aspects of their own personal identities. Societal oppression occurs when individuals are prevented from finding their own identities Pierce 1:
   , Andrew J. "Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews." Collective Identity, Oppression, and the Right to Self-Ascription. Notre Dame, 16 Sept. 2002. Web. 17 Dec. 2016. http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/33399-collective-identity-oppression-and-the-right-to-self-ascription/.
   Task 1: Kymlicka conceives of group identity in terms of cultural identity. Cultural identity, on AND  their collective identity.

2. All moral and legal theory is based on communicative intersubjectivity, meaning the aff’s conception of ethics controls the internal link to all other policies and frameworks. Pierce 2:
Task 2: Pierce's AND presuppositions of communication.

3. Whenever one group prevents another group from fully communicating, that results in oppression.  The negative’s use of censorship causes oppression in two ways: a) prevents individuals from finding their own identities. b) prevents individuals from subscribing to a larger cultural identity Pierce 3:
Oppression is-- the AND solidarity, no justice.

4. Only the aff’s conception of ethics can only contextualize why individuals act through the analysis of their self-ascription. The right to self-ascription allots mutual recognition which ensures confidence, respect, and self-esteem Pierce 4:
Pierce argues that AND of individual subjects.

I affirm as a principle of using language to form identities
Resolved:  Public colleges and universities in the United States ought not restrict any constitutionally protected speech. 

Advantage 1 – Temporal Language
Injurious speech is specifically conditioned by a history of social normalization. Strategies that account for the damage of the utterance in the moment cannot solve for the violence that precedes and follows the moment.
BUTLER: “Excitable Speech: A Politics of Performativity” by Judith Butler 1997 UH-DD
“Any delimitation of AND instance of utterance.” (Pg. 3)

Implications- 

1. Linguistic Reversibility- injurious speech subjugates agents but paradoxically marks them as socially recognizable within language. This presents a site of linguistic reversibility. Since language is temporal, we can reverse the norms that make injurious speech possible.
   BUTLER 2 : “Excitable Speech: A Politics of Performativity” by Judith Butler 1997 UH-DD
    “One is not AND understand its faultlines?” (Pg. 2

2. Censorship is guaranteed failure-- It prevents survival strategies and it requires using injurious speech in its own critique. This ensures recirculation.
BUTLER 3: “Excitable Speech: A Politics of Performativity” by Judith Butler 1997 UH-DD
 “Neither view can AND precisely a context.” (Pg. 13-14)

Impacts:
A. Censorship destroy legitimate forms of resistance and survival methods by closing off the ability to appropriate. So, censorship’s net benefit is non-unique.
B. Censorship can’t solve for its own impacts. Using the rhetoric becomes necessary in criticism against the speech. This is particularly true in a legal context that proliferates the utterance in policy.
C. This outweighs- directly kills any solvency censorship could have and it turns the link on a long-term basis. The recirculation of speech ensures its survival in language. This is specifically true in the context of censorship critique since it requires deploying the speech in its context. Instead we should appropriate. 

Advantage 2 – Epistemic representation
Ethics arise through shared discourse – having free dialogue comes sequentially prior to formulating moral obligations and is key to have a proper metaphysical understanding of the world and the self. Haste 98
Helen Haste, Ph.D., 1998 Communitarianism and the Social Construction of Morality, http://tigger.uic.edu/~lnucci/MoralEd/articles/haste.html
Communitarian thinkers start AND than a person.

This means censorship is never justifiable since censorship relies on the assumption that some viewpoint is not legitimate enough to be voiced.  Pohlhaus and Wright. Using Wittgenstein Critically: A Political Approach to Philosophy Author(s): Gaile Pohlhaus and John R. Wright
 Insofar as a AND have to answer 

The idea that the authority figures become the arbiter of acceptable speech causes a crackdown on dissent and kills minority views from even being heard in the first place.
Anthony L. Fisher 17 (associate editor at Reason.com, where his beats include criminal justice, civil liberties, free speech, and foreign affairs. He is also a sports and culture columnist at The Week.). “The free speech problem on campus is real. It will ultimately hurt dissidents”. Vox, Jan 2, 2017. http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/12/13/13931524/free-speech-pen-america-campus-censorship RC
It’s already happening. AND of free speech.

Ad3: Trump’s America
Student protest combats racial inequality by sparking national dialogue and movements
Curwen 15 Thomas Curwen, Jason Song and Larry Gordon (reporters), "What's different about the latest wave of college activism," LA Times, 11/18/2015
Although some of AND racism," she said.

Empirics prove- Repressive Tolerance is high now as the alt right is energized in the status quo—limits on free speech are just being used to sustain white supremacy
Harkinson 12/6 (Josh, reporter @ mother jones, “The Push to Enlist "Alt-Right" Recruits on College Campuses,” December 6, 2016, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/12/richard-spencer-alt-right-college-activism//LADI)
How much support AND attended Spencer's conference.

This outweighs- even if day to day racism might be lower, these ideologies have become politically instituted into the mainstream. This means it’s try or die- hate speech is incredibly high now, it’s just a question of engagement from the other side.
Roberts 16 (Stephen, writer @ political storm, “The Alt-Right: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly,” December 2, 2016, http://www.politicalstorm.com/alt-right-good-bad-ugly///LADI)
The ugly. There AND excise the latter.

Underview

1. In no way do we necessarily affirm the legitimacy of the government. All the aff does is recognize that uncensored language is key to form identity and obligations. 

2. 1AR theory is legitimate and no neg RVI
a) it would be impossible to check NC abuse since the 6 min NR could go all in on theory, disincentivizing 1AR theory.
b) I solve reciprocity – neg has exclusive access to T so if they also got rvi’s there could never be reciprocity. 

3. Aff theory is a reason to drop the debater
a) the time crunched 1ar is insufficient to win both theory and substance, so aff has no ability to check abuse leading to infinite harm
b) the 2nr can collapse on aff theory making it impossible for the aff to cover all of the arguments in the three minute 2ar if they split their time with substance and theory

4. Prefer reasonable aff interps and drop the argument on T. The judge should use reasonability with a bright line of the presence of link and impact turn ground for the negative. Since they have equal access to offense, there’s no abuse because structural access to the ballot is the same.
a) deters frivolous theory
b) allows us to go back to substance. Reasonability with this specific bright line allows us to better collapse to substance

5. Aff gets RVI’s on theory and T- A) It’s key to reciprocity since neg will kick theory if I answer it. B) Checks frivolous theory by punishing bad theory. C) It’s logical: you should lose for needlessly calling me a cheater. D) Under competing interps, if I set the better norm, I should win.

Tournament: TFA State | Round: 2 | Opponent: WestWood JuAm | Judge: John Sims
Framework
Agency, or the setting and pursuing of ends, is inescapable.
Ferrero Luca Ferrero (University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee) “Constitutivism and the Inescapability of Agency” Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. IV January 12th 2009 pp. 6-8
3.2 Agency is special AND closed under itself.15

analytics

And, agency posits universalizability. Two warrants.

1. Ends must be universalizable. Any other norm justifies someone’s ability to impede on your ends, which also means reason acts as a side constraint on ends-based frameworks.
   Siyar Jamsheed Aiam Siyar: Kant’s Conception of Practical Reason. Tufts University, 1999:
   . Now, when I AND recognized by others. 

2. Universal willing is a prerequisite to self-determination of action. Anything else means desire controls our actions, thus the actor is no longer an agent.
Korsgaard“Self-Constitution in the Ethics of Plato and Kant” by Christine M. Korsgaard
The second step AND something inside him. 

Thus the standard is consistency with willing universal maxims. Prefer the standard.

Analytics
Analytics

3. Only the AC framework explains how a state obligation can function. This also takes out util, governments have side-constraints.
Korsgaard 08 Korsgaard, Christine M (Exceptionally practical reasoner). 2008.
Taking the law AND to a government. 

4. Commitment to universal reason is the only way to create social change.
Drescher 6 Gary L. Drescher (Visiting Fellow at the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, PhD in Computer Science from MIT). “Good and Real: Demystifying Paradoxes from Physics to Ethics.” Bradford Books. 5 May 2006.
Still, to the AND right and wrong.

Inherency
The housing agency currently uses a 1-strike policy in which any arrest is sufficnet for denial of housing.
Cammett 16 Cammett, Ann (Professor of Law, Director, Family Law Practice Clinic, City University of New York School of Law). "Confronting Race and Collateral Consequences in Public Housing." Seattle UL Rev. 39 (Summer 2016): 1123.
One Strike remained AND public housing authorities. 

Advocacy

The United States Federal Government should stop enforcing automatic exclusion and 1-strike laws.
Carey 1, Corinne (researcher with the U.S. Program at Human Rights Watch) "No second chance: People with criminal records denied access to public housing." U. Tol. L. Rev. 36 (2005): 545.
The United States AND of entire communities.

Offense

AD 1: Dependability
One Strike Laws Prevent Ex-convicts from getting access to housing. Landlords Exploit Ex-convicts creating dependency from the ex-convicts on landlords.
Moraff 14 Cristopher Moraff “Housing first Helps Keep Ex-Inmates off the streets (and Out of Prison)” July 23, 2014 https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/housing-first-former-prisoners-homelessness
Many of the AND parole increases considerably.

This Means You Affirm. Dependency is Never justifiable. It reduces an Agent to a thing, and impedes them from willing freely.   Ripstein
The parallel between AND of a thing. 

The State will has an obligation to stop dependency.  Ripstein
The requirement that AND are never justifiable. 

King 5Housing as a Freedom Right” PETER KING Housing Studies, Vol. 18, No. 5, 661–672, September 2003 Centre for Comparative Housing Research, Department of Public Policy, De Montfort University, Leicester
“Property rules determine AND right to housing.” (667)

Analytic

Analytic

AD 2: Discrimination

One Strike Policies are empirically discriminatory: Carey 1
Carey, Corinne (researcher with the U.S. Program at Human Rights Watch) "No second chance: People with criminal records denied access to public housing." U. Tol. L. Rev. 36 (2005): 545.
This report, however AND their criminal histories.

Anyone with a Criminal Record is at Risk.
Carey 2 _{Corinne (researcher with the U.S. Program at Human Rights Watch) "No second chance: People with criminal records denied access to public housing." U. Tol. L. Rev. 36 (2005): 545.
Using the authority AND from public housing.}

analytic
analytic

Underview
Theory Underview
analytics

Neg Rights Topical

1. A Topical Version of the Right to Housing is a negative right
   The US is founded on negative rights.
   NICK SZABO 05. “Negative Rights and the US Constitution”. Unenumerated, Oct. 28, 2005. http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/10/negative-rights-and-united-states.html RC
   Wikipedia has a AND we are entitled.

Yates explains the distinction between rights and entitlements
Yates, Steven (Ass’t Prof of Philosophy, U of South Carolina). “Rights Versus Entitlements.” Foundation for Economic Education. 1 September 1994. https://fee.org/articles/rights-versus-entitlements/
In other words, AND keep its promises.

Tournament: TFA state | Round: 4 | Opponent: Clements DK | Judge: Stewart Shelton
1AC – Harms
Current housing and shelter for trans homeless youth is not just inadequate, it’s a site of institutional violence and transphobia.
Quintana et al. 10 Nico Sifra Quintana, Josh Rosenthal, and Jeff Krehely. Center for American Progress. “On the Streets The Federal Response to Gay and Transgender Homeless Youth”. June 2010
When gay and AND their LGB peers.23

Trans folk are dehumanized due to their non-conformity to the gender binary. Society’s intolerance stems from a lack of recognition of trans rights by the state – recognition and affirmation of identity is key.
Weiss 01  Jillian Todd Weiss. B.A. Yeshiva University, J.D. Seton Hall University School of Law. The Gender Caste System: Identity, Privacy, and Heteronormativity 10 Law and Sexuality 123 (2001)
The heterosexual norm AND and self-identification. 

1AC – Advantage
Plan: Resolved: The United States will guarantee a right to housing by funding the nationwide expansion of shelters modeled after the Ali Forney Center which is dedicated to assisting homeless trans youth with temporary, transitional, and permanent housing.
Quintana et al. 10 Nico Sifra Quintana, Josh Rosenthal, and Jeff Krehely. Center for American Progress. “On the Streets The Federal Response to Gay and Transgender Homeless Youth”. June 2010
One solution to AND community outreach services.

The poor treatment and discrimination that trans youth face in most homeless shelters dehumanizes them and denies their gender identity – the aff solves for this by providing housing that affirms their right to be trans and their basic humanity. This means that the AC is a reorientation of societies values.
Quintana et al. 10 Nico Sifra Quintana, Josh Rosenthal, and Jeff Krehely. Center for American AND given to everyone.  

Hunter 08 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1744-1617.2008.00220.x/full
One of the AND independent living arrangements.135

It’s empirically verified that this model works – thousands of trans youth have benefited from this shelter and were able to get off the streets.
Siciliano 12 Carl Siciliano, founder of Ali Forney Center, “Providing Safe Shelter for Homeless LGBT Youth” JULY 12, 2012. https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/07/12/providing-safe-shelter-homeless-lgbt-youth
When the Ali AND survive the streets. 

And a rights approach is uniquely key.
Cacanagh 14  Michaela Cavanagh works as the communications and documentation officer for the CVC/COIN Vulnerabilized Groups Project, a 5-year PANCAP Round 9 Regional Global Fund Grant in the Caribbean. “For the Transgender Community, Recognition AND dignity and respect.

1AC – Framework
The role of the ballot is to evaluate the simulated consequences of the affirmative policy vs a competiting neg policy option using a consequentialist standard.

1. The aff deploys the state to learn scenario planning- even if politics is bad, scenario analysis of politics is pedagogically valuable- it enhances creativity, deconstructs biases and teaches advocacy skills
   Barma et al 16 May 2016, Advance Publication Online on 11/6/15, Naazneen Barma, PhD in Political Science from UC-Berkeley, Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, Brent Durbin, PhD in Political Science from UC-Berkeley, Professor of Government at Smith College, Eric Lorber, JD from UPenn and PhD in Political Science from Duke, Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, Rachel Whitlark, PhD in Political Science from GWU, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Project on Managing the Atom and International Security Program within the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, “‘Imagine a World in Which’: Using Scenarios in Political Science,” International Studies Perspectives 17 (2), pp. 1-19,
   What Are Scenarios AND international affairs.

2. Imagining state solutions is key to getting students into politics and prevent a ceding of power to political elites.
Giroux 06, Henry, Sociologist, “The abandoned generation: The urban debate league and the politics of possibility,” 2006
The decline of AND and epistemically skewed

Mills 05, Charles, 2005, Ideal Theory” as Ideology,
“The crucial common AND may be misleading.” (175)

4. Debate should deal with the real-world consequences of oppression.
Curry 14, Tommy, The Cost of a Thing: A Kingian Reformulation of a Living Wage Argument in the 21st Century, Victory Briefs, 2014,
Despite the pronouncement AND contemporary moral parameters.

5. No act omission distinction for states means means based theories collapse to consequentialism.
Sunstein and Vermule 05Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule. The University of Chicago Law School. “Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? The Relevance of Life‐Life Tradeoffs.” JOHN M. OLIN LAW and ECONOMICS WORKING PAPER NO. 239. The Chicago Working Paper Series. March 2005
In our view, AND fully discourage it. 

6. Oppression is created by social systems so only a focus on material conditions can solve.
Johnson no date Allan Johnson (PhD in sociology, he joined the sociology department at Wesleyan University)   http://www.cabrillo.edu/~lroberts/AlanJohnsonWhatCanWeDO001.pdf
Privilege is a AND and one another.

7. analytic

Tournament: Read Me | Round: Finals | Opponent: Jack | Judge: Schmack
I reserve the right to read anything off of my teammates' wikis.
For Contact your best bet is messaging me on FaceBook

Tournament: Longhorn Classic at the University of Texas Austin | Round: 2 | Opponent: Kinkaid JY | Judge: Dominic Henderson
1AC – Default UT
ROB
The role of the ballot is to evaluate the simulated consequences of the aff world through a policymaking paradigm. You can weigh the SQUO or a competitive policymaking paradigm against the aff. Prefer:

1. Fairness.
   A. Anything moots 6 minutes of 1ac offense – forces 1ar restart. They get a 13-7 minute advantage which means we have worse discussion, even if the subject of discussion is slightly better. At the very worst that means I get to weigh the case to preserve my offense. B. Independently, there is a huge spectrum of political theories – the k can be the radical on both sides of the spectrum and multifunctional aff offense is insufficient to interact with everyone. Unfairness denies effective dialogue on kritikal issues which turns your impacts.
   Galloway 7 Ryan Galloway, Samford Comm prof, Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28, 2007
   Debate as a dialogue sets an argumentative table, where all parties receive a relatively fair opportunity to voice their position. Anything that fails to allow participants to have their position articulated denies one side of the argumentative table a fair hearing. The affirmative side is set by the topic and fairness requirements. While affirmative teams have recently resisted affirming the topic, in fact, the topic selection process is rigorous, taking the relative ground of each topic as its central point of departure. Setting the affirmative reciprocally sets the negative. The negative crafts approaches to the topic consistent with affirmative demands. The negative crafts disadvantages, counter-plans, and critical arguments premised on the arguments that the topic allows for the affirmative team. According to fairness norms, each side sits at a relatively balanced argumentative table. When one side takes more than its share, competitive equity suffers. However, it also undermines the respect due to the other involved in the dialogue. When one side excludes the other, it fundamentally denies the personhood of the other participant (Ehninger, 1970, p. 110). A pedagogy of debate as dialogue takes this respect as a fundamental component. A desire to be fair is a fundamental condition of a dialogue that takes the form of a demand for equality of voice. Far from being a banal request for links to a disadvantage, fairness is a demand for respect, a demand to be heard, a demand that a voice backed by literally months upon months of preparation, research, and critical thinking not be silenced. Affirmative cases that suspend basic fairness norms operate to exclude particular negative strategies. Unprepared, one side comes to the argumentative table unable to meaningfully participate in a dialogue. They are unable to “understand what ‘went on…’” and are left to the whims of time and power (Farrell, 1985, p. 114).
   2. The aff deploys the state to learn scenario planning- even if politics is bad, scenario analysis of politics is pedagogically valuable- it enhances creativity, deconstructs biases and teaches advocacy skills
   Barma et al 16 – (May 2016, Advance Publication Online on 11/6/15, Naazneen Barma, PhD in Political Science from UC-Berkeley, Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, Brent Durbin, PhD in Political Science from UC-Berkeley, Professor of Government at Smith College, Eric Lorber, JD from UPenn and PhD in Political Science from Duke, Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, Rachel Whitlark, PhD in Political Science from GWU, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Project on Managing the Atom and International Security Program within the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, “‘Imagine a World in Which’: Using Scenarios in Political Science,” International Studies Perspectives 17 (2), pp. 1-19, http://www.naazneenbarma.com/uploads/2/9/6/9/29695681/using_scenarios_in_political_science_isp_2015.pdf)
   What Are Scenarios and Why Use Them in Political Science? Scenario analysis is perceived most commonly as a technique for examining the robustness of strategy. It can immerse decision makers in future states that go beyond conventional extrapolations of current trends, preparing them to take advantage of unexpected opportunities and to protect themselves from adverse exogenous shocks. The global petroleum company Shell, a pioneer of the technique, characterizes scenario analysis as the art of considering “what if” questions about possible future worlds. Scenario analysis is thus typically seen as serving the purposes of corporate planning or as a policy tool to be used in combination with simulations of decision making. Yet scenario analysis is not inherently limited to these uses. This section provides a brief overview of the practice of scenario analysis and the motivations underpinning its uses. It then makes a case for the utility of the technique for political science scholarship and describes how the scenarios deployed at NEFPC were created. The Art of Scenario Analysis We characterize scenario analysis as the art of juxtaposing current trends in unexpected combinations in order to articulate surprising and yet plausible futures, often referred to as “alternative worlds.” Scenarios are thus explicitly not forecasts or projections based on linear extrapolations of contemporary patterns, and they are not hypothesis-based expert predictions. Nor should they be equated with simulations, which are best characterized as functional representations of real institutions or decision-making processes (Asal 2005). Instead, they are depictions of possible future states of the world, offered together with a narrative of the driving causal forces and potential exogenous shocks that could lead to those futures. Good scenarios thus rely on explicit causal propositions that, independent of one another, are plausible—yet, when combined, suggest surprising and sometimes controversial future worlds. For example, few predicted the dramatic fall in oil prices toward the end of 2014. Yet independent driving forces, such as the shale gas revolution in the United States, China’s slowing economic growth, and declining conflict in major Middle Eastern oil producers such as Libya, were all recognized secular trends that—combined with OPEC’s decision not to take concerted action as prices began to decline—came together in an unexpected way. While scenario analysis played a role in war gaming and strategic planning during the Cold War, the real antecedents of the contemporary practice are found in corporate futures studies of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Raskin et al. 2005). Scenario analysis was essentially initiated at Royal Dutch Shell in 1965, with the realization that the usual forecasting techniques and models were not capturing the rapidly changing environment in which the company operated (Wack 1985; Schwartz 1991). In particular, it had become evident that straight-line extrapolations of past global trends were inadequate for anticipating the evolving business environment. Shell-style scenario planning “helped break the habit, ingrained in most corporate planning, of assuming that the future will look much like the present” (Wilkinson and Kupers 2013, 4). Using scenario thinking, Shell anticipated the possibility of two Arab-induced oil shocks in the 1970s and hence was able to position itself for major disruptions in the global petroleum sector. Building on its corporate roots, scenario analysis has become a standard policymaking tool. For example, the Project on Forward Engagement advocates linking systematic foresight, which it defines as the disciplined analysis of alternative futures, to planning and feedback loops to better equip the United States to meet contemporary governance challenges (Fuerth 2011). Another prominent application of scenario thinking is found in the National Intelligence Council’s series of Global Trends reports, issued every four years to aid policymakers in anticipating and planning for future challenges. These reports present a handful of “alternative worlds” approximately twenty years into the future, carefully constructed on the basis of emerging global trends, risks, and opportunities, and intended to stimulate thinking about geopolitical change and its effects.4 As with corporate scenario analysis, the technique can be used in foreign policymaking for long-range general planning purposes as well as for anticipating and coping with more narrow and immediate challenges. An example of the latter is the German Marshall Fund’s EuroFutures project, which uses four scenarios to map the potential consequences of the Euro-area financial crisis (German Marshall Fund 2013). Several features make scenario analysis particularly useful for policymaking.5 Long-term global trends across a number of different realms—social, technological, environmental, economic, and political—combine in often-unexpected ways to produce unforeseen challenges. Yet the ability of decision makers to imagine, let alone prepare for, discontinuities in the policy realm is constrained by their existing mental models and maps. This limitation is exacerbated by well-known cognitive bias tendencies such as groupthink and confirmation bias (Jervis 1976; Janis 1982; Tetlock 2005). The power of scenarios lies in their ability to help individuals break out of conventional modes of thinking and analysis by introducing unusual combinations of trends and deliberate discontinuities in narratives about the future. Imagining alternative future worlds through a structured analytical process enables policymakers to envision and thereby adapt to something altogether different from the known present. Designing Scenarios for Political Science Inquiry The characteristics of scenario analysis that commend its use to policymakers also make it well suited to helping political scientists generate and develop policy-relevant research programs. Scenarios are essentially textured, plausible, and relevant stories that help us imagine how the future political-economic world could be different from the past in a manner that highlights policy challenges and opportunities. For example, terrorist organizations are a known threat that have captured the attention of the policy community, yet our responses to them tend to be linear and reactive. Scenarios that explore how seemingly unrelated vectors of change—the rise of a new peer competitor in the East that diverts strategic attention, volatile commodity prices that empower and disempower various state and nonstate actors in surprising ways, and the destabilizing effects of climate change or infectious disease pandemics—can be useful for illuminating the nature and limits of the terrorist threat in ways that may be missed by a narrower focus on recognized states and groups. By illuminating the potential strategic significance of specific and yet poorly understood opportunities and threats, scenario analysis helps to identify crucial gaps in our collective understanding of global politicaleconomic trends and dynamics. The notion of “exogeneity”—so prevalent in social science scholarship—applies to models of reality, not to reality itself. Very simply, scenario analysis can throw into sharp relief often-overlooked yet pressing questions in international affairs that demand focused investigation. Scenarios thus offer, in principle, an innovative tool for developing a political science research agenda. In practice, achieving this objective requires careful tailoring of the approach. The specific scenario analysis technique we outline below was designed and refined to provide a structured experiential process for generating problem-based research questions with contemporary international policy relevance.6 The first step in the process of creating the scenario set described here was to identify important causal forces in contemporary global affairs. Consensus was not the goal; on the contrary, some of these causal statements represented competing theories about global change (e.g., a resurgence of the nation-state vs. border-evading globalizing forces). A major principle underpinning the transformation of these causal drivers into possible future worlds was to “simplify, then exaggerate” them, before fleshing out the emerging story with more details.7 Thus, the contours of the future world were drawn first in the scenario, with details about the possible pathways to that point filled in second. It is entirely possible, indeed probable, that some of the causal claims that turned into parts of scenarios were exaggerated so much as to be implausible, and that an unavoidable degree of bias or our own form of groupthink went into construction of the scenarios. One of the great strengths of scenario analysis, however, is that the scenario discussions themselves, as described below, lay bare these especially implausible claims and systematic biases.8 An explicit methodological approach underlies the written scenarios themselves as well as the analytical process around them—that of case-centered, structured, focused comparison, intended especially to shed light on new causal mechanisms (George and Bennett 2005). The use of scenarios is similar to counterfactual analysis in that it modifies certain variables in a given situation in order to analyze the resulting effects (Fearon 1991). Whereas counterfactuals are traditionally retrospective in nature and explore events that did not actually occur in the context of known history, our scenarios are deliberately forward-looking and are designed to explore potential futures that could unfold. As such, counterfactual analysis is especially well suited to identifying how individual events might expand or shift the “funnel of choices” available to political actors and thus lead to different historical outcomes (Nye 2005, 68–69), while forward-looking scenario analysis can better illuminate surprising intersections and sociopolitical dynamics without the perceptual constraints imposed by fine-grained historical knowledge. We see scenarios as a complementary resource for exploring these dynamics in international affairs, rather than as a replacement for counterfactual analysis, historical case studies, or other methodological tools. In the scenario process developed for NEFPC, three distinct scenarios are employed, acting as cases for analytical comparison. Each scenario, as detailed below, includes a set of explicit “driving forces” which represent hypotheses about causal mechanisms worth investigating in evolving international affairs. The scenario analysis process itself employs templates (discussed further below) to serve as a graphical representation of a structured, focused investigation and thereby as the research tool for conducting case-centered comparative analysis (George and Bennett 2005). In essence, these templates articulate key observable implications within the alternative worlds of the scenarios and serve as a framework for capturing the data that emerge (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994). Finally, this structured, focused comparison serves as the basis for the cross-case session emerging from the scenario analysis that leads directly to the articulation of new research agendas. The scenario process described here has thus been carefully designed to offer some guidance to policy-oriented graduate students who are otherwise left to the relatively unstructured norms by which political science dissertation ideas are typically developed. The initial articulation of a dissertation project is generally an idiosyncratic and personal undertaking (Useem 1997; Rothman 2008), whereby students might choose topics based on their coursework, their own previous policy exposure, or the topics studied by their advisors. Research agendas are thus typically developed by looking for “puzzles” in existing research programs (Kuhn 1996). Doctoral students also, understandably, often choose topics that are particularly amenable to garnering research funding. Conventional grant programs typically base their funding priorities on extrapolations from what has been important in the recent past—leading to, for example, the prevalence of Japan and Soviet studies in the mid-1980s or terrorism studies in the 2000s—in the absence of any alternative method for identifying questions of likely future significance. The scenario approach to generating research ideas is grounded in the belief that these traditional approaches can be complemented by identifying questions likely to be of great empirical importance in the real world, even if these do not appear as puzzles in existing research programs or as clear extrapolations from past events. The scenarios analyzed at NEFPC envision alternative worlds that could develop in the medium (five to seven year) term and are designed to tease out issues scholars and policymakers may encounter in the relatively near future so that they can begin thinking critically about them now. This timeframe offers a period distant enough from the present as to avoid falling into current events analysis, but not so far into the future as to seem like science fiction. In imagining the worlds in which these scenarios might come to pass, participants learn strategies for avoiding failures of creativity and for overturning the assumptions that prevent scholars and analysts from anticipating and understanding the pivotal junctures that arise in international affairs.
   3. Heuristics.
   The 1AC acknowledges the state is bad in many ways. However, the aff uses state as heuristic which doesn’t affirm its legitimacy but allows enhanced governmental resistance.
   Zanotti 14 Dr. Laura Zanotti (Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech) “Governmentality, Ontology, Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the Global World” – Alternatives: Global, Local, Political – vol 38(4):p. 288-304,. A little unclear if this is late 2013 or early 2014 – The Stated “Version of Record” is Feb 20, 2014, but was originally published online on December 30th, 2013. Obtained via Sage Database
   By questioning substantialist representations of power and subjects, inquiries on the possibilities of political agency are reframed in a way that focuses on power and subjects’ relational character and the contingent processes of their (trans)formation in the context of agonic relations. Options for resistance to governmental scripts are not limited to ‘‘rejection,’’ ‘‘revolution,’’ or ‘‘dispossession’’ to regain a pristine ‘‘freedom from all constraints’’ or an immanent ideal social order. It is found instead in multifarious and contingent struggles that are constituted within the scripts of governmental rationalities and at the same time exceed and transform them. This approach questions oversimplifications of the complexities of liberal political rationalities and of their interactions with non-liberal political players and nurtures a radical skepticism about identifying universally good or bad actors or abstract solutions to political problems. International power interacts in complex ways with diverse political spaces and within these spaces it is appropriated, hybridized, redescribed, hijacked, and tinkered with. Governmentality as a heuristic focuses on performing complex diagnostics of events. It invites historically situated explorations and careful differentiations rather than overarching demonizations of ‘‘power,’’ romanticizations of the ‘‘rebel’’ or the ‘‘the local.’’ More broadly, theoretical formulations that conceive the subject in non-substantialist terms and focus on processes of subjectification, on the ambiguity of power discourses, and on hybridization as the terrain for political transformation, open ways for reconsidering political agency beyond the dichotomy of oppression/rebellion. These alternative formulations also foster an ethics of political engagement, to be continuously taken up through plural and uncertain practices, that demand continuous attention to ‘‘what happens’’ instead of fixations on ‘‘what ought to be.’’83 Such ethics of engagement would not await the revolution to come or hope for a pristine ‘‘freedom’’ to be regained. Instead, it would constantly attempt to twist the working of power by playing with whatever cards are available and would require intense processes of reflexivity on the consequences of political choices. To conclude with a famous phrase by Michel Foucault ‘‘my point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to hyper- and pessimistic activism.’’84
   Framework
   The standard is resisting material inequalities.
   Prefer:
2. Ideal theory cannot guide action since its starting point has diverged from the descriptive model of the real world. Non-ideal theory is key for ethical motivation. MILLS: Charles W. Mills, “Ideal Theory” as Ideology, 2005
   “A first possible argument might be the simple denial that moral theory should have any concern with making realistic assumptions about human beings, their capacities, and their behavior. Ethics is concerned with the ideal, so it doesn’t have to worry about the actual. But even for mainstream ethics this wouldn’t work, since, of course, ought is supposed to implies can the ideal has to be achievable by humans. Nor could it seriously be cal imed that moral theory is concerned only with mapping beautiful ideals, not their actual implementation. If any ethicist actually said this, it would be an astonishing abdication of the classic goal of ethics, and its link with practical reason. The normative here would then be weirdly detached from the prescriptive: this is the good and the right—but we are not concerned with their actual realization. Even for Plato, a classic example in at least one sense of an ideal theorist, this was not the case: the Form of the Good was supposed to motivate us, and help philosophers transform society. Nor could yone seriously say that ideal theory is a good way to approach ethics because as a matter of fact (not as a conceptual necessity following from what “model” or “ideal” means), the normative here has come is close to converging with the descriptive: ideal- as-descriptive-model has approximated to ideal-as-idealized-model. Obviously, the dreadful and dismaying course of human history has not remotely been a record of close-to-ideal behavior, but rather of behavior that has usually been quite the polar opposite of the ideal, with oppression and inequitable treatment of the majority of humanity (whether on grounds of gender, or nationality, or class, or religion, or race) being the norm. So the argument cannot be that as a matter of definitional truth, or factual irrelevance, or factual convergence, ideal theory is required. The argument has to be, as in the quote from Rawls above, that this is the best way of doing normative theory, better than all the other contenders. But why on earth should anyone think this? Why should anyone think that abstaining from theorizing about oppression and its consequences is the best way to bring about an end to oppression? Isn’t this, on the face of it, just completely implausible?”
   Non-ideal theory necessitates consequentialism since instead of following rules that assume an already equal playing field, we take steps to correct the material injustice.

2. Debate should deal with the real-world consequences of oppression.
Curry 14, Tommy, The Cost of a Thing: A Kingian Reformulation of a Living Wage Argument in the 21st Century, Victory Briefs, 2014,
Despite the pronouncement of debate as an activity and intellectual exercise pointing to the real world consequences of dialogue, thinking, and (personal) politics when addressing issues of racism, sexism, economic disparity, global conflicts, and death, many of the discussions concerning these ongoing challenges to humanity are fixed to a paradigm which sees the adjudication of material disparities and sociological realities as the conquest of one ideal theory  “Ideal Theory as Ideology,” Charles Mills outlines the problem contemporary theoretical-performance styles in policy debate and value-weighing in Lincoln-Douglass are confronted with in their attempts to get at the concrete problems in our societies. At the outset, Mills concedes that “ideal theory applies to moral theory as a whole (at least to normative ethics as against metaethics); since ethics deals by definition with normative/prescriptive/evaluative issues, against factual/descriptive issues.” At the most general level, there is a conceptual chasm between what emerges as actual problems in the world (e.g.: racism, sexism, poverty, disease, etc.) and how we frame such problems theoretically—the assumptions and shared ideologies we depend upon for our problems to be heard and accepted as a worthy “problem” by an audience—is the most obvious call for an anti-ethical paradigm, since such a paradigm insists on the actual as the basis of what can be considered normatively. Mills, however, describes this chasm as a problem of an ideal-as-descriptive model which argues that for any actual-empirical-observable social phenomenon (P), an ideal of (P) is necessarily a representation of that phenomenon. In the idealization of a social phenomenon (P), one “necessarily has to abstract away from certain features” of (P) that is observed before abstraction occurs. ¶ This gap between what is actual (in the world), and what is represented by theories and politics of debaters proposed in rounds threatens any real discussions about the concrete nature of oppression and the racist economic structures which necessitate tangible policies and reorienting changes in our value orientations. As Mills states: “What distinguishes ideal theory is the reliance on idealization to the exclusion, or at least marginalization, of the actual,” so what we are seeking to resolve on the basis of “thought” is in fact incomplete, incorrect, or ultimately irrelevant to the actual problems which our “theories” seek to address. Our attempts to situate social disparity cannot simply appeal to the ontologization of social phenomenon—meaning we cannot suggest that the various complexities of social problems (which are constantly emerging and undisclosed beyond the effects we observe) are totalizable by any one set of theories within an ideological frame be it our most cherished notions of Afro-pessimism, feminism, Marxism, or the like. At best, theoretical endorsements make us aware of sets of actions to address ever developing problems in our empirical world, but even this awareness does not command us to only do X, but rather do X and the other ideas which compliment the material conditions addressed by the action X. As a whole, debate (policy and LD) neglects the need to do X in order to remedy our cast-away-ness among our ideological tendencies and politics. How then do we pull ourselves from this seeming ir-recoverability of thought in general and in our endorsement of socially actualizable values like that of the living wage? It is my position that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s thinking about the need for a living wage was a unique, and remains an underappreciated, resource in our attempts to impose value reorientation (be it through critique or normative gestures) upon the actual world. In other words, King aims to we must reformulate the values which deny the legitimacy of the living wage, and those values predicated on the flawed views of the oppressed worker, Blacks, and the colonized (dignity, justice, fairness, rights, etc.) used to currently justify the living wages in under our contemporary moral parameters.
3. The oppressed don’t care about the abstract- they want actual consequential change. Anything else is just a reflection of privilege.
Utt ’13: Jamie Utt is a writer and a diversity and inclusion consultant and sexual violence prevention educator, “Intent vs. Impact: Why Your Intentions Don’t Really Matter,” July 30, 2013
I cannot tell you how often I’ve seen people attempt to deflect criticism about their oppressive language or actions by making the conversation about their intent. At what point does the “intent” conversation stop mattering so that we can step back and look at impact? After all, in the end, what does the intent of our action really matter if our actions have the impact of furthering the marginalization or oppression of those around us? In some ways, this is a simple lesson of relationships. If I say something that hurts my partner, it doesn’t much matter whether I intended the statement to mean something else – because my partner is hurting. I need to listen to how my language hurt my partner. I need to apologize. And then I need to reflect and empathize to the best of my ability so I don’t do it again. But when we’re dealing with the ways in which our identities intersect with those around us – and, in turn, the ways our privileges and our experiences of marginalization and oppression intersect – this lesson becomes something much larger and more profound. This becomes a lesson of justice. What we need to realize is that when it comes to people’s lives and identities, the impact of our actions can be profound and wide-reaching. And that’s far more important than the question of our intent. We need to ask ourselves what might be or might have been the impact of our actions or words. And we need to step back and listen when we are being told that the impact of our actions is out of step with our intents or our perceptions of self. Identity Privilege and Intent For people of identity privilege, this is where listening becomes vitally important, for our privilege can often shield us from understanding the impact of our actions. After all, as a person of privilege, I can never fully understand the ways in which oppressive acts or language impact those around me. What I surely can do is listen with every intent to understand, and I can work to change my behavior. Because what we need to understand is that making the conversation about intent is inherently a privileged action. The reason? It ensures that you and your identity (and intent) stay at the center of any conversation and action while the impact of your action or words on those around you is marginalized. So if someone ever tells you to “check your privilege,” what they may very well mean is: “Stop centering your experience and identity in the conversation by making this about the intent of your actions instead of their impact.” That is: Not everything is about you. “What They Did” vs. “What They Are” The incredible Ill Doctrine puts it well when he explains the difference between the “What They Did” conversation and the “What They Are” conversation, which you can watch here. In essence, the “intent” conversation is one about “what they are.” Because if someone intended their action to be hurtful and racist/sexist/transphobic/pickyourpoison, then they must inherently be racist/sexist/transphobic/pickyourpoison. On the other hand, the “impact” conversation is one about “what they did.” For you, it takes the person who said or did the hurtful thing out of the center and places the person who was hurt in the center. It ensures that the conversation is about how “what they did” hurts other people and further marginalizes or oppresses people.
Plan
Resolved: The United States should limit qualified immunity for police officers by removing the “clearly established” element from the Qualified Immunity Doctrine as method to increase accountability for officers. I’m willing to clarify T interps in CX. Wright 15
 (Journalist and PHD in Law. "Want to Fight Police Misconduct? Reform Qualified Immunity." http://abovethelaw.com/2015/11/want-to-fight-police-misconduct-reform-qualified-immunity/)
In order to truly hold police accountable for bad acts, civilians must be able to bring, and win, civil rights suits themselves — not rely on the Department of Justice, or special prosecutors, or civilian review boards to hold officers accountable. And in order to both bring and win civil rights suits, civilians need a level playing field in court. Right now, they don’t have one. Instead, police officers have recourse to the broad protections of the judicially established doctrine of qualified immunity. Under this doctrine, state actors are protected from suit even if they’ve violated the law by, say, using excessive force, or performing an unwarranted body cavity search — as long as their violation was not one of “clearly established law, of which a reasonable officer would be aware.” In other words, if there’s not already a case where a court has held that an officer’s identical or near-identical conduct rose to the level of a constitutional violation there’s a good chance that even an obviously malfeasant officer will avoid liability — will avoid accountability. To bring about true accountability and change police behavior, this needs to change. And change should begin with an act of Congress rolling back qualified immunity. Removing the “clearly established” element of qualified immunity would be a good start — after all, shouldn’t it be enough to deviate from a basic standard of care, to engage in conduct that a reasonable officer would know is illegal, without having to show that that conduct’s illegality has already been clearly established in the courts? That’s just a start. There are plenty of other reforms that could open up civil rights lawsuits and help ensure police accountability for bad conduct. Two posts (one, two) at Balkinization by City University of New York professor Lynda Dodd provide a good overview. Campaign Zero should consider adding civil rights litigation reform to its platform, our policymakers should consider making civil rights litigation more robust, and, if we want to see justice done, we should push to make it happen.
Inherency
The United States is a warzone—police murder thousands of black people a year—it’s try or die.
Wong ’15 (Kathleen is a branded content staff writer at Mic, “10 Police Brutality Statistics That Are Absolutely Shocking,” Mic, 12/9, https://mic.com/articles/129981/10-police-brutality-statistics-that-are-absolutely-shocking#.HiJcAd5rQ) Bracketed for efficiency

1. In May, the Washington Post analyzed the 385 fatal police shootings in the United States that had occurred so far in 2015. The Post noted its number, which came out to two officer-involved shooting deaths per day, was more than twice the rate that the government had recorded over the past decade. 2. That same report found blacks to be killed at three times the rate of whites or other minorities. 3. It also found that almost a quarter of those killed were identified as mentally ill by police or family members. 4. The youngest victims at the end of May, according to the Washington Post, were 16 years old (though at the time, nine ages were unknown). 5. Another Washington Post investigation from August found that black men — who constitute 6 of the nation's population — account for 40 of the 60 unarmed people who had been fatally shot by police by that time. 6. The Guardian's The Counted project, which crowdsources and reports on police deaths, analyzed the first half of 2015 to find that an average of three people were killed daily during the first half of 2015 that time. 7. Mapping Police Violence found that black people living in Oklahoma were six times more likely to be killed by police than in Georgia. 8. It also found 98 of these events did not end with an officer being charged with a crime. 9. A 2014 article by KQED found California to be the state with the most frequent occurrences of deadly officer-involved shootings, with 102 in 2011. 10. The Guardian also found that if this trend persists, the number of people killed by police will surpass 1,000 by the end of the year. 

Advantage 1 is Police Brutality
Qualified immunity destroys accountability for police officers-limitations are key. Bernick 15 Evan Bernick, https://fee.org/articles/to-hold-police-accountable-dont-give-them-immunity/
The sad fact is that it is often effectively impossible to hold police officers accountable for unconstitutional acts. That fact is attributable in large part to a potent well of unchecked power that many Americans have never heard of. You will not find it in the Constitution. You will not find it in any federal law. It is a judge-made doctrine, invented by the Supreme Court. It is called qualified immunity. And if those charged with enforcing the law are to be kept within the bounds of their rightful authority, it must be abolished. Section 1983, the federal law that allows citizens to sue for constitutional violations, is broad, unequivocal, and unambiguous. It says that “every person” who is acting “under color of” law who causes a “deprivation of any rights… secured by the Constitution and laws” “shall be liable to the party injured.” Section 1983 embodies a foundational principle of justice that resonates with Americans who have never heard of Marbury v. Madison: where there is a right, there is a remedy.But for decades, we have had rights without remedies. In the 1967 case of Pierson v. Ray, the Supreme Court held that police officers sued for constitutional violations can raise “qualified immunity” as a defense, and thereby escape paying out of their own pockets, even if they violated a person’s constitutional rights. This decision was unabashedly policy-oriented: it was thought that government officials would not vigorously fulfill their obligations if they could be held accountable for actions taken in good faith. Under current law, the general rule is that victims of rights violations pay the costs of their own injuries. In practice, qualified immunity provides a near-absolute defense to all but the most outrageous conduct. The Ninth Circuit has held that throwing a flash-bang grenade “blindly” into a house, injuring a toddler, isn’t outrageous enough. Just last year, in Plumhoff v. Rickard, the Supreme Court decided that firing 15 bullets at a motorist is a reasonable method to end the driver’s flight from the police. So much for “every person” “shall be liable.” Qualified immunity shields police misconduct not only from liability but also from meaningful judicial scrutiny. Private lawsuits are an essential tool in uncovering the truth about police misconduct. The discovery process can yield information that makes broader policy changes within police departments possible. At trial, judicial engagement — an impartial, evidence-based determination of the constitutionality of the officer’s actions — can take place.
The plan solves- cases that the aff puts in court get interacted fairly and result in success while still protecting officers- no backlash.
Sheng 11
(Philip, B.A., Stanford University, John Arrillaga Scholar. An "Objectively Reasonable" Criticism of the Doctrine of Qualified Immunity in Excessive Force Cas-es Brought Under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 BYU Journal of Public Law 2011 The BYU Journal of Public Law 26 BYU J. Pub. L. 99)
A better approach might be to eliminate qualified immunity altogether in excessive force cases; but rather than create a whole new test, the Court should remove the question of reasonableness from the jury and allow judges to decide whether the use of force was objectively reasonable. Under this approach, jury interaction would remain much the same, except that after all the facts are resolved, the judge would decide the ultimate constitutional question of reasonableness based on the jury's findings. While this would be a departure from settled practice, it appears to have an adequate basis in the law. For instance, trial court judges already decide the question of reasonableness on motions for summary judgment whenever facts are undisputed or viewed in the light most *109 favorable to the plaintiff. n83 Moreover, appellate judges routinely decide the question of reasonableness every time an excessive force case goes on appeal. n84 Judges are well-equipped, yet it seems odd that the constitutional question of reasonableness only goes to the judge when facts are not in dispute, but at all other times, is entrusted to the jury. It would perhaps make better sense to have the jury resolve the facts, and have the judge decide the question of reasonableness based on those facts. There are several benefits to this approach. First, it would eliminate the need for line drawing between Hope and Brosseau, and courts would not have to worry about clearly established law. Second, the Court could retreat from its "irreducibly murky" n85 distinction between Graham and Harlow. If applied judiciously, Graham alone provides law enforcement officers with adequate protection for reasonable mistakes. Third, even though they would be denied qualified immunity, law enforcement officers would benefit by having judges decide the constitutional question of reasonableness. Judges are in a better position to decide constitutional questions, having been trained in the law and having developed expertise through experience. This approach would also eliminate potential jury bias. While jury bias can cut both ways, n86 consider the case of Jared Massey, a YouTube sensation and public hero after being Tasered by a Utah Highway Patrol officer in 2007. n87 Despite an internal investigation clearing the officer, the state settled for $ 40,000 rather than risk a jury awarding more. n88 Fourth, the approach would serve the same purposes as qualified immunity by allowing claims to be decided early on summary judgment. 

And lawsuits deter brutality while indemnification is not guaranteed.
Gilles ’01 (Mirriam, Assistant Professor, Cardozo Law School, “In Defense of making Government Pay: The Deterrent Effect of Constitutional Tort Remedies,” Georgia Law Review, Vol. 35, 2001.) OS bracketed for gender
The question of whether constitutional tort remedies serve any deterrent effect is, I think, easily answered in the affirmative. No police officer wants to be sued, 2 particularly where there is no absolute guarantee that their his municipal employer will pay for their his defense and indemnify him for damages.3 Indeed, the substantive and procedural elements of the qualified immunity doctrine are largely premised on the undesirability of dragging public officials through a difficult legal process, taking their time and energies away from their official duties, and exposing them to potentially ruinous liability. 4 And even where officers are indemnified, it is reasonable to suppose that there are immense political costs (in the sense of everyday workplace politics) associated with a finding of liability and exposing the municipal employer to budgetary payouts. Common sense supports this view that constitutional damages deter police misconduct to some appreciable degree. Every day across the country, there are obviously situations in which officers are tempted to abuse a defenseless suspect in order to gain information during an interrogation, or for some other purpose. It would be foolhardy to assume that the knowledge that a suspect might sue for damages has no inhibitory effect.

Independent of deterrence, lawsuits lead to political reform for the better. Schwartz 11
Joanna Schwartz 11 (Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law.) "What Police Learn from Lawsuits." Cardozo L. Rev. 33 (2011): 841.
The practices of the departments in my study are distinct in two significant ways from expectations about the uses of litigation data underlying theories of deterrence. Deterrence theorists generally expect that settlements and judgments – financial penalties – inspire performance improvement efforts. Yet the police departments in my study that gather and analyze litigation data do not focus solely – or even primarily – on settlements and judgments. Instead, they pay particular attention to the allegations of misconduct in claims and lawsuits when they are first filed, and the information developed during the course of litigation. To be sure, departments in my study also pay attention to the resolution of suits in various ways. The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department tracks trends in settlements and judgments and has reviewed practices and units responsible for large payouts.115 And large settlements and judgments may focus attention on particular cases, particularly if they attract press or political attention.116 But the five departments in my study pay attention to lawsuits at the beginning and middle – as well as the end – of the litigation process. Second, deterrence theory expects that officials deciding which course of action to take weigh the costs of litigation against the benefits of the underlying conduct.117 Yet, the policies in place in the departments in my study do not facilitate this sort of weighing. Departments would not, for example, track lawsuits alleging chokeholds and then decide whether to retrain their officers about the impropriety of chokeholds based on the costs of these suits.118 Instead, departments in my study would use lawsuits, with other data, to identify chokeholds as behavior that triggered a concentration of suits, civilian complaints, and/or use of force reports. The department then would conduct an investigation and identify ways to address the underlying policy, training, or personnel problems.119 And when a department looks for trends in payouts, officials do not weigh those judgments and settlements against the costs of potential policy changes. Instead, the concentration of settlements and judgments is treated as an indication of an underlying problem that is then investigated and analyzed. By differentiating department practices from prevailing understandings of deterrence, I do not mean to suggest that these departments are immune to lawsuits’ deterrent effects. Indeed, the LASD’s elaborate efforts to track and reduce misconduct can be understood as a kind of end-product of deterrence. When the Board of Supervisors appointed the Kolts Commission to review LASD practices, they were motivated in part by a Los Angeles Times story that reported $32 million paid in settlements and judgments against the LASD over a five-year period.120 The Kolts Commission was instructed to find ways to reduce the costs of litigation against the department121 and a significant aim of Merrick Bobb’s reviews of the department remains to monitor the costs of lawsuits brought against the LASD.122 But the policies put in place by the Kolts Commission and Merrick Bobb reduce the costs of liability by understanding and addressing the underlying causes of police error and misconduct. And to achieve this understanding, the LASD and Bobb focus attention on the lessons that can be learned from lawsuits, regardless of an individual suit’s financial or political ramifications. The practices of departments in my study are more akin to those encouraged by those focused on the identification and reduction of error.
Meta-studies prove that police accountability and legitimacy stops the culture of fear and spillovers to decrease overall violence.
Mazerolle et al 13, Lorraine, Sarah Bennett, Jacqueline Davis, Elise Sargeant and Matthew Manning, 2013, Legitimacy in Policing: A Systematic Review, http://thecapartnership.org/cms/assets/uploads/2016/02/Mazerolle_Legitimacy_Review-1.pdf
The systematic search found 163 studies that reported on police led interventions, and a final set of 30 studies contained data suitable for meta-analysis. The direct outcomes analyzed were legitimacy, procedural justice, and citizen cooperation/compliance and satisfaction/confidence in the police. In addition, an indirect outcome, reoffending, was also analyzed. The main finding of this review is that police interventions that comprised dialogue with a procedural justice component (or stated specifically that the intervention sought to increase legitimacy) did indeed enhance citizens’ views on the legitimacy of the police, with all direct outcomes apart from legitimacy itself being statistically significant. Our review shows that by police adopting procedurally just dialogue, they can use a variety of interventions to enhance legitimacy, (and) reduce reoffending, and promote citizen satisfaction, confidence, compliance and cooperation with the police.

Case studies prove that litigation spurs legislation for positive policy reform, win or lose.
Richard A. L. Gambitta, Chair of the Political Science and Geography Department, University of Texas-San Antonio, GOVERNING THROUGH THE COURTS, ed. Gambitta, May, and Foster, 1981, p. 275-276.

Similar to the aftermath of the “winning” litigation in Serrano and Robinson, the losing litigation in Rodriguez was followed by positive, though limited, policy reform and relative equalization. How did the Rodriguez litigaton contribute to the policy reform and expenditure change? I suggest, in ways similar to Serrano and Robinson. The litigation process performed a legislative agenda-setting function. All three cases contributed to setting a legislative agenda that otherwise would not have 276 transpired. Additionally, the litigation processes bolstered the political positions of the advocates of change, though the policy outcomes were tempered by, as they are always subject to and at least partially determined by, the inherent compromises of the majoritarian processes and institutions (Casper, 1972; Clune, 1979; Horowitz, 1977; Lehn, 1978; Scheingold, 1974).

Advantage 2 – Human Rights
Qualified immunity leads to circumvention of rights and propagates police brutality – plan solves this.
Johnson 15 – Tabitha Johnson, : 2015(“QUALIFIED IMMUNITY OR JUSTIFIED BRUTALITY?: AN EXAMINATION OF THE QUALIFIED IMMUNITY DOCTRINE IN PETERSON V. KOPP” Tennessee Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice, Vol. 4:2 p.265-267)
The Eighth Circuit then addressed Peterson’s excessive force claim.43 During his arrest, Peterson contended that Kopp used excessive force, thus violating Peterson’s Fourth Amendment right “to be free from unreasonable seizures.”44 In determining whether Kopp used excessive force in Peterson’s arrest, the court used an “objective reasonableness” test.45 The Eighth Circuit explained that this test took into account that an officer’s actions “must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.”46 In determining whether an officer’s actions in pursuing an arrest were reasonable, the Eighth Circuit evaluated “the severity of the crime at issue, whether the suspect poses an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others, and whether the suspect is actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight.”47 The court concluded that Peterson’s purported crime was not severe, he was not posing a threat to others, nor was he fleeing.48 As Peterson’s disobedience was passive and non-threatening to others, Kopp’s infliction of physical force onto Peterson was deemed excessive.49 While Kopp’s arrest failed the excessive force test, the Eighth Circuit held that Kopp was entitled to qualified immunity because Peterson’s injuries sustained from the altercation with Kopp were de minimis.50 The injuries were de minimis because Peterson “did not seek medical care and his injuries resolved themselves without medical intervention.”51 To support its conclusion, the court provided a wealth of similar cases for comparison.52 The court further noted that a recent decision changed the law regarding the applicability of qualified immunity for de minimis injuries; however, the court also clarified that it rendered the ruling after the altercation between Kopp and Peterson.53 Therefore, Kopp was reasonable in assuming that, as long as the injuries he inflicted upon Peterson were de minimis, he would remain entitled to qualified immunity as his actions were “constitutionally permissible” at the time.54 Lastly, the Eighth Circuit addressed Peterson’s two retaliation claims.55 Peterson alleged that Kopp both pepper sprayed and arrested him for participating in a constitutionally protected activity.56 In determining whether Kopp acted in retaliation, the court determined that Peterson must show that “he engaged in a protected activity,” that “the government official took adverse action against him that would chill a person of ordinary firmness from continuing in the activity,” and that “the adverse action was motivated at least in part by the exercise of the protected activity.”57 The Eighth Circuit consolidated the three prongs of the test by stating that a plaintiff need only show that “he was ‘singled out because of his exercise of constitutional rights’” in order to prevail on a retaliation claim.58 The court further implemented a fourth prong to this traditional test.59 To satisfy the test, Peterson would also need to prove a “lack of probable cause or a lack of arguable probable cause.”60 The Eighth Circuit first applied the aforementioned test to Peterson’s claim of retaliatory arrest.61 In applying this four-prong test, the Eighth Circuit held that “Kopp was entitled to qualified immunity on Peterson’s retaliatory arrest claim because, as detailed above, Kopp had at least arguable probable cause for the arrest,” as exemplified through his actions prior to his arrest.62 The Eighth Circuit then evaluated Peterson’s claim of being pepper sprayed out of retaliation.63 The court determined that Peterson presented enough evidence to prove that Kopp pepper sprayed him out of retaliation. 64 In reaching its conclusion, the Eighth Circuit noted that it was significant to Peterson’s contention that, shortly before being pepper sprayed, Peterson demanded Kopp’s badge number.65 This—along with Kopp’s outright refusal to provide Peterson with the requested information—justified the court’s decision to remand the issue.66 The court ultimately held that “a reasonable jury could conclude . . . that Kopp pepper sprayed Peterson in retaliation for asking for his badge number, and Peterson’s First Amendment right was clearly established at the time of the incident.”67 For these reasons, the Eighth Circuit remanded the retaliatory force claim for further review. IV. CONCLUSION Despite its arrival during a tumultuous era for civilian rights, Peterson does not stray from the majority of its precedents regarding the evaluation of qualified immunity. Peterson’s claims of wrongful arrest, retaliatory arrest, and excessive force all proved futile under the Eighth Circuit’s application of qualified immunity, while Peterson’s claim of retaliatory force has been remanded for further examination. It is clear from the holdings in Peterson that the doctrine of qualified immunity still reigns supreme in cases of purported police brutality. Unless there is a reevaluation of the doctrine on a fundamental and moral level, Peterson will provide precedent for further police brutality cases.

UN condemns US for allowing Extreme Human Rights Violation on people of color, by the police.
By Jamil Dakwar, Director, ACLU Human Rights Program
MAY 15, 2015 | 4:30 PM

The U.N. Human Rights Council adopted a scathing report today, consisting of 348 recommendations that address myriad human rights violations in the United States. The report came out as a part of a mechanism called the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), which examines the human rights record of all U.N. member states. The council questioned the United States on its record earlier this week. Although many of these recommendations in the report are redundant or too general to offer tangible solutions to the human rights situation in the U.S., they echo many of the concerns raised by U.S. civil society groups like the ACLU, who attended the review and offered concrete recommendations to reverse policies that are inconsistent with international human rights principles. For example, the report adopted a recommendation made by Sweden to "halt the detention of immigrant families and children, seek alternatives to detention and end use of detention for reason of deterrence." The report also adopted several recommendations calling on the Obama administration to independently investigate allegations of torture documented in the recent Senate torture report and provide reparations to victims. Denmark, for instance, recommended that the United States "further ensure that all victims of torture and ill-treatment — whether still in US custody or not — obtain redress and have an enforceable right to fair and adequate compensation and as full rehabilitation as possible, including medical and psychological assistance." In addition, the report included many fitting recommendations to address police brutality and excessive use of force as well as (and) ending racial profiling against minorities and immigrants. Mexico recommended that the U.S. "adopt measures at the federal level to prevent and punish excessive use of force by law enforcement officials against members of ethnic and racial minorities, including unarmed persons, which disproportionately affect Afro American and undocumented migrants." Ireland, for its part, directly touched on the broken trust between American law enforcement and communities of color and recommended that the U.S. "continue to vigorously investigate recent cases of alleged police-led human rights abuses against African-Americans and seek to build improved relations and trust between U.S. law enforcement and all communities around the U.S." While in some areas, like LGBT rights and freedom of speech, the United States' human rights record fares far better than other parts of the world, in many areas — including national security, criminal justice, social and economic rights, and immigration policy — the U.S. has an abysmal record compared to other liberal democracies. This report sends a strong message of no-confidence in the U.S. human rights record. It clearly demonstrates that the United States has a long way to go to live up to its human rights obligations and commitments. This will be the last major human rights review for the Obama administration, and it offers a critical opportunity to shape the president's human rights legacy, especially in the areas of racial justice, national security, and immigrants' rights. The Obama administration has until September to respond to the 348 recommendations. At that time, the administration will make a direct commitment to the world by deciding which of the 348 will be accepted and implemented over the next four years, and which will be rejected. While many of the recommendations fall outside the constitutional powers of the executive branch — such as treaty ratification and legislative actions on the national, state, and local levels — the Obama administration should use its executive powers to their fullest extent to effectuate U.S. human rights obligations. The U.S. record for implementing U.N. recommendations has thus far been very disappointing, but if President Obama really cares about his human rights legacy, he should direct his administration to adopt a plan of action with concrete benchmarks and effective implementation mechanisms that will ensure that the U.S. indeed learns from its shortcomings and genuinely seeks to create a more perfect union. The world will be watching.

US acts as a beacon around the world, allowing systematic unjust actions harms Human Rights globally
Lorna Byrne (3) Author, #1 International bestsellers,”Love From Heaven and ‘A Message of Hope from the Angels’
 The Huffington Post
11/06/2012 02:31 pm ET | Updated Jan 06, 2013

I don’t think most Americans realize how important they are to the world.
America is meant to be a major force for good in our world. America does lots of good things now, but when America starts to show it’s true character and does the (do) right thing even more often, it will truly shine as a beacon of hope for the world.
I was about 12 when I learned about the importance of America.
I have been seeing angels since I was a baby. I see them physically as I see someone sitting in front of me. This may sound very strange, even crazy to you, but to me it’s natural. I have no idea why I am able to see angels and you aren’t. I’m just an ordinary person. I kept quiet about what I was seeing and told nobody, not even my family, until I was in my 50s. It was then that God and the angels told me I was to write and tell about what I had been, and was, seeing.
Every so often as a child I would see a particular type of angel standing beside a person. This type of angel looked different to other angels I saw. They were enormous and had a very powerful and strong masculine appearance and seemed to be dressed like a soldier, in silver coloured armour that covered their legs and their chests. On the chests there was a crest.
When I was about 12, I was told that these were these were American gathering angels, a powerful force of angels that have been created by God to gather people of all nationalities and all religions and bring them to America. I was also told that no other country or place had gathering angels.
The American gathering angels were created, I was told, because America ha(s)d a special role to play in the evolution of the world. I was told that it is from America that, what is essentially an evolved mankind, a new race will come, and it will spread throughout the world.
I have asked how the American gathering angels know who to gather. I haven’t been given a full answer but I have been told that it doesn’t mean that those gathered are more gifted or more special than people in other parts of the world. When I have talked about the American gathering angels some people who are not American have been offended because they were not chosen. I tell them neither was I!
This is not about American superiority or domination; it is about America being the cradle for an evolved human race.
Each time I come to America I feel how different America is to the rest of the world. To me it’s as if America is more vibrant and alive. The difference comes from the American people. They seem to me to be more energized, as if they have a stronger desire to live life to the fullest. God and the angels tell me that Americans are more open spiritually than other nationalities; that they listen more and are more responsive. I am told they are less afraid of the spiritual side of themselves, or those around them.
It’s as if Americans are more creative and open in looking to the future; they are not struck in the past or afraid of failure. Americans, I am told, are more determined than other nationalities to create a better future for themselves, their families and the world.
America is meant to have influence in the world. But it needs to earn the respect of the world by doing the right things — both at home and abroad. America does much that is good but at the moment America is not doing the right thing often enough.
At home, within America, a society has been created that is still, too frequently, deeply unequal and unjust.
Too much of the time America’s influence abroad is tainted by interests to do with power or money. America has a vital role in creating a peaceful world but to play this role they need to care about the rest of the world and not just their own patch. This is about world peace not about American dominance.
Doing the right thing will take tremendous courage from America’s leaders — whoever they may be. It involves vision and taking risks that more cautious advisors might counsel against. It demands leadership.
America is the gateway to humanity’s future, it is where the choices that will determine mankind’s future will be made. It is a beacon of hope for the world.
America needs to show its true character and when it does this it will speed up the process of evolution, which will make our world a better place.

US leadership is key to the UN’s worldwide success in human rights
Lagon 5/17
Mark P. Lagon, Centennial Fellow and Distinguished Senior Scholar in the Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University: May 17, 2016(“A GLASS HALF FULL: WHY THE U.S. NEEDS TO BE ON THE U.N. HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL” Freedom House Available at https://freedomhouse.org/article/glass-half-full-why-us-needs-be-un-human-rights-council )
Active membership in the Council by the U.S. has contributed to successes.  A resolution and rapporteur on Belarus were restored. Moreover, I would never have thought ten years ago that a resolution devoted to Iran could be passed not only in New York but in Geneva.  The Human Rights Council resolution does not yet enumerate Iran’s human rights violations chapter and verse – as it should.  But it has sustained a Special Rapporteur when the international community (and candidly the United States) have let nuclear nonproliferation be a pretext for deprioritizing human rights in that country – both before and after a nuclear deal with Tehran.  Despite fears to the contrary, the Council once again extended the Iran mandate on March 23, 2016 by a 5 vote margin.  Today, the Council and the current Iran resolution remain important vehicles for the world to increase pressure on Iran to improve its human rights record. While the Security Council has been all too inert on the atrocities of Assad in Syria, allowing ISIS to grow as a second source of atrocities, the Human Rights Council has repeatedly devoted its attention to those calamities.  On August 22, 2011, the Council established a Commission of Inquiry on Syria which found that the Syrian government is responsible for violations that amount to crimes against humanity. Since then, the UNHRC has held over 20 sessions on Syria and adopted no less than 17 resolutions. The Human Rights Council was pretty feckless in calling attention to human rights abuses in Sri Lanka in the period when the United States refused to run to be a Member.  After the United States got on, there was a pronounced shift in the substance of resolutions adopted on Sri Lanka, making clear the international community’s demand for accountability for mass atrocities committed during the civil war.   Sri Lanka is making some progress. It is one ray of hope in Freedom House’s Freedom of the World survey, which shows ten straight years of a global recession of democracy, notably in freedom of expression, freedom of association, and rule of law. Most striking was the Commission of Inquiry launched by the Council to investigate North Korea’s atrocities.  No single multilateral mandate or report on human rights has changed the terms of debate on a neglected human rights issue than this Commission headed by Australian jurist Michael Kirby.  No mandate devoted to atrocities-level abuse has treated a case where open warfare has not existed for decades.  And yet, so powerful were the Commission’s findings that China and Russia could not block North Korea’s human rights situation from being added to the U.N. Security Council’s standing agenda. Less striking, but highly important, was action on Eritrea – a country all but forgotten, and of little strategic importance, yet so repressive that in 2014, some 6 percent of its population fled to seek asylum. In July 2012, the Council appointed a Special Rapporteur to shine a light onto widespread human rights violations. On June 27, 2014, the Council established a Commission of Inquiry to investigate these gross and systematic abuses, with a particular focus on documenting crimes against humanity. The United States helped make the numerous Council assessments of Israel’s conduct in Gaza and in the humanitarian flotilla controversy fairer.  The United States may not fix the quantitative volume and qualitative tilt of the Council’s treatment of Israel, but its presence has been helpful.  And at a minimum, the United States using its voice and vote means that excessive criticism of Israel is not answered with silence. THEMATIC WORK In a second area, the thematic work of the Human Rights Council has improved, and been ameliorated by U.S. leadership.  Let’s take a few examples. First, the United States helped turn around a perverse set of resolutions on defamation of religion which gave states in Islamic-majority nations cover in order to use blasphemy laws to sideline and repress freedom of religion and of expression in the name of anti-defamation.  Those resolutions always have represented a latent threat for creation of a broader UN Declaration or Convention codifying their pernicious provisions.  In 2011, the United States, working with a cross-regional group of partners, engaged the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to end-run intransigent, longstanding ambassadors in Geneva. The result was a new consensus framework on combatting religious intolerance, resting on the pillars of defending freedom of expression and veritable freedom of all religions. That victory is precarious and is already vulnerable.  As the single most pronounced voice for freedom of conscience and expression in the international community, the U.S. should be on the Council.i Second, a much-needed mandate was created for Freedom of Assembly and Association, in large part because of U.S. leadership.  At a time when autocracies and ostensible democracies worldwide are squeezing civil society groups and demonizing them for getting international advice and backing, this mandate is essential.  We know the Rapporteur well.  Kenyan Maina Kiai happens to have won the Freedom Award at the annual dinner where I was named to become Freedom House’s President.  As Special Rapporteur, he embodies the UN’s thematic work on human rights at its most energetic and effective. I have said in my book Human Dignity and the Future of Global Institutions that multilateral measures on economic and social aspirations are not inherently less important than the political and civil liberties Freedom House champions.  Yet the Human Rights Council does dignify a number of matters that no serious person could claim are really human rights.  The number of mandates for economic, social, and cultural rights have grown, even while the U.S. has been on the Council as a voice of reason.  Without the U.S. there, there would be even more silly mandates, like treating the real problem of toxic waste as a human rights matter.  And those efforts which have proven constructive, like the Council resolution on business and human rights springing from the work of John Ruggie as Special Representative, would be in danger of being taken in the wrong direction, which bears watching as Ecuador and others seek a related treaty. UNIVERSAL PERIODIC REVIEW A third area relates to peer review.  The most distinctive innovation of the negotiation I took part in to create the Council is the Universal Periodic Review (UPR).  It meant all nations, including some heinous, human rights-abusing states managing to get on the Council would be subject to regular scrutiny. Some of us feared the UPR would be a pretext for winnowing the number of country-specific resolutions and rapporteurs, but they have been sustained, especially when the U.S. has been a Council Member. The UPR gives an opportunity for civil society groups to shine a light of accountability on their states.  The largest part of Freedom House’s work, our true comparative advantage, is capacity-building and emergency assistance to civil society organizations in all regions of the world.  We see how the UPR helps our local civil society partners assert their voice in an organized, focused and coordinated manner, which is why we support these frontline activists to engage directly in the UPR process, including appearing in Geneva and producing shadow reports. At its best, governments are adopting the practice of formally consulting with civil society, a good example being Mali, where the government arranged meetings between ministerial departments and representatives of civil society, and where the Ministry of Justice established a working group to prepare the UPR report. In more restrictive environments, civil society and even the media have the option of discussing UPR recommendations at one step removed: rather than themselves raising issues directly, they can report on recommendations raised by the international community.  According to a 2014 report of the civil society organization UPR Info, 48 percent of UPR recommendations triggered action (partially or fully implemented) within two and a half years, and 19 percent of recommendations that were not accepted but merely “noted” still resulted in action. The UPR is not an unvarnished success.ii  It offers an opportunity to raise human rights issues in any nation every four years, makes recommendations to states, and those states in turn make commitments to address some of the recommendations.  Yet in a decade, with nations now getting repeatedly assessed, it is not clear to me that there is sufficient onus on states to live up to even the recommendations they agree to meet, much less those they do not.  This is one reason Freedom House helps civil society actors, like some from Venezuela, to present their case to the expert bodies assigned to assess how much parties to UN human rights conventions fulfill their commitments, because these treaty bodies have more impact than the UPR.  The United States is empirically the most vocal participant in the UPR dialogue with states under examination.  The UPR will be stronger over time for U.S. involvement in the Council.

Improving UN rights and preventing violations helps billions materially across the globe.
CFR 13 - Council on Foreign Relations: June 19, 2013 (“The Global Human Rights Regime” From the multimedia Global Governance Monitor of the International Institutions and Global Governance program Available at http://www.cfr.org/human-rights/global-human-rights-regime/p27450#p1)
Although the concept of human rights is abstract, how it is applied has a direct and enormous impact on daily life worldwide. Millions have suffered crimes against humanity. Millions more toil in bonded labor. In the last decade alone, authoritarian rule has denied civil and political liberties to billions. The idea of human rights has a long history, but only in the past century has the international community sought to galvanize a regime to promote and guard them. Particularly, since the United Nations (UN) was established in 1945, world leaders have cooperated to codify human rights in a universally recognized regime of treaties, institutions, and norms. An elaborate global system is being developed. Governments are striving to promote human rights domestically and abroad, and are partnering with multilateral institutions to do so. A particularly dynamic and decentralized network of civil-society actors is also involved in the effort. Together, these players have achieved marked success, though the institutionalization and implementation of different rights is progressing at varying rates. Response to mass atrocities has seen the greatest progress, even if enforcement remains inconsistent. The imperative to provide people with adequate public health care is strongly embedded across the globe, and substantial resources have been devoted to the challenge. The right to freedom from slavery and forced labor has also been integrated into international and national institutions, and has benefited from high-profile pressure to combat forced labor. Finally, the steady accumulation of human-rights-related conventions has encouraged most states to do more to implement binding legislation in their constitutions and statutes.

Underview

1. 1AR theory is legitimate and no neg RVI a) it would be impossible to check NC abuse since the 6 min NR could go all in on theory, disincentivizing 1AR theory. b) I solve reciprocity – neg has exclusive access to T so if they also got rvi’s there could never be reciprocity. 

2. Aff theory is a reason to drop the debater because a) the time crunched 1ar is insufficient to win both theory and substance, so aff has no ability to check abuse leading to infinite harm, and b) the 2nr can collapse on aff theory making it impossible for the aff to cover all of the arguments in the three minute 2ar if they split their time with substance and theory

3. Prefer reasonable aff interps and drop the argument on T. The judge should use reasonability with a bright line of the presence of link and impact turn ground for the negative. Since he has equal access to offense, there’s no abuse because structural access to the ballot is the same. 

4. Grant me perms on any kritik that is not competitive with my advocacy statement such as reps K’s:
A. Key to actually comparing worlds—our division of ground ensures there is actually a debate where we compare worlds because the advocacies are resolutionally competitive, which forces debaters to make arguments in favor of their side of the debate. Any other model allows NEGs to advocate alternatives that do not inherently compete with the resolution, which decreases our ability to compare advocacies because debaters go into the round with the resolution as the only common ground.
B. Engagement—AFFs can only be expected to prepare against advocacies that compete with their advocacy, not advocacies that only compete with arguments in the AFF because arguments are only a way to advance the advocacy, not the advocacy itself. I.E. The discourse I use for my plan is part of how I advocate for my advocacy, but it is not my advocacy itself. A criticism on my discourse proves we reject the discourse, not the aff for discourse that does not compete with the advocacy. This means only our type of ground centers the debate over competitive advocacies that both debaters can reasonable engage with which links turns any NEG offense since none of their impacts matter if AFFs can’t engage in their model of debate. 

5. K’s of the state are totally irrelevant to the resolution and should be rejected- the resolution is a question of state obligations, so even if the state is bad, that’s not a reason they don’t have an obligation to take an action. For example, saying Joe is a murderer in response to the point that it would be good if Joe saved Tommy’s cat is non-responsive to whether or not the obligation exists. 

More Cards
The state is inevitable- policymaking is the only way to create change.
Coverstone 5 Alan Coverstone (masters in communication from Wake Forest, longtime debate coach) “Acting on Activism: Realizing the Vision of Debate with Pro-social Impact” Paper presented at the National Communication Association Annual Conference November 17th 2005 Powerful personal narratives unconnected to political power are regularly co-opted by those who do learn the language of power. One need look no further than the annual state of the Union Address where personal story after personal story is used to support the political agenda of those in power. The so-called role-playing that public policy contest debates encourage promotes active learning of the vocabulary and levers of power in America. Imagining the ability to use our own arguments to influence government action is one of the great virtues of academic debate. Gerald Graff (2003) analyzed the decline of argumentation in academic discourse and found a source of student antipathy to public argument in an interesting place. I’m up against…their aversion to the role of public spokesperson that formal writing presupposes. It’s as if such students can’t imagine any rewards for being a public actor or even imagining themselves in such a role. This lack of interest in the public sphere may in turn reflect a loss of confidence in the possibility that the arguments we make in public will have an effect on the world. Today’s students’ lack of faith in the power of persuasion reflects the waning of the ideal of civic participation that led educators for centuries to place rhetorical and argumentative training at the center of the school and college curriculum. (Graff, 2003, p. 57) The power to imagine public advocacy that actually makes a difference is one of the great virtues of the traditional notion of fiat that critics deride as mere simulation. Simulation of success in the public realm is far more empowering to students than completely abandoning all notions of personal power in the face of governmental hegemony by teaching students that “nothing they can do in a contest debate can ever make any difference in public policy.” Contest debating is well suited to rewarding public activism if it stops accepting as an article of faith that personal agency is somehow undermined by the so-called role playing in debate. Debate is role-playing whether we imagine government action or imagine individual action. Imagining myself starting a socialist revolution in America is no less of a fantasy than imagining myself making a difference on Capitol Hill. Furthermore, both fantasies influenced my personal and political development virtually ensuring a life of active, pro-social, political participation. Neither fantasy reduced the likelihood that I would spend my life trying to make the difference I imagined. One fantasy actually does make a greater difference: the one that speaks the language of political power. The other fantasy disables action by making one a laughingstock to those who wield the language of power. Fantasy motivates and role-playing trains through visualization. Until we can imagine it, we cannot really do it. Role-playing without question teaches students to be comfortable with the language of power, and that language paves the way for genuine and effective political activism. Debates over the relative efficacy of political strategies for pro-social change must confront governmental power at some point.

Legal debates are key to short-term survival of oppressed populations. Whether the law is good or bad, legal education is crucial to empowerment.
Arkles et al 10 (Gabriel Arkles, Pooja Gehi and Elana Redfield, The Role of Lawyers in Trans Liberation: Building a Transformative Movement for Social Change, Seattle Journal for Social Justice, 8 Seattle J. Soc. Just. 579, Spring / Summer, 2010)
While agenda-setting by lawyers can lead to the replication of patterns of elitism and the reinforcement of systems of oppression, we do believe that legal work is a necessary and critical way to support movements for social justice. We must recognize the limitations of the legal system and learn to use that to the advantage of the oppressed. If lawyers are going to support work that dismantles oppressive structures, we must radically rethink the roles we can play in building and supporting these movements and acknowledge that our own individual interests or even livelihood may conflict with doing radical and transformative work. n162 A. Community Organizing for Social Justice When we use the term community organizing or organizing, we refer to the activities of organizations engaging in base-building and leadership development of communities directly impacted by one or more social  *612  problems and conducting direct action issue campaigns intended to make positive change related to the problem(s). In this article, we discuss community organizing in the context of progressive social change, but community-organizing strategies can also be used for conservative ends. Community organizing is a powerful means to make social change. A basic premise of organizing is that inappropriate imbalances of power in society are a central component of social injustice. In order to have social justice, power relationships must shift. In Organizing for Social Change: Midwest Academy Manual for Activists (hereinafter, "the Manual"), n163 the authors list three principles of community organizing: n164 (1) winning real, immediate, concrete improvements in people's lives; (2) giving people a sense of their own power; and (3) altering the relations of power. n165 Before any of these principles can be achieved it is necessary to have leadership by the people impacted by social problems. n166 As Rinku Sen points out: Even allies working in solidarity with affected groups cannot rival the clarity and power of the people who have the most to gain and the least to lose . . . organizations composed of people whose lives will change when a new policy is instituted tend to set goals that are harder to reach, to compromise less, and to stick out a fight longer. n167 She also notes that, "If we are to make policy proposals that are grounded in reality and would make a difference either in peoples' lives or in the debate, then we have to be in touch with the people who are at the center of such policies. n168 We believe community organizing has the potential to make fundamental social change that law reform strategies or "movements" led by lawyers cannot achieve on their own. However, community organizing is not always just and effective. Community-organizing groups are not immune to any number of problems that can impact other organizations, including internal oppressive dynamics. In fact, some strains of white, male-dominated *613 community organizing have been widely criticized as perpetuating racism and sexism. n169 Nonetheless, models of community organizing, particularly as revised by women of color and other leaders from marginalized groups, have much greater potential to address fundamental imbalances of power than law reform strategies. They also have a remarkable record of successes. Tools from community organizers can help show where other strategies can fit into a framework for social change. The authors of the Manual, for example, describe various strategies for addressing social issues and illustrate how each of them may, at least to some extent, be effective. n170 They then plot out various forms of making social change on a continuum in terms of their positioning with regard to existing social power relationships. n171 They place direct services at the end of the spectrum that is most accepting of existing power relationships and community organizing at the end of the spectrum that most challenges existing power relationships. n172 Advocacy organizations are listed in the middle, closer to community organizing than direct services. n173 The Four Pillars of Social Justice Infrastructure model, a tool of the Miami Workers Center, is somewhat more nuanced than the Manual. n174 According to this model, four "pillars" are the key to transformative social justice. n175 They are (1) the pillar of service, which addresses community needs and stabilizes community members' lives; (2) the pillar of policy, which changes policies and institutions and achieves concrete gains with benchmarks for progress; (3) the pillar of consciousness, which alters public opinion and shifts political parameters through media advocacy and popular education; and (4) the pillar of power, which achieves autonomous community power through base-building and leadership development. n176 According to the Miami Workers Center, all of these pillars are essential in making social change, but the pillar of power is most crucial in the struggle to win true liberation for all oppressed communities. n177 *614 In their estimation, our movements suffer when the pillar of power is forgotten and/or not supported by the other pillars, or when the pillars are seen as separate and independent, rather than as interconnected, indispensable aspects of the whole infrastructure that is necessary to build a just society. n178 Organizations with whom we work are generally dedicated solely to providing services, changing policies, or providing public education. Unfortunately, each of these endeavors exists separate from one another and perhaps most notably, separate from community organizing. In SRLP's vision of change, this separation is part of maintaining structural capitalism that seeks to maintain imbalances of power in our society. Without incorporating the pillar of power, service provision, policy change, and public education can never move towards real social justice. n179 B. Lawyering for Empowerment In the past few decades, a number of alternative theories have emerged that help lawyers find a place in social movements that do not replicate oppression. n180 Some of the most well-known iterations of this theme are "empowerment lawyering," "rebellious lawyering," and "community lawyering." n181 These perspectives share skepticism of the efficacy of impact litigation and traditional direct services for improving the conditions faced by poor clients and communities of color, because they do not and cannot effectively address the roots of these forms of oppression. n182 Rather, these alternative visions of lawyering center on the empowerment of community members and organizations, the elimination of the potential for dependency on lawyers and the legal system, and the collaboration between lawyers and directly impacted communities in priority setting. n183 Of the many models of alternative lawyering with the goal of social justice, we will focus on the idea of "lawyering for empowerment," generally. The goal of empowerment lawyering is to enable a group of people to gain control of the forces that affect their lives. n184 Therefore, the goal of empowerment lawyering for low-income transgender people of *615 color is to support these communities in confronting the economic and social policies that limit their life chances. Rather than merely representing poor people in court and increasing access to services, the role of the community or empowerment lawyer involves: organizing, community education, media outreach, petition drives, public demonstrations, lobbying, and shaming campaigns . . . Individuals and members of community-based organizations actively work alongside organizers and lawyers in the day-to-day strategic planning of their case or campaign. Proposed solutions--litigation or non-litigation based--are informed by the clients' knowledge and experience of the issue. n185 A classic example of the complex role of empowerment within the legal agenda setting is the question of whether to take cases that have low chances of success. The traditional approach would suggest not taking the case, or settling for limited outcomes that may not meet the client's expectations. However, when our goals shift to empowerment, our strategies change as well. If we understand that the legal system is incapable of providing a truly favorable outcome for low-income transgender clients and transgender clients of color, then winning and losing cases takes on different meanings. For example, a transgender client may choose to bring a lawsuit against prison staff who sexually assaulted her, despite limited chance of success because of the "blue wall of silence," her perceived limited credibility as a prisoner, barriers to recovery from the Prison Litigation Reform Act, and restrictions on supervisory liability in § 1983 cases. Even realizing the litigation outcome will probably be unfavorable to her, she may still develop leadership skills by rallying a broader community of people impacted by similar issues. Additionally, she may use the knowledge and energy gained through the lawsuit to change policy. If our goal is to familiarize our client with the law, to provide an opportunity for the client *616 and/or community organizers to educate the public about the issues, to help our client assess the limitations of the legal system on their own, or to play a role in a larger organizing strategy, then taking cases with little chance of achieving a legal remedy can be a useful strategy. Lawyering for empowerment means not relying solely on legal expertise for decisionmaking. It means recognizing the limitations of the legal system, and using our knowledge and expertise to help disenfranchised communities take leadership. If community organizing is the path to social justice and "organizing is about people taking a role in determining their own future and improving the quality of life not only for themselves but for everyone," then "the primary goal of empowerment lawyering is building up the community." n186 C. Sharing Information and Building Leadership A key to meaningful participation in social justice movements is access to information. Lawyers are in an especially good position to help transfer knowledge, skills, and information to disenfranchised communities--the legal system is maintained by and predicated on arcane knowledge that lacks relevance in most contexts but takes on supreme significance in courts, politics, and regulatory agencies. It is a system intentionally obscure to the uninitiated; therefore the lawyer has the opportunity to expose the workings of the system to those who seek to destroy it, dismantle it, reconfigure it, and re-envision it. As Quigley points out, the ignorance of the client enriches the lawyer's power position, and thus the transfer of the power from the lawyer to the client necessitates a sharing of information. n187 Rather than simply performing the tasks that laws require, a lawyer has the option to teach and to collaborate with clients so that they can bring power and voice back to their communities and perhaps fight against the system, become politicized, and take leadership. "This demands that the lawyer undo the secret wrappings of the legal system and share the essence of legal advocacy--doing so lessens the mystical power of the lawyer, and, in practice, enriches the advocate in the sharing and developing of rightful power." n188 Lawyers have many opportunities to share knowledge and skills as a form of leadership development. This sharing can be accomplished, for example, through highly collaborative legal representation, through community clinics, through skill-shares, or through policy or campaign meetings where the lawyer explains what they know about the existing structures and fills in gaps and questions raised by activists about the workings of legal systems. D. Helping to Meet Survival Needs SRLP sees our work as building legal services and policy change that directly supports the pillar of power. n189 Maintaining an awareness of the limitations and pitfalls of traditional legal services, we strive to provide services in a larger context and with an approach that can help support libratory work. n190 For this reason we provide direct legal services but also work toward leadership development in our communities and a deep level of support for our community-organizing allies. Our approach in this regard is to make sure our community members access and obtain all of the benefits to which they are entitled under the law, and to protect our community members as much as possible from the criminalization, discrimination, and harassment they face when attempting to live their lives. While we do not believe that the root causes keeping our clients in poverty and poor health can be addressed in this way, we also believe that our clients experience the most severe impact from state policies and practices and need and that they deserve support to survive them. n191 Until our communities are truly empowered and our systems are fundamentally changed to increase life chances and health for transgender people who are low-income and people of color, our communities are going to continue to have to navigate government agencies and organizations to survive.
Root cause explanations of international politics don’t exist – methodological pluralism is necessary to reclaim IR as emancipatory praxis and avoid endless political violence.
Bleiker 14 – (6/17, Roland, Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland, “International Theory Between Reification and Self-Reflective Critique,” International Studies Review, Volume 16, Issue 2, pages 325–327)
This book is part of an increasing trend of scholarly works that have embraced poststructural critique but want to ground it in more positive political foundations, while retaining a reluctance to return to the positivist tendencies that implicitly underpin much of constructivist research. The path that Daniel Levine has carved out is innovative, sophisticated, and convincing. A superb scholarly achievement. For Levine, the key challenge in international relations (IR) scholarship is what he calls “unchecked reification”: the widespread and dangerous process of forgetting “the distinction between theoretical concepts and the real-world things they mean to describe or to which they refer” (p. 15). The dangers are real, Levine stresses, because IR deals with some of the most difficult issues, from genocides to war. Upholding one subjective position without critical scrutiny can thus have far-reaching consequences. Following Theodor Adorno—who is the key theoretical influence on this book—Levine takes a post-positive position and assumes that the world cannot be known outside of our human perceptions and the values that are inevitably intertwined with them. His ultimate goal is to overcome reification, or, to be more precise, to recognize it as an inevitable aspect of thought so that its dangerous consequences can be mitigated. Levine proceeds in three stages: First he reviews several decades of IR theories to resurrect critical moments when scholars displayed an acute awareness of the dangers of reification. He refreshingly breaks down distinctions between conventional and progressive scholarship, for he detects self-reflective and critical moments in scholars that are usually associated with straightforward positivist positions (such as E.H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau, or Graham Allison). But Levine also shows how these moments of self-reflexivity never lasted long and were driven out by the compulsion to offer systematic and scientific knowledge. The second stage of Levine's inquiry outlines why IR scholars regularly closed down critique. Here, he points to a range of factors and phenomena, from peer review processes to the speed at which academics are meant to publish. And here too, he eschews conventional wisdom, showing that work conducted in the wake of the third debate, while explicitly post-positivist and critiquing the reifying tendencies of existing IR scholarship, often lacked critical self-awareness. As a result, Levine believes that many of the respective authors failed to appreciate sufficiently that “reification is a consequence of all thinking—including itself” (p. 68). The third objective of Levine's book is also the most interesting one. Here, he outlines the path toward what he calls “sustainable critique”: a form of self-reflection that can counter the dangers of reification. Critique, for him, is not just something that is directed outwards, against particular theories or theorists. It is also inward-oriented, ongoing, and sensitive to the “limitations of thought itself” (p. 12). The challenges that such a sustainable critique faces are formidable. Two stand out: First, if the natural tendency to forget the origins and values of our concepts are as strong as Levine and other Adorno-inspired theorists believe they are, then how can we actually recognize our own reifying tendencies? Are we not all inevitably and subconsciously caught in a web of meanings from which we cannot escape? Second, if one constantly questions one's own perspective, does one not fall into a relativism that loses the ability to establish the kind of stable foundations that are necessary for political action? Adorno has, of course, been critiqued as relentlessly negative, even by his second-generation Frankfurt School successors (from Jürgen Habermas to his IR interpreters, such as Andrew Linklater and Ken Booth). The response that Levine has to these two sets of legitimate criticisms are, in my view, both convincing and useful at a practical level. He starts off with depicting reification not as a flaw that is meant to be expunged, but as an a priori condition for scholarship. The challenge then is not to let it go unchecked. Methodological pluralism lies at the heart of Levine's sustainable critique. He borrows from what Adorno calls a “constellation”: an attempt to juxtapose, rather than integrate, different perspectives. It is in this spirit that Levine advocates multiple methods to understand the same event or phenomena. He writes of the need to validate “multiple and mutually incompatible ways of seeing” (p. 63, see also pp. 101–102). In this model, a scholar oscillates back and forth between different methods and paradigms, trying to understand the event in question from multiple perspectives. No single method can ever adequately represent the event or should gain the upper hand. But each should, in a way, recognize and capture details or perspectives that the others cannot (p. 102). In practical terms, this means combining a range of methods even when—or, rather, precisely when—they are deemed incompatible. They can range from poststructual deconstruction to the tools pioneered and championed by positivist social sciences. The benefit of such a methodological polyphony is not just the opportunity to bring out nuances and new perspectives. Once the false hope of a smooth synthesis has been abandoned, the very incompatibility of the respective perspectives can then be used to identify the reifying tendencies in each of them. For Levine, this is how reification may be “checked at the source” and this is how a “critically reflexive moment might thus be rendered sustainable” (p. 103). It is in this sense that Levine's approach is not really post-foundational but, rather, an attempt to “balance foundationalisms against one another” (p. 14). There are strong parallels here with arguments advanced by assemblage thinking and complexity theory—links that
could have been explored in more detail.

Police brutality is the largest cause of a decline in US cred on human rights – the UN Human Rights Council has smashed the US for it
Sheriff 15 - Natasja Sheriff, independent journalist and a visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute: May 11, 2015(“US cited for police violence, racism in scathing UN review on human rights” Al Jazeera Available at http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/5/11/us-faces-scathing-un-review-on-human-rights-record.html)
The United States was slammed over its rights record Monday at the United Nations’ Human Rights Council, with member nations criticizing the country for police violence and racial discrimination, the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility and the continued use of the death penalty.  The issue of racism and police brutality dominated the discussion on Monday during the country’s second universal periodic review (UPR). Country after country recommended that the U.S. strengthen legislation and expand training to eliminate racism and excessive use of force by law enforcement. "I'm not surprised that the world's eyes are focused on police issues in the U.S.," said Alba Morales, who investigates the U.S. criminal justice system at Human Rights Watch. "There is an international spotlight that's been shone on the issues, in large part due to the events in Ferguson and the disproportionate police response to even peaceful protesters," she said. Anticipating the comments to come, James Cadogan, a senior counselor to the U.S. assistant attorney general, told delegates gathered in Geneva, "The tragic deaths of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Michael Brown in Missouri, Eric Garner in New York, Tamir Rice in Ohio and Walter Scott in South Carolina have renewed a long-standing and critical national debate about the even-handed administration of justice. These events challenge us to do better and to work harder for progress — through both dialogue and action." All of the names he mentioned are black men or boys who were killed by police officers or died shortly after being arrested. The events have sparked widespread anger and unrest over the past year. Cadogan added that the Department of Justice has opened more than 20 investigations in the last six years — including an investigation into the Baltimore Police Department — as well as the release of a report of the Presidential Task Force on 21st Century Policing in March, which included more than 60 recommendations. But advocates like Morales say the U.S. could do much more. "Use of excessive force by police was a major part of this year's UPR, and the fact that we still don't have a reliable national figure to know how many people are killed by police or what the racial breakdown is of those people is a travesty," she said. "A nation as advanced as the U.S. should be able to gather that number." The Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment. Although the problems are not new, the death of young men like Gray and Brown and the unrest that followed their killings in U.S. cities over the past year has attracted the attention — and criticism — of the international community. "Chad considers the United States of America to be a country of freedom, but recent events targeting black sectors of society have tarnished its image," said Awada Angui of the U.N. delegation to Chad. 

Allowing police violence perpetuates systems of racism in the squo. Hadden et al 16
(Bernadette R. Hadden, MSW, PHD, is Assistant professor in the MSW program at Hunter College School of Social Work New York. Willie Tolliver, PhD. Associate Professor at Silberman School of Social Work.  Fabienne Snowden PHD. Professor at Hunter College School of Social Work. and Robyn Brown Manning, PHD. Professor at Hunter College School of Social "An authentic discourse: Recentering race and racism as factors that contribute to police violence against unarmed Black or African American men, Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment" http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10911359.2015.1129252#abstract)
Police shootings of unarmed Black or African American men are occurring at alarming rates (Wihbey, 2014) and are indicative of a national trend of excessive force used by law enforcement agents on the bodies of people of color (American Civil Liberties Union ACLU, 2014). These incidents are happening inside and outside of Black and Hispanic neighborhoods (Carroll and Gonzalez, 2014), to low-income and middle-class Blacks or African Americans (Jones-Brown, 2009), and are frequently the result of routine encounters (ACLU, 2014). One of several challenges in obtaining an accurate count of the number of the police shootings of unarmed Black or African American men in the United States is that there are no nationally consistent measures of collecting these data (Department of Justice, 2015). This lack of standardized reporting, accompanied by public outrage, civil unrest, and community activism, calls for investigations into, and law enforcement reporting of, fatal police shootings of unarmed Black or African American men. Suggestions of racial profiling in police shootings have been presented as an explanation of the phenomenon of the disproportionate shooting of unarmed Black or African American men by law enforcement agents (Amajor, Sandars, and Pitts, 1999). In 2007 researchers found that in 10 of the United States’s largest cities, Blacks or African Americans were overly represented among victims of police shootings (Lowerstein, 2007). These findings were most visible in New York City, Las Vegas, and San Diego (Lowerstein, 2007). At a 2010 hearing calling for the investigation of police-involved shootings in Oakland, California, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) reported that from 2004 and 2008, 37 of the 45 police shootings in that city were at Black or African American suspects (Bulwa, 2010). A report from the New York City Police Department (NYCPD) illustrates that between 2000 and 2013, 97 Blacks or African Americans, 41 Hispanics, and 21 Whites were killed by NYPD police officers (NYCPD, 2014). In other words, from 2000 to 2013, more Blacks or African Americans were killed by NYCPD weapon discharges than Latinos and Whites combined. These reports identify and document the phenomenon of Black or African American men being shot and/ or killed by police officers, despite the limitations in data tracking police shootings (Graham, 2015). However, they do not inform us of the incidence or prevalence of this phenomenon